Facebook And Google Consolidate Power Across Channels; Snapchat Scores Poorly On Performance

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Godzilla Vs. Mothra

EMarketer’s latest macro forecast shows Facebook and Google consolidating power and share across mobile, display and search. Facebook’s US ad revenue will surge 32% to $16.3 billion this year, giving it almost 40% of the US display market and stealing share from Google, Yahoo and Twitter. Meanwhile Google’s display revenue will rise to $5.2 billion even as its share of that market will drop to 12.5%, but the company is tightening its iron grip on search in spite of surges from Amazon and Pinterest.

Snap Back To Reality

Snap Inc. is feeling good about its IPO, but advertisers are less amped about their returns on the platform. An RBC Capital survey of 1,600 marketers found Snapchat outperformed only AOL in terms of ROI, scoring 3.4 out of eight possible points (for comparison’s sake, Google scored 6.9 and Facebook 6.7). While 64% of marketers say they are interested in advertising on Instagram, only 37% want to advertise on Snapchat, which trailed behind Amazon (43%) and Spotify (40%). Snapchat faces concerns around copycat competition from Instagram, inability to measure KPIs, poor targeting and a decrease in user engagement and open rates. Ad Age has more. Related: EMarketer trimmed its 2017 Snapchat ad revenue estimate by $30 million. More at Reuters.

Sweet On Platforms

By pushing about 80% of its content through Apple News, The Telegraph has gotten readers to subscribe to the remaining 20% that lives behind its paywall, Digiday reports. Sixty-five percent of people driven to The Telegraph’s app through Apple News are its most engaged users, says Chief Customer Officer Robert Bridge. “I’m committed to driving subscriptions to our premium content,” he said. Meanwhile, The Boston Globe has found Facebook Messenger to be the cheapest and most direct platform for reader notifications. The Globe has seen an 80% open rate and 15% click-through rate on one-way Messenger notifications. “You can stand on the shoulders of Facebook,” said Matt Karolian, the Globe’s director of audience engagement. More.

PDA

Eric Jackson, a hedge fund manager known for activist positions in media stocks like Viacom and Yahoo, wrote in an investor note that tech companies’ recent shyness to the public market is “an aberration in the long arc of time.” He says it’s no longer the case that private valuations outweigh the market, and it’s “getting tougher and tougher to make an economic case to stay private.” Jackson points out before Facebook IPO’d it had done little to adapt to mobile migration, and it was public markets, not investors or board members, that forced the course correction. Airbnb, the second-largest US private startup after Uber, expects to take another year or more before it can complete its expected IPO.

But Wait, There’s More!