It’s not too late to find middle ground

Down under, the news about the news is not good.

Facebook followed through this week on its promise to restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing news content. Facebook says the move is in response to Australia’s new Media Bargaining Code, noting that the proposed law “fundamentally misunderstands the relationship” between Facebook and publishers.

While the current dispute falls most directly within the borders of Australia, the underlying issues are universal: the relationship of news media to tech platforms; the ebb and flow of advertising dollars; and the role of government in picking winners and losers. Citizens of any free country should take note.

The Australian government, supported by publishers, is reacting to the fact that Facebook and Google have taken a disproportionate share of digital advertising dollars while bearing few of the costs of creating quality content. Facebook says that publishers willingly choose to post news on Facebook and reap the attendant benefits of site visitors, subscriptions, and advertising. And by restricting news content in Australia, Facebook avoids the new law.

In contrast, Google is choosing to settle. This week Google announced partnerships with a number of Australian news organizations, capped by a deal Wednesday with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. These deals will allow Google to avoid the most onerous elements of the Media Bargaining Code, and will effectively set a market price for any complaints that are subject to arbitration.

There is room to maneuver, as Facebook could — and likely would under the right circumstances — commit a significant sum to sidestep this issue.

This leaves Facebook as the tech giant standing alone on this issue, and with 2020 revenues of US$71 billion, they make an unsympathetic victim. Further, the political realities in Australia may preclude anything that appears to be appeasement of a Big Tech platform. Even so, there is room to maneuver, as Facebook could — and likely would under the right circumstances — commit a significant sum to sidestep this issue. Especially if it sets a precedent for other countries seeking to emulate Australia’s approach.

Facebook has already demonstrated a willingness to devote hundreds of millions of dollars to support journalism, and could readily commit billions of dollars to the cause. What they need in exchange for that level of commitment is cost certainty. No business should willingly accept a situation where commercial license fees can be substantially increased via forced arbitration.

SocialFlow provides software to publishers while at the same time serving as a partner to Facebook, Twitter, and other tech platforms. We’ve seen the layoffs and shared the tears, and can testify first-hand that the economic pain driving the Australian Media Bargaining Code is quite real. At the same time, it’s hard to blame Facebook for choosing to avoid rules by which it cannot abide.

The Australian government and Facebook can and should find a way to settle. Unless they do, we all may learn the true value of news publishers and platforms — but in a way that benefits neither.

Having lost his MAGA-phone, former President Trump plots his next move

The impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump is set to commence on February 9, and while that will generate plenty of political headlines, its outcome may not matter nearly as much as something Trump has already lost: his Twitter account.

Journalists, especially political journalists, love Twitter, and Trump consistently used the media’s collective obsession with Twitter to his advantage. His provocative Tweets appealed to his followers, and demanded the attention of journalists. Trump’s ability to control the news cycle was near-absolute and he was relentless in wielding it, firing off provocative Tweets at will.

The events at the Capitol on January 6 changed everything. Real-world violence caused a sea change in how tech platforms interpreted politicians’ Tweets. Formerly loath to muzzle a sitting president, Twitter ultimately banned @realDonaldTrump over what was a pretty tame tweet, at least by Trump’s standards.

He Tweeted on January 8 that he wouldn’t be attending the inauguration for Joe Biden. Few expected Trump to attend anyway, but Twitter worried the message would be interpreted by some as an invitation to violence. So Twitter pulled the plug.

The loss of his MAGA-phone creates an uphill climb for Trump in whatever he chooses to do next, as he will have a harder time gaining the attention of his followers. That will make it more difficult for him to wield power as a Republican kingmaker, or to rebuke those who have crossed him. He is still the former President and very popular with the Republican base. But whatever combination of messaging he comes up with is not going to have the same impact as his pithy 280-character missives.

