By the summer of 2016, Marie Outtier had spent eight years as a consultant advising media agencies and martech companies on marketing growth strategy.
Pierre-Jean “PJ” Camillieri started as a music software engineer before joining one of Apple’s consumer electronics divisions. Inspired by Siri, he left to start Timista, a smart lifestyle assistant.
When the two joined forces to co-found Aiden.ai, the combination was potent — one was a consummate marketer, the other, a specialist in machine learning. Their goal: create an AI-driven marketing analyst that offered actionable advice in real time.
Humans who manage ad campaigns must analyze vast amounts of numbers, but Outtier and Camillieri envisioned a tool that could make optimization recommendations in real time. Analytics are vast and unwieldy, so theirs was a no-brainer proposition with a market crying out for solutions.
The company’s first office was at Bloom Space in Gower Street, London. It was just a handful of hot desks and a nearby sofa shared with four other startups. That summer, they began in earnest to build the company. A few months later, they had a huge opportunity when the still 100% bootstrapped company was selected for Techcrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield competition.
Interviewed by TechCrunch, they explained their proposition: Marketers wanted to know where a digital marketing campaign was getting the most traction: Twitter or Facebook. You might need to check several dashboards across multiple accounts, plus Google analytics to compile the data — and even if you conclude that one platform is outperforming the other, that might change next week as users shift attention to Instagram, potentially wasting 60% of ad spend.
Aiden was intended to feel like just another co-worker, relying on natural language processing to make the exchange feel chatty and comfortable. It queried data from multiple dashboards and quickly compiled it into flash charts, making it easy to find and digest.
Eventually, instead of managing 10 clients, marketing analysts would be able to manage 50 using dynamic predictions as well as visualizations. Aiden incorporated Outtier’s expertise into its algorithms so it could suggest how to tweak a Facebook campaign and anticipate what was going to happen.
Was appearing at Disrupt a significant moment? “It was a big deal for us,” says Outtier. “The exposure gave us ammunition to raise our first round. And being part of the Disrupt Battlefield alumni gave us many meaningful networking and PR opportunities.”
A few weeks later the company had raised a seed round of $750,000. But not without difficulty. By this time Outtier was in the latter stages of pregnancy. Raising money under these circumstances was difficult, but, she says, “it can be done. It’s tougher than ‘normal circumstances.’ It’s a bit like running a marathon, but with a fridge on your back.”
Despite traffic for many online properties being at an all-time high, advertising has fallen off a cliff because of the downturn in consumer activity outside the home and the wider economic pressures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. And today, Twitter reported quarterly earnings that bore this trend out.
The ad-based social networking and media company said that in Q1 it made $808 million in revenues, actually up 3% on a year ago, with monetizable daily active users (Twitter’s own metric for measuring its audience) grew 24% to 166 million, an all-time high, adding 14 million average mDAUs since Q4 (152 million) and 32 million since Q1 of last year (134 million).
However, operating income for the quarter swung to a loss of $7 million, working out to a net margin of -1% and diluted EPS of -$0.01.
Analysts had expected, on average, to see $775.96 million in revenues on earnings per share of $0.10, so Twitter beat on sales, and missed on earnings. (Note: Twitter’s analyst consensus, provided to journalists, was a little different and painted a more positive picture: it noted average EPS expectations were -$0.02 on sales of $776 million, with expectations of mDAUs at 164 million. Twitter says that its figures are based on non-GAAP numbers, but even on GAAP EPS Twitter’s actual EPS is a beat on consensus of -$0.02.)
Times have really changed whichever way you look at it. In the same quarter a year ago, Twitter reported sales of $787 million, up 18%; net income of $191 million; and diluted EPS of $0.37.
“In this difficult time, Twitter’s purpose is proving more vital than ever,” said CEO Jack Dorsey in a statement. “We are helping the world stay informed, and providing a unique way for people to come together to help or simply entertain and remind one another of our connections. We’ve delivered our strongest ever year over year mDAU growth. Public conversation can help the world learn faster, solve common problems, and realize we’re all in this together. Our task now is to make sure we retain that connection over the long term with the many people new to Twitter.”
The company said that the quarter played out in “two distinct periods”, January through early March, which largely performed as expected, it said, and eearly March through the end of the quarter, “when the pandemic became global.”
None of this should come as a surprise. Twitter itself announced more than a month ago that it was removing its own financial guidance because of the instability of its business due to COVID-19 — noting only that it would be lower than expected:
“While the near-term financial impact of this pandemic is rapidly evolving and difficult to measure, based on current visibility, the company expects Q1 revenue to be down slightly on a year-over-year basis,” it wrote at the time. “Twitter also expects to incur a GAAP operating loss, as reduced expenses resulting from COVID-19 disruption are unlikely to fully offset the revenue impact of the pandemic in Q1.”
It did point out one bright spot, which is that it is picking up many more users because of increased “conversation about COVID-19 as well as ongoing product improvements.” Then, it said that quarter-to-date average total mDAU was around 164 million, up 23% from 134 million in Q1 2019 and up 8% from 152 million in Q4 2019.
Generally, Twitter’s fortunes this quarter are in line with results from Alphabet/Google and Facebook, which also reported earnings this week that reflect the impact of reduced advertising revenues due to fallout from the the public health crisis.
But even without the impact of COVID-19 on Twitter’s primary business of advertising, the company had been facing a tough time leading into the quarter. Like eBay, Twitter has been the subject of activist investor activity pushing for leadership and operational changes to improve growth and profitability. (Coincidentally, the same activist investor, Elliott, has been behind both efforts.) Unlike eBay, however, Twitter has managed to keep its CEO in place — co-founder Jack Dorsey — but has had to concede board seats as part of a wider financing package and strategy to refocus the business. There may be questions on the call today to see if all of that has been put on ice given how other factors are now in play.
