This is issue no. 141 of 180. The last issue had a 37.78% open rate with a 🔥10.71% of you going to this article on understanding cohort analyses. Will launch of the Google Pixel affect the iPhone 7 market?
The future will be catalyzed by those exposing fundamental truths and created by those who are willing to thoroughly understand and leverage the power of those truths directly. But those truths will be far easier to find when you are looking for the layers obscuring them from view. - Layers, Rebekah Cox
BRAND: How did Adidas miss out on such a lucrative opportunity? According to Sonny Vaccaro, a former sports marketing executive who was working with Adidas at the time, Adidas had a chance to land James with a 10-year, $100 million contract. Adidas could afford it, too — the company still had Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady selling shoes for it. But Adidas lowered its offer to $70 million at the last minute, allowing Nike to swoop in with a $90 million deal to land the future superstar. Vaccaro explained how it all went down to Chris Vernon on the latest Ringer NBA Show.
ECOMMERCE: It will take some time to see if this shift means anything significant for the way sneakers are sold and how smaller boutiques can leverage relationships for the benefit of the customer. Until then Staple and TGS are going to focus on Extra Butter's 10-year anniversary, which is right around the corner. "As we embark on our 10th year, we've found both a unique perspective and commonality with Jeff in how we view what's next and we're thrilled to be moving things in that direction," Jason Faustino of Extra Butter says.
ECOMMERCE: He also plans to use Jet's more urban, younger base of shoppers to bring in more high-end brands to its marketplace, though he didn't mention any specific brand names Thursday. Walmart and Jet, Lore added, also have a "huge advantage" of having a network of more than 4,600 stores in the US, which the company can use for in-store pickups, returns and shipping for online sales. But Walmart needs to create new connections between online and retail locations, integrate Jet into its systems and jump into the holiday shopping season.Â
ECOMMERCE: While Wayfair is enhancing the customer experience with virtual reality, it is simply for brand awareness, and does not yet offer a transactional experience. Mike Festa, head of Wayfair’s Research and Development Lab, said Wayfair is looking into adding ecommerce to its next iteration. Festa said Patio Playground is more focused on the opportunity to showcase some of its items in a new setting. He said this demonstrates Wayfair’s thought leadership in virtual and artificial reality fields, ecommerce industry and increased awareness.
ECOMMERCE: As an entrepreneur, you want to maximize your revenues. In the ecommerce industry, this fact is even more important. Chances are, you’ve taken steps to avoid the obvious hits to your profitability. Unfortunately, that doesn’t guarantee that you are covered from all potential loss. There are many ways that you could be losing revenue without even realizing it. That’s why you need to take a long, hard look at your startup to see if you are guilty of letting these 5 revenue killers slip through the cracks.
MEDIA: Do your articles truly inform, or do they just state the obvious? Start keeping a list (you can even set one up on your phone) of every time you encounter a newsworthy triumph, industry change, surprising statistic, or upcoming event that would make for good content. If you waste your clients’ time and clog up their email with vapid un-news, you’re damaging your brand. If you’re having trouble finding the time to write articles that add real value, invest in the services of a professional writer.
MEDIA: The channel will publish 14 to 17 snaps each weekend, telling business, politics, science and technology stories through a mix of graphics, video, animation and text. Its weekend publishing schedule is another sign that Snapchat is getting more flexible with publishing frequency. The first Discover partners, including People and CNN, were posting content on a daily basis. Since then, there have been popup channels like Seventeen Prom from Hearst.
DATA: As a UX Designer specialized in e-commerce and optimization, using data is crucial to my work. Not using data seems silly to me. Why would you design something using only your own (limited) experience and gut feeling if you can use data of thousands of sessions of the site or app you are working on? This is my plea to all UX Designers out there: please use data. I will give you four reasons why you shouldn’t design without it.
MEDIA: But Snap isn’t throwing wide the doors anytime soon, as it endeavors to control the kind of ads that appear on its app as well as the kind of software that can integrate with its servers. It’s a tricky balancing act for the company, which is trying to boost ad revenue sharply ahead of an expected IPO filing in coming months. Snap’s early tests with allowing outside ad tech firms to serve ads is restricted to a few types of ads and partners.Â
MEDIA: Snapchat has turned on the gears of its ad technology platform, unleashing a new way to buy and even test ads. Snapchat has fired up its ads API -- application programming interface -- allowing third-party partners to plug into the app and deliver ads for brands and agencies. It's Snapchat's first foray into what's known as programmatic advertising, the automated buying and selling of ads. The Snapchat ad platform has been under construction for months, and was unveiled in June, but until now key details of its inner workings were unknown.
A deep dive into The Verge's effort to grow their reach
I remember when Circuit Breaker launched in April of 2016. I was skeptical of their approach but also excited to be proven wrong. Well, here is the verdict. They grew content views some 36% by playing nice with Facebook. They scare thing is, if Facebook strikes back, they will be worse off than they were in Q3 of 2015. We've seen Facebook manipulate algorithms numerous times.
Mobile web article pages are quickly becoming the least important thing we make, even though they’re currently a huge part of what most people think of as The Verge. Let’s plot it out:
There are three main paths most readers use to get to a Verge story: the homepage, search, and social, and all of those are increasingly mobile.
Our search traffic largely comes from Google, which already serves our AMP pages in Google News. Google is also switching mobile search results to AMP links, and that means almost all of our search visitors will see AMP pages instead of the mobile web.
Our social traffic mix is dominated by Facebook, where we already serve every article in Facebook Instant Articles — and features and reviews are coming soon. That means a huge percentage of our social traffic is already seeing Instant Articles instead of the mobile web, and that number will just go up as we deliver more story types in IA.
Twitter is basically the rest of the social mix, and Twitter is signed up to use... AMP. Twitter already loads AMP pages in Moments, and it’s only a matter of time before clicking a link from the main timeline loads an AMP page by default. (In fact, I don’t know why Twitter doesn’t already do this. Get on it, Jack.)
Other social platforms like Pinterest are also signed up to use AMP, because Facebook isn’t sharing Instant Articles, and none of them can force publishers to dance the way Facebook and Google can.
We still have a very popular homepage that sends people to standard mobile article pages, as do emailed links and so on, but our homepage traffic is obviously tiny compared to search and social.
You could, at this time, make a solid argument that AMP is the future of the web.
You could also make a fine wine out of the tears I weep each night as the open web dies anew, but that’s neither here nor there.