Trump won’t go quietly into the night, and will find ways to use TV, radio, and other media to his advantage. There have been rumors of him creating his own media outlet, his own social network, or even his own political party. But without Twitter, Trump doesn’t have instant, wide access to the political news scrum. He’ll have a much harder time taking control of a news cycle.

We shouldn’t outsource our hardest decisions to tech companies

Jan 19, 2021 | Blog, Data Analysis

By Jim Anderson | CEO, SocialFlow

The social networking app Parler remains offline more than two weeks after Google, Apple, and Amazon removed the app from their platforms. Parler has managed to get a website back up, but is still a long way from rebuilding a functioning social network.

While I believe that Parler’s ban is reasonable (more on that below), it does illustrate the power of big technology platforms and invites questions about how and when they wield it.

What happened to Parler is not complicated: They positioned themselves as a free-speech alternative to mainstream social networks, and a non-trivial number of their customers used that free speech to make posts that encouraged violence. The events at the Capitol on January 6 demonstrated how threats of violence online can encourage violence in the real world. Concerned that Parler would not adjust its free-speech policy to remove potentially dangerous content, Google, Apple, and Amazon turned off Parler’s access to their services — effectively erasing it from the internet.

Conservatives have decried these decisions as censorship of free speech. Even liberals who think the decisions were warranted have expressed concern about unchecked power in the hands of a small number of tech platforms. And the tech companies themselves seem to acknowledge that they are poor candidates to lead a national conversation about the limits of free speech.

There is no easy solution to these issues, but the following are some of the best avenues I’ve seen suggested. Each one could be a component of a path forward.

Section 230 Reform

Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act provides technology platforms immunity from liability for content that is posted on its platforms. There’s bipartisan support for reforming, if not outright repealing, of Section 230, but the motivations behind the support are vastly different.

Without Section 230, Parler would likely have been forced to substantially alter its “free speech” position well before Google, Apple, and Amazon took action. Parler would have done this out of fear of lawsuits, not because of the directives of tech platforms–and would very likely still be operating today.

Outright repeal of Section 230 could cause more problems than it solves, as it would create liability for areas ranging from the comments section of your local newspaper’s website to business ratings and review providers such as Yelp.

Reform seems more likely than repeal, and Congress is going to have to do the messy work of balancing these competing interests. It will be ugly and political, and a good outcome is far from guaranteed. But the urgency on both sides of the aisle suggests that some reforms will pass.

Regulate Algorithmic Feeds

Many have questioned whether companies like Facebook and YouTube should be treated as media companies. Rather than trying to answer that difficult question, a better approach might be to focus on what makes these tech companies different from media companies — specifically the tech companies’ algorithmic feeds.

These algorithmic feeds are immensely powerful, and we’ve seen increasing evidence of their downsides — the amplification of extreme content, and the creation of filter bubbles that some would argue verge on an alternate reality.

It’s not clear what form this regulation should take, but one obvious starting point would be transparency. Forcing companies to disclose how and when they use algorithms, how those algorithms work, and the impact they have on the content that users see would be a big step forward.

Anti-Trust Action

Combined, Apple and Google account for the entirety of the mobile operating system market in the U.S., according to the market research firm IDC. Amazon Web Services is the preferred hosting service for many of the world’s most notable tech companies, accounting for nearly half the cloud market share in the U.S.

Power is similarly concentrated in the digital advertising industry. Of the more than $115 billion spent on digital advertising in the U.S. in 2019, $98 billion (or nearly 85 percent) went to properties owned by Amazon, Facebook and Google, per research firm eMarketer.

The amount of power these companies have over our information ecosystem is staggering. “How big is too big?” and “How powerful is too powerful?” are questions that should be addressed by anti-trust action. There will no doubt be protracted litigation, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see the tech platforms themselves eventually agree to settlements that result in them divesting parts of their businesses, or even dramatically breaking up into smaller components.

Whatever the recourse, recent events have shown the tech industry can’t continue to operate in its current form, and that reforms are needed. Soon.