One outcome from the deal it had cut with investors was to provide more actionable plans that translated to growth and profit, and on that front at least Twitter is playing ball.
It notes that it has “shifted resources and priorities to increase focus on our revenue products, particularly performance ads beginning with MAP [mobile application promotion ads], with the goal of accelerating our long-term roadmap.” This has included an ad server rebuild that should be finished by the end of Q2 to implement microservices architecture for more efficiency and to make it easier to make changes on the fly. It’s also implementing direct response advertising, also with the aim of adding new features that it can charge advertisers for.
“We have increased our focus and the relative prioritization of our revenue products, and will shift and add product and engineering resources as practical to increase our pace of execution on this critical work,” it noted in the earnings letter.
Breaking out some specific numbers, advertising accounted for the lion’s share of sales at $682 million, with data licensing making up much of the remainder. US revenues were $468 million, up 8% year-over-year, while international was at $339 million, down 4%.
No layoffs announced (not yet) but as with others like Spotify, Twitter is putting a hold on hiring. The company had committed to increase headcount this year by at least 20% (alongside its CEO relocating to Africa temporarily and many other optimistic plans) but this is now being slowed down — to what extent, it did not say, but it did note that 2020 total expense growth would now be “considerably less” than the 20% it had projected.
Facebook is today rolling out a tool that will allow users in the U.S. and Canada to export their Facebook photos and videos to Google Photos. This data portability tool was first introduced in Ireland in December, and has since been made available to other international markets.
To use the feature, Facebook users will need to click on “Settings,” followed by “Your Facebook Information,” then “Transfer a Copy of Your Photos and Videos.” Facebook will ask you to verify your password to confirm your identity in order to proceed. On the next screen, you’ll be able to choose “Google Photos” as the destination from the “Choose Destination” drop-down box that appears. You’ll also need your Google account information to authenticate with its service before the transfer begins.
The tool’s release comes about by way of Facebook’s participation in the Data Transfer Project, a collaborative effort with other tech giants, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Twitter, which focuses on building out common ways for people to transfer their data between online services.
Of course, it also serves as a way for the major tech companies to fend off potential regulation, as they’ll be able to point to tools like this as a way to prove they’re not holding their users hostage — if people are unhappy, they can just take their data and leave!
Facebook’s Director of Privacy and Public Policy Steve Satterfield, in an interview with Reuters on Thursday, essentially confirmed the tool is less about Facebook being in service to its users, and more about catering to policymakers’ and regulators’ demands.
“…It really is an important part of the response to the kinds of concerns that drive antitrust regulation or competition regulation,” Satterfield told the news outlet.
The launch also arrives conveniently ahead of a Federal Trade Commission hearing on September 22 that will be focused on data portability. Facebook said it would participate in that hearing, if approached, the report noted.
In Facebook’s original announcement about the tool’s launch last year, it said it would expand the service to include more than just Google Photos in the “near future.”
The transfer tool is not the only way to get your data out of Facebook. The company has offered Download Your Information since 2010. But once you have your data, there isn’t much else you can do with it — Facebook hasn’t had any large-scale rivals since older social networks like Myspace, FriendFeed (RIP!) and Friendster died and Google+ failed.
In addition to the U.S. and Canada, the photo transfer tool has been launched in several other markets, including Europe and Latin America.
Facebook is today rolling out a tool that will allow users in the U.S. and Canada to export their Facebook photos and videos to Google Photos. This data portability tool was first introduced in Ireland in December, and has since been made available to other international markets.
To use the feature, Facebook users will need to click on “Settings,” followed by”Your Facebook Information,” then “Transfer a Copy of Your Photos and Videos.” Facebook will ask you to verify your password to confirm your identity in order to proceed. On the next screen, you’ll be able to choose “Google Photos” as the destination from the “Choose Destination” drop-down box that appears. You’ll also need your Google account information to authenticate with its service before the transfer begins.
The tool’s release comes about by way of Facebook’s participation in the Data Transfer Project, a collaborative effort with other tech giants including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, which focuses on a building out common ways for people to transfer their data between online services.
Of course, it also serves as a way for the major tech companies to fend off potential regulation as they’ll be able to point to tools like this as a way to prove they’re not holding their users hostage — if people are unhappy, they can just take their data and leave!
Facebook’s Director of Privacy and Public Policy Steve Satterfield, in an interview with Reuters on Thursday, essentially confirmed the tool is less about Facebook being in service to its users, and more about catering to policymakers’ and regulators’ demands.
“…It really is an important part of the response to the kinds of concerns that drive antitrust regulation or competition regulation,” Satterfield told the news outlet.
The launch also arrives conveniently ahead of a Federal Trade Commission hearing on September 22 that will be focused on data portability. Facebook said it would participate in that hearing, if approached, the report noted.
In Facebook’s original announcement about the tool’s launch last year, it said it would expand the service to include more than just Google Photos in the “near future.”
The transfer tool is not the only way to get your data out of Facebook. The company has offered Download Your Information since 2010. But once you have your data, there isn’t much else you can do with it — Facebook hasn’t had any large-scale rivals since older social networks like MySpace, FriendFeed (RIP!), and Friendster died and Google+ failed.
In addition to the U.S. and Canada, the photo transfer tool has been launched in several other markets, including Europe and Latin America.
Despite traffic for many online properties being at an all-time high, advertising has fallen off a cliff because of the downturn in consumer activity outside the home and the wider economic pressures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. And today, Twitter reported quarterly earnings that bore this trend out.
The ad-based social networking and media company said that in Q1 it made $808 million in revenues, actually up 3% on a year ago, with monetizable daily active users (Twitter’s own metric for measuring its audience) grew 24% to 166 million, an all-time high, adding 14 million average mDAUs since Q4 (152 million) and 32 million since Q1 of last year (134 million).
