Weekly Roundup – Week of March 27th, 2023

"Half of sports fans said they have used Twitter at least once in the past month, compared with 44% of the general population who said the same.
Meanwhile, 16% of sports fans said they use Twitter multiple times per day, compared with 13% of U.S. adults who said similar.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter Inc. doesn’t appear to have severely impacted the industry’s ad spending on the platform, according to Sensor Tower data, as several sports properties reportedly spent about the same or even more in January as they did in September, prior to Musk’s acquisition.
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In 2015, sports events comprised about 1% of the U.S. TV programming, but contributed to nearly 50% of all Twitter TV conversation, according to a Nielsen Holdings PLC media report. The number of U.S.-based tweets on Super Bowl Sunday was reportedly up 20% year over year. For many sports fans, Twitter is an indisputable resource that’s a crucial element of every game, highlight and news report.
“Fans aren’t going to BBC Sport or ESPN for their news,” said Will Misselbrook, chief creative and content officer for Major League Soccer’s LA Galaxy. “They’re using Twitter as that primary platform for keeping up-to-date with their teams.”"

"Since a Supreme Court ruling opened the door in 2018, legal sports betting has exploded in the U.S., fueled by easy access through online apps and expensive, star-studded ad campaigns for online sportsbooks. Some 36 states have passed laws to allow gambling on sports, another eight are considering it and more than half of American adults—146 million people—now live in a live, legal sports-betting market. The result: record-breaking revenue for the betting companies, a tax windfall for states and, many experts believe, a sharp and troubling rise in the risk of serious gambling problems and addiction. It's a trend the experts believe may rapidly worsen, given what is known about the trajectory of compulsive gambling and the experience of countries that have had legal sports betting in place far longer than the U.S.
Calls to gambling helplines reflect the growing problem. In 2021 (the most recent year for which data is available), calls to the helpline run by the National Council on Problem Gambling, a gaming industry supported group, rose 43 percent, while texts increased 59 percent and chats jumped 84 percent. That's troubling, but a Newsweek analysis of the available data in every state that has legalized sports gambling since the Supreme Court ruling shows an even more dramatic spike in pleas for help. In Connecticut, for example, helpline calls jumped 91 percent in the first year after legalization; in Massachusetts, calls are up 276 percent since 2020; in Ohio, which just opened the door to legal sports betting in January, calls to the state's problem gambling hotline tripled in the first month alone compared to the same period last year; in the first year after Virginia legalized sports gambling, calls climbed 387 percent; in Illinois, calls rose 425 percent between 2020 and 2022.
Especially troubling to experts: The fastest-growing group of sports bettors—and the ones who seem to be getting into the most trouble—are typically people in their twenties, spurred by easy access on their phones and ubiquitous advertising. Young men, who are the main target audience for sports betting companies, are the most vulnerable. "We believe that the risks for gambling addiction overall have grown 30 percent from 2018 to 2021, with the risk concentrated among young males 18 to 24 who are sports bettors," said Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, in an interview with Pew Research last year."

"As major media, entertainment and technology companies downsize in search of better profit margins, a recurring theme has been advertising. In recent months, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has called the ad market “very weak,” NBCUniversal chief Jeff Shell deemed it “shallow,” while Paramount topper Bob Bakish described it “cyclically tough.”
But the difficult advertising environment obscures a silver lining: Despite the tough macro environment, the sports advertising business is still booming. Look no further than Fox’s broadcast of the Super Bowl last month, where 30 second ads sold for north of $7 million, and with the network anticipating a record ad haul.
Or the NCAA March Madness men’s basketball tournament, which Bloomberg Intelligence estimates will bring in $1.2 billion in ad revenue for broadcast partners Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount this year, up 8 percent from a year ago.
In a world where the strongest media companies are seeing their ad revenue flat year over year, an 8 percent gain can be considered, well, madness.
“The sports dollars continue to be I would say relatively consistent each year with the advertisers that have these tentpole events that they participate in,” says John Bogusz, the executive VP of CBS Sports advertising for Paramount.
In the case of March Madness in particular, “seasonality is on our side,” says Jon Diament, executive VP of ad sales for Warner Bros. Discovery.
“It’s starting to get warm, the sun’s coming out,” the WBD exec adds. “Winter is over, you start thinking about home improvement, you start thinking about going on a trip or travel, you start thinking about going out again … picking up a beer and going to picnics and all that kind of fun.”
While sports is inconsistent on the TV schedule, the impact can be clearly seen. The World Cup last fall led NBCUniversal and Fox to advertising growth in a quarter when everyone else was down (ESPN, for its part, was merely flat when accounting for a change in college football playoff schedules)."

