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The app for TikTok on a phone screen. Cabinet Office minister Oliver Dowden, has confirmed TikTok will be banned on Government devices following a review. Picture date: Thursday March 16, 2023. (Photo by Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images)

TikTok expands its premium ad slots despite potential US ban

2024-06-14

Image Credits: Yui Mok/PA Images / Getty Images

In an effort to capture more ad dollars, despite the looming U.S. ban, TikTok is introducing new advertising products and opportunities that will allow marketers to better control what sort of content their ads appear against.

The company says it will use generative AI to curate trending, brand-safe content; expand its selection of “tentpole” moments, like the Paris Olympics and Met Gala; and allow advertisers to buy slots with specific networks and content offerings.

The company introduced the “Pulse Premiere” ad slot last year, and it is now adding new partners to it. The offering focuses on bringing in more premium ad dollars by letting advertisers position their ads directly after publisher and media content in over a dozen categories, including lifestyle, sports, entertainment and education. The ads would appear on content from select publishers on the app’s For You feed.

The slot is meant to appeal more to TV advertisers who are used to being able to buy ads that run alongside specific programs.

TikTok had earlier partnered with companies like NBCUniversal, Condé Nast, Dotdash Meredith, BuzzFeed, Hearst Magazines, Major League Soccer, UFC, Vox, and others. Now it is adding Paramount Global and NHL to its list of Premiere partners.

The former partnership gave advertisers the option to buy ads that run alongside content from, for example, NBCUniversal — think “Saturday Night Live,” “America’s Got Talent,” “Today Show,” Bravo, and others. The new partnership with Paramount Global, for instance, will let advertisers place ads against content from MTV, CBS Sports, The Daily Show, Entertainment Tonight, and more.

TikTok said it will also work with Nielsen ONE Ads and iSpot.tv to give advertisers the ability to measure how their TikTok ads add “incremental and complementary reach” to their TV campaigns, the company said.

The company is presenting these new ad options at this year’s IAB NewFronts 2024, where a number of media companies and social apps market themselves to advertisers. TikTok took the opportunity to share some stats on its ad offerings’ success, noting, for example, that the TikTok Pulse suite — which guarantees ads next to the top 4% of trending videos, seasonal moments, or premium content — increases ad recall by 9.8%.

The company also touted its ability to reach users who may not have seen TV ads, saying that 58% of all TikTok campaign impressions reached a unique audience “unexposed” to the TV portion of the campaign. Plus, it said advertisers who added TikTok to their TV campaigns reached an additional 22% of their audience.

TikTok’s announcement is seemingly business as usual for the company, since it represents deals that were finalized long before the U.S. ban bill went through, but the fate of the app’s future in the country is uncertain. Though the company’s parent, ByteDance, has vowed to fight the ban, it has also threatened to pull out of the country rather than divest. Obviously, that would not be great for its ability to bring in ad dollars.

Biden signs bill that would ban TikTok if ByteDance fails to sell the app

TikTok partners with top publishers on its new premium and brand-safe ad slot, ‘Pulse Premiere’

Google says YouTube Premium and Music now have over 100 million subscribers

2024-05-26

by admin with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Alexander Shatov (opens in a new window) / Unsplash

Google said today that YouTube now has more than 100 million paid users across YouTube Music and YouTube Premium. This number is up from the 80 million paid users the company mentioned in November 2022.

Earlier this week, during its Q4 2023 earnings call, Sundar Pichai said that Google’s subscription business — which includes YouTube’s paid plans — has now crossed $15 billion annually.

The company’s chief business officer Philipp Schindler said that premium users are providing more value to its partners.

“YouTube Music and Premium performed well. Premium users are delivering more value to our partners and YouTube than even ad-supported users do. On average, each additional Premium sign-up boosts earnings for creators, music and media partners, and YouTube itself,” he said.

The search giant first launched YouTube Music in 2015. At that time, YouTube offered a $9.99 per month Red subscription for ad-free viewing that also allowed users to access Play Music. In 2018, the Red subscription was rebranded to YouTube Premium.

