A month ago, Adobe announcedFirefly, its entry into the generative AI game. Initially, Firefly’s focus was on generating commercially safe images, but the company is now pushing its technology beyond still images. As the company announced today, it will soon bring Firefly to its Creative Cloud video and audio applications. To be clear, you won’t (yet) be able to use Firefly to create custom videos yet. Instead, the emphasis here is on making it easier for anyone to edit videos, color grade using just a few words, add music and sound effects, and create title cards with animated fonts, graphics and logos. However, Firefly also promises to automatically turn scripts into storyboards and pre-visualizations — and it will recommend b-roll to liven up videos.
Maybe the highlight of these promised new features is being able to color grade a video by simply describing what a video should look like with just a few words (think “golden hour” or “brighten face”).
Image Credits: Adobe
It’s no secret that color grading is an art — and not one that comes easy to most people. Now, anyone will be able to describe the desired mood and tone of a scene and Adobe’s video tools will follow suit. In many ways, it’s this democratization of skill that’s at the heart of what Adobe is doing with Firefly in its creative tools.
Other new AI-based features include the ability to generate custom sounds and music. Firefly will also help editors create subtitles, logos and title cards by having them describe what they want them to look like. Those, too, are somewhat specialized skills that take some familiarity with the likes of After Effects and Premiere.
Image Credits: Adobe
The real game changer, though, is that Adobe also plans to use Firefly to read scripts and automatically generate storyboards and pre-visualizations. That could be a massive time saver — and I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw those videos pop up on TikTok.
Image Credits: Adobe
It’s worth noting that for now, we’ve only seen Adobe’s own demos of these features. It remains to be seen how well they will work in practice.
Adobe’s aim is to ensure that all of its generative AI tools are safe to use in a commercial environment. With its generative image creator, this meant that it could only train it on a limited number of images that were either in public domain or part of its Adobe Stock service. However, this also means it’s quite a bit more limited when compared to the likes of Midjourney or Stable Diffusion.
Pinterest has begun alpha testing a new advertising product that allows brands to reach consumers from a more prominent position within the company’s mobile app. With the “Premiere Spotlight” ad, as the new format is currently being called, advertisers will gain access to a premium placement for 24 hours on the Pinterest app’s search page. This allows them to reach Pinterest users as they use one of the app’s key features — the ability to search for pins, inspiration, and ideas.
You can see the new ad format now in the most recent version of the Pinterest mobile app, where Kohl’s is currently advertising women’s spring apparel.
In addition to a short video that plays overlaid by text, there’s also a button that takes you to Kohl’s website. The site opens within the Pinterest app, not as a separate tab. From there, Pinterest users can browse the retailer’s product suggestions, search for other items, add items to their cart, and check out — just as they could if visiting Kohl’s website directly.
For years, Pinterest has catered to advertisers by allowing them to create Pins featuring products or ideas that they pay to promote and target to different audiences. These pins then appear within the Pinterest home feed and within relevant search results. But many Pinterest users don’t open the app to browse the feed, nor are they looking for a specific product. Instead, they head to the search page to type in a more general query. Today, 97% of searches on Pinterest are unbranded, company data indicates.
The new format would allow advertisers to capture these new customers — including those who may not have previously seen their ad if they weren’t among the targeted audience.
Though the ads are sold in 24-hour blocks, it would be possible for marketers to book the ads back-to-back to hold the top spot even longer.
As an alpha test, the ad pricing is not yet being shared as it could potentially change between now and a more public launch. Kohl’s will be followed by other pilot testers across various categories, including those interested in promoting a product launch or aiming to capitalize on seasonal moments, as Kohl’s is with its spring fashion trends. Likely, there will be some curation in terms of which brands and type of creatives will be permitted here. All ads will also feature Pinterest’s max width video format.
Pinterest confirmed the ad pilot with a statement.
“We’re constantly looking for ways for advertisers to reach the people who come to Pinterest with commercial intent,” a spokesperson said. “As we continue to build a suite of products to drive performance across the full funnel, we’re exploring a new takeover feature that showcases a brand in a new premium, exclusive placement.”
Image Credits: Pinterest app screenshot
Over the past couple of years, Pinterest has been working to adapt to the growing interest in video from both consumers and advertisers alike. While originally an image pinboarding website, the company shifted into video with the launch of Idea Pins in 2021, which offer creators a more TikTok-like experience. Last year, it enabled marketers to turn their Idea Pins into ads. This year, the company pushed further into short-form video territory through a new agreement with Condé Nast, which will produce 160 exclusive videos for the site from top brands, Vogue and Architectural Digest.
During its Q4 earnings call earlier last month, Pinterest remarked that it had grown its supply of video content by 30% quarter-over-quarter, adding that high-quality content would help to better engage users, particularly Gen Z.
“Monetization per user should also be driven by our ads initiatives,” said CEO Bill Ready, who last year joined Pinterest from Google, where he headed its commerce initiatives. “Pinterest is unique because users come to our platform with intent, and we are one of the few places where people can go from seeking inspiration to fulfilling that intent through action,” Ready added.
