Reddit announced a new $300 funding round valuing the company at an astounding $3 billion. The valuation is amazing considering that Reddit has been around for quite a while and is presumably past its high growth phase. Reddit was founded in 2005, a year after Facebook and a year beforeTwitter.
Half of that investment is coming from China video game producer Tencent, raising concerns from some about censorship possibilities. Reddit is currently banned in China.
We are reinventing the ads business both on the technology side and our ability to sell it and to create a friendly home for users and brands alike. We’ve made steady progress on all of these fronts over the last year. We feel pretty proud of where we are. As a result, we’re seeing a lot of attention from both brands and investors.
When we’re talking about competing for ad dollars, of course, we’re talking about Facebook and Google who take up the vast majority of ad spend. But when we think about our competitors, I half-jokingly but truthfully say, we’re competing with anywhere people spend their free time.
They (Tencent) are investing in lots of videogame companies and video games are one of many categories that are really popular on Reddit. But the fact of the matter is we are the only company at our scale that’s still a private company. We’ve had a lot of investor intention in the last year. So we find ourselves in a good position to kind of get something done right now.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson defended AT&T’s aggressive 5G E marketing following the filing of a lawsuit by Sprint. During the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, some of their competitors criticized them, saying AT&T is “slapping 5G stickers” on upgraded 4G phones.
Stephenson says that 5G Evolution (5G E), represents new technology that they are deploying that delivers radical increases in speed and performance on their network.
Description of 5G Evolution on AT&T website.
Randall Stephenson, Chairman and CEO of AT&T, defends their 5G E marketing amid a lawsuit filing by Sprint in an interview with CNBC:
It’s an Evolutionary Step to 5G
It’ll play itself out obviously. We feel very comfortable with how we’ve characterized the new service that we’re launching. What we do is go into a market and we turn up a significant block of spectrum, wireless airways that we own. I mean it’s rather dramatic. We’re deploying new technology that I won’t go into the details of it, but when we go into a market and we turn up this technology and we light up this spectrum our customers are seeing radical increases in speed and performance on the network.
This is a step that’s required to get to ultimate 5G. It’s an evolutionary step to 5G, a critical step. So we are characterizing this 5G E, 5G Evolution. We’ve obviously done our homework. We’ve done a lot of work around how we characterize this. We’re being very clear with our customers that this is an evolutionary step.
It’s Not a Play Everybody Can Run
But this is a dramatic step-change improvement in what the customers experience where we turn this up. I fully understand why our competitors might be upset with this. It’s not a play everybody can run. It’s a play that we really like. It’s a play that’s going to differentiate us in the marketplace as we begin to roll this out over the course of this year.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson says that he expects to see significant growth in their SVoD business as their DIRECTV business declines. Stephensen empasized that the declining subscriber numbers for DIRECTV was something they always expected. “The traditional linear we expect to continue to decline,” he said. “We expected that when we bought DIRECTV.”
Stephensen says that the DIRECTV acquisition was a “typical synergy deal” done to both create cashflow by extracting cost synergies and to leverage their SDoV, advertising, and mobile strategy which would have been “hard to execute” without this deal.
Randall Stephenson, Chairman and CEO of AT&T, discusses the expected decline of DIRECTV and the projected massive growth of subscription video on demand (SVoD) in an interview with CNBC:
Significant Growth in SVoD as DIRECTV Declines
The results were really right in line with what we had told the street back in November. We had said we expect to see continued declines in the traditional video business and what we are doing is now investing in the new streaming service. Now that you own a large scale media company, the idea is that you can now build an SVoD, a subscription video-on-demand service, that is premium, that is unique, leveraged off the HBO content, and the Warner Brothers content. That is now where the investment is going for streaming television, an SVoD service.