However, operating income for the quarter swung to a loss of $7 million, working out to a net margin of -1% and diluted EPS of -$0.01.
Analysts had expected, on average, to see $775.96 million in revenues on earnings per share of $0.10, so Twitter beat on sales, and missed on earnings. (Note: Twitter’s analyst consensus, provided to journalists, was a little different and painted a more positive picture: it noted average EPS expectations were -$0.02 on sales of $776 million, with expectations of mDAUs at 164 million. Twitter says that its figures are based on non-GAAP numbers, but even on GAAP EPS Twitter’s actual EPS is a beat on consensus of -$0.02.)
Times have really changed whichever way you look at it. In the same quarter a year ago, Twitter reported sales of $787 million, up 18%; net income of $191 million; and diluted EPS of $0.37.
“In this difficult time, Twitter’s purpose is proving more vital than ever,” said CEO Jack Dorsey in a statement. “We are helping the world stay informed, and providing a unique way for people to come together to help or simply entertain and remind one another of our connections. We’ve delivered our strongest ever year over year mDAU growth. Public conversation can help the world learn faster, solve common problems, and realize we’re all in this together. Our task now is to make sure we retain that connection over the long term with the many people new to Twitter.”
The company said that the quarter played out in “two distinct periods”, January through early March, which largely performed as expected, it said, and eearly March through the end of the quarter, “when the pandemic became global.”
None of this should come as a surprise. Twitter itself announced more than a month ago that it was removing its own financial guidance because of the instability of its business due to COVID-19 — noting only that it would be lower than expected:
“While the near-term financial impact of this pandemic is rapidly evolving and difficult to measure, based on current visibility, the company expects Q1 revenue to be down slightly on a year-over-year basis,” it wrote at the time. “Twitter also expects to incur a GAAP operating loss, as reduced expenses resulting from COVID-19 disruption are unlikely to fully offset the revenue impact of the pandemic in Q1.”
It did point out one bright spot, which is that it is picking up many more users because of increased “conversation about COVID-19 as well as ongoing product improvements.” Then, it said that quarter-to-date average total mDAU was around 164 million, up 23% from 134 million in Q1 2019 and up 8% from 152 million in Q4 2019.
Generally, Twitter’s fortunes this quarter are in line with results from Alphabet/Google and Facebook, which also reported earnings this week that reflect the impact of reduced advertising revenues due to fallout from the the public health crisis.
But even without the impact of COVID-19 on Twitter’s primary business of advertising, the company had been facing a tough time leading into the quarter. Like eBay, Twitter has been the subject of activist investor activity pushing for leadership and operational changes to improve growth and profitability. (Coincidentally, the same activist investor, Elliott, has been behind both efforts.) Unlike eBay, however, Twitter has managed to keep its CEO in place — co-founder Jack Dorsey — but has had to concede board seats as part of a wider financing package and strategy to refocus the business. There may be questions on the call today to see if all of that has been put on ice given how other factors are now in play.
One outcome from the deal it had cut with investors was to provide more actionable plans that translated to growth and profit, and on that front at least Twitter is playing ball.
It notes that it has “shifted resources and priorities to increase focus on our revenue products, particularly performance ads beginning with MAP [mobile application promotion ads], with the goal of accelerating our long-term roadmap.” This has included an ad server rebuild that should be finished by the end of Q2 to implement microservices architecture for more efficiency and to make it easier to make changes on the fly. It’s also implementing direct response advertising, also with the aim of adding new features that it can charge advertisers for.
“We have increased our focus and the relative prioritization of our revenue products, and will shift and add product and engineering resources as practical to increase our pace of execution on this critical work,” it noted in the earnings letter.
Breaking out some specific numbers, advertising accounted for the lion’s share of sales at $682 million, with data licensing making up much of the remainder. US revenues were $468 million, up 8% year-over-year, while international was at $339 million, down 4%.
No layoffs announced (not yet) but as with others like Spotify, Twitter is putting a hold on hiring. The company had committed to increase headcount this year by at least 20% (alongside its CEO relocating to Africa temporarily and many other optimistic plans) but this is now being slowed down — to what extent, it did not say, but it did note that 2020 total expense growth would now be “considerably less” than the 20% it had projected.
Researchers at NYU have identified hundreds of groups of Instagram users, some with thousands of members, that systematically exchange likes and comments in order to game the service’s algorithms and boost visibility. In the process, they also trained machine learning agent to identify whether a post has been juiced in this way.
“Pods,” as they’ve been dubbed, straddle the line between real and fake engagement, making them tricky to detect or take action against. And while they used to be a niche threat (and still are compared with fake account and bot activity), the practice is growing in volume and efficacy.
Pods are easily found via searching online and some are open to the public. The most common venue for them is Telegram, since it’s more or less secure and has no limit to the number of people who can be in a channel. Posts linked in the pod are liked and commented on by others in the group, with the effect of those posts being far more likely to be spread widely by Instagram’s recommendation algorithms, boosting organic engagement.
Reciprocity as a service
The practice of groups mutually liking one another’s posts is called reciprocity abuse, and social networks are well aware of it, having removed setups of this type before. But the practice has never been studied or characterized in detail, the team from NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering explained.
“In the past they’ve probably been focused more on automated threats, like giving credentials to someone to use, or things done by bots,” said lead author of the study Megan Greenstadt. “We paid attention to this because it’s a growing problem, and it’s harder to take measures against.”
On a small scale it doesn’t sound too threatening, but the study found nearly 2 million posts that had been manipulated by this method, with more than 100,000 users taking part in pods. And that’s just the ones in English, found using publicly available data. The paper describing the research was published in the Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference and can be read here.