However, Pinterest’s shares dipped after earnings as it missed on revenue with $877 million versus the expected $886.3 million, and it forecast growth only in the low single digits in the first quarter of 2023.
Despite the revenue struggles — which are not unique to the company given the economic downturn– Pinterest has been seeing more traction with users. It noted its global monthly active users were up 4% year-over-year to 450 million and average revenue per user was up 6% in North America. Gen Z has become particularly fond of the service, and was again Pinterest’s fastest-growing demographic in Q4, also accounting for nearly half of its video content pinned during the quarter.
Video ads may be able to better appeal to those younger users than image Pins, as they’re used to being inspired to shop from video elsewhere, including through TikTok, Reels and YouTube.
Pinterest did not say when the new ad format would be available more broadly.
AI’s ability to reinvent web search remainsmurky, but the technology’s impact on everyday tools seems to be more promising. Case in point: A startup called Capsule has been putting AI to use in video editing software to improve the speed and efficiency of post-production edits. After launching its AI-powered editor into beta, the company closed on $4.75 million in seed funding to commercialize the product.
Longer term, Capsule says such technology could allow anyone to be creative with video, even if they aren’t professional video editors.
The company hasn’t always been into AI technology. Founded in 2020, Capsule emerged from the same team that built the animated GIF capture tool and social network Phhhoto, which eventually lost out to Instagram’s clone, Boomerang. After shutting down their app in 2017, they moved on to an experiential marketing business for live events called Hypno. But they soon had to pivot when the COVID-19 pandemic put an end to the need for Hypno’s in-person photo booths and other interactive experiences.
The company isn’t necessarily trying to use AI to take over the work of video editors. It says 90% of its revenue comes from the enterprise but, specifically, an underserved market of enterprise teams without video expertise that still need consistency in branding. Its video platform has been used at companies like Snowflake, TED, Salesforce, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
More recently, Capsule began to explore how new AI models could improve its product.
Citing data from HubSpot, the company points out that short-form video is set to grow faster than any other format in 2023, and over 90% of marketers said they plan to either maintain or increase their investment in video creation. But the demand for video exceeds the supply of professional video editors, noted Capsule co-founder and CEO Champ Bennett.
“Despite the large number of video tools in the market, the needs of enterprise teams have largely been ignored,” he said in the company’s funding announcement. “Ask anyone in marketing, comms, sales, or success and they’ll tell you video outperforms all other formats, but they’ll also tell you they don’t get to use it often enough because of how costly and complex it is to make.”
To address these challenges, Capsule built AI Studio, which focuses on AI-driven, post-production video edits.
The company showed off a demo of the technology in December (see below), which uses AI and machine learning in a variety of models, including an ASR (automatic speech recognition) model for transcribing the video’s audio into text.
It also offers a diffusion model for generating B-roll images from the transcript as well as a generative LLM (large language model) that summarizes text from the transcript.
The AI Studio software runs in the browser, without requiring an app or extension to work, the company says.
After uploading a video to the platform, Capsule creates the transcript, which is placed off to the side of the video for use in edits. In the demo, the company showed how a user could select a block of text and then click a button to have the text automatically summarized and turned into a title card, using AI and its video markup language. There are different card styles available, including an animated title card page and a title card that appears below the video, each of which can be selected with a click.
It also showed off how you could select a block of text and then have AI generate an image automatically based on the subject matter identified in the highlighted text. Plus, you could click into the text prompt field and adjust the text for more precise control over the end results.
Another feature lets you select a line of text to have it appear as one of several available caption styles, like full-screen text, animated captions, or even a tweet-style caption.
“What we do for video is similar to what companies like Jasper are doing for copywriting or Replit is doing for coding,” Bennett tells TechCrunch. “We don’t own the models. Instead, we leverage the best foundational models to make video creators 10–100x more productive, while simultaneously lowering the barrier to entry so that teams in marketing, sales, success, and leadership can create compelling on-brand videos on their own.”
Image Credits: Capsule
The edits themselves are powered by Capsule’s video scripting language, CapsuleScript, built over the past couple of years and designed to work in the browser. All of the AI model outputs are fed as inputs into CapsuleScript.
“Think what HTML/CSS are to websites, CapsuleScript is to video. It can render video dynamically, both at create-time and run-time –– allowing for the creation of personalized video at scale for the first time,” Bennett says. But he clarifies Capsule’s customers aren’t looking for a fully automated “one-click” solution, even though CapsuleScript would be capable of that.
“In reality what customers actually want is 80% automation, and 20% customization so they can tell a unique, creative story without a ton of friction,” he explains.
After the demo was posted, the company had to put access to AI Studio behind a waitlist due to demand, the company said.
With the additional funding, Capsule says it aims to make key hires across engineering, product design, and marketing teams to help it more quickly commercialize its AI Studio product. It’s looking to add a dozen full-time employees, including an ML engineer, front-end engineer, head of video and marketing, and product designer.