It’s not as common as you think

Conventional wisdom says that consumers on social media routinely share stories they haven’t read. Anxiety about this behavior spikes around elections, and Twitter even rolled out a feature this year that asks users if they are really sure they want to retweet a link they have not tapped on.

Twitter Support on Twitter: "Sharing an article can spark conversation, so you may want to read it before you Tweet it.To help promote informed discussion, we're testing a new prompt on Android -- when you Retweet an article that you haven't opened on Twitter, we may ask if you'd like to open it first. / Twitter"

Sharing an article can spark conversation, so you may want to read it before you Tweet it.To help promote informed discussion, we're testing a new prompt on Android -- when you Retweet an article that you haven't opened on Twitter, we may ask if you'd like to open it first.

That perception is almost entirely false, though, according to our analysis. The vast majority of news articles shared on social media generated more clicks than shares or retweets.

SocialFlow processes about a billion clicks on news articles every single month, and we analyzed the 1,000 most-shared articles for the past 30 days (ending on November 19). Our data show that social media users tend to click on stories they see on social media far more than they share them. The difference is even more striking when you look at the 1,000 most clicked-on stories: they generate tens of thousands times more clicks than shares. Both data sets can be seen in this graph:

There are some stories that generate more shares than clicks, and this is where it gets interesting. These stories tend to fall into one of two categories:

1. News articles in which the headline tells the entire story. Articles about the deaths of Sean Connery and Alex Trebek, and articles about news organizations calling the presidential election for Joe Biden elicited more shares than clicks.
2. Inflammatory political articles. These include a article from a conservative outlet about how Vice President-elect Kamala Harris failed to prosecute gang members while working as California attorney general; and an article from a liberal outlet about how a President Trump campaign rally led to 30,000 Covid infections.

The first category is easy to explain. For many people, the headlines were news enough — they didn’t need to click-through to understand what happened.

The second category is more interesting. It suggests that highly-charged political articles elicit a visceral emotional response that prompts people to share the post without even reading it — a behavior that makes perfect sense given the polarization of U.S. politics over the past several years.

This analysis comes with a couple important caveats:

• Just because someone clicks on a story doesn’t mean they followed through and actually read it. And it certainly doesn’t mean they read it in its entirety or with any degree of thoughtfulness.
• Even if the overall number of clicks for an article exceeds the number of shares, some people no doubt share without reading it.
• This analysis relates to news stories published by SocialFlow media clients, and not posts from politicians or individuals.
• Twitter’s new feature, rolled out first on Android and then on iOS devices, may very well have affected behavior as intended. Though only 22% of the most-shared stories were on Twitter; the rest were on Facebook.

Caveats aside, it’s both surprising and encouraging that “share without reading” behavior appears to be far more rare than you would think.

Pandemic coverage stays center stage as interest in the presidential election wanes.

In a normal election year, a presidential candidate refusing to concede an election would be an all-consuming news event. But 2020 has been anything but conventional, and that’s reflected in consumers’ news habits. After a brief spike in interest in election-related news, Covid is once again the dominant news story in the country, with readers eager to learn about the worsening pandemic.

Even in the run-up to the election, news consumers were more interested in articles about Covid, clicking on them at a slightly higher rate than articles pertaining to the presidential election.

Of course the subjects aren’t totally disconnected. One of the primary issues — if not the primary issue — heading into the election was the Covid pandemic, and its impact on voters’ choices.

Still, interest in the election steadily dropped after election day, and has been declining ever since.

Interest in news about election fraud (a subset of all election news) has seen periodic spikes, but has not changed the overall election news trajectory. Interest in this type of content rises with news about lawsuits and recounts, but those stories tend to be more localized.

The states most interested in news stories about election fraud? On a per-capita basis, that would be Delaware, Joe Biden’s home state. Reliably blue states Rhode Island and Massachusetts are numbers two and three, followed closely by Michigan, the hotly-contested battleground state that Biden managed to flip blue after it went for Trump in 2016. Of note, Georgia has become a hotly-contested state, both in terms of a vote recount and two upcoming Senate runoff elections. But so far at least, Georgia residents are in the bottom half of states on per-capita interest in election fraud topics.