The traditional linear we expect to continue to decline. We expected that when we bought DIRECTV. We’ve generated a lot of synergies for that acquisition. It was a typical synergy deal. You buy a declining business and you extract a lot of cost synergies. People forget that within 18 months we had generated about a $3.5 billion run rate synergy in this business. It’s still generating $4 billion of cash flow. That $4 billion is now being invested in the new platforms. It’s being invested in fiber deployment and the fiber deployment is going great. In fact, our broadband business in the quarter was up around seven percent.
We’re investing in an advertising business and since we bought DIRECTV we have stood this advertising business up. It’s a very unique business. It’s a $2 billion a year business now and it grew 26 percent last quarter. We’re investing in that and investing in the SVoD. What you’re seeing is when the investment in the traditional linear goes down you’ll see subscribers continue to go down. As we stand up the SVoD service you’re going to see significant growth over here. That’s where our excitement is. This is where we’re putting all of our focus and our investment.
Hard to Execute SDoV Strategy Without DIRECTV
It would have been really hard to execute this strategy had you not done DIRECTV. You needed some basis to get content delivered to mobile. The world of mobile, that’s what we were always trying to accomplish and we’ve been trying to do that for many years. We actually got that done. We got all the rights to begin distributing to mobile within months of closing DIRECTV.
So now you own a media company and you own some great IP and you stand up a new SVoD service. Now you have built-in distribution for this SVoD, not only through your traditional DIRECTV subscribers but through your mobile subscribers. The two work hand-in-hand over the next two or three years bringing these two together standing this up and distributing.
One of the keys to making money with Facebook ads is to create and test 100 Facebook ad sets per day, says Kevin David who has become a successful entrepreneur by utilizing this strategy.
David explains precisely how he increases spending on the profitable ad sets and shuts off the unprofitable ad sets using automation rules built right into Facebook. He says there is no need to use third-party tools, simply use the tools Facebook already has in place.
Kevin David, who now trains others how to start a viral Amazon business selling everyday products, was recently interviewed by successful affiliate marketer Benjamin Yong at the Affiliate World Conference in Bangkok. Below is one strategy David revealed: (Video Interview Below)
Create 100 Facebook Ad Sets Per Day
Creating 100 Facebook ad sets per product for ecommerce is probably overkill. Realistically, $250 a day, which is 100 ad-sets times $2.50 per ad set a day is not that much money. So even if you’re spending $250 a day on ecommerce what’s that’s going to allow you to do is just get results faster. You could do ten ad sets a day but it’s gonna take you ten days. Or you can do 100 ad sets a day and it’s going to take you three days. You’re going to have your proven winners, so it’s just faster.
If you can do it the lazy easy way, which is just images, by making some really sleek 3D-rendered beautiful images, you don’t even need to go crazy and create videos. Even if you do create videos, all you need is a basic video that has the ability to go viral, that appeals to emotion, is fun and funny, has one of those things. Then all you need is six images and one video.
Use Facebook’s Automation Rules
No third party tools are necessary. You can do all of this with Facebook’s automation rules. You don’t need to have external tools, you can use automation rules inside of Facebook. People just don’t know it exists. Everyone’s looking for that little hack but Facebook has it all available for you. People just don’t know how to do it.
All you have to do is use the Create Multiple Ad Sets and then you just use automation rules to govern all of your different ad sets based on the criteria that you’ve set.
Scale Ads With a Positive ROAS by 21% Every 3 Days
The first rule is If an ad set has a positive ROAS, a positive return on ad spend of over one, I scale that ad by 21% every three days. With Facebook you can’t just scale something by 1000% because you just won’t spend the same, you’ll get penalized, you won’t have the same results. You won’t have profitable ad sets.
What I’ve found through a lot of testing is the most you can scale is about 20% a day. I figured that the smartest people who’ve learned that are doing it by 20% and so I’m doing it by 21% to try and be one step ahead of them.
When to Turn Unprofitable Ads Off
The second rule is how I turn things off. Since I’m running $2.50 per ad set I set an automation rule that turns off all active ad sets if they meet two criteria. The first criteria is if they’ve spent more $7.50, which means they have been running for three days, three days of $2.50 a day. The second criteria are if they have less than one lead.