In the past year, YouTube has cracked down on ad blockers by saying that these tools violate its terms of service. The video streaming service started to show a warning about preventing them from watching videos unless they disable ad blockers.

In the last few years, it also experimented with asking users to pay to watch videos in higher resolution or showed multiple unskippable ads.

Separately, the company has launched features like mini-games and video with enhanced bitrate to make the Premium version more attractive for users.

YouTube has expanded its Premium subscription in over 100 countries. In December 2023, the company expanded the offering to 10 more countries, including Algeria, Cambodia, Ghana, Iraq, Joran, Kenya and Senegal.

YouTube is a big part of Google’s business and it garnered $9.2 billion in Q4 2023 — up from $8 billion for the same period last year.

X now allows Premium+ users and organizations to publish articles

2024-05-25

by admin with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Matt Cardy / Contributor (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

X announced a new long-form post format called Articles today. The feature, which is only available to Premium+ subscribers and verified organizations, lets users publish posts with text formatting, other X posts and embedded videos and images — akin to a post on a WordPress-like content management system or an article on Medium.

The company’s @Write account announced the new feature on the platform by publishing an article.

https://t.co/dlJ6rIEONa
— Write (@Write) March 7, 2024

Last year, the Elon Musk-owned social network increased the limit for long posts to 25,000 characters for paying users. The limit for an article is seemingly higher at 100,000 characters, as noted by Engadget.

This post by Chris Bakke indicates users can add bulleted lists and hyperlinked text to the post as well — Bakke’s job listing company Laskie was acquired by X last year.

Twitter debuted Notes as a long-form publishing medium in 2022 before Musk took over the company. However, under Musk’s management, the Notes project was put on hold, ad-free articles were killed and the newsletter platform Revenue was shut down.

And yet, in July 2023, Musk noted that the company is working on a way for creators to post long-form articles with mixed media.

“This will allow users to post very long, complex articles with mixed media. You could publish a book if you want,” Musk wrote in a reply to a user at that time, who posted about the newly named “Articles” feature.

Musk has long pushed creators like MrBeast and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to post on X directly. With this latest move, the social media company aims to attract writers who would like to post on the platform directly.

Elon Musk says all Premium subscribers on X will gain access to AI chatbot Grok this week

2024-05-25

by admin with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Following Elon Musk’s xAI’s move to open source its Grok large language model earlier in March, the X owner on Tuesday said that the company formerly known as Twitter will soon offer the Grok chatbot to more paying subscribers. In a post on X, Musk announced Grok will become available to Premium subscribers this week, not just those on the higher-end tier, Premium+, as before.

The move could signal a desire to compete more directly with other popular chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. But it could also be an indication that X is trying to bump up its subscriber figures. The news arrives at a time when data indicates that fewer people are using the X platform, and it’s struggling to retain those who are. According to recent data from Sensor Tower, reported by NBC News, X usage in the U.S. was down 18% year-over-year as of February, and down 23% since Musk’s acquisition.

Musk’s war on advertisers may have also hurt the company’s revenue prospects, as Sensor Tower found that 75 out of the top 100 U.S. advertisers on X from October 2022 no longer spent ad budget on the platform.

Offering access to an AI chatbot could potentially prevent X users from fleeing to other platforms — like decentralized platforms Mastodon and Bluesky, or Instagram’s Threads, which rapidly gained traction thanks to Meta’s resources to reach over 130 million monthly users as of the fourth quarter 2023.

Musk didn’t say when Grok would become available to X users, only that it “would be enabled” for all Premium subscribers sometime “later this week.”

Later this week, Grok will be enabled for all premium subscribers (not just premium+) https://t.co/4u9lbLwe23
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2024

X Premium is the company’s mid-tier subscription starting at $8 per month (on the web) or $84 per year. Previously, Grok was only available to Premium+ subscribers, at $16 per month or a hefty $168 per year.

