Why Did Pinterest Lose Millions of Users?

AMAZON:Its Ad Business is Now a Real Contender

We start with a part of Amazon's revenue that many people forget exists. Sure, they make most of their money on e-commerce sales, but a growing chunk of pie comes from its ads business. 

In their latest earnings statement, they reported that chunk was up 87% in Q2 this year, compared to Q2 last year. 

To put that in perspective, eMarketer says last year Amazon's share of the overall U.S. digital ad market surpassed 10% for the first time.

Amazon said in the last quarter, they added at least 40 new features and self-service capabilities to their ad portal.

Among those features, a new service that lets sellers contact shoppers directly via email. The tool is called "Manage Your Customer Engagement," and its introduction marked the first time Amazon really loosened its grip on customer data. This makes it easier for brands to encourage repeat purchases — possibly completed on a non-Amazon site.

Don't forget Amazon the company is more than Amazon the site. They have a lot of web properties that are more tuned to the ad business: the gamestreaming platform Twitch, IMDb TV, Fire TV — cumulatively, those now reach 120 million monthly actives.

PODCASTS:Ad Spending is Also Way Up Here Too

Over to the health of the podcast ad business — and it's certainly healthy! New numbers from Magellan say podcast ad spending grew 71% YoY. When you look at QoQ, those numbers were up a healthy 22%. 

For the first time, this past quarter, Magellan tracked more than 2000 brands advertising on podcasts. The highest spending of which was the online counseling software BetterHelp. They spent $18M on podcast ads. 

Apparently, when you average out the playtime of all monetized podcasts, about 5.3% of podcast airtime is dedicated to ads. 

It's worth calling out Spotify, in particular, which saw its podcast ad revenue go up by 627% year over year. Even so, Spotify's CEO said recently he doesn't "believe that podcast audiences will overtake music audiences." 

As a reminder, then Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in 2007: 

PINTEREST:Why Did They Lose Millions of Users?

After 11 quarters of consecutive user growth, Pinterest shared some surprising news with analysts this week in its Q2 reports — a decline in overall users.

Pinterest lost 24 million users over the last three months. 

The company says the re-opening of physical stores is largely the cause here, given that online browsing has dipped.

I don't know about that. Pinterest is trying to spin itself here as primarily an e-commerce platform, and sure it's made some big strides to embrace that, but I think most people still consider the platform to be a social media site that people use more for visual discovery, design inspiration, and so on. 

Maybe this is just about people having less free time at home now. Pinterest itself acknowledged this in its report, saying:

They also reported that people who use Pinterest on the web are 'less engaged and generating less revenue' than people who use the mobile app.

As for the all-important ARPU metric — that's Average Revenue Per User — that's doing just fine. This past Q2 was more than double the revenue per user than Q2 last year.

In terms of top-line revenue, that was up 125% YoY.

So maybe the user loss is more a market correction than anything else. That might explain the awfully cautious language it used in its report:

TIKTOK:Classic TV Ads Remade in New Challenge

It doesn't matter what decade you grew up in — everyone's got a favourite retro TV ad. Maybe yours was this:

TikTok has launched its campaign called Re:Make which asks its users to recreate these retro ads.

Quoting the company:

It's a little strange that they just put this news out yesterday, since content for this promotion has been on TikTok since as far back as February.

Some of those brands in early: Snickers, Old Space, and Skittles...

...but there's no requirement for you to have any kind of formal arrangement with them to jump in.

If this is something you think your brand could jump on, just use the hashtag #TikTokReMake. You could do your own remake of an old ad from your brand, or — better yet — ask your followers and the TikTok community to do one themselves and tag you in it.

Even if you didn't run TV ads back in the day, you might ask people to recreate a current promotion you're running in the style of the neon 80s or something.

SNAPCHAT:New "Campaign Lab" Multivariate Testing Tool

There is something new in Snapchat's ads manager — 'Campaign Lab': A more comprehensive version of the Split Tests tool they launched last year.

Quoting the company: 

You'll find it under that top nav bar thingy:

Incidentally, if Snapchat is in your marketing quiver and you were having trouble getting the app working yesterday — it wasn't just you; the platform reported an outage that was fixed a few hours later.

Today in Digital Marketing is produced on beautiful Vancouver Island by engageQ digital. Production support and fact checking by Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Music licensing by Source Audio.