Importantly, the reciprocal liking does more than inflate apparent engagement. Posts submitted to pods got large numbers of artificial likes and comments, yes, but that activity deceived Instagram’s algorithm into promoting them further, leading to much more engagement even on posts not submitted to the pod.
When contacted for comment, Instagram initially said that this activity “violates our policies and we have numerous measures in place to stop it,” and said that the researchers had not collaborated with the company on the research.
In fact the team was in contact with Instagram’s abuse team from early on in the project, and it seems clear from the study that whatever measures are in place have not, at least in this context, had the desired effect. I pointed this out to the representative and will update this post if I hear back with any more information.
“It’s a grey area”
But don’t reach for the pitchforks just yet — the fact is this kind of activity is remarkably hard to detect, because really it’s identical in many ways to a group of friends or like-minded users engaging with each others’ content in exactly the way Instagram would like. And really, even classifying the behavior as abuse isn’t so simple.
“It’s a grey area, and I think people on Instagram think of it as a grey area,” said Greenstadt. “Where does it end? If you write an article and post it on social media and send it to friends, and they like it, and they sometimes do that for you, are you part of a pod? The issue here is not necessarily that people are doing this, but how the algorithm should treat this action, in terms of amplifying or not amplifying that content.”
Obviously if people are doing it systematically with thousands of users and even charging for access (as some groups do) that amounts to abuse. But drawing the line isn’t easy.
More important is that the line can’t be drawn unless you first define the behavior, which the researchers did by carefully inspecting the differences in patterns of likes and comments on pod-boosted and ordinary posts.
“They have different linguistic signatures,” explained co-author Janith Weerasinghe. “What words they use, the timing patterns.”
As you might expect, strangers obligated to comment on posts they don’t actually care about tend to use generic language, saying things like “nice pic” or “wow” rather than more personal remarks. Some groups actually warn against this, Weerasinghe said, but not many.
The list of top words used reads, predictably, like the comment section on any popular post, though perhaps that speaks to a more general lack of expressiveness on Instagram than anything else:
But statistical analysis of thousands of such posts, both pod-powered and normal, showed a distinctly higher prevalence of “generic support” comments, often showing up in a predictable pattern.
This data was used to train a machine learning model, which when set loose on posts it had never seen, was able to identify posts given the pod treatment with as high as 90 percent accuracy. This could help surface other pods — and make no mistake, this is only a small sample of what’s out there.
“We got a pretty good sample for the time period of the easily accessible, easily findable pods,” said Greenstadt. “The big part of the ecosystem that we’re missing is pods that are smaller but more lucrative, that have to have a certain presence on social media already to join. We’re not influencers, so we couldn’t really measure that.”
The numbers of pods and the posts they manipulate has grown steadily over the last two years. About 7,000 posts were found during March of 2017. A year later that number had jumped to nearly 55,000. March of 2019 saw over 100,000, and the number continued to increase through the end of the study’s data. It’s safe to say that pods are now posting over 4,000 times a day — and each one is getting a large amount of engagement, both artificial and organic. Pods now have 900 users on average, and some had over 10,000.
You may be thinking: “If a handful of academics using publicly available APIs and Google could figure this out, why hasn’t Instagram?”
As mentioned before, it’s possible the teams there have simply not considered this to be a major threat and consequently have not created policies or tools to prevent it. Rules proscribing using a “third party app or service to generate fake likes, follows, or comments” arguably don’t apply to pods, since in many ways they’re identical to perfectly legitimate networks of users. And certainly the threat from fake accounts and bots is of a larger scale.
And while it’s possible that pods could be used as a venue for state-sponsored disinformation or other political purposes, the team didn’t notice anything happening along those lines (though they were not looking for it specifically). So for now the stakes are still relatively small.
That said, Instagram clearly has access to data that would help to define and detect this kind of behavior, and its policies and algorithms could be changed to accommodate it. No doubt the NYU researchers would love to help.
The quarantine lockdown is driving a record number of users to Facebook’s products. On a conference call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed a number of new metrics highlighting a significant bump in Facebook usage during the broader quarantine lockdown.
In the past month, more than 3 billion internet users logged onto a Facebook service, including its central app, Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp, Zuckerberg disclosed. This number constitutes roughly two-thirds of the world’s total internet users. This was a record for the platform, which reported average monthly active users of 2.60 billion in Q1.
The company’s communications tools saw major surges in the past several weeks, with Zuckerberg also disclosing more granular metrics that voice and video calling usage had doubled, views on Facebook and Instagram Live videos had doubled and the amount of time on group video calling had surged 1,000% in recent weeks.
The company predicted that usage would settle down once shelter-in-place was discontinued, though Zuckerberg highlighted opportunities Facebook could realize during the lockdown. “When the world changes quickly, people have new needs and that means that there are more things to build,” he said.
Facebook reported its Q1 earnings Wednesday, sharing they had earned revenues of $17.74 billion during the quarter. While the company shared that usage of certain services had surged, they also disclosed that the company had seen a “significant reduction” in the demand for ads at the end of the quarter, sharing that they had seen flat year-over-year growth in the first few weeks of April.
TikTok, the widely popular video sharing app developed by one of the world’s most valued startups (ByteDance), continues to grow rapidly despitesuspicion from the U.S. as more people look for ways to keep themselves entertained amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The global app and its Chinese version, called Douyin, have amassed over 2 billion downloads on Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store, mobile insight firm Sensor Tower said Wednesday.
TikTok is the first app after Facebook’s marquee app, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger to break past the 2 billion downloads figure since January 1 of 2014, a Sensor Tower official told TechCrunch. (Sensor Tower began its app analysis on that date.)
A number of apps from Google, the developer of Android, including Gmail and YouTube have amassed over 5 billion downloads, but they ship pre-installed on most Android smartphones and tables.
