🗞️ Digital Marketing Must-Knows

This week’s round-up:

1. Facebook records the biggest ever share price slide. Facebook’s daily active users dropped for the first time in it’s 18 year history. Although the drop of 1 million users from 1.930bn (Q3) to 1.929bn (Q4) was relatively small. Bloomberg reported that Zuckerberg told employees they are facing an “unprecedented level of competition.” And must focus on short-form video, given the rise of TikTok and YouTube shorts. Meta’s CFO said iOS 14 will cost them $10 billion in 2022.

2. YouTube Shorts has amassed 5 trillion views in less than 2 years. Expect YouTube to turn viewership into advertising opportunities. Currently, creators are paid by YouTube via the ‘YouTube Shorts Fund’.

3. TikTok introduces Instant Pages to improve load times. The landing pages are intended to act as a stepping stone between a TikTok ad and the advertiser’s website. The TikTok landing page reportedly loads 11x faster than typical advertiser’s mobile pages. Potential customers can quickly learn more about the products or services before choosing to visit the advertiser’s website.

4. Amazon’s advertising revenue grew 32% to almost $10 billion. Amazon continues to cement its position as a major distribution channel for advertisers. Amazon is behind only Google & Facebook. Google reported fourth-quarter ad revenue of $61.2 billion, while Facebook reported ad sales of $32.6 billion in the period.

5. NBCU sells out of in-game inventory ahead of the Super Bowl 56. The ads sold for up to $7 million for a 30-second in-game. The automotive, technology, entertainment, travel, and health and wellness categories saw the largest growth compared to last year’s event.

Snippets for the road

• A former Facebook exec’s viral tweet on Facebook’s big challenges (below)

• Over 50% of Programmatic ad spend is now video

• Shopify filed a patent to open physical stores

• Pinterest’s active users are down 6% on last year

• While Snapchat’s active users are up 20%