Weekly Roundup – October 7th, 2025
Roundup Links
Have We Passed Peak Social Media?
"...It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. And this is not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time during pandemic lockdowns — usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus."
Our Take: Perhaps social media usage is in permanent decline. Perhaps social media usage is merely stabilizing after the pandemic had everyone sitting on their couches scrolling their phones for unseemly amounts of time. Yes, there are fewer posts from friends and family. However, take a look around you next time you are in a public place. A good portion will be scrolling a social media feed of some sort.
Prediction markets shake up sports betting, rattling DraftKings and FanDuel
"Prediction markets are emerging as a major new competitor to online sportsbooks, sending shares of DraftKings and FanDuel’s parent company sharply lower this week, Bloomberg News reported Saturday.
Robinhood and Kalshi reported surging activity, with Robinhood saying more than four billion prediction contracts have traded on its platform so far this year, half of them in the third quarter alone. Kalshi also set fresh records in September, topping $260 million in weekly volume during the NFL season.
The rapid growth has fueled investor fears that prediction platforms (which let people bet on political races, economic events, and increasingly, sports) could siphon users from traditional gambling sites. DraftKings stock tumbled more than 16% for the week, its steepest drop since 2022, while Flutter Entertainment, owner of FanDuel, fell over 8%. Analysts quickly cut price targets, with one downgrading DraftKings to a sell-equivalent rating."
Our Take: Seeing how sports betting has, for a sizable chunk of Americans, upended traditional notions of what a ‘sports fan’ is, ‘prediction markets’ apply the instantaneous functionality of sports betting apps and apply it to everyday life. While some people might not like the idea of impulsively wagering on a quadruple parlay in a throwaway game between the colts and the jags, others definitely seem to like betting on whether humans will make contact with aliens and/or whether time travelers exist. Or, if you are slightly more morbid, you can easily place bets on how and when a celebrity might die. And not only are prediction markets popular, they are posing a stiff challenge to the sports betting duopoly of FanDuel and DraftKings.
Google Ads copywriting with AI: Getting the prompt right
"Creating effective ad copy has always been a critical skill for PPC marketers, especially in Google Ads.
In the past, it meant hours of brainstorming, drafting, and A/B testing.
Today, LLMs like Google’s Gemini can produce high-quality ad copy in minutes.
But the results don’t come from the tool alone – they depend on the prompts you use to guide it.
Google does offer built-in AI features to suggest ad copy ideas and variants, but that’s not the same as generating ads in batch or scaling copy across titles and descriptions."
Our Take: Now that S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) is essentially passé in the ‘tech community’, we have what I call P.O.S. (Prompt Optimization Specialists). The quality of AI output is dependent on the quality and specificity of the prompt (input) you feed to an AI system. Expect a cottage industry of P.O.S. to pop up. Pro Tip: Write your own ad. Most people can sniff out AI generated content.
Bari Weiss named editor-in-chief of CBS News under Free Press-Paramount deal
"...The announcement capped months of talks between Ellison and Weiss. The newly minted media baron first floated the idea at July's Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, a frequent staging ground for major media mergers, according to media reports.
Weiss resigned as an opinion writer for the New York Times in July 2020, in a 1,500-word open letter, opens new tab in which she described being the subject of "constant bullying" by colleagues who disagreed with her views.
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In 2022, she founded her new media company on a credo of "honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence."
In a letter to Paramount employees Monday, Ellison wrote that the company is a steward of one of the world's most iconic news organizations. “We are challenging ourselves to do better – recognizing that we have the ability to reach a broad audience and demonstrate constructive, respectful, and bipartisan dialogue in our own work,” he wrote."
Our Take: The not-quite-liberal, not-quite conservative, almost defiantly centrist ‘Free Press’ won a substantial audience (and mailing list) through its mix of reportage and op-eds from an ideologically diverse camp of outsiders (and insiders). CBS (Paramount) noticed and now Bari Weiss is the face of their news division in a 9-figure deal.
