From Stardom to Silence

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In This Issue:

🛍️ Shopify merchants can now integrate with Amazon's 'Buy with Prime'
🤖 Despite AI surge, virtual influencers see less use in marketing
💻 ChatGPT sees a 29% drop in visits, with 30% seeking programming help
🎯 Reddit adds suggested keywords and more interests for targeting
🌐 Threads' anticipated web launch fails to attract new users
📸 Instagram now is asking people to visit Threads
🎙️ Substack unveils podcast transcription and audiogram tools
📊 YouTube relaxes monetization criteria and rolls out enhanced analytics
📱 BeFake app, challenging authenticity norms, secures $3M in funding

Shopify and Amazon's Unexpected Alliance

Well, I didn’t have this on my Bingo card — Amazon and Shopify (usually seen as direct competitors) this morning announced that Shopify merchants will now be able to offer Amazon integration on their Shopify store.

The “Buy with Prime” feature lets people purchase items from a Shopify store, even if those items are actually part of their Amazon inventory.

• Customers will checkout using either Amazon Pay or Shopify’s program.

• Because it’s tied to Amazon’s Prime program, customers using that method will get free delivery on items.

• Amazon will handle returns through its own fulfillment network.

• The actual purchase will still be processed by Shopify Payments.

• And merchants will still be able to see all their customer’s info.

This is also unexpected given that only a year ago Shopify warned merchants to avoid Amazon’s Buy with Prime, because they said it was in violation their Shopify’s terms of service. Instead, they said, use our system: Shop Pay. Merchants still could hack Amazon’s tools into their store, but had to do that outside the Shopify admin platform.

Logistically this will work through an app you’d add to your Shopify back-end. For the time being, it will only work with American merchants.

read more at techcrunch.com

Virtual Influencers Lose Their Shine

As much as there are age-old truisms in marketing, so too are there fads — things that come quickly in a flash of light and venture capital, then disappear as fast as Twitter’s brand equity.

Is that what’s happened to virtual influencers?

You remember the stories back in the era when everyone was talking about the metaverse — 3D images of usually attractive young women, posted on Instagram, claiming to do all the things Instagram models do — lie on a beach, buy Versace, and lie on a beach some more.

But a thinkpiece up today on Digiday suggests the virtual influencer trend appears to dying down.

It’s not the whole influencer scene that’s down — far from it. Content creators are still in high demand — Digiday says 76% of agency professionals report their clients spent at least some part of their media spend on influencers.

Take the HangarFour creative agency. In 2020, they pitched about six or seven virtual influencer campaigns. This year, they’ve only done one — a promotion for a hip hop artist which generated a decent 1.3 million views on YouTube.

read more at digiday.com

ChatGPT's Declining Popularity Analyzed

So if generated influencers are falling out of favour, that must be because of generative AI, right?

Well, certainly that consumed some fascination for a while, but now it seems even generative AI is cooling off.

SparkToro and Datos released a study they did showing that since May, traffic to OpenAI.com — that’s where ChatGPT lives — has dropped by almost 30%.

The companies speculate that this could be because people just kicking the tires have come, kicked the tires, and left. They also think it could be that students had been using a lot of it for their schoolwork, and then the summer came and they didn’t need it any more.

Indeed, they found that nearly a quarter of prompts were related to education.

That wasn’t the biggest category of prompts though — that went to programming-related prompts, which made up almost 30% of requests.

Content creation was at 20% — this is where most of the “write me an SEO-filled blog post about ___” fell, though the study authors also called out another popular subclass within that group — Dungeons and Dragons players needing riddles or quests generated for the game.

The data came from an opt-in, anonymized panel of 20M devices covering 200+ countries.

read more at sparktoro.com

Reddit's Updates Keyword Targeting Options

In June, Reddit launched Contextual Keyword Targeting, letting brands place ads alongside specified keywords as they appear across Reddit community discussions.

The company today shared some numbers on the new tools, claiming lower-funnel objectives got a click-through rate lift of 29%, and a 59% decrease in CPA.

