Meta enhances Threads Insights to support content creators.
Meta has announced a significant update to Threads, its microblogging platform, aimed at giving content creators a better understanding of how their posts are performing. Revealed on Tuesday, the improved Threads Insights will provide deeper analytics and visibility into content discovery, a move that could help attract more creators to the growing platform.
In a blog post, Meta explained that the upgraded Insights feature is designed to offer creators a more detailed view of post performance. Unlike earlier, when Threads only offered basic analytics, users will now be able to track various metrics including total views, interactions, and follower growth. This overhaul marks a major step in Meta’s strategy to make Threads a more creator-friendly space, especially as its daily active users (DAUs) continue to grow, reportedly hitting 115.1 million across iOS and Android.
One of the key features of the new Threads Insights is the ability to tap into specific metrics. Users can now explore detailed breakdowns of engagement, including likes, replies, quotes, and reposts, directly through the Interactions section. The platform also now highlights a user’s top-performing posts and gives visibility into how many views, comments, and likes each piece of content has received.
In addition, the Followers section has been improved to show follower growth trends, top cities and countries where audiences are based, and demographic information like age and gender. These features give creators valuable audience data to help tailor content strategies more effectively.
Threads is also introducing performance tracking over time, with new charts that display trends in views and interactions across a selectable range of seven to 90 days. This allows content creators to analyze what types of content perform well and when. Importantly, the updated Insights tool will now reveal where a post was discovered, even if it surfaced through other Meta apps, providing greater clarity on content reach and visibility.
The move follows the recent appointment of Connor Hayes, a long-time Meta executive, as the new Head of Threads. Hayes has been involved in developing several Meta products and is now tasked with overseeing the platform’s daily operations.
As Threads seeks to challenge platforms like X (formerly Twitter), these improved analytics features appear to be part of a broader push to bring more creators on board. With better tools to track engagement and audience growth, Threads is positioning itself as a serious contender in the social media space.
Following layoffs of over 200 employees in May, Google is now offering voluntary buyouts to staff across several divisions as part of its ongoing restructuring efforts. Rather than issuing direct pink slips, the company is encouraging U.S.-based employees in teams like Search, Ads, Commerce, Engineering, Marketing, and Research to opt for a quiet exit with severance.
According to CNBC, this strategic move—targeting groups under the Knowledge & Information (K&I) umbrella—reflects Google’s attempt to streamline operations without triggering large-scale layoffs, though the total number of departures remains uncertain.
In an internal memo, Google’s K&I chief Nick Fox made it clear that the voluntary exit program is aimed at employees who may be disengaged or underperforming, offering them a respectful way out. For those thriving, the message was to stay focused, with Fox emphasizing the company’s ambitious goals and workload ahead. This approach is part of a broader shift in Google’s internal culture following the major layoffs in early 2023, with buyouts now being used more frequently as a quieter, less disruptive means of trimming the workforce.
However, these buyout offers come with strings attached—many are linked to Google’s renewed push for in-office work. Employees living within 50 miles of a Google campus are being encouraged, or subtly pressured, to return to a hybrid schedule. The shift reflects not just a workforce adjustment strategy but also Google’s evolving stance on remote work, suggesting that those unwilling to adapt may find the buyout route increasingly appealing.
Google is quietly reshaping its workforce by cutting internal training budgets and prioritizing AI-focused skill development, signalling a clear shift toward its AI-first strategy. Programs deemed non-essential are being sidelined, reinforcing the message that employees not aligned with this direction may not have long-term roles at the company. While the move from layoffs to voluntary buyouts has made restructuring less dramatic, the impact remains significant as Google sharpens its focus on future priorities.
Xiaomi surpasses Apple as the second-largest smartphone maker.
Xiaomi made waves by becoming the second-largest smartphone brand in the world based on sell-through volume, surpassing Apple. Sell-through volume measures the actual number of phones sold to consumers, rather than just those shipped to stores, giving a clearer view of a brand’s market strength. This milestone, highlighted by market research firm Counterpoint in their Smartphone 360 Monthly Tracker, underscores Xiaomi’s impressive growth in a competitive industry.
This marks a significant comeback for Xiaomi, as it returns to the second position for the first time since 2021. Throughout 2024, the company has seen a steady rise in sales, bolstered by smart promotions and a strong line up of affordable devices. In particular, markets like Latin America have responded well to Xiaomi’s aggressive marketing strategies, appealing to budget-conscious consumers eager for quality smartphones.
On the other hand, Apple has faced some challenges. Its sell-through volume has fluctuated, partly due to a more limited range of products and the mixed reception of its iPhone 16 series. Recent reports suggest that this new model hasn’t generated the excitement of previous releases, raising questions about its sales potential compared to last year’s devices. This shift illustrates the hurdles Apple must overcome as the smartphone market evolves, increasingly favouring a variety of affordable options.