It depends on what your business is. Maybe it’s less than one purchase or maybe it’s less than one lead, depending on how high ticket what you’re selling is. I know my funnel and I know that if I can get a lead for under $7.50 then it’s worth spending that money because I trust my funnel so well, but everyone has to know their own business. If it’s an ecommerce product, maybe you know it’s going to be different depending on how high ticket it is.
In this age of shiny web applications and mobile computing, emails have sustained their supremacy over all the other channels. It is the communication tool that has worked seamlessly for all your prospects.
Email marketing is a dynamic, paradigm-shifting field with a rich scope of innovation. Through 2017 and 2018, it has fostered diverse trends like typography, gamification, dynamic content, CSS-based animations to name a few.
In 2019, something even more fascinating, where extraordinary stuff is likely to get mainstream, awaits email enthusiasts.
In the Infographic ‘Top Email Design Trends of 2019,’ exclusively provided to WebProNews by EmailMonks, you will get a sneak peek into what kind of email marketing designs lie ahead.
Click the Infographic below to enlarge and unleash the future of emails:
The advent of 5G is a big reason OpenX has decided to move to Google Cloud Platform, says OpenX CEO Timothy Cadogan. “When consumers start to move to 5G on their phones and have a very rapid experience, the advertising experience needs to be incredibly compelling,” says Cadogan. “We wanted to make sure that we could run on infrastructure there. That’s why we wanted to move to the public cloud.”
“Marketing has evolved significantly over recent years, and the old way of operating is no longer sustainable,” said Cadogan. “As we look at the programmatic market today, we see a sector that has experienced massive growth and adoption, but at the same time has stalled in its ability to deliver real innovation for marketers and publishers. We believe it is time to take a completely fresh look at the market and place a major bet on building the infrastructure necessary to drive the next wave of innovation.”
The company says that prior to 2019, almost one-quarter of the OpenX tech workforce was dedicated to maintaining legacy infrastructure. They say that the transition to Google Cloud Platform will free resources to focus on new growth areas for the company, such as people-based marketing, video, and CTV.
“Both OpenX and Google Cloud are dedicated to helping customers achieve their goals with cutting-edge technology,” says Chris Klayko, Managing Director, Americas, Google Cloud. “This collaboration will allow for continued innovation leveraging both OpenX’s Exchange Platform and Google Cloud’s commitment to performance, collaboration, and big data optimization at scale.”
Timothy Cadogan, CEO of OpenX, discussed why OpenX is moving its platform to Google Cloud Platform on Bloomberg Technology:
We Process Over a Trillion Transactions a Day
We run one of the largest advertising exchanges which means we process over a trillion transactions a day. The volume that we’re working with is huge. As we started to think about all of the new innovation we want to bring to the market over the next couple of years we realized that’s going to require even more computing power. We also need that computing power to be extremely efficient.
We started to map out a path to move to the public cloud, which is Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon (AWS). We really wanted to focus on a system that would give us an incredible amount of scale and enable us to innovate at a rate that would really make a difference in the industry. We didn’t want to have to continue to work on a lot of the maintenance of our own infrastructure that we had to do with our own servers.
An example of the importance of this is moving to 5G. When consumers start to move to 5G on their phones and have a very rapid experience, the advertising experience needs to be incredibly compelling. We wanted to make sure that we could run on infrastructure there. That’s why we wanted to move to the public cloud.
With Google, what you have is really the largest advertising infrastructure in the world and they do a lot of the foundational work that we can build on top of.
Facebook will once again try to channel some of Google’s search success with its new and improved Search Ad feature. However, the ads will only be seen by users in North America.
The new Search Ads will work the same way as conventional search engines. The user will type what they are looking for in the search bar and the platform will show the results. And similar to Google, the promoted results will be at the top of the list.
Facebook’s product manager, Zoheb Hajiyani revealed that this new feature is just a trial run, and only a select number of eCommerce, retail, and automotive companies in Canada and the US have access to it. He also explained that they are only conducting “a small test to place ads in Facebook search results.” The company will then assess the value of these ads before deciding whether it will be beneficial to expand it.