Investors backing the company in the new seed round that closed late January include Human Ventures, Swift Ventures, InVision founder Clark Valberg’s Tiferes Ventures, Behind Genius Ventures, plus its pre-seed investors Array Ventures and Bloomberg Beta.
Angel investors include Replit CEO Amjad Masad, Dropbox CTO Arash Ferdowsi, Figma head of sales Kyle Parrish, former head of audio & video at Spotify/Anchor founder Mike Mignano, Chorus.ai co-founder Roy Ranani, and Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia.
The company declined to share its metrics related to revenues or the total number of customers but said it plans to announce the latter “soon.”
Including the new funding, the New York–based startup has raised $6.75 million since its founding.
For another year in a row, TikTok has found itself as the social app kids and teens are spending the most time using throughout the day, even outpacing YouTube. According to an ongoing annual review of kids’ and teens’ app usage and behavior globally, the younger demographic — minors ranging in ages from 4 through 18 — began to watch more TikTok than YouTube on an average daily basis starting in June 2020 and TikTok’s numbers have continued to grow ever since.
In June 2020, TikTok overtook YouTube for the first time, with kids watching an average of 82 minutes per day on TikTok versus an average of 75 minutes per day on YouTube, according to new data from parental control software maker Qustodio.
This past year, the gulf between the two widened, it said, as kids in 2022 saw their average daily use of TikTok climb to a whopping 107 minutes, or 60% longer than the time they spent watching video content on YouTube (67 minutes).
TikTok not only topped the average daily usage of other video apps, like Netflix (48 mins.) and Disney+ (40 mins.), it also came out ahead of other social apps, including Snapchat (72 mins.), Instagram (45 mins.), Facebook (20 mins.), Pinterest (16 mins.) and Twitter (10 mins.) among the under-18 crowd.
Image Credits: Qustodio
Meanwhile, as the U.S. grapples with TikTok bans across college campuses and in the government, the app’s addictive video content was viewed, on average, 113 minutes per day in this market, compared with 77 minutes per day on YouTube, 52 minutes for Netflix, 90 minutes on Snapchat, and 20 minutes on Pinterest.
There is still some good news for YouTube, though. The study found that the average daily time spent on YouTube was up by 20% year-over-year, to reach 67 minutes — the highest number since Qustodio began reporting on annual trends in 2019. YouTube also gained sizable global market share and mindshare last year, as 63% of kids worldwide were using the service in 2022. The report additionally broke down a few top markets in more detail, noting that 60% of U.S. kids watch YouTube, compared with 67% in the U.K., 73% in Spain, and 58% in Australia. The second most popular video service was Netflix, with 39% popularity among kids worldwide.
Overall, kids under 18 managed to increase their video content viewing by 18% in 2022, watching 45 minutes daily, on average, across long-form video services like YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, Prime Videos, and others.
Other winners for the year included Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, which saw 7% and 10% gains in popularity, respectively — meaning if they were used at some point by these under-18 years. But in terms of average daily minutes spent, Prime Video dropped 15% year-over-year to 34 minutes. Disney+ declined by the same percentage, dropping from a 47-minute average daily to 40 minutes in 2022. Twitch also suffered last year with only 11% of under-18-year-olds tuning in compared with 16% in 2021.
Image Credits: Qustodio
TikTok’s growth among the younger demographic has forced big tech giants to combat the threat with short-form video of their own. YouTube Shorts is YouTube’s solution to the problem. Google this month reported Shorts crossed 50 billion daily views. Instagram, of course, has been cramming Reels into its experience — and receiving some backlash over the changes. Instagram head Adam Mosseri even admitted earlier this year, the platform has been pushing “too many videos” on users.
It’s not clear this shoehorning of Reels into Instagram has paid off with the younger crowd. In Qustodio’s analysis, the app fell out of the top 5 most popular social media apps in the U.S., U.K., and Australia with users under 18. It still ranked No. 5 globally, however, behind TikTok, Facebook (38% of kids used it globally!), Snapchat, and Pinterest.
Though the software firm chose to analyze Roblox among other video games, it’s worth also noting the game is a social network of sorts — and an extremely popular destination among kids worldwide. The gaming platform was popular with 59% of kids globally, and average daily time spent grew 4% year-over-year to 180 minutes. That’s larger than any other games, including the No. 2 game Minecraft (up 37% to 48 mins.), Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, Clash of Clans and What Would You Choose?
Qustodio’s full report digs into other app trends as well, including Twitter’s 7% growth in popularity worldwide, which also led to it appearing in the list of most-blocked apps by parents in 2022 for the first time. It also delved into educational app usage where Google Classroom ruled on school devices, and Duolingo remained a top app on personal devices. And it looked at communication, where WhatsApp and Discord edged out Messages as the most popular way to chat with friends, though Zoom saw more minutes spent daily.
While the report’s data is limited to the app usage Quostido tracks on its own platform, it’s a sizable group that includes over 400,000 global families with children in the Gen Z and/or Gen Alpha demographic. It additionally sureveyed 1,617 parents directly to ask them about how they manage their children’s access to technology.