Xiaomi’s success can largely be traced back to its focus on the entry-level segment, specifically smartphones priced under $200. As many of its key markets recover economically, the demand for budget-friendly phones has surged, allowing Xiaomi to thrive. By offering feature-rich devices at competitive prices, the brand has carved out a strong niche, particularly against higher-end competitors like Apple.
Moreover, Xiaomi has skilfully capitalized on seasonal trends and promotional events to boost its sales, mitigating declines in other areas. By emphasizing value and accessibility, the company has effectively attracted a larger share of consumers who prioritize affordability without sacrificing quality.
As the global smartphone market continues to rebound, Xiaomi’s strategies align well with what today’s consumers are looking for. The brand’s dedication to innovation and a diverse product line up positions it as a significant player in the industry. With a solid grip on the entry-level market and ongoing efforts to strengthen its presence, Xiaomi appears poised for further growth.
Xiaomi’s rise to the second spot in global smartphone sales marks a notable shift in consumer preferences and market trends. While Apple navigates challenges with its latest offerings, Xiaomi’s commitment to affordability and value resonates with a wide audience, signifying a pivotal moment in the fast-changing smartphone landscape.
As augmented reality (AR) progresses and technology continues to evolve, Tommy co-founder and chief growth officer Marcus Foley considers how it can be used in new industries.
AR has moved into the mainstream. For some age groups, it’s phenomenally familiar already. It’s still an exciting and fast-moving growth area for the marketing industry, developing at pace. The global AR market is expected to expand with a 40%+ compound annual growth rate in the next six to eight years. It’s allowing brands to create experiences that only a few years ago we couldn’t imagine delivering on a phone to a waiting crowd of millions (or billions – 3.5 billion users globally, as it stands). Even fewer than this many people would be confident enough to pick it up, play, share and create with it. Now we’re delivering hundreds every few months.
Tommy predicts where the evolution of AR will take the advertising industry / Lucrezia Carnelos via Unsplash
At Tommy, we spend a lot of time designing, making and geeking out over AR experiences. This is partly driven by being an official partner for TikTok, and working with a considerable number of household name entertainment brands. AR can be a brilliant tool for famous characters and their fans, and we’ll come on to that, but it is also becoming increasingly important for the retail sector – 71% of shoppers recently reported they would shop with a retailer more often if it offered AR.
Why is AR so attractive to shoppers? For the relevant brands, it’s the ease and speed of product trial, which can be mind-blowing these days. Want to try a new hair color? Click, it’s done. You like it? Click, it’s in your basket. Want to see that new sofa, in your chosen fabric, in your lounge? Click, it’s done. It might save two or three trips to the showroom. What has changed is that it’s become easier to deliver on devices without the need for apps, it’s much easier to use and it’s far more convincing, which has opened up the market. This is without talking about the myriad of fashion brands that have tested, trialled or permanently used AR in their purchase journey. Trying on, personalizing, seeing things in your context – these all de-risk the purchase and give customers the confidence to buy.
What else is pushing AR into familiar spaces and sometimes unexpected hands? Social media, of course. What’s interesting about AR in these spaces is that it has become a part of turning the traditional model of influence on its head. In social media, AR is helping everyday people (not brands or celebrities) to tell more immersive, richer stories with unlimited creative possibilities – without a budget or a studio – from their own special effects lab. Where once the technology barriers and costs kept this as a domain for the few, it’s now in the hands of a huge volume of people. With so many individuals and ideas with such powerful tools, it takes storytelling and share ability to a whole new level.
The younger generations are often the instigator, but all generations are being exposed to AR through their peers, friends and family. It might be in photos and videos using lenses, a shared moment playing a game at a family event, or a website where a convenient trial moment is embedded into the customer journey. If you ask them, ‘Do you use AR?’, they would probably say no, but they are part of a growing number of people who are starting to see the blend of digital and physical imagery as being ‘normal.’ Of course, it’s not just Josephine Bloggs putting bunny ears on Granny – it’s also the creators and brands that are intentionally building an audience that is driving expectation and desire for AR too.
So what about them? For one, the entertainment industry loves AR, and albeit from our slightly biased perspective, is doing some amazing work to bring their IP to people in immersive moments that were previously impossible. Combining novel experiences with getting a fan closer to their favourite characters – in many cases appearing as their favourite foe or hero – can go a long way to encourage people to try, create and share. The noise from each major release ripples through feeds and, once again, AR becomes less novelty and more expected. Those who don’t have it become the odd ones out.
AR is no longer a novelty – and the expectation and desire for it is growing. What does this mean for marketers? It means that it’s time to start having a serious think about AR, and to identify if it works for your product and target market. This is not to advocate for the use of technology where it doesn’t fit, but to encourage you to explore, and at least understand, how your customers are using these tools to engage with people, products and places. It’s great fun, and its capacity to inspire and connect people with pure entertainment moments shouldn’t be overlooked. However, it’s more than that – it’s a shift in the way we experience brand and product that is here to stay.