The new Search ads will be composed of a headline, an image, copy, and a link to external websites. While the format is more complicated than Google’s text ads, Hajiyani admitted that they’re still improving the feature’s design.
Facebook also hasn’t commented on whether the search triggers are based on phrases or branded or non-branded keywords. But the company will reportedly tag the ads with a “Sponsored” label. It will also provide users with the same controls and transparency settings that will determine what ads they will see.
Users won’t be able to opt out of these ads though. While they can “hide” ads they don’t want to see, much like how it’s done with News Feed advertisements, it won’t stop different ads from appearing on their wall later.
This is not Facebook’s first foray into monetizing the search feature. It previously launched a “sponsored results” feature in 2012 but shut down the project the following year when it was discovered that many advertisers were taking advantage of loopholes in the system.
If account holders take a shine to the new Search Ads, it could lead to a new and significant revenue stream for the company. It will also pit Facebook directly against Google’s paid-search ads.
At the moment, Facebook needs something to energize its growth. Most of the company’s profit comes from ads. Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild saw its profits peak at 59 percent in the third quarter of 2016 and 49 percent in 2017. However, this year’s revenue only grew by 33 percent.
Wouldn’t it be great if your business could be in real-time contact with your potential customer while they are looking at your ad or business listing in a directory or search engine? With Yellzz Super Ads, businesses can do just that. Yellzz has partnered with various marketplaces, directories, and is currently in a small pilot with Microsoft Bing to enable their lead generation service for businesses.
Sharon Mayblum, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Yellzz, recently discussed on ILTV Israil Dailyhow Yellzz is taking the lead in lead generation by creating real life, real-time interactions with customers:
Imagine, for instance, you’re selling a car or you have a mobile repair shop and you’re advertised on a classified website. Do you just place the ad and wait for someone to call? It really doesn’t work that way because there’s a lot of competition. You need more engagement. What we do is give the advertisers superpowers. Now they actually can know when there’s a potential customer online looking for their product or service. Not only do they know that they can engage with that customer and ask him to chat with them or send a coupon in real time.
How Does Yellzz Work?
It really depends on the marketplace we’re working with. When we partner with a marketplace they decide on the business rules that really work on that website. What happens is if a customer is looking for a specific car for, instance, then we know to alert the right seller and let the seller start engaging with the potential customer.
It’s the real advertiser, the real service provider or seller who is interacting with you. Now you as a customer, when you go into a website, you don’t have to download anything to start engaging. You get a chat invite and you can start engaging with that potential seller without giving any details and without logging in. You don’t have to give your Facebook account or email or anything. You just start engaging with different sellers, getting different proposals and closing the deal with whoever you want to close it.
Yellzz in a Pilot with Microsoft Bing Search Engine
We are working with classified websites such as Web.com which is a huge American company. They have 3.5 million websites of SMBs in the United States and we’re in the websites and the directories in the UK. We’re also in Asia in Singapore and in Southeast Asia. We’re starting to work here in Israel with a major player that I can’t really reveal the name yet.
We’re also actually in a very tiny pilot now with Microsoft on the Bing search engine. Hopefully, you’ll see our capabilities on the Bing search engine pretty soon.
About Yellzz
Once driving a steady flow of customers was good for your business, but today it’s no longer good enough. Faced with cutthroat competition online and consumers who are constantly on the move, small business owners can no longer afford to just wait for the phone to ring. Make way for Yellzz and the age of the Super Ad. Super proactive, super interactive, with powers of conversions that are out of this world.
Yellzz Super Ads has the power to see the invisible traffic and transform it into sales by giving small business owners the proactive sales enhancing tools they need. This includes letting them know when someone is taking an interest in their product or service, enabling them to initiate real-time peer-to-peer engagement, and allowing coupons to be made and sent in an instant to entice the prospect to choose their service.