Amazon is bringing a TikTok-like shopping experience to its app. The company today announced the launch of Inspire, a new short-form video and photo feed that allows consumers to explore products and ideas and shop from content created by influencers, brands, and other customers. The feature is designed to draw consumers’ attention away from apps like TikTok, where brands can directly market to consumers, in order to drive sales on Amazon.com instead.
The retailer said the shopping feautre will initially roll out to select customers in the U.S. in early Decmeber, and will become broadly available to U.S. customers in the months that follow.
The launch follows tests earlier this year when Amazon had been spotted experimenting with a TikTok-like shopping feed in its app, which then had its own navigation button at the bottom of the Amazon mobile app. In the version launching now, that high-level placement in the main navigation remains the same, however the Inspir feed will now be accessible with a tap of a light bulb icon instead of the diamond icon that was seen in tests.
Image Credits: Amazon
To get started with Inspire, customers will open the Amazon Shopping app and tap Inspire’s icon. Upon first launch, they’re prompted to choose from over 20 interests, including things like makeup, skin care, pets, gaming, plants, hiking, interior design, travel, running, and more in order to personalize their Inspire feed.
While Inspire focuses on short-form video content, it also offers support for photos, making it something of a hybrid between TikTok and Instagram. Like Instagram, you can double-tap anywhere on the screen to “like” the content with a red heart. However, you scroll through the Inspire experience much like using TikTok’s vertical video feed, where you swipe up from the bottom to see the next video. Engagment buttons are also off to the right side of the screen, as on TikTok.
Image Credits: Amazon
When you see something you like, you can tap on small buttons at the bottom of the window which link to the product on Amazon. Initially, a tap on these buttons will pop-up the product in an overlay window on top of the video, but a tap on “See all details” will take you to the item’s product page where you can read more, make a purchase, or add it to a list.
Over time, Amazon says the feed will better customize itself as Inspire learns more about the user’s interests by tracking their engagement. Longer-term, the retailer plans to add more shoppable features to Inspire, as well as additional in-app functionality and content, to further improve the product.
Image Credits: Amazon
“We invent every day to make shopping easy and fun,” noted Amazon Shopping director Oliver Messenger in a statement about the launch. “Inspire is our new shopping experience that connects Amazon customers with shoppable content created by other customers, the latest influencers, and a wide range of brands. In just a few taps, customers can discover new products or get inspiration on what to buy, all tailored to their interests, and then shop for those items on Amazon,” Messenger said.
The company has already lined up a handful of Amazon Influencers to post on Inspire, including Mae Badiyan, Practically Pursia, and others. The creators will be able to earn money from customers’ purchases via the Amazon Influencer Program.
“My audience wants engaging videos that introduce them to new products, which is why I’m excited to use Inspire to spotlight my favorite everyday essentials with the convenience of shopping those items immediately on Amazon,” noted Badiyan.
Elsewhere on the site, Amazon has drawn inspiration from live-stream shopping with Amazon Live and even once tried a YouTube copycat where anyone could upload videos.
Unfortunately, most of Amazon’s takes on social media tended to be fairly bland, as the content only exists to push products. Meanwhile, people browse social sites for more than just ideas about things to buy. They want to engage with creators, learn new things, laugh, and be entertained. It’s not clear if Inspire will be able to deliver on these factors, despite the shift to video.
Amazon Inspire is currently only available in the Amazon mobile app on iOS and Android, initially to select customers.
Spotify today is expanding its video podcasting capabilities to creators in more than 180 markets worldwide, which means the functionality is now available in nearly all the markets where Spotify’s podcast creation software, Anchor, is currently available. The feature, first entered wider testing last year, then officially launched in April to a handful of key markets, including the U.S., before rolling out to half a dozen more countries this summer, including parts of Europe.
The move puts Spotify in closer competition with YouTube, where video podcasts have been growing in popularity.
Meanwhile, though Spotify is happy to talk about the expansion of its video recording functionality, the company wouldn’t share any sort of metrics about the traction its video podcasts are seeing — either in terms of creation or viewership. Instead, the company only responded to our inquiries by saying it’s “excited about the growth” as the format is adopted.
So far, the adoption of video podcasts on Spotify has included both Spotify Originals and other, independent shows, like “Call Her Daddy,” which became a Spotify exclusive in July 2021, plus “Diary of a CEO,” and the “Always Sunny Podcast,” among others.
Spotify also couldn’t confirm if its video podcasts have managed to increase the time users spent directly watching the shows on their phone or laptop, for example. However, the company did note that creators don’t necessarily have to switch to video entirely to leverage the new format. Rather, they can choose to diversify their content types by publishing some visual episodes alongside their traditional audio podcasts. For example, the episode “An Abortion Story” from “Call Her Daddy,” encouraged listeners to pull out their device at various parts to watch the video.
With today’s expansion, Spotify says video podcasters can now use Anchor’s tools to reach Spotify’s audience of 456 million monthly listeners, while listeners can take advantage of features like the ability to switch between watching the video and playing the video in the background. Notably, background play is a feature YouTube charges for through its YouTube Premium subscription. But on Spotify, it’s available to all users — including non-subscribers — for free. If Spotify’s video podcast market share grows, this could become a competitive advantage.
