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| February 27 · Issue #92 · View online |
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America’s longest sustained national conversation about CPMs entered a surprising fifth day on Tuesday, as writers and thinkers continued to analyze the dynamics of Facebook ad auctions. It’s a weedsy topic — even weedsier than this newsletter hopes to be on most days — but it involves an important question: does Facebook’s ad platform incentivize politicians to create more polarizing, divisive ads, because they spread faster and more cheaply than less inflammatory ones? By the end of the day, we would have internal Facebook data to consider, and some new ways of thinking about the question. Firm answers, though, remained a bit beyond our grasp. Hillary Clinton kicked off the latest news cycle on Twitter, with a post that got wide pickup: “We should all care about how social media platforms play a part in our democratic process,” she tweeted. “Because unless it’s addressed it will happen again.” At the Washington Post, Philip Bump talked to one of the people who ran Clinton’s digital advertising campaign, and found him unperturbed by the suggestion that Donald Trump’s ad campaign had been more cost-effective. The important thing to glean from this interview is that different ad campaigns are designed to produce different results, and are priced accordingly: “Fundamentally, we were trying to do two different things,” said Andrew Bleeker, a senior adviser on advertising to Clinton’s campaign and president of Bully Pulpit Interactive. “It’s not that one was right and one was wrong, but they were different. They shouldn’t cost the same.” Clinton ran a lot of video ads, aiming to boost turnout or make the case for her candidacy. Trump’s ads were often single images with an enticement to click. The ads were designed to do different things. “When I look at cost, I don’t necessarily care at all what he’s paying,” Bleeker said. “I care: What would it cost me to get this video in front of people on television, or any other format? This is still a good deal.” In a Twitter thread last night, former Facebook advertising VP Andrew Bosworth played down the impact of cost differentials in campaign advertising. “The only caveat is that our auction favors good creative which improves user experience,” Boz wrote. “However that benefit is on the order of +/- 10%, meaningful for advertisers but far from 200x.” And then, after I had worked on this story for four months, Boz just … tweeted it out. Or rather, he tweeted the campaigns’ average CPMs from the general election. “After some discussion we’ve decided to share the CPM comparison on Trump campaign ads vs. Clinton campaign ads,” he wrote. “This chart shows that during general election period, Trump campaign paid slightly higher CPM prices on most days rather than lower as has been reported.” (See chart below.) The first thing to note is that the CPMs shared by Facebook include only what the campaign paid up front. They do not include so-called “organic” reach — additional people reached by the ad campaign based on people liking, commenting, and sharing them. So it’s possible Trump had to pay a little more up front to place some of his inflammatory ads, but his fans picked them up and lowered the effective CPM in ways that are still invisible to us. The second thing to note — reiterate, really — is that Trump and Clinton ran very different kinds of ad campaigns on Facebook, making direct comparisons difficult. A former Facebook account manager wrote to me in response to yesterday’s newsletter saying that average CPMs ultimately would not tell us very much, precisely because of how different the ad campaigns were. “More important than average CPM for each campaign, the most interesting thing would be to have the CPM for each camp on the ‘overlapping’ audiences (swing states, etc),” the former employee wrote to me. “I think that the differences there may be significant but not wild. I would expect +50% cost difference on a given audience based on engagement but not more than this (ok, maybe 2x for some edge cases).” Antonio García Martínez, who kicked off this week’s discussion with his piece in Wired, made a similar point on Twitter. “National averages won’t tell the tale on a very complicated story,” he wrote. “This needs to be broken out my market, action type, etc. to make any sense at all.” Ultimately, then, it can be true that: 1. Trump paid more to reach 1,000 people on average than Hillary Clinton did, because the direct-response ads his team used are more expensive generally.2. Trump’s ads reached more people, because they were picked up and shared by more people, lowering his overall cost relative to his opponent.3. Facebook’s ad platform can reward more polarizing ads. Whether all three or true, and the degree to which they are true, is still a bit beyond us. But perhaps it won’t be forever: Bosworth says Facebook is asking campaigns to let them share more data from the 2016 election campaign. And it will release even more for future campaigns. “We’ll be making data like this plus more available to the public when we launch our ads transparency tool in spring,” he tweeted.