This morning, they announced Keyword Suggestions — basically, providing more options for targetable words once you start typing a couple. For instance, type “football” and their ad platform would suggest “soccer” and “American football” and others.

One nice touch — the suggestions will be shown in the order of monthly views.

Also, Reddit says it has now doubled the number of interests available for targeting.

This should be live now.

read more at redditinc.com

Threads’ Web UI Didn’t Move the Needle

When Meta’s Twitter-competitor Threads launched, it was pretty barebones. You could post, read, and that was about it.

There still aren’t hashtags or search or quote posts or an API.

But last week, they did add something people said they desperately wanted — a web UI… a way for desktop users to post and read content.

So, it’s there now… how much did it help Threads’ falling usage? Almost not at all.

Sensor Tower says Threads’ daily active users are now only 18% of what it was at launch — that’s 8 million daily users.

Today, Meta announced it’s testing search in Australia and New Zealand.

It’s also using Instagram to try to pull people over — some people noticing a “For you on Threads” carousel, with a button to open the app on your phone.

Substack Adds More Podcasting Features

Substack — the email newsletter platform — has been slowly building out its podcasting abilities, today announcing the ability to generate transcripts and audiograms.

The transcript generates pretty fast, and you can edit it, and then publish it in its own tab on the episode post page.

The audiogram lets you select some words and it will generate a video with the transcript — words highlighted as they’re spoken — and you can post that on social media.

If you’re looking for this in your dashboard, these tools show up when you’re in editing mode and have uploaded your audio. There is a toggle switch that make the transcript appear alongside your episode.

The audiogram you’ll find after you have published your transcript, there should be a Make audiogram button.

read more at techcrunch.com

YouTube's Monetization and Analytics Update

YouTube is expanding its monetization features to more accounts and introducing new analytics tools.

Previously, YouTube had reduced the entry requirements for its Partner Program from 1,000 to 500 subscribers, granting more creators access to monetization features.

Initially, this was limited to five countries, but as of earlier this week, it's available in 33 more. This new level offers accounts earlier access to features like:

• Super Thanks

• Super Chat

• Super Stickers

• Channel memberships

This is mostly a frontal attack on TikTok, which still lacks good monetization options, especially in countries outside of the U.S.

But, unlike the main Partner program, this new introductory level does not include ad revenue sharing by default; creators must still meet higher engagement thresholds.

YouTube is also upgrading some of its analytics, now letting channel managers analyze multiple videos at the same time, in case you want to more easily compare video performance.

And it’s revamping its channel memberships offer screen.

read more at socialmediatoday.com

The BeFake App is a Thing Because Of Course It Is

One of the breakout social apps that came around in the last year or two was BeReal — the idea was that it would take a photo from the front and back camera, at a time of the app’s choosing, and there were no filters for you to, you know, touch things up.

The app is still around, though it doesn’t seem to have grabbed the attention of many users. It certainly hasn’t grabbed the attention of marketers.

So maybe this new app will — it’s called (and I’m not kidding here) BeFake.

This works just like BeReal — you’ll get prompted to take a front and back image — but then, it will filter the living hell out of you, using generative AI.

If, by the way, you want to post outside of the window when the app demands, you need to spend credits. You get a handful when the app starts, but after that you’ve got to pay with real money.

The whole thing actually isn’t a bad idea, when you consider that many other standalone apps offer AI self-portraits, or some — like Snapchat — are building this tech into their products.

You know who else seems to like it? Investors. The company behind the app has already raised $3 million in seed funding.

The app is a kind of lightweight social network — it has a friends feed, a top pics feed, and a Discovery feed.

read more at techcrunch.com

And finally…

As you might know, if you’ve been around here for a while, our associate producer Steph Gunn has been absent for a couple of weeks because she’s having a baby.

She has now had that baby, and mom and daughter are doing just fine. Her name is Pearl; there’s a photo of her in our Slack community if you want to see what a perfect baby looks like.

Congratulations Steph and husband! ❤️ 

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