In-App Ad Blocker Folds; Pinterest Growth Forecast Impresses

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Been Done

In-app ad blocker Been Choice has decided to call it a day – on in-app ad blocking, that is. After getting pulled from the App Store over what Apple deemed a security issue, co-founder Dave Yoon and his team resubmitted the app without blocking Pinterest, Facebook and others. Following a week of “in review” purgatory, Yoon and company are retracting their app from review and resubmitting a version that focuses on Safari, working within the existing framework for blocking in iOS 9. In other words, another version of Crystal, et al. But “even with just Safari, choice is better than no choice, we think,” Yoon told AdExchanger. Pair with AdExchanger’s Yoon Q&A.

Pinning Your Hopes

TechCrunch got a hold of Pinterest’s internal revenue and growth forecasts, and whoa boy are they optimistic. By the end of this year, Pinterest expects to have about 151 million users and $169 million in revenue. But by 2018, the social media platform projects 329 million users and $2.8 billion in revenue. Andreessen Horowitz used those figures to solicit co-investors at a $11 billion valuation earlier this year. It remains to be seen how well Pinterest can spin its natural resources (shopping intent and a core of loyal female users) into revenue. Read on.

Digital Wins When It Disappears

At this year’s ANA Masters of Marketing conference, some CMOs (notably Pepsi’s Bradley Jakeman) called for a moratorium on “digital marketing,” as it’s just marketing now. It’s a similar theme we’ve seen from retailers, who in a few years have shifted from an in-store vs. online perspective to omnichannel. Tom Goodwin, a Havas SVP, writes for The Guardian that “our obsession with the divide between non-digital and digital media is limiting marketers thinking.” Apparently, the idea is catching on. More.

Finger On The Pulse

If you’ve wondered why tech has eyeballed health care so intensely (from the controversial startup Theranos to Alphabet’s massive life sciences investments), Bloomberg View columnist Peter Orszag has a telling graph. In the past decade, the top 10% of companies in terms of return on capital have skyrocketed … and those companies are either in health care or information technology. Facebook, Apple and Google have all pivoted into health care recently. There are far more profitable ways than advertising for companies to monetize intimate knowledge of their users.

But Wait, There’s More!