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Here’s that Hillary tweet in full:
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We should all care about how social media platforms play a part in our democratic process. Because unless it’s addressed it will happen again. The midterms are in 8 months. We owe it to our democracy to get this right, and fast. https://t.co/aM3pRrZW4J
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After some discussion we've decided to share the CPM comparison on Trump campaign ads vs. Clinton campaign ads. This chart shows that during general election period, Trump campaign paid slightly higher CPM prices on most days rather than lower as has been reported. https://t.co/u0qgUQ02qM
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One of America's Most Notorious Neo-Nazi Extremist Groups Is Posting Freely to YouTube, Steam
On Friday, ProPublica wrote about Atomwaffen, an American neo-Nazi group, one of whose members is alleged to have killed a gay Jewish teenager. Motherboard finds that the group has an active YouTube presence. Its videos have been placed under some restrictions, but writers Emanuel Maiberg and Matthew Gault suggest they are in violation of the service’s hate speech guidelines: One YouTube video titled “Zealous Operation” shows masked members of the group yelling “gas the kikes, race war now,” before they begin firing guns. A warning on the video says it’s been identified by the YouTube community “as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.” This means users have to click a button that says “I understand and wish to proceed” before viewing the video, and that certain features like comments and the viewcount have been disabled. This is the same warning YouTube put on conspiracy videos made be a user named Mike M after a video he uploaded suggesting that a student from the Parkland shooting is a crisis actor was the number one trending video on the platform. Overall, the Atomwaffen Division channel has uploaded 12 videos since it was created June 29, 2017. According to the channel’s about section, it is the “backup youtube page of the Atomwaffen Division - Revolutionary National Socialist Organization.” It links out to what appears to be the group’s primary channel, which only has one video titled “Fire up the Panzers and launch the nukes! The Atomwaffen Division is here!” It was uploaded nine months ago.
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YouTube Won’t Ban Neo-Nazi Group Chanting ‘Gas the K**kes, Race War Now’
Kelly Weil looks at the same issue and talks to an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who says a stricter standard should be applied to the Atomwaffen videos, because they are being used for recruiting purposes: Other social-media companies’ terms of service “have a provision saying ‘if your group is leading to violence in the real world, that factors against you in your review process. Atomwaffen’s had five different murders associated with it in the last few months,” Hankes said, “so it’s a surprising outcome for a group that extreme. We’re talking about a network of radical terror cells. That’s how they set up their organization.”
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How Black Twitter and other social media communities interact with mainstream news
Very cool report from the Knight Foundation on how marginalized communities use Twitter. As Choire Sicha quipped after reading this report, “Black Twitter is Twitter, but Media Twitter refuses to notice.” The full report also serves as a thoughtful and even moving history of black, female, and Asian-American activism and community organizing on the platform: In 2017, Knight Foundation commissioned a study to understand how subcultures on social media, comprised of traditionally marginalized communities including Black Twitter, Feminist Twitter, and Asian-American Twitter, interact with reporters and the news. The goal was to create lessons for reporters on better covering and engaging with these communities, aligned with Knight’s journalism work that supports greater newsroom diversity. Using a mix of computational analysis, qualitative review, and interviews, the researchers analyzed over 46 million tweets with community-related hashtags from 2015 to 2016. To date, this report is the largest review of Twitter conversations examining the relationship between media and these online sub-cultures.
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‘Success’ on YouTube Still Means a Life of Poverty
I swear you could remake Hoop Dreams about kids resting all their hopes on getting YouTube famous: New research out of Germany billed as among the first to review the chances of making it in the new Hollywood shows a vanishingly small number will ever break through—just like in the old Hollywood. In fact, 96.5 percent of all of those trying to become YouTubers won’t make enough money off of advertising to crack the U.S. poverty line, according to research by Mathias Bärtl, a professor at Offenburg University of Applied Sciences in Offenburg. Breaking into the top 3 percent of most-viewed channels could bring in advertising revenue of about $16,800 a year, Bärtl said in an analysis for Bloomberg News
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N.C. man livestreams his own killing on Facebook
Just awful: A gunman shot and killed a North Carolina man Monday while the victim was broadcasting live on Facebook using a selfie stick. Police say Prentis Robinson — who often livestreamed himself via his phone while walking around the town of Wingate, N.C. — was shot while on one of his typical Facebook live jaunts.
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Curling and U.S. snowboarder Shaun White were popular Olympics topics on Facebook — we just don’t know how popular
It sure seems like people cared less about these Olympics than previous Olympics, or other sports events in general, Kurt Wagner reports: On Monday, the social network unveiled some data about the past 17 days of Olympics-related conversations, including things like the “most-talked-about athlete,” U.S. snowboarder Shaun White; the “most-talked-about sports,” figure skating and curling; and the “most-’Liked’ post,” this great post highlighting many of the female athletes who represented African countries at the Games. What was almost as interesting as the data Facebook did share, though, is what Facebook didn’t share: Total audience and interaction data around the Olympics, the standard metrics the company shares for almost all major events, like the World Cup, the Rio Olympics, the Sochi Olympics and the Super Bowl.
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Pinterest has hired former Google and Square executive Francoise Brougher as its first COO
I can never tell if Pinterest is extremely slow or just very deliberate: Pinterest just made an important new hire: The visual search company is bringing on Francoise Brougher, a former executive from both Google and Square, to be its first-ever COO. Brougher has some serious street cred in the tech industry. At Google, where she started in 2005, Brougher eventually led the global sales and operations teams for Google’s small-business advertisers. As my colleague Jason Del Rey wrote about Brougher in 2014, it was a role “similar to the one Sheryl Sandberg held [at Google] before she departed for Facebook.”