Spotify has been heavily focusing on podcasting, video and non-video alike, after spending more than $1 billion on podcast-related acquisitions. During the company’s 2022 investor day event, CEO Daniel Ek said that while the company is still in investment mode for podcasts, it believes the vertical has the potential for a 40-50% gross margin.
The video feature is not without its challenges, however. Reports this fall indicated Spotify creators were using the podcast tool to illegally pirate movies. SeveralTikTokvideos at the time showed the problem in action. Spotify said it uses technology to discover and remove this sort of infringing content. Piracy isn’t a problem limited to Spotify, of course. In fact, TikTok’s own LIVE feature is often used for finding a movie to watch, as users live stream directly from their TVs.
Previously, Spotify had rolled out video podcast publishing to Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It’s now available to most of Anchor’s markets, including Sweden, Netherlands, and regions like SEA (Indonesia), MENA (UAE, Saudi), LATAM (Chile, Argentina, Colombia) and others.
YouTube is expanding the reach of its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, with today’s announcement that it will begin rolling out Shorts on TV to its global users. The company’s updated smart TV app will now allow users to view the popular vertical videos in an optimized experience that’s designed to feel more consistent with what users see on mobile, YouTube explains. This was a challenge given that YouTube Shorts, like TikTok, were largely meant to be watched on smaller smartphone screens.
The new Shorts-watching feature will require a smart TV from 2019 or later, a newer gaming console or a streaming device, YouTube says. The videos themselves can be found on new Shorts shelf on the homepage of the YouTube app or on a creator’s channel page.
In a blog post, the company detailed the different design experiments it researched in coming up with the final concept for Shorts on TV. It found Shorts videos didn’t look great in the YouTube app’s conventional video player, which had too much black space on either side of the vertical video. It also considered a “jukebox” style format which would line up three Shorts side-by-side to take full advantage of the TV’s screen without leaving any additional space on the sides. But this experience was not only cluttered, it also deviated from how Shorts are meant to be viewed — one-by-one.
The design YouTube landed on is a customized option that attempts to better fill in the sides of the video with a color-sampled blurred background and an outline around the video that resembles a smartphone’s screen. It then further iterated on this format to add more functionality off to the side of the video, including information about the creator, the sound used in the video, and thumbs-up and down buttons. This information can be displayed by clicking the right button on your remote.
In this initial rollout, viewers can subscribe to a creator’s channel in addition to liking or disliking the video after viewing. The company plans to introduce more community features over time, it says.
When watching Shorts, you can also use the remote to start or stop the video from playing by clicking directly on the short or by using the Play and Pause buttons on the remote control itself. The Short will continue to play until you advance to the next Short using your remote. You can use the up and down buttons on the remote to move to the next video or return to a prior Short, YouTube says.
The company noted it was unusual for consumers to prefer to use the remote control to move through the Shorts videos, as typically watching videos on TV is more of a lean-back experience. But in this case, it found that viewers wanted to manually control which Short played or which they skipped, as they would on mobile.
While today YouTube Shorts are watched by over 1.5 billion logged-in users every month, there hasn’t been a way to watch them on the big screen until now as the YouTube app hasn’t allowed users to cast Shorts to their TV and the main TV app didn’t support Shorts viewing.
The expansion of Shorts to TV will help YouTube to better challenge TikTok, which had also rolled out its own TV app to various platforms last year,including Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Android TV OS and select LG and Samsung Smart TVs in North America. TikTok had also offered a TV app for Google TV and Android TV in the U.K., France and Germany, and on Samsung TVs in the U.K.
But unlike TikTok’s TV app, YouTube’s TV app has the advantage of being pre-installed on many smart TV platforms. And its rollout is global. However, users won’t necessarily gain immediate access to the feature today as these sorts of rollouts take time. The company says all users should gain the ability to view Shorts in the “coming weeks.”
Pinterest’s TikTok competitor is gaining new music. The company announced today its video-focused “Idea Pins” feature will now include the ability to add popular tracks from top artists, thanks to new licensing deals with Warner Music Group, Warner Chappell Music, Merlin and BMG. This will expand upon the music already provided through Pinterest’s royalty-free music library from 7Digital, the company noted.
With the launch, Pinterest says there will be thousands of new tracks available from artists like Dan + Shay, Bruno Mars, Michael Bublé, Twenty One Pilots, Zach Bryan, Paramore, and others.
To make it easier to browse and access this larger music catalog, the Pinterest mobile app will also introduce a new music experience on iOS and Android. Here, creators will be able to search for music by artist, track name or keyword in order to find the right song to accompany their Idea Pin.
To use the feature, creators will first open Idea Pins, then click on the music icon to be taken to the screen where they can search and add their desired track. They’ll then record their Idea Pin and publish it.
The update could help to make Pinterest’s Idea Pins a more viable competitor to TikTok as well as other social apps that have ventured into the short-form video format, like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts — all of which already include the ability to add popular songs from major labels.