The online giant gives a leg up to hundreds of house brand and exclusive products that most people don’t know are connected to Amazon
It took Robert Gomez about five months to get his Kaffe coffee grinder to the big leagues in e-commerce: among the first three search results for “coffee grinder” on Amazon.com.
Gomez, founder of Atlanta-based consumer goods startup 4Q Brands, said he obsessively refined his photos and description, amassed reviews from happy customers, and paid Amazon $40,000 a month on advertising to boost sales, one of the elements Amazon tells sellers will increase search ranking.
Robert Gomez, owner of startup 4Q Brands, in his warehouse in Buford, GA on October 6th, 2021. For more than two years, his coffee grinder had been one of his best sellers on Amazon. Rita Harper
Then Amazon introduced a competitor from house brand Amazon Basics and another from a brand that sells exclusively on Amazon, DR Mills.
“They ranked well right away,” Gomez said, each of them appearing among the top-three results for “coffee grinder” searches immediately. The reason, he said, was clear: “Their search ranking is high because they’re an Amazon brand.”
An investigation by The Markup found that Amazon places products from its house brands and products exclusive to the site ahead of those from competitors—even competitors with higher customer ratings and more sales, judging from the volume of reviews.
We found that knowing only whether a product was an Amazon brand or exclusive could predict in seven out of every 10 cases whether Amazon would place it first in search results. These listings are not visibly marked as “sponsored” and they are part of a grid that Amazon identifies as “search results” in the site’s source code. (We only analysed products in that grid, ignoring modules that are strictly for advertising.)
We used machine learning to try to predict which product Amazon put first in search results based on various factors. Source: The Markup/Amazon.com
When we analysed star ratings and number of reviews, neither could predict much better than a coin toss which product Amazon placed first in search results.
Amazon told Congress in 2019 that its search results do not take into account whether a product is an Amazon-owned brand.
Sellers say it doesn’t seem that way to them. Gomez said Amazon’s brands have “unfair advantages” that make it harder for small merchants like him to compete” on its open marketplace. “Who bears the cost are those entrepreneurs and small businesses that don’t have the means to fight.”
The Markup found Amazon placed its Happy Belly Cinnamon Crunch cereal, with four stars and 1,010 reviews, in the number one spot ahead of cereals with better and more reviews including Cap’n Crunch (five stars, 14,069 reviews), Honey Bunches of Oats (five stars, 5,205 reviews), and Honey Nut Cheerios (five stars, 11,702 reviews). A vacuum cleaner from Amazon’s exclusive Noisz brand was placed on top, ahead of models from Bissell, Eureka, and Hoover with higher ratings and more reviews. And the Amazon-exclusive Concept 3sneaker from Skechers placed number one, four spots ahead of a similar but not exclusive to Amazon Skechers sneaker with the same star rating but 77 times more reviews.
A former Amazon employee told The Markup that the company used to give its new house brand products an unearned place at the top of search rankings when they first launched. He said the practice has since stopped.
However, we found that Amazon brands and exclusive products overall received an outsized portion of the top spot on search results, one that was far out of line with their proportion of the sample.
That’s not what shoppers expect.
We commissioned a national panel of 1,000 adults. We included (non-Amazon) competing brands Champion and Brooklinen as a control. Source: The Markup/YouGov
In a national survey we commissioned from YouGov, only 17 percent of respondents said they assumed Amazon put its own products first. Half said they expected the first non-sponsored product on Amazon’s search results page to be the cheapest, highest rated, or bestselling.
By giving its brands top billing, Amazon is giving itself a significant leg up in sales. The first three items on the search results page get 64 percent of clicks, according to one ex-Amazon-employee-turned-consultant.
In a short, written statement, Amazon spokesperson Nell Rona said that the company does not favour its brands in search results and declined to answer any of the dozens of specific questions posed by The Markup.
She said the company identified its brands to shoppers by adding “Amazon brand” to the list of product features on the product page and sometimes to the listing title as well. We only found this to be the case in 23 percent of products in our sample that were Amazon-owned brands. She said brands that are exclusive to Amazon would not carry the disclosure because they are not owned by the company.
Invisible tags
A signal, invisible to the public but coded into the listings, suggests that most of the Amazon brand and exclusive products that were listed first were ads. In 87 percent of cases, the listing’s source code identified them as “sponsored”—though that label isn’t shown to the public. Instead, Amazon labels the products “featured from our brands.”
Rona, the Amazon spokesperson, said the company considers “featured from our brands” listings “merchandising placements” and not “search results,” despite their presence in the search results grid. She also said they are not ads, despite the “sponsored” label in the source code. Rona said they are “clearly labelled to distinguish them from search results” but did not respond to questions about whether the company believes such disclosures were clear enough under Federal Trade Commission requirements.