Consumer attention will ebb and flow as the news cycle continues. One thing is clear, though: Covid is still with us, in person and in consumers’ consumption of news content.

The 2020 presidential election may have been the most contentious political battle in American history, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the list of the most clicked-on articles on Facebook in the days leading up to the election. Not even a reality TV president can compete with reality TV news.

Instead of reading articles about whether president-elect Joe Biden was making inroads in key battleground states, President Donald Trump’s growing popularity among Latino voters, or how each candidate plans to handle the Covid pandemic, Facebook users were more concerned with Kris Jenner’s Halloween costume and the status of former American Idol contestants.

SocialFlow conducted an analysis of the 30 most clicked-on links shared on social media across its publishing partners, and the results indicate a stark contrast between Facebook and Twitter in terms of what stories generated the most interest.

Five of the Top Facebook Stories

1. “Megan Fox slams ex Brian Austin Green for Halloween pic with son” (TMZ)

2. “Kris Jenner looks unrecognizable in her nightmare before Christmas Halloween costume” (E! Online)

3. “Sean Connery: James Bond actor dies aged 90” (The BBC)

4. “American Idol Alum Nikki McKibbin Dies” (The Today Show)

5. “This high school dropout dad cashed in his 401(k) to open a burger joint” (CNBC)

Five of the Top Twitter Stories

1. “Can you tell a ‘Trump’ fridge from a ‘Biden’ fridge?” (The New York Times)

2. “Sean Connery: James Bond actor dies aged 90” (The BBC)

3. “Study warns five states at high risk for election-related armed violence by milita groups” (The Hill)

4. “Don’t ignore the good news on Covid-19 from Asia” (Bloomberg)

5. “What we can learn from 1918’s deadly second wave” (CNN)

The Facebook list is dominated by articles with more light-hearted fare, such as stories about reality TV programs such as The Bachelor and Keeping Up With The Kardashians. There are some hard news stories — including a few about the Covid pandemic — but these are not as widely engaged with as the celebrity content.

The Twitter list is pretty much the opposite, with the most clicked-on articles being about Covid and the election, and just a few stories about pop culture subjects, including a story about the death of Sean Connery (also one of the top Facebook stories).

This does not mean that people avoid politics on Facebook. Political content is immensely popular on the platform, so much so that Facebook’s effect on political discourse has become the subject of intense scrutiny in recent years. But it may indicate a difference between what people interact with on Facebook and what articles they actually click on and take the time to read.

The other interesting phenomenon is the distribution of engagement. With both platforms, we see that the most popular stories receive disproportionate engagement. This is consistent with the “80/20” rule we’ve seen before: 20% of the content receives 80% of the engagement.

This data underscores the idea that Facebook has more mass appeal, while Twitter is more popular among hard news junkies and amateur political wonks.

But lo and behold, the pivot appears to be working. Publishers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are all coming off victory laps celebrating subscriber milestones; memberships seem to be the new coin of the realm. Given the pandemic’s negative impact on already receding ad revenue, this couldn’t come at a better time.

Indeed, one might say we’re in a golden age of subscriptions. From the dowagers to the streamers to the long substacky tail (as nicely outlined in this recent post by Jarrod Dicker on Renaissance Creators), subscriptions are the rage.

But.

As positive as subscriptions may be for your business (“Recurring revenues — yes!”), they’re a negative for consumers (“Recurring charges — no!”). As we all know, consumers are besotted with options for their attention. Every credit card statement is a reckoning. Your offer faces a Darwinian battle for share-of-wallet with the likes of Netflix, Spotify Disney+, and Fortnite, among many, many others — with new competitors seemingly piling on by the day.

If you’re lucky enough to sell annual instead of monthly subscriptions, you can insulate yourself from some of the volatility. But let’s face it, the consumer “is this really worth it?” bar is set higher by the day.

