Funnily enough, the word "barbarian" for uncivilized people comes all the way from Ancient Greek slang, proverbially meaning "people who speak in these 'bar bar bar' noises".[0] It's all bar bar bar to me. :)
This post reads like a Buzzfeed article of pointing out not quite impressive iterations of known technologies or fixes to "it ain't broke" situations.
Electric buses have been around for a while, they're called trolleys. Putting the batteries inside the buses is an improvement, but hardly a breakthrough, and I'm not entirely sure it would make me "Love the Bus"
Likewise, autonomous buses have been around for at least a couple decades in the form of driverless trains. For high-density routes with lots of passengers doing the same itinerary, I feel it's probably cheaper in the long run, more maintainable and safer to use rails, so I'm not sure an autonomous bus is an innovation we want over trains.
Seamless payment is not a tech breakthrough at this point, it's just a matter of getting regulators and government contractors to implement seamless payments.
"Accessibility" is not a tech breakthrough and the things mentioned in the article make me question the author's understanding of the state of assistive technology and the actual current needs of people with disabilities.
As for "Minibus or ‘trackless train’", that's indeed a super interesting question that hasn't been solved in the space of transportation: given a very dense ad-hoc demand for transportation from region A to region B, how can you broker a collective transportation solution that is cheap, efficient and desirable over, say, a slower multimodal option, or more expensive private transportation. Sadly, the article discusses minibuses (which we've had, in Brazil at least, for longer than I can remember) and only mentions they "can" be routeless but doesn't fully explain how that could be achieved.
My strategy pretty much consists of subscribing to good creators and curators across all channels.
I have a bookmark folder (aptly named 1) which opens:
- My Gmail "newsletters" filter view
- My AOL Reader
- HackerNews
- MetaFilter
- My Facebook "Must read" user list
- My Twitter "Must read" list
- My Reddit "Must read" list
- My Youtube "Subscriptions" page
In each one of these there's my selection of profiles that reliably create or flag good content (to my standards).
If I have the time, I also go for the noisier and long-form channels in 2:
- Newspapers
- My YouTube "Watch Later" list
- My Pinboard "Read later" list
- HN Explain (in case I missed something big)
Being able to prioritize what comes into my "inbox" and being able to defer longer or more exhaustive content for later helps me always get a pulse of things quickly without spending too much time or mental energy.
Podcasts have a routine of their own because I listen during commute and workout but I treat it like my inbox: two daily scrubs of new content, and what seems interesting goes to the "Up next" playlist.
There is no point in acquiring page likes, for two reasons: first, as you mentioned, after you paid to acquire the like you'll still have to pay to reach those people with your campaign (organic reach is peanuts these days); second, targeting ads at fans rather than any other segmentation makes no difference for your campaign cost structure.
To be fair, all things being equal, Fans have better CPM than interest-based clusters ("people who like such pages and such topics") on average. But that's not a Facebook incentive, it's merely a statistical correlation between someone having liked your page and the likelihood of their reaction to your ads being positive (which drives the relevance score up, in turn bringing the CPM down). But you can find even better results with proper behavior-based targeting (in particular remarketing).
When I'm surveying the competition, net fan growth is a useful metric to keep in hand because it leaks information. High churn is indicative of sponsored content targeted towards fans only (which usually comes hand-in-hand with outdated content strategies such as increasingly like-bait content and equally distributed total engagement across many posts), while positive net fan growth can be coupled with total engagements and views and some qualitative observations in order to ballpark competitor's budget and broad-strokes strategy.
If I'm being honest, looking at the cost-effectiveness of both branding and performance campaigns on Facebook, it remains a secondary channel and gives no signs of ever meriting a prime role in my campaigns. Production costs, data lock-in opportunity costs and its highly kafkaesque tools and available metrics only make things worse.
In my years in advertising it's been repeatedly demonstrable that about every other DSP performs better than Facebook (across all industries and campaign goals I've worked with), whose only clear strength seems to be having massive inventory with a pretty decent coverage, making it a one-stop-shop for small and medium businesses and making itself a required line item in large companies media planning.