TikTok’s 2 billion download milestone, a key metric to assuage an app’s growth, comes five months after it surpassed 1.5 billion downloads.
In the quarter that ended on March 31, TikTok was downloaded 315 million times, surpassing its previous best of 205.7 million downloads in Q4 2018. Facebook’s WhatsApp, the second most popular app by volume of downloads, amassed nearly 250 million downloads in Q1 this year, Sensor Tower told TechCrunch.
As the app gains popularity, it is also clocking more revenue. Users have spent about $456.7 million on TikTok to date, up from $175 million five months ago. Much of these spendings — about 72.3% — has happened in China. Users in the United States have spent about $86.5 million on the app, making the nation the second most important market for TikTok from the revenue standpoint.
Craig Chapple, a strategist at Sensor Tower, said that not all the downloads are organic as TikTok, which launched outside of China in 2017, has engaged in a “large user acquisition campaign.” But he attributed some of the surge in downloads to the COVID-19 outbreak that has driven more people than ever to look for new apps.
India, TikTok’s largest international market, accounts for the app’s 30.3% downloads, according to Sensor Tower. The app has been downloaded 611 million times in the world’s second largest internet market.
From a platform’s stand point, 75.5% of all of TikTok’s downloads have occurred through Google Play Store. But the vast majority of spendings has come from users on Apple’s ecosystem ($435.3 million of $456 million).
The coronavirus pandemic is significantly slowing the growth of Facebook’s ads business, but investors seem pleased with the company’s performance in Q1 after Facebook released its earnings report Wednesday.
The company beat Wall Street expectations on revenues, sharing that they had made $17.74 billion while falling short on earnings per share at $1.71. The company also shared that monthly active users had swollen to 2.6 billion users, beating expectations of 2.55 billion.
The company’s shares rose upwards of 10% after-hours following the report’s release.
While Facebook’s ad revenues in Q1 showcased 17% year-over-year growth, Facebook used its earnings announcements to hedge expectations for Q2. The digital ads market has taken a major hit in the past several weeks in light of the pandemic crisis. In its release, Facebook said they had seen a “a significant reduction in the demand for advertising, as well as a related decline in the pricing of our ads, over the last three weeks of the first quarter of 2020.”
The company said they would not be providing guidance for Q2 of full-year 2020, instead indicating that the first three weeks of April indicated flat year-over-year growth in the the company’s outsized ads business. Facebook’s ad revenues for Q4 2019 indicated 25% year-over-year growth by comparison.
Flat growth is far from the doomsday drop-off investors had feared may hit the digital ads market as cash-strapped businesses reeled in advertising budgets.
via Facebook Investor Relations
Facebook’s $17.44 billion in ad revenues makes up the lion’s share of its revenue growth, but the company’s “Other” segment of revenue, which includes various efforts, including its Portal and Oculus hardware business, grew 80% year-over-year to $297 million.
Twitter is making it possible for developers and researchers to study the public conversation around COVID-19 in real time with an update to its API platform. The company is introducinga new COVID-19 stream endpoint to those participating in Twitter Developer Labs — a program that offers access to new API endpoints and other features ahead of their public release. The new COVID-19 endpoint will allow approved developers to access COVID-19 and coronavirus-related tweets across languages, resulting in a data set that will include tens of millions of tweets daily, Twitter says.
The data can be used to research a range of topics related to the coronavirus pandemic, including things like the spread of the disease, the spread of misinformation, crisis management within communities and more.
Developers may also use the new data set to build machine learning and data tools to help the scientific community answer key questions about COVID-19, Twitter notes.
The company itself will determine which tweets qualify for inclusion in this data set based on which words are used in the tweets — like “COVID-19” or “coronavirus,” for example. It also will pull tweets that use common coronavirus hashtags, which tend to be language-agnostic. These, by the way, are the same keywords that Twitter uses for its existing COVID-19 topic, which is powered by a Tweet annotation.
Twitter will also filter this data stream to exclude spammy and low-quality content.
While access to the endpoint will be free, Twitter will be hand-selecting which developers and researchers will be granted permission to use it. Developers will also have to inform Twitter of their project plan, detail their experience in working with big data and detail the available resources they have to process such a data set.
“Given the expertise and computational resources necessary to handle this data, and recognizing the sensitivity of it, we’ve created a dedicated application to access this endpoint and plan to carefully review access requests to ensure they support the public good,” notes Twitter in an announcement. “We also encourage applicants to describe in detail the safeguards they intend to implement to protect the privacy and safety of people represented in these data, including applicable institutional reviews and ethics screenings,” it says.
Twitter says it will prioritize processing applications from researchers and developers with established expertise and resources.
The application and endpoint are launching today. No developers or researchers had early access.
In addition to the application requirement to access the new endpoint, developers will also need to already have an approved developer account and adhere to the terms of Twitter’s Developer Agreement and Policy, which provides guidance about restricted use cases relevant to projects analyzing health-related topics. To ensure the data is kept in compliance, approved developers will also gain access to a new compliance stream endpoint, as well.
The new endpoint is one of several efforts Twitter has made since the coronavirus outbreak began, focused on connecting people with information about the pandemic. Across its platform, it introduced changes to make COVID-19 facts and reliable health information more accessible. It also updated its ads policy, partnered with relief organizations and matched fundraising donations, among other things.
“Public conversation can help the world learn faster, solve problems better and realize we’re all in this together,” said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, in a statement released today. “Facing a devastating global pandemic really brings that, and Twitter’s role, to light,” he added.
Twitter has said that tweets posted early Tuesday morning by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk that irresponsibly call for restrictions put in place to defend against the spread of COVID-19 don’t violate its guidelines around inaccurate or disputed information about the coronavirus that could cause harm. Musk tweeted a series of things on Tuesday, including an endorsement of a controversial Wall Street Journal op-ed with the caption “Give people their freedom back!”
A Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch that these tweets, which also include an urging to “FREE AMERICA NOW,” are “not currently in violation of the Twitter rules. According to the company, it has said previously that it’s not enforcing punitive or corrective action on each instance of tweets about COVID-19 that don’t provide a full picture or that appear to contain info that’s disputed by other sources.
Twitter says that it has removed over 2,400 Tweets since March 18 when it implemented its new policy, and that it’s automated filtering systems have addressed in some way or another as many as 3.4 million accounts which seemed to be spamming or providing manipulative info regarding COVID-19 discussions. Thus far, however, some of the most influential sources of have not been subject to punitive or corrective action under the policy.
President Trump’s tweets calling to “liberate” states, for instance, which bear a content and formatting similarity to the new tweets by Musk, have not been removed or disputed by the social network, and Twitter provided a similar statement about those missives not currently violating its rules.
Trump and Musk represent some of the most influential Twitter users, with 78.9 million and 33.3 minion users respectively, so their voices have outweighed impact on the community and public discourse relative to spam or automated misinformation accounts. In both cases, these messages indirectly seek to encourage the curtailing or disruption of social distancing, isolation and quarantine measures, even as the U.S. surged past 1 million diagnosed cases this week, with many more likely undiagnosed and therefore unaccounted for in the total.
The coronavirus pandemic has sent record numbers of new users to video chat apps. Now, video messaging app Marco Polo aims to capitalize on the increases it’s also seeing to launch its new subscription business, Marco Polo Plus. The service delivers a handful of new features — including support for HD video, voice-only messaging options, custom emoji, expanded speed controls and more — for $5 per month with an annual subscription of $59.99.
On a monthly basis, the service costs $10 per month.
Marco Polo had already carved out its own space on the market before the coronavirus outbreak. Instead of focusing on live video calls or group video chats, Marco Polo focuses on asynchronous communication. That is, users leave a video message for friends and family, which the other party can watch at their convenience, then reply to.
This works particularly well for people who have different work schedules or those who are spread out among various timezones. It also works for adults who have less free time to chat than the teens who virtually “hang out” in group video chat apps, like Houseparty.
With the new Marco Polo Plus subscription, the company is offering an expanded feature set that will appeal to its most frequent users. However, it will remain an optional upgrade — free users will still be able to use Marco Polo as before.
Subscribers, meanwhile, will be able to message their friends and family in HD or have the option to respond using only their voice, for those times you’re not camera-ready.
The subscription will also expand its set of built-in reaction emoji, which today includes a smiley face, sad face, heart, prayer hands, and thumbs up — to now include support for adding any emoji from your keyboard.
In addition, subscribers will have more granular control over playback speed. While free users can choose to 2x their video messages, paying users will be able to access speed control options of anywhere between 1.5x and 3x speed.
They’ll also gain a time scrubber for more easily moving to different parts of the video and a scratchpad for personal notes. The latter is especially helpful for jotting down the different parts of the message you want to respond to — something that can be hard to remember after listening to a long video.
Subscribers will be able to share their $5 per month subscription in the form of “Plus Passes” you can dole out to friends and family, as well.
Like many apps in the space, Marco Polo has seen a sizable jump in usage due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it says.
In March 2020, Marco Polo saw a 16x increase in new sign-ups for its service and a 3x increase in activity versus the prior month. In one 24-hour period in April, Marco Polo even saw a record 20 million video messages shared in its app. And its social media campaign designed at reaching out to others, #PoloTogether, resulted in over 1 million check-ins.
According to data from Sensor Tower, Marco Polo has seen nearly 56 million lifetime installs across iOS and Android since January 2014. Publicly, Marco Polo says it has “millions” of users and 3 billion messages sent to date. Across its 1.7 million user reviews on both app stores, the app averages a 4.8 rating.
The new subscription program is only one way Marco Polo is working to gain traction for its app in the coronavirus era.
The company also recently launched a program called Channels by Marco Polo into beta testing, which allows creators to reach fans through the Marco Polo platform, but via a dedicated app.
The program is aimed at those with a following — like leaders, speakers, facilitators, creators, fitness instructors, and health and career coaches — who want to offer their content to a paid membership base.
While these creators could publish to social media platforms and then try to monetize in other ways, like through ads or brand deals, Marco Polo offers a way to facilitate more private one-to-many interactions.
The advantages of this program is that the content won’t be at the mercy of changing algorithms or interrupted with ads. However, as a paid membership program, it limits exposure. That means it would likely only supplement the efforts creators made across social media to raise awareness of their offerings and their personal brand, in order to gain new subscribers.
The program is not broadly available, but is being used by a handful of testers today.
The Channels program is also aimed at helping Marco Polo generate revenue, as the company takes a 10% cut of the monthly membership fees charged by the creators.
The new Marco Polo Plus subscription service replaces an older, less feature-rich service that never gained traction. Along with the new Channels program, the company hopes stay ad-free and turn a profit.
“From the time Marco Polo was founded, we’ve never shown ads in the app. We will never use social comparisons or manipulate algorithms, as so many social networking companies must do for their business model,” explains CEO and co-founder Vlada Bortnik. “We believe that Marco Polo Plus is the best version of our app to date, and subscription is an important part of our strategy to achieve profitability. Based on our early pilot of Channels by Marco Polo, we’re optimistic that it also has the potential to contribute significantly to our monetization goals,” she continued.
“I know we can become a sustainable business in a way that feels true to our brand values of authenticity and trust,” Bortnik added.