Grok’s chatbot may appeal to Musk’s followers and heavy X users as it will respond to questions about topics that are typically off-limits to other AI chatbots, like conspiracies or more controversial political ideas. It will also answer questions with “a rebellious streak,” as Musk has described it. Most notably, Grok has the ability to access real-time X data — something rivals can’t offer.

Of course, the value of that data under Musk’s reign may be diminishing if X is losing users.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/13/what-is-elon-musks-grok-chatbot-and-how-does-it-work/

Spotify audiobooks displayed on smartphone screens

Spotify brings its audiobooks perk for Premium users to Canada, Ireland and New Zealand

2024-05-25

by admin with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Spotify

Spotify announced on Tuesday that it’s bringing its free audiobooks perk to Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. Users in these markets will be able to access 15 hours of free monthly audiobook listening time. Spotify also announced that it’s expanding its audiobooks catalog from 200,000 to 250,000 titles. The perk is already available in the U.S., U.K. and Australia.

The expansion comes two months after Spotify said its audiobooks service is the second-largest audiobook provider behind Amazon-owned Audible. Spotify says users have listened to more than 150,000 titles since the free service’s launch last November.

Audiobooks can be found in the Home feed of the Spotify app or via the search tab. Any audiobook marked as “Included in Premium” can be listened to with a Spotify Premium subscription. You can track your listening hours in the settings of your Spotify app. If you run out of listening hours, you can purchase additional 10-hour allocations for CAD $14.99, IRE €12.99 and NZD $19.99.

Spotify recently launched a $9.99 per month plan that allows its free users to access its audiobooks collection in the U.S. The plan, which includes 15 hours of listening, gives Spotify a way to compete with Audible by targeting users who aren’t as interested in its music service. While Audible’s $14.95 per month subscription gives users one credit to buy a title, Spotify’s $9.99 plan allows users to listen to 15 hours across its catalog, which is often enough time to listen to more than one audiobook.

Spotify’s Audiobooks will get their own ‘Countdown Pages’ to tease upcoming new releases

Chrome Enterprise goes Premium with new security and management features

2024-05-25

by admin with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: TRAVELARIUM / Getty Images

At its Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas, Google on Tuesday extended its Chrome Enterprise product suite with the launch of Chrome Enterprise Premium.

Google has long offered an enterprise-centric version of its Chrome browser. With Chrome Enterprise, IT departments get the ability to manage employees’ browser settings, the extensions they install and web apps they use, for example. More importantly, though, they also get a number of new security controls around data loss prevention, malware protection, phishing prevention and the Zero Trust access to SaaS apps.

Chrome Enterprise Premium, which will cost $6/user/month, mostly extends the security capabilities of the existing service, based on the insight that browsers are now the endpoints where most of the high-value work inside a company is done.

“Authentication, access, communication and collaboration, administration, and even coding are all browser-based activities in the modern enterprise,” Parisa Tabriz, Google’s VP for Chrome, wrote in Tuesday’s announcement. “Endpoint security is growing more challenging due to remote work, reliance on an extended workforce, and the proliferation of new devices that aren’t part of an organization’s managed fleet. As these trends continue to accelerate and converge, it’s clear that the browser is a natural enforcement point for endpoint security in the modern enterprise.”

These new features include additional enterprise controls to enforce policies and manage software updates and extensions, as well as new security reporting features and forensic capabilities that can be integrated with third-party security tools. Chrome Enterprise Premium takes Zero Trust a step further with context-aware access controls that can also mitigate the risk of data leaks. This includes approved applications and those that were not sanctioned by the IT department.

“With Chrome Enterprise Premium, we have confidence in Google’s security expertise, including Project Zero’s cutting-edge security research and fast security patches. We set up data loss prevention restrictions and warnings for sharing sensitive information in applications like generative AI platforms and noticed a noteworthy 50% reduction in content transfers,” said Nick Reva, head of corporate security engineering at Snap.

The new service is now generally available.