🗝️ Streaming Swells

FEATURE

Google: Streaming in the living room has exploded

Google announced they are “reaching more than 150 million people on Connected TV screens in the U.S.” and seeing growth internationally.

For Google, this mainly measures people watching YouTube or YouTube TV on Smart TVs (or game consoles).

The increases in time spent watching the likes of YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Netflix, on Smart TVs means that more advertisers are starting to invest.

Last year both Netflix & Disney launched ad-supported plans to help meet increasing demand from advertisers.

While Connected TV can increasingly match the scale of traditional TV, it has other benefits too. Advertisers can:

• Target specific audiences and personalize their ads.

• Monitor and make adjustments to ads in real time.

• Avoid high minimum spend commitments (which usually restricts access to traditional TV advertising to larger advertisers).

Plus, Google is exploring new ‘Pause experiences” for YouTube TV, so brands can also advertise on the screen when users hit pause.

It feels like we are in the early innings of Connected TV. Now big tech is slowly starting to take the golden goose away from traditional TV networks. Live sports.

This coming season YouTube TV has NFL regular season games in the US. Amazon Prime has two rounds of Premier League games in the UK. And Netflix, who missed out on F1 rights, is expected to move into live sports in the near future.

HEADLINES

Meta’s Reels now accounts for 20% of the time people spend on Facebook and Instagram. Earlier this year Zuckerberg said, “Reels is the fastest-growing format we've ever seen in our history”. Reels has a $10bn annual run rate which shows advertisers are embracing Reels too. For comparison, TikTok’s ad business is projected to be $13bn. (Reuters ↗️)

LinkedIn is seeing an increase in sessions and record engagement levels. Last reported, there are 830 million monthly active users on LinkedIn. While Cisco is training its 84k employees to be influencers on the platform. (Social Media Today ↗️)

Roblox recently launched its own ads Manager in beta. In the past make-shift ads have been used by creators on the platform. Now the process has been formalized. ‘Immersive ads’ are displayed within game experiences, but cannot direct users off-platform. (Roblox ↗️)

X announced their creator revenue-share program is now available to all eligible users. X has started to pay out a share of revenue generated for the ads served in a user’s post replies feed. To qualify, users must have at least 15 million impressions on their cumulative posts in the last 3 months and at least 500 followers. (Tech Crunch ↗️)

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back on Wednesday.