That's great for them, I'm sure, but they simply don't deliver as well as about anything else I work with, and that translates into a "when in doubt start by decreasing the Facebook budget and reallocating it somewhere else" pattern that you see everywhere. That may turn out to be a long term threat for them, I don't know. Their recent closing of FBX is telling: I for one had better results running Facebook campaigns through 3rd party DSPs than through Facebook itself, even at a premium on the CPM.
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edit. – I realize I mentioned CPM 3 times and no other metric, here's why: most Facebook optimizations involve finding the cheapest inventory that is on-target (for branding campaigns) or high-conversion (for performance campaigns). So trying to grok your campaign results always leads back to CPM, even though my job is usually to deliver something more useful to the client such as low CPA, high ROI or even additional reach with better CPP for their TVC campaign.
I wonder how much better performance they could deliver if they improved their attribution tools, ad interface, bid rules, etc.
Part of the problem is that if you do anything at scale with FB you really should be using a PMD. For many things the Ads Manager and Power Editor are just painful.
I'm also not in love with how conversions are tracked and optimized against in terms of how they try to lump everything possible in as a conversion to show a higher number and try to convince advertisers that all those components have equal value.
Running an FB campaign focused on performance is, like I said, a game of finding the lowest on-target/high-conversion CPM (conversely: finding your intended audience at its cheapest). It's not in Facebook's interest to disclose this information too easily, as part of their profit margin comes from squeezing campaign spread.
So my thinking here is that their tools are poor at performance optimization by design, so that we have to jump through hoops, experiment and throw money at different audience mixes in order to find just the right creative-segment-budget allocation. So I don't think that is headed to change so long as they are allowed to keep playing black box and walled garden.
I was astounded how easy it was to get better CPA/ROI running Facebook campaigns on, say, DBM or Criteo even at a premium on the CPM. It goes to show just how lacking their tools are in fast audience and creative optimization.
So there's definitely something to be said for tools that can optimize the best to deliver higher ROI despite higher CPMs.
That said, I'm not sure I fully agree on where FB's interests lie. They've come under a LOT of fire over the past couple of years for various things that people felt inflated the value of their inventory, and so helping advertisers prove they can drive more value and provide tools to help them scale more easily would all be things that should help their bottom line. Particularly when marketers have to make a budget allocation decision towards something that might be a bit more mid/bottom funnel like SEM.
So to compete for that same budget, they need to be competitive on all fronts, and right now they are not. Their margins might be higher from obfuscating some of these key insights that might let people trim the fat, but that needs to be weighed against potential lost revenue from advertisers who can't reach profitability quickly enough and stop advertising, or lost budget share from advertisers who shift it to other channels.
I don't have numbers on those hunches to back them up of course, but it just seems like a really poor long term decision to intentionally cripple your platform in such a way (and that is inherently different than just poor design or design geared to make it easy to spend).
The way it stands, Snapchat already has more data points to tap from and richer content and interaction opportunities than traditional media (television, radio, print, OOH...), and this could be further improved in future versions. You don't need to set out to compete against Google and Facebook when the actual big fish in the market are in fact easier to position yourself against.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by the actual big fish in the market. Google's Q2 16 ad revenue was $19.1B, NBC's was $2.1B, CBS's was $1.6B, and ABC's was also $1.6B.
I was thinking verticals as a whole, not individual companies. The budget for TV, print, radio and so forth tells the size of the market, the fact that there are more players in these verticals than in online search is maybe yet another reason to attack them rather than Google.
Kakao's business model history is actually rather fascinating, and they keep grabbing sizeable market shares in unlikely or previously inexpressive markets to great success.
> In 2012, KakaoTalk's $42 million revenue is broken down to 67.5% ($31.1M) gaming, 26.2% ($12.1M) advertising, and 6.3% ($2.8M) emoticon sales. [1]
Growing up in a coffee farm in countryside São Paulo state, I was a late BBSer (from 1994 to the early 2000s). As other people have it with Usenet and early web forums, I just loved how tight-knit and contentful the Internet was back then. I don't subscribe to the Eternal September "newcomers ruined everything" feeling (in fact I'm quite a big fan of massified Internet culture), but I do love and cherish those sorts of small, focused online communities, every day more protective of themselves and thus harder to find.