Launched last year, Idea Pins are Pinterest’s own unique take on the now ubiquitous TikTok short video format, which has shown up in numerous apps including Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, and most recently, Twitter. Instead of copying TikTok directly, as some others have done, the 60-second Idea Pins allow creators to tell their stories using a combination of video, images, music, and other editing tools — but in a way where the Pins themselves can be tapped through, which is similar to Stories. The Idea Pins feed, meanwhile, is scrolled through vertically, like TikTok.
This format can be useful for the types of videos Pinterest creators would want to make as it allows them to add elements to their Pins that a video-only feature wouldn’t as easily permit — like a list of ingredients and steps for a recipe, for example, or the names of products used in a makeup tutorial.
Pinterest users can like, share and comment on the Idea Pins. But they can also save them to different boards for later reference — an organizational feature TikTok today lacks.
“Music plays a vital role in elevating storytelling and empowering storytellers, creators and Pinners who inspire the world every day on Pinterest,” said Malik Ducard, Pinterest’s Chief Content Officer, in a statement about the launch. “We are thrilled to partner with Warner Music Group, Warner Chappell Music, Merlin and BMG to bring the latest music tracks to our platform and elevate the content and inspiration created on Pinterest.”
Zoom has in many ways “won” the mindshare game when it comes to video conferencing: whether you’re actually using Zoom, or another service that’s wrapped into another platform like Google or Microsoft, and whether it’s for work or fun, the standalone Zoom is the one that people reference, the one that has claimed anthimeric status.
But for those who use Zoom, or Google’s Meet, Microsoft’s Teams, or something else, you’ll know that they still lack in certain scenarios. Today a startup called Venue built to plug one of those gaps — larger team meetings — is setting out its stall to compete, with a video conferencing platform that brings in a host of personalization and other features from consumer communication apps to make it more engaging. These include emoji bursts, the ability to set background music and backgrounds, easy tools to share videos and other media, gifs, and multi-functional control panels that mimic those that appear in streaming platforms like Twitch.
“Our clients have told us that if Slack made video conferencing for team meetings, this is what it might look like,” said Jason Goldlist, who co-founded the company with Frank Poon, in an interview with me (which took place, naturally, on Venue).
The Toronto-based startup has been in private beta for the past two years, first as a bootstrapped business and then as part of the Y Combinator Winter 2022 cohort.
In that time, it’s picked up some very interesting traction. Its customers include Yelp, Shopify, and PwC; and it’s so far hosted more than 5 million minutes of meetings and 250,000 participants in aggregate.
And now it’s announcing $4 million in seed funding from an impressive list of backers: led by Accel, the group also incudes Stewart Butterfield, the CEO and co-founder of none other than Slack (he is investing directly, the investment is not coming from the Slack Fund, and this is the video pitch, in Venue, that Goldlist used to pitch him); SquareSpace founder and CEO Anthony Casalena; and the founder and CEO of Remote.com, Job van der Voort.
Venue will be using the funding both for more product development, and also to scale its infrastructure to work with more customers.
Venue’s basic pitch is that it’s not another video conferencing platform. As Goldlist told me the other day, the aim is not to replace Zoom, Meet, Teams or the others, which are perfectly serviceable for one-on-one or small group virtual gatherings.
“We see Zoom as the Craigslist of video conferencing,” he said. “You will always have people who will use it.
“Our role is not to out-Zoom Zoom,” he continued. “It’s to pick our niche and to execute really well. There is a specific set of use cases and venue is the best at and no one focuses the way we do on the all hands, the town halls the AMAs, especially for remote or highly distributed companies.”
Borrowing from the wider world of consumer apps, its aim is to give users more control and thus make video meetings on the platform less abstract. Emoji reactions, background music, dynamic backgrounds, video bubbles, and a wide set of chat tools are among the bells and whistles that Venue believes will keep users interested, and keep organizations on board as customers.
Winning people over with bells and whistles seems to have worked so far. The startup says that there have been over 2 million emoji reactions “blasted to presenters” and that more than 30,000 one-on-one connections have been made between users on Venue to date.
Venue’s emergence from private beta is coming with some momentum for sure, but also — for the video call weary among us — maybe some malaise. Much of the world has inched away from many of the trappings of life in the throes of Covid-19 — local authorities are imposing less rules about face masks, travel and being in groups; offices are opening up again; and some of our e-commerce habits are tailing off in favor of shopping, eating out or doing other things in person.
Video conferencing hasn’t exactly died in recent months, but we are definitely entering a more sober phase after the heady months of 2020 and 2021. Even Zoom has felt the pinch. Although the company met analyst expectations for revenues and beat on earnings in its last financial quarter, it’s been feeling the pinch of a tough market for tech stocks.
Most recently, Citi downgraded Zoom’s stock in the face of growing competition from bigger platforms (Microsoft being especially aggressive with business customers, picking up some interesting partners in the process such as Workplace, the enterprise version of Facebook from Meta), and Zoom itself has been working on a new strategy to double down once more on its bread-and-butter enterprise base after finding that monetizing all those dinner parties and calls among friends was going nowhere fast.