Mary Engle, who retired as the FTC advertising practices associate director last year, said that what Amazon calls “merchandising” is actually advertising.
“Amazon’s placement of its own products on its own site is advertising, whether or not money changes hands,” she said. She said it would require an investigation to determine whether “featured from our brands” is sufficient disclosure under the FTC’s rules.
Bill Baer, a former assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice and former director of the Bureau of Competition at the FTC, said if consumers expect Amazon’s product search results to be neutral, but they are not, and the site is essentially a monopoly, that could be a violation of the FTC Act of 1914, which prohibits unfair competition and unfair or deceptive practices in commerce, or the U.S. Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibits monopolies from using their market power to harm competition.
“If basically you’ve got somebody with market power that is restraining competition both in terms of site access or where things appear on the site,” he said, “that is potentially problematic.”
Amazon’s online marketplace garners more than five times more sales than its closest online competitor, Walmart, which also allows third-party sales.
Congress is considering a package of anti-monopoly bills aimed at big tech, including the Ending Platform Monopolies Act, which would make the practice of platforms giving their brands a leg up explicitly illegal.
Amazon refers to its own brands and brands developed by others that sell exclusively on Amazon as “our brands.” They peddle everything from snack chips and vitamins to fashion and furniture.
Using public records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Amazon’s own statements, we identified more than 150 brands registered by or owned by Amazon. These include both brands with an obvious connection, such as Amazon Basics and Amazon Commercial, and those that are generally known to be owned by the company, including Kindle and Zappos. But they also include dozens more, such as Happy Belly, Daily Ritual, and Society New York, where the connection to the company is not obvious. Those are in addition to the estimated hundreds of third-party brands that are exclusive to the site.
We analysed search results on Amazon for 3,492 popular internet product queries in January 2021 and looked closely at what Amazon placed in the first spot. In 60 percent of cases, Amazon sold this spot to an advertiser and added a public label indicating the listing was “sponsored.” Of the rest, Amazon gave half to its own brands and brands exclusive to the site, and the other half to competing brands. But Amazon brands and exclusives made up only 6 percent of all products in the sample, and competitors made up 77 percent. In short, Amazon was hogging the top spot.
In more than a quarter of searches in which Amazon gave its brands the top spot, it placed its products above competitors that had both better ratings and more reviews than the Amazon brand or exclusive product.
‘They would shut us down’
Sellers said there’s no mistaking the effect on sales of Amazon’s choices in search results.
“If the customers are not seeing [our products] in the top five offers, then it makes it really hard for us to reach customers,” said Gabriela Mekler, a Miami mom who co-founded the organizational products company Mumi in 2014.
Mumi’s top product—a set of color-coded packing cubes—struggles for visibility on Amazon, even after more than two years on the site. She said the coronavirus pandemic decimated her sales—they dropped by more than 68 percent—costing the company a hard-won “Amazon’s Choice” badge on its packing cubes.
Mumi has not been placed on the first page of our search results for “packing cubes” for months. At the time of this writing, Amazon Basics took up eight spots on the first page; one was labelled “featured from our brands.” None were visibly marked “sponsored.”
“Their product will always show before yours,” Mekler said.
One Mumi product has still been selling well despite the pandemic, she said: reusable pill pouches. For now, there is no Amazon Basics pill pouch, and Mekler hopes there won’t be anytime soon.
“We’re a small company,” she said. “They would shut us down.”
Some annotated examples of popular searches we collected in January 2021. Source: The Markup / Amazon
The National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, which represents more than 30,000 distributors, submitted a letter to members of Congress in July 2020, complaining that Amazon “abuses its position” to give preferential treatment to its house brands.
But when The Markup asked to speak to some of the sellers the group had quoted anonymously, NAW’s vice president of government relations, Blake Adami, demurred.
“Our members are still very hesitant to speak out against Amazon for fear of retaliation,” he said in an email, “even anonymously.”
Many sellers whose products we found were placed below Amazon products with fewer sales or ratings also declined a reporter’s request to be interviewed for this article, saying they were concerned it would negatively affect their livelihoods.
“Everybody’s so scared of Amazon,” said Paul Rafelson, executive director of the Online Merchants Guild, which represents Amazon sellers. “Their whole livelihood relies on them.”
‘This was a knockoff’
Some of Amazon’s competitors have accused the company of knocking off their products to sell under its house brands.
Williams Sonoma settled a lawsuit that included the claim that Amazon was copying West Elm furniture and selling it under the Amazon house brand Rivet. Allbirds co-CEO Joey Zwillinger wrote an open letter to Jeff Bezos when Amazon’s 206 Collective brand copied his company’s wool sneaker, urging Amazon to adopt Allbirds’ sustainability practices in addition to its design.