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Despite backlash to the redesign, Snapchat downloads are up
Redesigns of popular apps follow a familiar pattern. First, a small segment of vocal users screams in protest, drawing widespread media coverage that consists of eight to 12 embedded tweets. Second, they organize an online petition to bring back the former version, garnering millions of signatures. Third, they disappear completely and are never heard from again. Snapchat is now entering the third phase of this phenomenon.
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Ex-Twitter CEO is shutting down his fitness startup
Ex-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is ending Chorus, a group fitness app that never made it out of beta. Will be curious, as ever, to see what he tries next.
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Alexis Ohanian and Tinder are petitioning Unicode for interracial couple emoji
This is great. Would love to see more big tech companies come out for this one: Tinder announced this morning that it’s launching a campaign called #RepresentLove, in collaboration with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Emojination founder Jennifer 8. Lee, with the goal of petitioning Unicode to introduce interracial couple emoji. The Change.org petition reads “Why is Tinder involved? We believe all love deserves emoji representation.” Ohanian — who previously joined Lee in lobbying for the addition of the hijab emoji — told Wired “We want our kids to have emojis that look like their parents. [Emoji] are the universal language of the internet and should reflect the modern world where interracial relationships are normal.”
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Facebook launches program to help local news outlets boost digital subscriptions
The Facebook Journalism Project is going to coach local news outlets on how to grow their digital subscription businesses using experts in the field. It’s a worthy effort, and I hope all the papers in the program get a lot from it. One path forward for journalism on Facebook is that it serves primarily as a marketing vehicle for subscriptions — something I think both Facebook and publishers could live with: The Facebook Journalism Project has announced a new program today called Local News Subscriptions Accelerator that will work with several local US outlets over the next three months to help bolster their subscription efforts. The pilot program has $3 million in funding and will work with 10 to 15 news organizations in order to help boost their digital customer base, both on the Facebook platform and off. Confirmed outlets that are participating include The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, The Miami Herald, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Omaha World-Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Seattle Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Newsday. Outlets that partake in the program will meet in person once a month to get training from digital subscription experts, and have weekly sessions that cover marketing and digital subscriptions. Along with coaches, the outlets will then design projects that help solve their individual needs as it relates to digital subscriptions. As Facebook is footing the bill, these outlets will have to share any findings they learn of with the Accelerator.
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Facebook is starting to tell more users about facial recognition
If you’re wondering why you’re getting a notification about facial recognition on Facebook lately, Russell Brandon has you covered: Facebook has used some form of facial recognition for years, particularly to suggest friends’ names when tagging photos. Company representatives say the latest notification refers to a feature that was announced in December, which searches for your face in photos you’re not tagged in. The feature has been slowly rolling out since December, and the opt-out page appears to have rolled out at the same time. The feature won’t roll out to Facebook users in Canada or the European Union because of stricter regulations on the collection of facial data in those regions.
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Quinn Norton: The New York Times Fired My Doppelgänger
Quinn Norton writes about the controversy over her hiring — and firing several hours later — from the New York Times. Whatever you make of Norton, it’s a fascinating account of a person who has decided to leave online nearly all of her previous work, even that which she now disavows, and costs her opportunities: If you look long enough you can find my early terrible writing. You can find blog posts in which I am an idiot. I’ve had a lot of uninformed and passionate opinions on geopolitical issues from Ireland to Israel. You can find tweets I thought were witty, but think are stupid now. You can find opinions I still hold that you disagree with. I’m going to leave most of that stuff up. In doing so, I’m telling you that you have to look for context if you are seeking to understand me. You don’t have to try, I’m not particularly important, but I am complicated. When I die, I’m going to instruct my executors to burn nothing. Leave the crap there, because it’s part of my journey, and that journey has a value. People who came from where I did, and who were given the thoughts I was given, should know that the future can be different from the past.
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How Tiny Red Dots Took Over Your Life
John Herrman writes eloquently on the tyrrany of notification badges, which really ought to be disabled by default, says your extremely OCD notification-clearing newsletter writer: Commonly seen at the corners of app icons, where they are known in the trade as badges, they are now proliferating across once-peaceful interfaces on a steep epidemic curve. They alert us to things that need to be checked: unread messages; new activities; pending software updates; announcements; unresolved problems. As they’ve spread, they’ve become a rare commonality in the products that we — and the remorseful technologists — are so worried about. If not the culprits, the dots are at least accessories to most of the supposed crimes of addictive app design. When platforms or services sense their users are disengaged, whether from social activities, work or merely a continued contribution to corporate profitability, dots are deployed: outside, inside, wherever they might be seen. I’ve met dots that existed only to inform me of the existence of other dots, new dots, dots with almost no meaning at all; a dot on my Instagram app led me to another dot within it, which informed me that something had happened on Facebook: Someone I barely know had posted for the first time in a while. These dots are omnipresent, leading everywhere and ending nowhere. So maybe there’s something to be gained by connecting them.
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Questions? Comments? Pleas to stop writing about CPMs? casey@theverge.com
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