All of that means not just a trickier climate for all video conferencing apps, but also a lot more competition for smaller players among those bigger companies with the resources to build in the tools they lack today.
But although many work practices, including remote working and virtual meetings, definitely opened up in the last couple of years, Goldlist points out that the use case for better, larger team meetings is not something that materialized during / after Covid-19. He points specifically to the costs and clunky nature of traditional video conferencing systems.
“The price of running an all-hands [for a company with employees in more than one place] is extraordinary,” he said. Doing “back of the napkin math”, said Goldlist, the cost for a meeting for 1,000 people for an hour is upwards for $50,000. That is not equipment investments per se. “it’s a huge cost to interrupt people in the middle of the day to have a meeting,” he said. “These are expensive things. You need to make them unique.”
The fact that there are still so many moments when video meetings don’t feel ideal is likely a strong enough reason for investors to place a bet on one in an early stage that has picked up some users, and is seeing some momentum with the wider startup community.
“Too often all hands and large meetings are inefficient and costly. Historically, it’s been hard to produce highly engaging meetings for large groups – the tools and technology hasn’t supported it. But Venue is now making top-tier production value simple and accessible,” said Sara Ittelson, a partner at Accel, in a statement.
Instagram may be worried about TikTok’s threat to its business, but in the near-term, it’s still far ahead when it comes to the influencer marketing dollars spent on its platform in the U.S. According to a new analyst report, Instagram is on track to capture nearly 3x the amount of influencer marketing spend compared to TikTok in 2022 — or $2.23 billion spent on Instagram compared with the $774.8 million spent on TikTok.
However, while Instagram is faring well against TikTok on this front, Meta’s other app, Facebook, is not as lucky.
The new data, which hails from analysts at Insider Intelligence (previously eMarketer), indicates that TikTok is now on track to overtake Facebook in terms of influencer marketing spend this year and will overtake the No. 2 platform, YouTube, by 2024.
Currently, YouTube is seeing $948.0 million in influencer marketing dollars spent on its platform in the U.S., ahead of Facebook’s $739.0 million. In addition, TikTok has already overtaken YouTube based on marketer usage for influencer-based marketing, the report notes.
Image Credits: Insider Intelligence
Instagram has been steadily adjusting its algorithm and feed to highlight creator content, recommended posts and advertising, despite complaints from users who want to see more of their friends’ photos and videos. But as Instagram tweaks how content is ranked in its main feed, some creators have worried their reach could be negatively impacted by the constant changes.
Last week, Instagram agreed to roll back some recent updates which saw the app morphing itself into TikTok with a full-screen home feed and increased number of recommended posts, after two of the Kardashians posted a complaint to their Instagram profiles. Of course, mega influencer celebs like the Kardashians could lose out if Instagram shifts its algorithm to feature a greater number of smaller creators.
The report also points out that could be the eventual plan for Instagram, adding that the mix of influencers benefiting from this form of monetization has been shifting over time.
Specifically, Instagram’s feed adjustments would allows smaller “micro” and “nano” influencers, as they’re called, to take a large slice of the pie, it says. Nano-influencers are defined as individuals with 1,000 to 4,999 followers, while micro-influencers are individuals with 5,000 to 19,999 followers. These influencers are already benefitting on TikTok, which has been part of the app’s draw for creators.
The report notes, too, that marketing spend on smaller influencer partnerships has been growing quickly. This year, “nano” influencer spending will rise 220.5%, the analysts predict, while spending on “mega” influencers will grow only 8.0%. (Mega influencers have at least 1 million followers, as the firm defines it.)
Marketers may also prefer working with smaller creators for a variety of reasons, including the fact that their rates are cheaper but their posts may have higher engagement rates.
They may be less likely to have their view counts elevated artificially through the use of fake views or bots, as well.
For what it’s worth, TikTok is often accused of having inflated view counts and is known to have lower limits for what qualifies as a view for marketers’ purposes. It’s said to count a view as soon as the video plays and counts rewatches as views. (Plus, some believe there are questions as to how much TikTok itself could be complicit in inflating views, given its owner ByteDance directly involved itself with making fake accounts in a prior app that was a sort of TikTok precursor.)
“TikTok is surging in popularity for influencer marketing, but it’s still nowhere near Instagram in terms of spending or marketer adoption,” Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said. “That’s in part due to the higher prices Instagram creators charge for content, but also because of its wide array of content formats, most of which are now shoppable. Still, Instagram is trying to be more like TikTok so that it can attract smaller creators, which TikTok is known for. That’s key for Instagram to retain its lead in the influencer marketing space, especially as many creators on TikTok now boast follower counts that rival or surpass those on Instagram and YouTube.”
In total, the report estimates that 74.5% of U.S. marketers will use influencer marketing in 2022 and influencer marketing spend will rise by 27.8% to $4.99 billion this year.