Marco Polo’s parent company Joya Communications has raised at least $25 million in funding from investors including Benchmark, Stanford’s StartX Fund, Matrix Partners, Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures, Evolve Ventures, and others, according to Crunchbase. The company declined to comment its total raise or investor lineup, however.
Here’s some consolation for the Class of 2020: a virtual graduation ceremony, which kicks off at 11AM PT/2PM ET on May 15 via the Facebook Watch App. Oprah Winfrey will be giving the commencement address, while Awkwafina, Jennifer Garner, Lil Nas X and Simone Biles will all be giving speeches. And Miley Cyrus is set to perform.
Other sites are holding similar events — and many schools are also planning their own, less star-studded events to celebrate graduations remotely.
More details have emerged about a coronavirus contact tracing app being developed by U.K. authorities. NHSX CEO Matthew Gould said today that future versions of the app could ask users to share location data to help authorities learn more about how the virus propagates.
The app is actually an update and rebrand of Arrive, an app for tracking packages from Shopify merchants and other retailers — in addition to package tracking, Shop allows consumers to browse a feed of recommended products, learn more about each brand and make purchases using the one-click Shop Pay checkout process.
David Bradbury, a security veteran with more than two-decades of security experience and recently served as chief security officer at Symantec, takes over from Yassir Abousselham, who departed for Splunk in February.
This month, when we asked 17 VCs how this era would impact consumer startups, gaming was one of the top verticals they named. We wanted to learn more about how the venture community thinks about the future of this sector, so we asked five experienced gaming investors about where they do — and don’t — see new opportunities within this trend. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
The original Mavic Air’s 21 minutes of life was among Brian Heater’s key frustrations with the product. The company says the new drone should be able to get up to 34 minutes on a charge.
The firm is looking for companies at the very early stage, from pre-seed to pre-Series A. Partech can invest as little as a few hundred thousands dollars and as much as several million dollars, depending on the stage of the startup.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has forced millions into isolation, video games are seeing a surge in usage as people seek entertainment and social interaction.
When we surveyed gaming-focused VCs in October, Andreessen Horowitz partner Jonathan Lai predicted that “next-generation games will be bigger than anything we’ve seen yet,” eventually reaching “Facebook scale.” This month, when we asked 17 VCs how this era would impact consumer startups, gaming was one of the top verticals they named.
We wanted to learn more about how the venture community thinks about the future of this sector, so weasked five experienced gaming investors about where they do — and don’t — seenewopportunities within this trend:
Below are their responses, edited for space and clarity. We’ll follow up with surveys on other gaming categories in the next couple of weeks.
And if you’re interested in understanding the challenges for gaming companies aiming to become next-generation social platforms, be sure to read myeight-part series on virtual worlds.
I’m going to make a bet with you that if you follow the 3 steps below, and you really follow them, you can get 10,000 visitors from Google.
I promise it won’t be hard, but it will take time.
And if you follow my steps and don’t get the results, hit me up and I will personally help you with your marketing.
All I ask is you do it for 3 months straight. You may not get to 10,000 visitors from Google in 3 months as some niches are really tiny, but most of you should get there or be well on your way.
Again, if you prove to me that you followed everything below and you don’t achieve the results, you can get in touch and I will personally help you with your marketing for free.
Ready?
Step #1: Finding the right keywords
If you pick the wrong keywords, you’ll find yourself with little to no traffic and, even worse, you’ll find yourself with little to no sales.
So, before we get you on your way to more search traffic, let’s find you the right keywords.
I want you to head to Ubersuggest and type in your competitor’s domain name.
Now, I want you to click on the “Keywords” navigational option in the sidebar.
This report will show you all of the keywords that your competition is ranking for.
If you don’t see a list of thousands of keywords, that means you didn’t type in a big enough competitor. And if you don’t know who a big competitor is, just do a Google search for any major term related to your industry. The sites at the top are your major competitors.
I want you to go through the list of keywords and look for all of the keywords that are related to your business and have an SEO Difficulty (SD) score of 40 or less. The higher the number, the harder the keyword is to rank for. The lower the number, the easier it is to rank for.
In addition to an SD score of 40 or lower, I want you to look for keywords that have a volume of 500 or more.
Volume means the number of people that search for the keyword on a monthly basis. The higher the number, the more potential visitors that term will drive once you rank for it.
Next up, I want you to click on “Top Pages” in the navigation.
This will bring you to a report that looks like this:
This report shows you the most popular pages on your competitor’s site.
Now, under the Est. Visits (Estimated Visits) column, I want you to click on “view all” for the first few results.
Every time you do that it shows you all of the keywords that drive traffic to that page.
Just like you did with the keywords report, I want you to look at the keywords that have an SD of 40 or lower and a volume of 500 or more.
The one difference though, is that I want you to check out some of the URLs on the Top Pages report.
Click on over to the site so you can see the type of content they are writing. This is important because it will give you an idea of the types of content that Google likes to rank.
When you create similar pages (I will teach you how to do this shortly), it will allow you to get similar results to your competition over time.
Now that you have a handful of keywords, I want you to expand the list and find other related keywords.
In the navigation menu, click on “Keyword Ideas.”
When you type in one of the keywords you are thinking of going after in this report, it will give you a big list of other similar keywords.
This is important because it will show you all of the closely related terms.
For example, let’s say you came up with a list of keywords of a handful of keywords, such as:
Dog food
Cat food
Dog bed
How to clean your cat
What do birds eat
You can’t just take all of those keywords and write one article and shove all the keywords in because they aren’t similar to each other. Someone looking for “dog beds” is probably not interested in reading about what birds eat.
So by typing in a keyword into the Keyword Ideas report, it will show you all of the other similar keywords that you can include in a single article.
When you are on the Keyword Ideas report you’ll notice some tabs: Suggestions, Related, Questions, Prepositions, and Comparisons.
