The internal email too acknowledged the emergence of Mastodon and BlueSky as direct competitors to Twitter. But the company pointed out Meta’s advantage of access to billions of users through its other apps, including Facebook and Instagram.
Before marketers get too excited, they will be watching the adoption of the yet-to-be-named platform and how people interact with the content.
“Clubhouse was something that everybody was talking about a year ago,” said Ben-Zvi. “Ultimately, [it] never really reached that adoption point.”
Plugging signal loss with more data
Sources presume Meta will monetize via ads since that’s the platform’s dominant revenue stream: In 2022, Meta made over $113 billion dollars in ad revenues, according to Statista.
But its ad revenue has taken a hit from Apple’s ATT roll-out, upending Meta’s ability to target users. Earlier this week, the tech giant was hit with a record $1.3 billion in privacy fines for violating European Union privacy laws by transferring the personal data of Facebook users to the U.S., further exacerbating its signal loss.
“[Meta] needs more engagement and users doing things to create data that they can feed into their machine learning to target ads,” said Jason Kint, CEO of trade body Digital Content Next.
Meta has often made headlines for mishandling people’s data, especially since its reputation took a hit after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018.
Just this week, Axios and Harris Poll surveyed 16,310 Americans to capture the reputation of the most visible brands in the U.S. Meta was at number 96 while Twitter was at number 97.
“You stop and reflect on who am I going to trust as a company that’s launching a service that I want to go use instead of Twitter because I’ve lost my appetite for Twitter,” said Kint. “I don’t know if [Meta] is the place I’d be jumping.”
Lower funnel monetization and subscriptions
For Ben Jeffries, CEO & co-founder at Influencer, the new platform could attract ad dollars depending on the type of ad placements, such as sponsored content within a feed or pre-rolls. Marketers could also likely expect organic influencer marketing, without paid media, to address lower-funnel objectives by driving conversions based on link sharing.
“Instagram feed doesn’t offer links in the organic content, and this is what that app will be able to do,” he said. “We could see the return of a lot of creators promoting links from a conversion-based activation.”
