Nice video interview with Washington Post TikTok on what to do with the platform as a publisher.
TikTok is a way to reach Gen Z (see below on employment) for publishers. The drawback is that, to be successful, you have to invest time and resources into the platform that has no monetization options for now and does not really drive traffic to your own platform. But if TikTok carries on at its current rate of growth – and emerges as a social media mainstay like Facebook – it could soon be a must-be-on platform.
Also at the Post, their business tool Zeus is now proposing a single sign on platform to be shared across multiple publishers, to reduce friction and enable micropayment for articles. I am curious to see the business results. The customer value has always been too low for publishers as you get some cents per transaction and loose the opportunity to sell a longer term, high value subscription. But it is always good to retry old models after a few years.
All this Clubhouse stuff is early days. Some experiments by Cosmopolitan, Insider and Yahoo Finance on Clubhouse. Some nice hints for publishers, but as always with audio, unclear how to make money from it.
Google has cut its app store commission from 30% to 15% for the first $1m of a developer’s revenue. Apple did the same last November. This is over 90% of developers, but less than 10% of revenue, so it’s a good PR move and good for the ecosystem. However, it also does nothing to address the structural arguments about the store model. App builders and publishers have no direct user data, so cannot bill them directly, reactivate them after churning, and are subject to any margin change Google and Apple will make in the coming decades. It is just not sustainable business to give your most strategic asset - the customer relationship - to another entity in another country, that will never even consider dealing with you directly.
On a different note, also respect for Google as the browser Chrome can now caption and translate video and audio speech automatically. This technology is amazing and has great potential for unlocking content from around the world, and doing business in the future.
It’s not good to be under 25 years old in Spain or Italy. Chances are 40% that you are unemployed due to the global pandemic. In this chart you can see the gap in OECD countries between older generations and the (more than 2 billion people) in the Generation Z age born between 1997 and 2009.
They now represent about 30% of the total global population and by 2025 will make up 27% of the workforce.
This tracker shows how 8,550 companies are measuring up to the 17 Societal Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, designed to achieve three primary objectives by 2030:
Protect the planet
End poverty
Create prosperity and peace for all
Only 0.2 percent are “strongly aligned” to the SDGs, which could mean a lot of competitive advantage is up for grabs.
The worst performing goal is responsible production and consumption, followed affordable and clean energy.
Asian companies are leading the pack, whilst the EU closely follows and the US are falling behind.
Very good article shedding light on remote working, pulling together a lot of the existing academic literature to argue remote work would be much more common in the years.
Most people find remote work better than expected, although still a larger part (27%) want to go to work 5 days a week.
Microsoft internal surveys also found remote collaboration technology was less suited for some kinds of work like gathering around a whiteboard and big picture/creative work while fully remote.
Others complained it was harder to plan, brainstorm, and change directions quickly in virtual meetings than had been the case on site.
I love to transform businesses by forging high performance teams, connecting the world of suits to the creative world of sneakers. With these teams I have learnt from our many mistakes and successes, pioneering digital renovations that produced tens of millions in bottom line increases.
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