In March, Amazon Basics started selling the Everyday Sling, a camera bag with a similar design, the same name but a much lower price than a product from Peak Design.
“It wasn’t like they took some styling cues from it. This was a knockoff,” CEO Peter Dering said in an interview. The smaller company produced a parody video that now has 4.6 million views on YouTube. Within hours, Amazon changed the product’s name.
Dering said he wasn’t worried about losing sales because Peak Design mainly targets wholesalers and customers who want a high-end brand. Still, he said he found the move “highly distasteful.”
Rona, the Amazon spokesperson, said the company “did not infringe” on Allbirds’ or Peak Design’s “design rights” and “strictly prohibit[s] our employees from using non-public, seller-specific data to determine which store brand products to launch.”
Hard to spot
Identifying all of Amazon’s brands and brand exclusives to the site for this investigation was cumbersome. The company does not provide a complete list. The Markup’s reporting team used various filters on the site, reviewed the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records, and reviewed Amazon bestseller lists—but even then we likely missed some.
Consumers would have an even harder time. We found Amazon does not consistently label its brands and exclusives.
Of the products in our sample that Amazon considered “our brands,” about two in five were not labeled as such in search results nor did they carry a name that many people would understand was connected to the company, such as Amazon Basics, Kindle, or Whole Foods.
Inconsistent labelling, combined with an almost endless stream of its own private brands, leaves customers in the dark to decide whether Amazon highly ranked a particular product because it was a good buy or because it benefited the company’s bottom line.
Nine in 10 respondents to the national survey The Markup commissioned in July didn’t know that Amazon’s highest-selling house brands, apart from Amazon Basics, were owned by the company.
Even there, 24 percent of respondents could not identify Amazon Basics as an Amazon brand, and half didn’t know Amazon owned Whole Foods.
To test your knowledge, Select all products from Amazon brands and exclusives: link
Alex Harman, competition policy advocate at Public Citizen who has studied Amazon’s marketplace, said that to him, the strategy of creating a stream of brands without a clear affiliation to Amazon feels “deceptive.”
Large brick-and-mortar retailers also have house brands. Costco has Kirkland Signature. Target has Up&Up, among others. Historically, he said, when large stores create brands they have been clearly affiliated with the store.
And Amazon’s search results are different from a store shelf.
“Unlike a retail store where you see everything on the shelf, the platform may be in a position to elevate its goods in a way that is harder to do in a retail outlet,” said Baer, the former FTC official, and assistant attorney general at the Justice Department.
By creating more than a hundred trademarked brands, most without an obvious connection to the company, Amazon can preserve its reputation if one of its homegrown products flops. This happened in 2015 when customer reviews for its newly launched Amazon Elements diapers included complaints about leaks and “sagginess.” Amazon pulled the products after just seven weeks to make “design improvements.”
Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the small business advocacy group Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and a frequent Amazon critic, said that as Amazon’s brands squeeze competitors, those competitors have less money to spend on innovation—and consumers lose.
“Consumers don’t even know what’s missing,” she said.
Case in point: Brandon Fuhrmann, who runs the New York Amazon Seller Meetup. He was considering expanding his kitchenware brand into a new type of dishware. While checking trademark registrations and U.S. import logs for sellers with similar products, he realized that the majority of his competition would come from Amazon brands.
“When that happened, we realized we couldn’t even compete,” he said. He decided not to launch the product.
Rise of Amazon brands
Amazon has continually set its sights on dizzying growth.
It launched in 1995, with the goal of becoming “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” Four years later, it declared its intention to become “Earth’s Biggest Selection.”
To reach this point, it took a page from rival eBay’s playbook, inviting individuals and business owners to list rare, used, and collectible items—which quickly transitioned to third parties selling mainstream, new wares on Amazon.
In 2003, Jason Boyce got a call from Amazon asking him to list his company’s basketball products on the nascent marketplace.
Jason Boyce, photographed at his home, on October 4th, 2021. (James Bernal for The Markup)
“We’re like, what are you talking about? You guys sell books,” he said. “What do you mean you’re selling sporting goods?”
Boyce took the plunge and his company’s basketball sales took off on Amazon.
By 2018, third-party sellers like Boyce were responsible for 58 percent of physical goods sales on Amazon. They helped boost Amazon’s North American sales by more than an order of magnitude, from $24.5 billion in 2009 to $386.1 billion in 2018.
The volume created fortunes for small businesses across the world. It also created a deep reliance on Amazon. A 2021 report by JungleScout, which provides software for Amazon sellers, found that Amazon was the only source of income for 22 percent of Amazon’s third-party sellers.
“Within two years of getting on Amazon, most of my clients, whether they want to or not, it becomes their single biggest sales channel,” said James Thomson, who was a manager at Amazon from 2007 to 2012 and now works at the e-commerce consulting firm Buy Box Experts.
And these new third-party sellers had lots of competition, eventually from Amazon itself.
Boyce said Amazon started undercutting his business, selling the same sporting goods—Spalding basketballs, for example—for less.
Unable to compete with Amazon on price for brand-name products, Boyce and his brothers launched their own brand, Harvil, in 2007, to sell sporting goods and home recreation equipment on Amazon. They figured Amazon couldn’t undercut their prices if he and his brothers owned the brand.
They had no idea Amazon was also beginning to launch its own brands and to enter into deals with companies to develop brands exclusive to the platform.
Among the first Amazon brands was Pinzon (a likely nod to the first conquistador to stumble across the Amazon River), which Amazon registered as a trademark in 2007 to sell bedding. Then came Denali for tools, and Amazon Basics for a slew of products, including household appliances and office supplies.
Sometime in 2017, Boyce was searching keywords related to his products on Amazon—”bocce ball,” “air hockey table”—when he noticed a new brand, Rally and Roar, peddling very similar products to his own. They showed up at the top of search results.
Rally and Roar are exclusive to Amazon, labelled as “our brands.” The company was moving in on his territory, again.
The speed of Amazon’s expansion of its own brands has been accelerating, according to several e-commerce and retail research firms. TJI Research counted 598 Amazon-exclusive brands in 2019. Coresight Research said Amazon brand products on the site tripled in the two years between 2018 and 2020 alone.
Amazon invites companies and individuals to join its “our brands” family through programs like Amazon Accelerator, which promises increased exposure for products sold exclusively on Amazon in exchange for extra fees, and sets a sales price if Amazon chooses to later buy the brand.
Boyce and his brothers had already been talking about getting off Amazon’s platform when they noticed Rally and Roar pop up. That settled it.
“We’re like, we’re not going to sit around and wait for Amazon to knock off the rest of our private-label products as well,” he said.
They sold the business.
A leg up
For years, Amazon gave items from its own brands multiple advantages when they first launched, said JT Meng, a former house brand manager at Amazon—though he said the practice has since stopped.
Employees manually applied the Amazon’s Choice label to a new Amazon brand product, even if it didn’t meet the usual criteria, he said.
And instead of starting from scratch in search results with zero reviews, sales, and stars, Meng said employees used a tactic called “search seeding” for new products, “cloning” a competing product’s search ranking and allowing the new Amazon product to appear immediately below that competitor in search results.
“We would use that for all of our products from the get-go for the first six months or longer,” he said.
Meng worked on the launch for Amazon Elements baby wipes, which he said were seeded against similar products from Huggies, Pampers, and others.
Sales spiked so quickly that his team had to stop promoting the Amazon Elements wipes so they didn’t take too much market share, he said.
Once a new house brand product was established, Meng said employees would turn off search seeding. “Without fail, your product would drop in ranking,” he said, “but the hope was that it would drop a small amount.”
By the time Meng left Amazon in 2016, he said search seeding and adding the Amazon’s Choice label to new Amazon brand products were no longer allowed.
Sellers who do try to compete with Amazon brands today said they feel compelled to pay for sponsored listings in order to get a higher result for non-sponsored listings on Amazon. On its Seller Central site, Amazon underlines to sellers how important sales are, stating that “better-selling products tend to list towards the beginning of search” and that as sales increase “so does your placement.”
“You can’t not advertise anymore,” said Boyce, who after selling his sporting goods line founded a consulting firm, Avenue7Media, which advises companies and individuals who want to sell on Amazon.
“You turn off the ads and you lose organic rank within days,” Boyce said. “It’s pay to play.”
Lots of companies are paying.
We found that inside the search results alone, 17 percent of products were paid listings. That doesn’t include entire rows of sponsored products that appear as special modules on about a third of search result pages. (Including those would roughly double the ad percentage on the first results page.)
Amazon is the third-largest seller of online advertising in the U.S., after Google and Facebook, and is growing fast. “Other” revenue, which the company says “primarily includes sales of advertising services,” jumped 52 percent from 2019 to 2020, to $21.4 billion a year.
Struggling for visibility
“If you’re willing to spend a ton of money, you can sell a ton of product,” said Evan Patterson, vice president of business development at California-based Linco, which is one of Boyce’s clients.
The 47-year-old family-owned institution makes casters, the small wheels that attach to office chairs and industrial gear—and has a solid reputation in the offline world for premium products. It competes against a product from Amazon Commercial, among others.
It’s so well known in industrial circles that Linco’s competitors advertise against its name within Amazon’s search results, Patterson said.
Still, Linco hasn’t consistently listed on the first page of search results for “caster wheels,” despite selling on Amazon for years. It will appear on the first page for Patterson, but did not in repeated searches by The Markup.
The only thing that seems to help Linco’s search ranking, Patterson said, is to spend more money for paid listings on Amazon. The company now pays about $10,000 a month for advertising.
“Our search ranking has improved dramatically,” Patterson said.
