M essenger Ads, FCC and Social Media Addiction
Here’s the news we’re talking about around the Zbra Studios water cooler. We’ve provided key bullet points from each article for the speed readers out there. For those looking to dig in, click on the link for the full story.
Facebook Messenger begins testing ads…and they’re big
By SARAH PEREZ from TechCrunch
- “The ads currently take up a lot of screen space on the homescreen, where they sit below your Favorites and above the Active Now section, which shows you which friends are online.”
- “But the truth is, people like to reach out to businesses via Messenger because it’s a more efficient ways of asking questions or getting customer service compared with calling the business or shooting an email. That doesn’t mean that they want the user interface of one of their main messaging apps cluttered with advertisements.”
- “Facebook says the ads will roll out to a test group of people in Thailand and Australia in the coming weeks.”
Trump taps net neutrality critic to lead the FCC
By BRIAN FUNG from The Washington post
- “President Trump has named Ajit Pai, an advocate of deregulation and a critic of the government’s net neutrality rules, as the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.”
- “Pai was a staunch critic of Democratic efforts aimed at breaking the dominance of some of America’s biggest Internet providers, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.”
- “Policy analysts widely expect the FCC to roll back its net neutrality rules under Pai. The rules seek to prevent Internet providers from unfairly benefiting themselves at the expense of smaller online companies, particularly as more telecom behemoths such as Verizon and AT&T expand into digital content. Pai has long criticized the rules as an example of government overreach.”
Generation X More Addicted to Social Media Than Millennials, Report Finds
By JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH From The New York Times
- “Adults from 35 to 49 were found to spend an average of six hours and 58 minutes on social media per week, compared with the six hours and 19 minutes that their younger counterparts spent on such sites.”
- “The report also broke out which social networks were most popular on smartphones, finding that Facebook still ruled the roost on mobile, with about 178.2 million unique users in September 2016. It was followed by Instagram with 91.5 million unique users, Twitter, with 82.2 million unique users and Pinterest, with 69.6 million users.”
- “Again, in this category, it was Generation X that couldn’t look away from its device screens: On an average day, the report found that 42 percent of those interacting with television on Facebook were from 35 to 49, while only 40 percent of millennials were doing the same thing.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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