An inevitable correction awaits. And if enough subscribers decide your product isn’t worth it, the resulting churn may well overwhelm whatever new subscribers you were able to attract.

Which brings us to one of my favorite metaphors.

Brand, Meet Leaky Bucket

Imagine a spigot that puts out a gallon of water every minute. Five minutes will fill a 5-gallon bucket; 25 minutes will fill a 25-gallon bucket. Simple.

But if each bucket has a hole that causes it to lose 5% of its volume in a minute, you’ll never actually fill the larger bucket.

Substitute “subscribers” for “water” and and the impact on your business becomes evident. As your subscriber base grows you’d better either find a bigger spigot, or ways to plug those holes.

In the early 2000s, I spent nearly a decade working for a consumer Internet business that at its height approached 5 million subscribers. But the monthly churn was an astonishing 4%, meaning that we were losing close to 200,000 subscribers each and every month. It won’t surprise you to hear that we never hit that 5 million subscriber mark.

So what’s someone selling subscriptions to do?

Retention as the New Acquisition

The adage “it’s cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one” is so time-worn as to be a cliché. But few organizations actually behave that way. Acquisition is prized, while Retention is presumed.

Keep ten thousand subscribers from canceling, and you’ll be praised. Acquire ten thousand new subscribers, and you’ll be promoted.

Such an effort can be very labor-intensive, though — and labor is probably your biggest cost. You have to systematically manage subscriber lists and update them daily; be able to quickly identify, organize, and promote quality content; and then be able pull together promoted posts, delivered to the right subscribers, in an economical way. It’s a problem that cries out for a technology solution, which is why we at SocialFlow built a product that does just that.

Fish Where the Fish Are

Social media feeds offer you a significant opportunity to systematically provide content to your subscribers, and to remind them what they’re paying for. You’ll have to pay a per-impression cost to target specific subscriber cohorts, but the unit economics are surprisingly affordable: if you want to reach 1,000 subscribers with 10 stories each, you’ll spend about $50 in advertising (10,000 impressions at a $5 CPM).

When you look at where consumers spend their attention, you don’t have to look far: they’re spending it on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok — typically on their mobile devices.

Consumer attention may be the most valuable commodity in the world, and a company like Facebook is worth $600 billion because it’s consistently proven that it can capture that attention.

Leveling the Playing Field

Most publishers have already made a significant investment in distributing content to social networks. SocialFlow’s biggest customers publish on the order of 100,000 organic posts every month to platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. A social media presence has become table stakes for the modern publisher, and much has been written about the systemic problems with this arrangement.

If you’re one of those publishers with a large social footprint and a subscription business, shouldn’t you think about how you can leverage that attention you garner for further gain?

By reminding your paying customers why they subscribed in the first place, you can reinforce their content consumption habits and increase the chances of a long-term relationship. The key is to do it systematically, every day — and to leverage technology to make sure you keep up with the daily flow of subscribers, while keeping your labor costs in line.

Social networks are not your friends, but they’re not your enemies either. By more effectively reusing the content you already publish, you can plug the leaks in your bucket, keep your subscriber base growing, and extract more value from what you’re already doing on social networks.

Growing faster, by focusing less on acquisition.

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is reportedly close to a deal to sell its U.S. business. It’s a high-stakes negotiation, with a purchase price that will likely be in the tens of billions of dollars. It’s also possible that ByteDance could choose not to sell at all, forcing a showdown with the U.S. Government.

The geopolitical implications of this are significant, but I’m also interested in what it says about the battle for consumer attention. Microsoft seems to be the leading contender, and while they have been wildly successful over the past 20 years in the enterprise space, they generally (excluding XBox and to a degree, LinkedIn) have not been a major player in the battle for consumer attention. Remember the dominant position of Internet Explorer? It now has less than 6% market share on desktops. And Bill Gates himself said his greatest mistake ever was in allowing Android mobile operating system to become what Microsoft’s mobile operating system should have been.

