💾 Blue Skies Threading the Needle

Why you might want to join the federation after you break up with your X.

Author

Jeff Sauer
February 09, 2024

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📢 TOP STORY

Blue Skies in the Forecast

Bluesky is ready to open up. For marketers, that means yet another social media platform is ready to rumble. 

There was a moment last year when Bluesky — the weird, irreverent Twitter competitor with a decentralized twist — had captured lightning in a bottle. The app quickly amassed over two million users while in closed beta and became a hot topic of conversation. 

Now, the conversation about what comes after the platform-now-called-X has largely shifted to ActivityPub, the decentralized protocol powering Mastodon, a budding ecosystem of other services, and eventually, Meta’s Threads.

Even with ActivityPub taking off, Bluesky is ready to have its moment in the spotlight again. Starting this week, the app is removing its invite system and throwing open its doors to anyone who wants to sign up.

Instagram Threads now has more than 130 million monthly active users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings today. The text-based social networking app is one of the many new projects that have sprung up in the wake of Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter, now called X, where it competes with various startups and open source projects, including Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr, Post, Spill and others.

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko lauds Threads’ entry into the decentralized social media space, saying the move will make Mastodon — the open source Twitter/X rival — “a far more attractive option.”

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Meta plans to start labeling AI-generated images in multiple languages on its platforms over the next few months. This move comes during major elections worldwide, when knowing the source of content is especially important.

Meta will employ various techniques to differentiate AI-generated images. These include visible markers, invisible watermarks, and metadata embedded in the image files. Meta’s methods follow best practices recommended by the Partnership on AI (PAI), an industry group focused on responsible AI development.

AI is primed to help us reimagine what marketing — and marketers — can do. And everyone in the digital advertising universe — marketers, publishers, agencies — has a critical role to play in defining the next era of AI-powered growth.

As an industry, we’re in this together. We know that every marketer, publisher, and agency is building too. New solutions that enable a balance between privacy, marketing, and publishing will come from teams like yours.

Amazon is making a bigger play for publishers in the post-third-party cookie ad market by offering to connect the dots between media companies’ first-party contextual data and its own transaction data.

For a retail giant like Amazon, leveraging this focus in its pitches to publishers will be notable to watch to see if it helps win new deals as third-party cookies gradually deteriorate this year.

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🤿 DEEP DIVE

There’s no debating whether the Privacy Sandbox breaks the way real-time bidding has functioned for over a decade. It does.

And if you ask the Chrome team, that’s the point. To introduce privacy-centric features, RTB has to change, which is why the online ad industry now finds itself at an impasse.

The Privacy Sandbox represents a massive divergence from standard business practices, yet it’s only recently become possible to run even somewhat scaled testing of the APIs. And Google still plans to fully phase out third-party cookies in Chrome by the end of this year.

Against this backdrop, the Tech Lab is publicly analyzing the business impact of the Privacy Sandbox to demonstrate that the APIs don’t address fundamental use cases, said Tech Lab CEO Tony Katsur.

“Yes, there are some elements in the industry that pine for the past, but most of us know we’re not going to have our cake and eat it, too,” Katsur told AdExchanger. “What we’re saying is that many of the building blocks in the Privacy Sandbox aren’t effective or robust enough and in some cases they’re simply dysfunctional.”

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