I want you to go through each of those tabs. They will show you a different group of similar keywords that you may be able to include in your article (we will go over how to write the article in step 2).
Just take a look at the Questions tab:
You can see the keywords are drastically different than the Related tab:
Again, you’ll want to look for all keywords that have an SD score of 40 or lower. But this report looks for keywords that have a volume above 200.
I know 200 may seem like a small number, but if you find 100 good keywords that all have a volume of 200 or more, that adds up to 20,000 potential visitors per month. Or better yet, 240,000 per year.
Now it’s rare that you are going to get all of those people to come to your site, but you can get a portion of them. Even 10% would add up… especially if you did this with a handful of articles.
Your goal should be to have a list of at least 100 keywords that are very similar. You’ll want to do this at least five times. For example, remember that list of five keywords I mentioned above wasn’t too similar to each other…
Dog food
Cat food
Dog bed
How to clean your cat
What do birds eat
You’ll want to make sure that for each main keyword you use the Keyword Ideas report to find another 100 that can accompany each keyword.
Step #2: Write content
At this point, you should have a list of keywords. If your list of keywords isn’t at least 100 keywords per group, go back to step 1 and keep at it.
It’s not that hard to get to 100 similar keywords that you can include in one article. It just takes some time to continually search and find them.
In general, as a rule of thumb, I can find 100 keywords in less than 8 minutes. It may take you a bit longer than me at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’ll be easy.
With your newly found keywords, I want you to write an article.
All you have to do is follow this tutorial step-by-step to write your first article.
Or, if you prefer a video tutorial, watch this:
As for your keywords, naturally place them into the article when it makes sense.
What you’ll quickly learn is that you probably won’t be able to “naturally” include all 100 keywords within your article. And that’s fine.
The last thing you want to do is stuff in keywords because you aren’t writing this article for just search engines, you are writing it for people… and the secondary benefit is that search engines will rank it because it contains the right keywords.
Before you make your article live on your site, I want you to keep a few things in mind:
Keep your URLs short – Google prefers shorter URLs.
Include your main keyword in your headline – by having your main keyword in your headline, you’ll be more likely to rank higher.
Include your three main keywords in your meta tags – whether it is your title tag or meta description, include at least three main keywords in them. You won’t fit as many in your title tag, and that’s fine, but you should be able to within your meta description tag.
There are a lot of other things you can do to optimize your articles for SEO, but my goal is to keep this simple. Again, if you just follow these three steps, you’ll hit the 10,000-visitor mark.
So, for now, let’s just keep things simple and once you hit your goal, then you can get into the advanced stuff.
Step #3: Promoting your content
Writing content is only half the battle. Even if you include the right keywords in your article, if you don’t promote, it’s unlikely that it would be read or rank on Google.
So how do you make sure your content is read and ranks well?
Well, first you need to get social shares, and second, you need to get backlinks.
Yes, search engines don’t necessarily rank pages higher when they get more Facebook shares or tweets, but the more eyeballs that see your page the more likely you are to get backlinks.
And the more backlinks you get, generally, the higher you will rank.
So here’s how you get social shares…
First, I want you to go to Twitter and search for keywords related to your article.
As you scroll down, you’ll see thousands of people tweeting about stuff related to your keywords. Some of them will just be general updates but look for the members sharing articles.
And…
Now what I want you to do is click on their profile and see if they mention their contact information or their website. If they mention their email you are good to go. If they mention their website, head to it, and try to find their contact information.
You won’t be able to find everyone’s contact information, but for the people you do, I want you to send them this email:
Subject: [insert the keyword you searched for on Twitter]
Hey [insert their first name],
I saw that you tweeted out [insert the title of the article they tweeted]. I actually have an article that I recently released on that subject.
But mine covers [talk about what your article covers and how it is unique].
[insert link to your article]
If you like it, feel free to share it.
Cheers,
[insert your name]
PS: Let me know if you want me to share anything for you on Twitter or any other social network.
What you’ll find is a large percentage of the people will be willing to share your content because they already are sharing related content and, of course, you offered to share their content, which helps out too.
If you send out 30 to 40 emails like this, you’ll start getting traction on the social web.
Now that you have social shares, it’s time to build backlinks. Instead of giving you tons of link building methods as there are many that work, I am just going to start you off with one that works very well.
I want you to head back to the Keyword Ideas report on Ubersuggest.
Once you get there, type in some of the keywords that you are trying to go after.
On the right side of the report, you’ll see a list of sites that rank and the number of backlinks that each of the ranking URLs has.
Click on the “Links” number. For each result, it will take you to the Backlinks report, which looks something like this:
This will give you a list of all the sites linking to your competitor’s article.
I want you to go to each of those URLs, find the site owner’s contact information, and shoot them an email that looks like this:
Subject: [name of their website]
Hey [insert their name],
I noticed something off with your website.
You linked to [insert your competitor that they linked to] on this page [insert the page on their site that they are linking to them from].
Now you may not see anything wrong with that, but the article you linked to isn’t helping out your website readers that much because it doesn’t cover:
[insert a few bullet points on how your article is better and different]
You should check out [insert your article] because it will provide a better experience for your readers.
If you enjoyed it, feel free to link to it.
Cheers,
[insert your name]
PS: If I can ever do anything to help you out, please let me know.
I want you to send out 100 of those emails for each article you write.
Conclusion
Yes, it takes work to get 10,000 visitors but once you do it you’ll continually generate traffic and, more importantly, sales.
To achieve 10,000 visitors, I want you to do the steps above five times. In other words, you will be writing five pieces of new content following the steps above.
It’s actually not that bad because you can just do 1 a week. So, within 5 weeks you would have done your job.
So, are you going to accept the challenge? If you do everything and don’t see the results over time, you can hit me up and I’ll help.