This is an international story, and I had the opportunity to join anchors on Canada’s Business News Network and Al Jazeera to discuss what’s going on. Some of the topics we covered:

• There aren’t a lot of situations that make Microsoft look like a “warm & fuzzy” company — but buying Tik Tok from a Chinese-owned company is one of them. The reasons we find ourselves in this place are remarkable, but I’m focused less on the geopolitics than on what it says about the battle for consumer attention.
• Instagram (owned by Facebook) launched its Reels product to compete with Tik Tok. But copying a successful application involves more than just replicating its features. It will be a long road for the competition, unless somehow a deal can’t be reached and Tik Tok is removed from the Apple and Google app stores.
• Facebook can indeed try to copy Tik Tok. But if every matched feature comes paired with an invitation to Mark Zuckerberg to testify in front of Congress, how willing will they be to keep copying features?
• I really like this move, as given the current political climate, Tik Tok urgently needs a new home. Microsoft is a $1.6 Trillion (market cap) giant, and Tik Tok will not be relegated to the kids’ table when going up against Facebook, Google, and other tech titans.

Since those interviews aired, TikTok’s CEO resigned; Microsoft has enlisted Walmart as a potential partner; and both Oracle and Twitter have joined the mix. All while the clock is ticking as a result of the President’s Executive Order.

Oracle (where I worked for a year, after they acquired a previous company) certainly has the deep pockets to make a successful bid, but it’s hard for me to get my mind around how they would successfully run a giant consumer business. Twitter could be a great fit, but it’s hard for me to get my mind around how they can afford the likely price tag of this acquisition.

People like to talk about “FAANG” stocks — short for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. Regardless of how it plays out (FAMANG? FOANAG? FATANG?), I suspect we’ll be talking about this deal, and how it altered the landscape of companies competing for consumer attention, for years to come.

This morning SocialFlow made the public announcement of its Universal Attention Token, or UAT. But I won’t use this post to talk about the specifics of the offering (see our announcement, check out our website, and read our white paper).

Instead, I’d like to address the question “Why Blockchain?” It’s a fair one, because it seems like every company out there has added two slides on blockchain to its Powerpoint presentations (and IBM, never to be outdone, is spending tens of millions in advertising to make blockchain “relatable”, sort of the way they’ve done with Watson and Artificial Intelligence).

So Why Blockchain for the UAT?

Everything we’re proposing to do with the Universal Attention Token could be done with a database. So why complicate things by extending it to blockchain?

The simple answer is that there’s precious little trust in the current digital advertising ecosystem, and blockchain systems are well-suited for transactions in systems that lack trust. A properly designed blockchain solution is a step in the right direction and will facilitate transactions without requiring trust. And hopefully, over time it will actually help build trust.

The 2018 Version of the “Bound Ledger”

The idea of a creating a permanent record of important data is hardly a new one. Those familiar with the history of banking, accounting, and legal professions have no doubt seen physical ledgers that incorporate a number of security features: (a) they are bound, with numbered pages so that entire sheets cannot be easily added or removed; (b) entries are made using indelible ink, so that entries cannot be not be deleted or easily altered; and, (c) the entries are made in sequential order, so that it is obvious if entries are inserted after the fact. The approach was a good one and served society well for centuries.

Of course someone could enter a false record, using indelible ink, properly sequenced, in a bound ledger. But fraud at the time of data entry is a small subset of fraud relating to events from the past. And steps that minimize fraud relating to events from the past are important, even if they don’t prevent someone from entering a fraudulent record today. The perfect is not the enemy of the good.

This is directly relevant to what we’re doing: by adding blockchain to the Universal Attention Token, we are effectively making it impossible for anyone — including SocialFlow — to alter historical data. Once it’s written, it’s immutable. And that has important implications to the advertising ecosystem, on topics ranging from click fraud, to viewability, to reporting discrepancies.

