KC DEBRIEF WEEK 13, FRIDAY 2024/04/05
DIGITAL TITANS
_Apple Vision Pro got a new update, called “spatial Personas” that could possibly make you feel less lonely. The idea is to make it feel like you’re in the same physical space as another user. Vision Pro Personas will be able to do more than hover like a ghost in FaceTime calls. Now, you can use them in SharePlay-enabled apps to collaborate, play games, or watch media with up to five people.
_ Yahoo announces the acquisition of Artifact, the news discovery platform created by Instagram cofounders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Today Yahoo announced that it has acquired Artifact, the AI-driven news aggregation and discovery platform created by Instagram cofounders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Artifact will no longer operate as a standalone app, but the proprietary AI-powered personalization technology and other features will be integrated across Yahoo, including the Yahoo News app, in the months to come. The technology Artifact has created will be even more impactful with the scale of the Yahoo News network, ranked the #1 news and information property in the US in 2023. Artifact’s mission was focused on delivering the most relevant stories to users through AI, utilizing proprietary technology to provide curated news and content experiences. As a trusted guide to the internet, Yahoo helps people achieve their goals online, including connecting with high quality content they care about. This investment advances Yahoo’s commitment to bringing trusted news and information to hundreds of millions of users globally, and accelerates our vision to offer a more personalized experience for discovering news and information across platforms.“Yahoo was one of the first to combine human and algorithmic curation of news. Since then, the landscape of machine learning and personalization has changed dramatically and Artifact has innovated with best-in-class technology to meet the moment,” said Kat Downs Mulder, SVP and General Manager of Yahoo News. “Artifact has become a beloved product and we’re thrilled to be able to continue to grow that technology and further our mission of becoming the trusted guide to digital information and the best curator connecting people to the content that matters most to them.”“We built an intuitive product experience that users love and has the opportunity to benefit millions of people. Yahoo brings the scale to help the product achieve what we envisioned while upholding the belief that connecting people to the trusted sources of news and information is as critical as ever,” said Kevin Systrom, CEO and Co-Founder of Artifact. “AI has allowed us to give users a better experience discovering great content they care about. Yahoo recognizes that opportunity, and we could not be more excited to see what we’ve built live on through Yahoo News.”Artifact’s AI-powered discovery engine surfaces content users most want to see and becomes more attuned to their interests over time. The result is a personalized feed of news stories that's extremely effective at helping users discover stories they want to read. In addition to curation, Artifact brings a host of features aimed at improving the quality of the experience, from easy-access to top news, to link-sharing capabilities, to tools to prevent clickbait proliferation, and more. Bringing these capabilities into the Yahoo portfolio accelerates the opportunity to connect users with even richer content experiences and tailored personalization.Yahoo’s acquisition of Artifact closed on March 29, 2024. Artifact’s co-founders, CEO, Kevin Systrom and CTO, Mike Krieger, will work with Yahoo in an advisory capacity during this transition.
_ LinkedIn moves in on TikTok's turf with video option. LinkedIn is tinkering with featuring short-form videos. Why it matters: Until now, the professional networking platform has been one of the few social media brands that hasn't caved to TikTok-style video experiences. "[W]e are testing new ways to help members more easily discover timely, relevant videos to watch on LinkedIn," Suzi Owens, a company spokesperson, tells Axios in an email. A new "Video" option will appear next to the "Home" button at the bottom of the app's navigation bar, per a demo of the feature shared online by Austin Null, strategy director at creative agency McKinney. After tapping it, viewers are led to a feed of short-form videos similar to Instagram Reels and TikTok. The big picture: Creators on LinkedIn don't have the same scale as TikTokers, according to Brendan Gahan, co-founder and CEO of Creator Authority, a marketing agency that helps brands strike deals with LinkedIn influencers. Accounts with over 1 million followers are rarer on LinkedIn, "but they attract narrower, deeper and more trusted connections," he tells Axios.