But it still has a ways to go. When The Markup searched for “caster wheels” at the time of writing, Linco appeared in the middle of the fifth page.
Your iPhone has trouble keeping secrets. Thankfully, there’s something you can do about it.
What you do on the internet, what apps you download, and, often, where you go are all data points that can be linked to an iPhone’s so-called advertising identifier (Android phones have a similar Advertising ID). Combined with commercially available databases, this unique alphanumeric string can be enough for third parties to tie an iPhone’s actions back to the real name of its owner.
We were reminded of the real-world consequences of this Friday, when the New York Timespublished an article exposing the movements of individuals involved in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The newspaper obtained a data set that linked phone location data to advertising identifiers, which, combined with other available databases, allowed the paper to link that location data to real people.
Assuming they’re playing by Apple’s rules, app developers get access to a phone’s advertising identifier by simply requesting it from the phone. Think of an ad identifier like the more familiar web cookie which follows you around the internet, remembering what you do and exchanging information with websites along the way. Your phone has something like a cookie, too — that’s the ad identifier.
While you may not have much sympathy for those described in the Times article — who, after all, may have taken part in the attack on the Capitol — the point remains. Your phone’s advertising identifier is yet another digital breadcrumb leading straight back to you.
If you want privacy when, say, going to the doctor, church, an AA meeting, this should concern you. Many of the apps on your phone that have access to your ad identifier are tracking your location. While the apps may promise to store this data anonymously — linked only to your ad identifier — the Times article provides an example of just how easy to it to tie those identifiers (and all the data associated with them) back to real names.
“Several companies offer tools to allow anyone with data to match the IDs with other databases,” the paper explains. And those databases might contain your real name and address.
But there’s a way to fight back.
Apple offers users the option, albeit buried deep in an iPhone’s settings, to deny apps access to your advertising identifier. Turning off apps’ access to location data is also an important step, but there are other ways for apps to estimate your phone’s location — like connections to WiFi networks. You should also not give apps access to your location data unless they absolutely need it to function, like, for example, a map app.
To deny apps access to your phone’s advertising identifier:
Go to “Settings”
Tap “Privacy”
Select “Tracking”
Disable the option that says “Allow Apps to Request to Track”
Limit how you can be tracked on your iPhone.
Image: screenshot: iphone
That’s it.
Interestingly, the menu page doesn’t make it immediately clear that this action will have the intended effect. But it does. Clicking “Learn More” takes the curious to a long page of text which explains what’s going on behind the scenes.
“When you decline to give permission for the app to track you, the app is prevented from accessing your device’s advertising identifier (previously controlled through the Limit Ad Tracking setting on your device).”
Facebook recently announced that it’s widening the access to Rights Manager to give more creators an ability to better control their content on Facebook and Instagram. As a part of the new expansion, page admins would now be able to submit images and videos for rights protection. Creators would also be able to issue takedown requests for videos and images that are owned by them but are reuploaded on these platforms.
In case you aren’t aware, ‘Rights Manager’ is a powerful, highly customizable tool, which is built for people who want to control when, how, and where their content is shared across Facebook and Instagram. As posted on its blog, the ‘Collect Ad Earnings tool’ and expanding availability has also been improved which means more creators will be able to collect ad earnings from matching videos that also include in-stream ads.
A new filter view for spotting monetizable matches has been added along with a guide on how creators can get more monetization opportunities and exportable revenue reports. Page admins can submit an application for the content created by them that they want to protect.
There’s also a new in-stream ads toggle in the Creator Studio app that will let users easily manage their content and ads directly from their mobile phones. “We’ve expanded In-stream ads to Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, and Turkey, adding to the 45 countries where the in-steam program is already available,” states the blog.
It was back in September 2020 when Facebook had announced an update to its ‘Rights Manager’ tool that allowed photographers to claim ownership over their most popular images and track when these images had been used without their permission. Rights Manager for Images used image matching technology to help creators and publishers protect and manage their image content at scale.
Groceries and cleaning supplies aren’t the only things Amazon is selling during the pandemic.
The e-commerce giant is peddling plenty of advertising space to companies hoping to give their items prime placement in front of Amazon’s legions of shoppers. The demand has kept Amazon’s ad sales strong amid Covid-19, even as its big tech competitors in digital advertising, Google and Facebook, suffer slowdowns.
Those two companies have dominated the online ad market, accounting for roughly 61% of digital ad spending by one estimate. But Amazon has been making inroads in recent years, and Covid-19 has pushed companies to devote more dollars to retail media, according to market research firm Forrester.
“Retail media—which, in its simplest form, refers to digital ad placements on eCommerce websites bought by consumer goods brands to influence the customer at the point of purchase—is booming during the pandemic,” the firm said in an Aug. 12 report. “In fact, Amazon’s advertising revenue didn’t miss a beat in Q2, growing at 41% year over year, while Facebook recorded its slowest ad revenue growth since going public and Google’s ad revenue declined for the first time ever.”