“But Blockchain is Slow and Inefficient”

We’re not trying to build a blockchain system that records every click in real-time. That would be a daunting engineering challenge, and completely unnecessary at this stage. Instead, we’re batching transactions. So instead of writing a transaction to the blockchain once every ~0.03 seconds (that’s how often we process clicks), we’re writing once every ~10 minutes.

To appreciate how big a difference that is, consider that it’s about the same ratio as the time it takes to blink your eyes (~0.33 seconds) to the time it takes to watch the movie Casablanca (102 minutes). It’s a massive difference in scale.

Encrypted Data, With Audit Rights

Our blockchain records will be distributed and available on many different Stellar nodes around the world. But the data is all encrypted — it’s not publicly readable unless you have the record’s private key. As we write the settlement records to the blockchain, we think it’s important to use those private keys to provide audit rights to Advertisers (to see how many real humans interacted with their advertising experiences), to Publishers (to see how many people clicked on and interacted with their stories), and to Users themselves (to see how their attention was directed and accounted for). Parties in the system will only be able to audit their own data, so privacy is protected.

Moving Towards Decentralization

Stellar has developed a consensus protocol that offers the advantages associated with a distributed (aka, decentralized) ledger. The blockchain has many verified nodes, and while you might be able to enter a fraudulent record in a physical bank ledger, to do so on the blockchain you’d need to enter the same exact record at the same exact time on dozens of server, using high grade encryption. That’s a practical impossibility using today’s computing standards.

SocialFlow will write the UAT records to the Stellar blockchain at ~10 minute intervals, and we’ll provide audit rights to Publishers, Users, and Advertisers, as described above. This is a much more transparent, distributed, and trustworthy approach then most anything else in the ad tech ecosystem today.

To Summarize...

We don’t believe that blockchain is a magic bullet, or that it will solve all the problems in the ad tech ecosystem. But we see great value in creating a distributed immutable ledger that protects privacy but that can also be audited by each of the parties in the digital advertising ecosystem.

I should note that all of what I’ve written here applies to the Utility function of our Universal Attention Token. We are of course conducting a capital raise with a Security Token, and the “Why blockchain?” answer to that question is quite simple: Blockchain and ERC20 tokens give us a much better path to liquidity, by having the tokens listed on Security Token exchanges.

More than 61,000 Facebook posts (Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms comprise an even larger data set, but aren’t included here) generated a combined 1.6 billion in organic Facebook reach. If you were to buy that reach at a $5 CPM, you would spend on the order of $8 million just for the ad spend — without even considering the cost of creating all the content.

There are a few interesting patterns in the animated GIF that are worth calling out:

• It’s necessary to plot the y-axis on a logarithmic scale to see what’s going on. If you try to view it on a conventional scale, the posts with reach of 5+ million make it impossible to see all the posts with reach of under 10,000.
• Social posting is clearly a “hit-driven” business. You can see that 15% of the posts generate 90% of the reach.
• We, humans, are peculiar. Despite SocialFlow’s efforts to explain the perils of scheduling posts, we still see large vertical “stripes” in the data which reflect the human tendency to post at even hour and half-hour increments. (Fortunately, most users instead rely on our data-driven algorithms to slot content into the right windows of attention. But still, the scheduling stripes are noticeable.)

We’re spending quite a bit of time and effort around Publisher monetization, and on understanding what marketers and their agencies are looking for — beyond simply a giant Facebook audience. We know that contextual relevance is one opportunity, and we’ve been helping media companies understand how to use their high-performing organic content to drive revenue:

In many ways it’s reassuring to see how great content serves as a magnet for consumer attention. That attention is finite — each of us only has 24 hours in a day, and no matter how hard we try to multi-task, there’s an upper limit to what we can consume.

We’re excited to be working on the “business” of consumer attention, and on finding ways to reward the Publishers who produce so much of the great content. We have some exciting product innovations in the works that do just this, and look forward to sharing more about our plans in the coming weeks!