Snap Spends A Lot On New Users; Twitter Is Rethinking Its Ad Products

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Snap Judgment

In a post on Stratechery, Ben Thompson dubs Snap’s product and advertising road map “the Gingerbread Man strategy,” since its only defensible position is to run, run, run as fast you can (aka constantly invest in new consumer and advertiser products). The problem? Cost. Snap pays more per new user than Twitter or Facebook ever have, and it needs a lot more of them to achieve profitability. Snap needs to “dramatically increase the average revenue per user,” which means finding a way to make Snapchat users look more like TV viewers to advertisers. More.

Flailing

Twitter is trimming its ad products suite after another round of disappointing earnings [AdExchanger coverage]. In an effort to simplify its offer to both consumers and advertisers, the platform will reassess products such as direct-response ads, promoted tweets and the legacy TellApart business that do not provide “significant buy-in from advertisers.” Twitter paid $533 million to acquire TellApart in a bid to beef up its DR targeting capabilities, but the retargeter suffered year-over-year revenue declines. The company will instead double down on video and other ad products that fit its mission of being “the best and fastest place to see what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about.” More at TechCrunch.

I Like The Way You Move

Advertisers are buying into beacons and proximity sensors. The number of these devices has nearly tripled to 13 million since 2015, according to research from Proximity Directory. The firm found 42% percent of companies that make proximity sensors operate ad networks that enable targeting based on the location data they intercept. Thirty percent allow advertisers to pick up identities via sensor and to retarget consumers on mobile or measure attribution. As proximity sensors are deployed across major cities to monitor things like traffic flow, crowd density and public safety, advertisers reap the benefits of knowing where their consumers are. Ad Age has more.

With Great Power

A federal judge sided in Google’s favor in a dispute between the search giant and SEO firm e-ventures Worldwide. The case was over whether Google’s decision to remove e-ventures sites from search results abridged the search optimizer’s First Amendment rights. The judge said Google’s rights in this matter are “the same as decisions by a newspaper editor regarding which content to publish, which article belongs on the front page and which article is unworthy of publication.” Legal observers expected Google to win, but the court’s decision represents a potential standard for media/tech giants. If Google (or Facebook) have editorial rights over content, do they have any responsibilities as well? More at MediaPost.

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