YouTube wants to quickly ramp up the number of short-form “Shorts” videos available on its platform in order to better compete with TikTok. To aid with this effort, the company is today rolling out a new creator tool that turns existing YouTube videos into Shorts in a matter of moments. The update, now available on YouTube’s mobile app, allows a video’s creator to easily select a segment of any video they’ve uploaded previously, then publish that clip as YouTube Shorts content.
The company was already converting users’ uploaded vertical videos under 60 seconds as Shorts videos, even if the content had been originally uploaded as a standard YouTube video. (Not all creators were fans of this idea, we should note.) Now YouTube is hoping creators will more actively help build out the Shorts library even further with the launch of this new tool that allows them to clip interesting bits from their longer videos.
The move may signal how much YouTube parent Google is worried about TikTok’s dominance in short-form. Clearly, it doesn’t think that allowing YouTube’s Shorts library to grow organically through new, original content uploads will be enough to compete. Instead, YouTube has been relying on leveraging its existing long-form content to create more Shorts. This April, for example, YouTube announced that any public YouTube video could be “remixed” into YouTube Shorts unless creators opted out.
The new tool, meanwhile, at least puts some of the power back into creators’ own hands.
The updated mobile app allows creators to select a part of their video up to 60 seconds in length and turn that into Shorts content using the same editing tools they’re familiar with inside the app, explains the company. If their selection is less than 60 seconds long, they can then shoot additional videos using the Shorts camera or they can add gallery videos to complete their 60-second Shorts content.
Creators may be motivated to use the tool as a means of generating interest in their long-form content, as YouTube notes that Shorts created using VOD (video on demand) content will automatically link back to the original.
YouTube has been touting Shorts’ ability to drive views to creators’ long-form content as part of a trend it referred to as “the rise of the multiformat creator.” In June, the company said Shorts had topped 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users but only had anecdotal data to suggest that Shorts were helping to grow critical metrics like watch time or subscribers.
In the meantime, the fact that YouTube is leaning so heavily on its existing long-form content to build out Shorts suggests a possible lack of creator interest in filming original Shorts; or it could also mean that YouTube ultimately still sees more potential as a long-form platform — but it envisions Shorts as a marketing mechanism to boost views for its better-monetized content.
The new Shorts creation feature is rolling out starting today on YouTube’s mobile app for both iOS and Android devices, the company says.
Last year, Pinterest began its pivot from being an online image board to being more of a creator platform with the launch of Idea Pins. The new feature allows Pinterest users to tell their stories using a combination of video, images, music, and other editing tools, resulting in something that’s a cross between TikTok’s short videos and a Stories product with multiple pages of content. Today, Pinterest is opening up this new format to its advertisers with the launch of its new “Idea Ads.”
This ad format is designed to give brands a way to connect with their audience on Pinterest’s platform, which can then in turn drive traffic to their websites or inspire future shopping purchases — similar to much of Pinterest’s organic content. The Idea Ads themselves are basically just Idea Pins either crafted directly by marketers or produced in collaboration between a business and a creator who are working together. The latter is referred to as “Idea ads with paid partnership,” in Pinterest’s lingo.
The company envisions the new format as a better way for brands to reach their audience beyond using just video alone, as on TikTok and other video-first platforms. While video, of course, works well for storytelling, it can be difficult to share other crucial details — like the supply list for a DIY project, the ingredients or instructions needed to make a recipe, or the names of products used in a makeup tutorial along with links as to where to shop.
Both TikTok and YouTube have been experimenting with solutions to some aspects of this problem which involve placing shoppable items below the video in question. More recently, YouTube even laid the groundwork for a second-screen experience aimed at those watching videos on TV where they could shop on their phones while watching videos on the big screen.
In Pinterest’s case, however, brands may want to do more than just generate clicks to their website. They also may want to offer inspirational content to raise brand awareness or share a series of step-by-step instructions to help viewers complete a specific project. Those are things that aren’t as easily accomplished via merch shelves underneath videos alone.
Image Credits: Pinterest
According to Pinterest’s tests, people who saw Idea Ads were 59% more likely to recall that brand. Meanwhile, brands that worked with creators saw 38% higher brand awareness and 37% higher Pin awareness, it said. Scotch and Gatorade were among Idea Ads’ early adopters. Scotch worked with craft-focused creator Kailo Chic on a back-to-school shopping campaign that saw 64% lower cost per impression than Scotch’s benchmark goals. Gatorade worked with fitness creators VeraLaRo and Domonique Panton on Idea Ads that generated more than 14 million views and 34 million impressions.
In addition to today’s public launch of the new ad format, Pinterest also introduced a new paid partnership tool. The tool allows creators to both disclose and promote their brand partnerships. With the tool, creators can tag their brand partners directly in their content. Pinterest says brands who had tested the tool include Gatorade, 3M, Coty, and M.A.C. Cosmetics.
The new products were announced ahead of Pinterest’s return to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity — a global ad festival that Pinterest will return to for the first time in three years, it said. It also follows this week’s news of its multi-million dollar partnership with Tastemade to scale creator content and live streaming across Pinterest starting later this year, which will also involve Idea Pins.
The company says the new ad formats and tools are now generally available to advertisers in over 30 countries worldwide.