"Late last year, a series of polls from The Economist/YouGov asked Americans who they wanted to be the Republican nominee in 2024, and among Democrats, DeSantis had an edge over Trump — particularly when respondents were given only those two candidates to choose from.2 When it comes to the broader electorate, an average of FiveThirtyEight’s polling of imperfect, hypothetical, head-to-head matchups of each man against President Biden, meanwhile, shows DeSantis with a slightly better chance than Trump.3
So what gives? Do Democrats want their own party to face a tougher fight next year?
Democrats’ slight preference for DeSantis over Trump — even if DeSantis might currently be better positioned to beat Biden — could be about one simple thing: Democrats really, really don’t want to deal with the former president again and might not currently be thinking in terms of who’s more beatable.
“I think most Democrats would be terrified of another Trump presidency, but I also think that most Democrats would not be happy about a DeSantis presidency and maybe think DeSantis is a lot like Trump but ‘more competent’ or something,” said Hans Noel, a professor of government at Georgetown University. “I don’t know if that’s the right interpretation, but it’s definitely one that a lot of Democrats have.”
Of course, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about Democrats’ preferred challenger based on surveys conducted months ago. And let’s remember — this isn’t about Democrats liking DeSantis more, or even knowing much about him at all. A more recent YouGov survey, from late February, showed that Democrats had a slightly more favorable (28 percent) and unfavorable (67 percent) opinion of Trump than they did for DeSantis (25 percent favorable, 60 percent unfavorable), suggesting that many Democrats simply haven’t made up their minds about the Florida governor. Indeed, 15 percent of Democrats didn’t have an opinion on DeSantis in the poll, while only 4 percent had no opinion of Trump. We see similar numbers in other polls as well. It’s possible, then, that Democrats’ preferences are squishy at this point and will continue changing as they learn more about DeSantis after his expected presidential campaign officially kicks off."

Almost every service we use on the internet is basically a platform for advertising, especially search engines.
Advertisers pay to get their sites at the top of search results, have their businesses show up on digital maps or populate their products at the top of shopping carousel pages.
The search engine companies are not only paid, but get data about what users want, which they can then turn around and use to sell more advertising.
But how does all this work if, as chat-based artificial intelligence permeates web search, the results become less like a big list and more like a one-on-one conversation? That’s where it looks like Microsoft and Google are headed with their Bing and Bard chatbots.
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Garrett Johnson, assistant professor of marketing at Boston University, about how this new approach could really shake up the online ad space.
Garrett Johnson: The chat interface is kind of like a Goldilocks approach. So, like, the traditional search results page with four sponsored and 10 organic links, I think, is going to become a thing of the past. But then the other extreme would be like a voice assistant, which is typically providing a single answer. So a chat-based search is more amenable to multiple options than voice search because of the relative speed of reading versus speaking. And we all know that chat-based search also has a fibbing problem. So search engines, users and advertisers want this information, but also like footnotes and links to make it easier for users to be able to check the source themselves.
Meghan McCarty Carino: When we think about traditional search versus the chatbot approach, it seems like you’re kind of going from multiple results to maybe one result or fewer results. How could that affect advertising?
Johnson: That’s one of the key things that could be disruptive here, is that it creates a “winner take most” dynamic. So, you know, you get fewer search results with chat search. And so that typically is going to benefit strong brands No. 1, and No. 2 is going to benefit the leaders in SEO or search engine optimization, those that [adapt] to the parts of SEO that are relevant to chat.

With advertising weakening, platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter need to lean on subscribers for revenue growth—but they don’t actually expect most users to pay.
Social-media companies are finally asking users to pay up. It isn’t personal—it’s strictly business.
As of last month, the option to pay for Facebook’s new subscription service will run you nearly $12 a month in some countries despite co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s 2010 declaration that his social-media network will always be free. Facebook parent Meta Platforms is also rolling out an optional subscription service for its photo sharing app, Instagram. Snap Inc. has added a subscription service for Snapchat. Elon Musk’s Twitter, bleeding cash, recently upgraded its legacy subscription service, Blue, and LinkedIn has had subscription offerings for well over 15 years.
The reason subscription models suddenly are so popular is obvious: In the past year a weaker economy has shrunk advertisers’ budgets and privacy initiatives have made existing ads less lucrative. Meta’s advertising revenue doubled between 2016 and 2018 and then doubled again by 2021. But it fell last year for the first time on an annual basis. The result has been a focus on “efficiency”—a euphemism for tens of thousands of layoffs and a major shift for a technology company accustomed to moving fast and breaking things.
The idea of charging customers while helping companies sell them things is as old as newspapers. More recently, television went from a few channels delivered free over the airwaves to dozens on your cable dial that show ads and charge cable providers pennies. Those pennies added up, creating billionaires like Ted Turner in the process.
It creates them even more quickly these days because Wall Street loves businesses with predictable revenue streams. Over the last five-plus years, for example, subscription companies like Salesforce and Netflix have fetched significantly higher price-to-earnings multiples than ad-based businesses like Google-parent Alphabet. But what might eventually score points with investors is already proving unpopular with many social-media consumers.
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Asking a user who has long been the product to become a paying customer is bound to ruffle feathers, but Daniel McCarthy, assistant professor of marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, calls social media’s foray into subscriptions “only natural.”
One key misunderstanding is how few people are expected to pay anything. Digital-product strategy expert Vineet Kumar, associate professor of marketing at the Yale School of Management, believes social-media companies will actually be best served by trying to get just a “small fraction” of users to buy in, “say 1- 2%.” In a 2014 Harvard Business Review piece on freemium strategy, he discusses how converting too high a percentage of users suggests your free product isn’t very compelling, limiting your overall potential user base.

Scott Masteller stresses the primacy of talent and scouting for on-air success: "One talented personality can make all the difference in generating consumption and revenue."