Amazon doesn’t report advertising revenue separately, but it does report “other” sales that it explains “primarily includes sales of advertising services, as well as sales related to our other service offerings.” In the quarter ending June 30, those sales jumped to $4.2 billion, while Facebook’s and Google’s ad businesses struggled over the same period.
In its report, Forrester pointed to retail media benefiting from factors that include e-commerce adoption, the large budgets consumer packaged goods companies maintain for retail marketing, and the fact that more retailers are offering media platforms. CVS, for example, is said to be readying its own ad network, and Walgreens is testing digital displays on the doors of coolers in its stores.
Whether the shift of ad dollars toward retail continues may depend on how e-commerce fares as the pandemic plays out, and on advertisers’ willingness to move money out of Google and Facebook.
For now, at least, it’s another way that Amazon looks poised to emerge even stronger than before.
We finally know how much Google is making from ads on YouTube.
Google took in more than $15 billion from YouTube ads in 2019, the company revealed. That number, nearly 10 percent of Alphabet’s total revenue, doesn’t include other sources of revenue from the video platform, including subscriptions.
Google disclosed the numbers, along with revenue for its growing cloud business, for the first time ahead of Alphabet’s fourth-quarter earnings call.
“I’m really pleased with our continued progress in Search and in building two of our newer growth areas — YouTube, already at $15 billion in annual ad revenue, and Cloud, which is now on a $10 billion revenue run rate,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement.
The new disclosure, which included revenue totals going back to 2017, highlights just how quickly YouTube’s ad business has grown, with ad revenue nearly doubling since 2017 when the video platform took in $8.1 billion. Ad revenue in 2018 was $11.1 billion.
Up until now, Google has declined to break out YouTube’s revenue, which has been a source of much speculation.
Pichai also shed light on how YouTube’s subscription business is doing. The company now has more than 20 million subscribers to YouTube Premium and YouTube Music, and 2 million subscribers to YouTube TV. Overall, YouTube’s non-advertising revenue, which includes subscriptions and commerce, amounts to $3 billion.
The new stats also come as Google is facing increasing scrutiny over its ability to police its video platform for disinformation and other unsavory content. And Google, like Facebook, is facing an antitrust investigation.
Facebook’s former head of Global Elections Integrity Ops left after six months on the job — and now she’s speaking out about the problems she faced when trying to fix the company’s political ad problems.
In an op-ed in the Washington Post on Monday, Yaël Eisenstat, who joined Facebook after working with the CIA and the White House, says she tried to sound the alarm at the company leading up to the 2016 election. Recently, Facebook said it would let politicians lie in ads in the name of “free expression.”
“I didn’t think I was going to change the company,” wrote Eisenstat. “But I wanted to help Facebook think through the very challenging questions of what role it plays in politics, in the United States and around the world, and the best way to ensure that it is not harming democracy.”
Eisenstat explained that while employed at Facebook, she saw firsthand how ad tools and features were misunderstood by users and how the company pushed back on any suggested moves to fix the problem.
She said that she believes that when the company approves political advertisers, and provides them with a checkmark and a “paid for” label, it adds credibility to the posts. In reality, Facebook and its partners don’t fact-check any of this content.
“The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools…”“The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare. Its business model exploits our data to let advertisers custom-target people, show us each a different version of the truth and manipulate us with hyper-customized ads — ads that, as of two weeks ago, can contain blatantly false and debunked information if they’re run by a political campaign,” she continued. “As long as Facebook prioritizes profit over healthy discourse, they can’t avoid damaging democracies.”
According to Eisenstat, many of her Facebook colleagues agreed with her push to fix some of these political advertising issues. They still do, according to a recent letter signed by hundreds of Facebook employees.
Facebook’s leadership, however, did not agree.
“Ultimately, I was not empowered to do the job I was hired to do, and I left within six months,” she says.
In addition to sharing her own experience at the company, Eisenstat makes the case as to why Facebook’s ad transparency tools don’t cut it.
“True transparency would include information about the tools that differentiate advertising on Facebook from traditional print and television, and in fact make it more dangerous: Can I see if a political advertiser used the custom audience tool, and if so, if my email address was uploaded? Can I see what look-alike audience advertisers are seeking? Can I see a true, verified name of the advertiser in the disclaimer? Can I see if and how your algorithms amplified the ad?” she writes. “If not, the claim that Facebook is simply providing a level playing field for free expression is a myth.”
Eisenstat doesn’t believe in an outright ban on political advertising, as companies like Twitter have instituted. However, she believes the time for the government to step in and regulate the social media platform is well overdue.
Feature Image Credit:Facebook’s former head of Global Elections Integrity Ops is speaking out about her time at the company. Image: chesnot / Getty Images