_ Apple muscles in on subscription podcasts. To get their show featured at the top of the Apple Podcasts feed, one of the best placements in the audio world, podcasters fill out a form, send it to Apple, and hope for the best.The other, quicker way is to simply give the company a slice of their revenue.Last week, five of the first seven podcasts promoted on the “browse” carousel in the Apple Podcasts app were participating in Apple Podcasts Subscriptions, the program the tech company rolled out in 2021 for shows to monetize bonus episodes, segments, and other content. This wasn’t an accident. An executive at an independent podcast told Semafor that in recent months, when they asked the company how they could be promoted in the carousel, Apple leaders suggested that the show participate in the platform’s new subscription program. Another podcast exec told Semafor that while Apple Podcasts Subscriptions wasn’t a huge moneymaker for them, it was worth participating for the benefit of the podcast feed placement. The company’s podcast team selects various shows for inclusion in the top slots, some of which are not participants in the revenue share. But since launching Apple Podcasts Subscriptions in 2021, it has tried to funnel podcast creators and shows into the subscription service. And, as one person at Apple put it to Semafor, the company has designed the Apple Podcasts app to offer more features to shows that opt in to Apple’s subscription product, including reserving slots for them in the top carousel. Podcasting, unlike virtually every other online media industry, has resisted being dominated by powerful digital platforms. Most podcasts are distributed across a number of platforms, from brand-name tech companies’ apps to specialist services like Overcast. Many podcasters sell their own ads and maintain a direct relationship with their audiences
PEOPLE, MEDIA, CULTURE
_ Flip wants to make shopping go viral. Social shopping platform Flip has raised new capital to expand its ambitious goal of taking on Amazon and TikTok Shop. Considering it functions solely as a creator-driven sales platform for brand names like DeLoghi and OtterBox, Flip may become the hub for a new generation of QVC-style influencers. Flip’s marketplace exists somewhere on the spectrum between Amazon and TikTok Shop, offering only brand-name products and featuring videos from shoppers who have actually purchased them. Reviewers earn money from video views and affiliated product sales, while Flip gets a commission on sales and also charges brands a fee for the app’s algorithm to make the products more discoverable.
_ Actually, the internet's always been this bad. A new study considers 30 years of comments, with surprising conclusions. The internet is a festering, antisocial hellscape that has only gotten worse with time. That claim is held so widely — and so unequivocally — that it's become a ground truth of life online. But a fascinating new study out today in Nature complicates the presumption that online discourse is bad and worsening. A team of Italian researchers evaluated more than half a billion comments spanning 30 years, and concluded that online discourse is no more "toxic" today than it was in the early 1990s. "The toxicity level in online conversations has been relatively consistent over time, challenging the perception of a continual decline in the quality of discourse," said Walter Quattrociocchi, one of the study's authors, in an email. "While the platforms and how we use them have evolved, human behaviors in these spaces have remained surprisingly stable."Given the noxious virtual muck we all flail around in, some of you may well be wondering if Quattrociocchi — the head of the Data and Complexity for Society Lab at Rome's Sapienza University — is, in fact, for real. Does he know about QAnon? Kiwifarms? LibsofTikTok? True crime fanatics or Star Wars stans? Has he never seen Nextdoor after a bike lane installation? Has he logged into Twitter since it became X?! Reader, he has. (Or, well — I assume; I did not specifically ask.) Quattrociocchi and his team aren't denying the toxicity of the social internet. Instead, they find that early online conversations — far from avoiding the negativity and combativeness that we associate with modern social media — actually followed similar patterns. It's not the internet, babe. It's human nature. To come to that rather dispiriting conclusion, Quattrociocchi and his team analyzed half a billion comments from eight platforms between 1992 and 2022. To determine the toxicity of any given comment, they ran them through Perspective AI, an automated classifier tool also used by a number of social platforms and major publishers. Perspective AI claims to identify speech that is "rude, disrespectful or unreasonable" and "likely to make someone leave a discussion" — a squishy definition, admittedly, but one that definitely encompasses a broad range of objectionable speech and behavior. After scoring the toxic comments, researchers then looked at how toxicity accumulated across conversations, from '90s Usenet to 2010s YouTube and Twitter.
BRANDS
_Lay's, which has been a sponsor of the women’s UCL over the last few years, prepared a social experiment to highlight the need to reinforce respect for women inside and outside the sphere of soccer. AlmapBBDO agency, journalist Elaine Trevisan commented on the friendly game on March 26th live on radio broadcast and on YouTube. But the people listening didn't know that it was, in fact, Elaine who was commenting. The journalist's voice was changed by a male voice, named Elias, in real time using an artificial intelligence tool. She participated as if she were a guest male commentator. Days after the game, Elaine revealed the action in a video on social media.