I still wonder if it's possible to have a large community (beyond, say, Dunbar's number active member) that is able to sustain the feeling of those small ones — as far as I'm concerned, it's an open question in modern design. Points and reputation systems (such as HN, Slashdot and Reddit sport) and closed doors (secret groups on Facebook and other communities that are hard to access or join) are fair compromises, but I still feel no-one has quite squared the market opportunity around those communities yet. But maybe they do have to stay small. And maybe it's a thing that will elude monetization forever, who knows. Right now, as far as I'm concerned, no-one's making money out of those small-and-focused community patterns which are the best and oldest of the Internet.
as far as I'm concerned, it's an open question in modern design.
It's not complicated. The rate of assimilation has to be kept higher than the rate of immigration. That doesn't mean small, but does mean a bit insular and/or "LURK MOAR."
no-one has quite squared the market opportunity around those communities yet.
I think they have. Forums, slack, blogs, their own websites, email lists, subreddits, twitter, facebook, g+, etc...
The problem with the types of community you describe, is not that they're small, but that they're actually communities. Not userbases branded as a community. They can flit on and off services as they come and go because the community has multiple ways to talk among itself.
You can sell them a tool or host a place to talk to a group of friends. But they're in too strong of a negotiating position with you for you to start a social network and scale it to the moon. They're already on the social networks anyway.
If you're targeting a community, your competition isn't facebook. Your competition is a guy with a dreamhost account and a copy of phpbb.
If you really want a killer app for communities, I think it was called Trillian. But that was back when the popular communication platforms were less rigorous at keeping everyone in the branded client.
This reminds me of Shoes. Of course, Javascript isn't designed for simplicity like Ruby, and Electron is aimed at serious product development rather than novice and weekend programmers. The product design just isn't "there" yet if we are to measure it by _why's standards. But it's nice to see an ACCESSIBLE actively-maintained tool for making cross-OS apps that "just work" again.
In fact, _why released Shoes around 2007 and disappeared in 2009. To put this in perspective, Google Chrome and the 1st iPhone were released in 2008. The web standard mess (JS in particular) was only beginning to be untangled back in 2007. Maybe today's _why would have preferred to try and make Javascript more approachable rather than choose a simple language like Ruby and make it more powerful. I don't know.
At any rate, the trend for things like Electron is to become increasingly complicated to the point where it merits a mention in developers' CVs — as it happened with Rails and Node and countless other frameworks before. Hopefully at this point there are players with stakes high enough at making things accessible to push for an entry-level version of Electron. Maybe Codecademy or one of its cousins.
I'll start by pointing out that this article makes no sense whatsoever for large businesses and agency-managed campaigns, where expertise and scale mean CPC and CPM are analytical tools and not goals. When you have enough expertise to integrate data and attribute results, it makes no sense to optimize for anything other than ROI/CPA.
Now. Both Google and Facebook get a lot of revenue from small and medium businesses. SMBs often have short budgets, little expertise and limited work-hours to dedicate to online advertising, so it's not at all uncommon for them to concentrate all or most of their effort into a single platform.
For that reason, both Google and Facebook have a constant incentive to constantly innovate in formats, targeting options and channels catered to long-tail small pockets.
The problem with this article is that it mixes large and small. The over-crowded web display network caters mostly to big fish (common-enough exception: small fish by proxy, through retailer campaigns). Am I saying SMBs running web display campaigns is unheard of? Not at all, but clearly that's not Google's strongest proposition. For SMBs, that would be Search. App display and exclusive channels (such as Gmail's promotions inbox) being the next logical step.
Now I work at a fairly specialized agency so I can only guess what my online advertising portfolio would look like if I were an SMB or a boutique agency with off-the-shelf solutions for SMBs, but I honestly don't see Google being ruled out or even majorly threatened for most use cases by this inflation in the web display network.
Large companies and agencies will keep otimizing display campaigns for ROI/CPA. Small businesses (and their agencies) will flock around either Facebook or Google Search mostly, as they already do.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian