E-COMMERCE
Walmart’s ad business is thriving
We reported a few weeks ago that Chinese sellers were flocking to Walmart as a result of Amazon’s ban.
In case you didn’t know, Walmart is the second largest e-commerce marketplace in the U.S. Now it turns out that they’re also a pretty large advertising marketplace as well.
Walmart released its Q4 earnings report and reported on its global advertising revenue for the first time.
How big is it? Walmart’s advertising revenue reached $2.1 billion last year. The number of active advertisers in the U.S. who’ve used Walmart’s advertising tech (named “Walmart Connect”) has also increased by 136%.
How does this stack up against Amazon? Amazon reported $31 billion in advertising revenue last year, which makes Walmart’s figure look pretty small in comparison. However, one wise person once said: “If a figure starts with a B, pay attention.”
The Crew’s take: Walmart is to Amazon what Microsoft is to Google in search. Much smaller in market share, but still significant enough to pay attention to.
Markets with a dominant player share one characteristic: Everyone is focused on the dominant player. Most people forget that there are still other players in the space. Herein lies the opportunity.
ADVERTISING
Here’s why third-party cookies may not be going away anytime soon
It’s the government’s “fault”.
Over the past few months, we covered many antitrust lawsuits against Google, Facebook and Apple. It seems governments around the world are fed up with Big Tech’s (ab)use of power and are increasingly taking action to limit it.
One of these abuses of power is attempting to replace open web technology with proprietary technology. One example is Google phasing out third party cookies in favor of FloC cookies. Jason Bier from AdExchanger recently wrote a piece on why this plan probably won’t work, thanks to the government.
Google vs. the government: One month ago, the EU opened up an investigation into Google’s “Privacy Sandbox”. The UK competition regulator has also investigated Google’s Privacy Sandbox and requested revisions (which it recently accepted). The US Justice Department is also looking into this matter.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst: Despite this, there has been a heavy backlash against tracking and a push for privacy tracking solutions. Government lawsuits will buy us marketers some valuable time we can use to find an alternative that works for our use cases.
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SOCIAL MEDIA
What kind of content do people consume during the day?
If you create and share any type of content, you probably asked yourself at least once what’s the best time of the day to post.
This Ariyh issue by Thomas McKinlay will answer that question. And it’s quite straightforward.
First, let’s make a distinction between two main types of content:
- “Virtue” content: This is educational or value-adding content, such as a financial article or a marketing case study.
- “Vice” content: This is content that gives immediate gratification, such as memes, a flash sale, entertaining content.
So, when should you post what?
The study, took in analysis 7,604,530 Twitter likes, 139,151 Twitter follows and found out that:
- In the morning, people engage more with virtuous content.
- Later during the day, people want to be entertained, hence, the consumption of vice content increases.
And this is true even for weekends and for content not related to a person’s job.
Why is that?
We must consider the following points:
- People consume content for two main reasons: to get immediate pleasure or to learn something.
- Our self-control declines during the day, especially on hot days. And mixed reasons cause this phenomenon.
- When self-control lowers, we look for instant gratification, so we tend to watch Netflix or read gossip magazines rather than go through a financial newsletter.
What can you bring home?
- Divide your content into educating and entertaining. And post accordingly.
- This isn’t just true for social media, but any type of content.
- Even though you create virtue content, you should still try to inject entertainment in it, to facilitate its consumption.
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
$25,000 giveaway stats and thoughts from The Crew
If you were to venture a guess, how many new subscribers do you think our giveaway brought through referrals?
If you are new, or just don’t know what we are talking about: Between 10th January and 4th February, we partnered with Flippa to give away an online business worth up to $25,000. To enter, you had to refer at least one new reader using their unique referral link.
We shared some of the early lessons from our giveaway, lessons that were very obvious once a few days passed. Now it’s time to dig into some stats!
Out of the 22,000+ subscribers we had when starting the giveaway, less than 1% referred at least one new reader in the giveaway period. The final number of what we call advocates (readers who refer other subscribers) was 194. This generated 1,146 referrals in total.
The Crew’s thoughts: We had a good first few days, then the next 2 weeks were relatively poor. We did a bad job at keeping up the excitement with how we mentioned the giveaway in our newsletter. It also didn’t help that promoting the giveaway to a cold audience did nothing.
All in all, we thought both numbers could have been higher.
What could we have done better? Three things come to mind:
- Giving you a heads-up about the giveaway. If more people had a chance to prepare promotional activities 1-2 weeks ahead of time, we could have seen an improved result.
- More examples of what you could win, presented better. We already saw that giving awesome business examples helped engagement the most. Doing a better job at creating the “after winning” image in our readers’ minds would have likely helped.
- Better social buzz. Even though we saw our giveaway mentioned on social organically, we should have done a better job at partnering with some publications to hype up the giveaway before it started.
It’s easier in hindsight, but those are the main things we’d try to improve on if and when we do a similar giveaway.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
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FACEBOOK: What data does Facebook currently collect about its users when they are not using Facebook? This research provides some really interesting insights into what are usually called “Facebook Shadow Profiles”.
TIKTOK: Take this with a grain of salt but TikTok was the highest earning app of January 2022 in the US. It earned an estimated $64M from the App Store and Google Play.
BROWSERS: Watch out, Apple! Microsoft Edge is edging out Safari in terms of market share. Still a long way to catch up to Google Chrome though.
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
Can you name three consecutive days without using the words Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday?
You can find the answer here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
When you try to cut off internet to your kids but accidentally cut off internet to your entire city
This is what actually happened to one father in France.
This French father attempted to do what almost every father has attempted to do at some point in their parenting lives: get their kids to spend less time on the internet.
How? He used a signal jammer to prevent radio frequencies from reaching the family’s home. Except that the signal jammer turned out to be capable of blocking radio frequencies throughout the entire town!
This alerted the French government agency in charge of managing radioelectric spectrum in the country, which then tracked down the jamming signal to the house.
In France, using jamming devices is illegal and can result in a fine of up to 30,000 euros as well as 6 months in prison. Let’s hope that this “Oops” story ends happily.