It’s a big day for our podcast as we have our first official guest speaker, Reynolds Wallis, join us! We like the sound of her voice better and of course her personality is the BEST. Reyn doesn’t know this, but not only is she our first guest, but our second unsung hero and we had the opportunity to surprise her live. 10 years of client wisdom, industry knowledge, and the best dang attitude out there makes her more than deserving as March’s Unsung Hero Award!
Today we dive into some fun topics:
Is YouTube bigger than Netflix?
Alphabet, Google’s parent firm, dropped its latest earnings report Tuesday night. And it was bonkers. Per The Verge, Alphabet’s revenue in 2021 hit a record $257B, a gain of 41% YoY. Somewhat absurdly for its size, this is the company’s fastest annual growth since 2007. For the latest quarter, YouTube ads brought in $8.6B.
Our Take: Here’s the wild part: That’s an annualized run rate of $34B, which outpaced Netflix — a $30B run rate — for the 1st time. With a mostly ad-based business, YouTube is usually left out of the streaming subscription wars conversation, but it’s clearly the video leader. As one point of comparison, a study of Android users found that in 2020 the average monthly time spent on YouTube was 23 hours (vs. ~6 hours for Netflix).
Meanwhile, YouTube itself has more active users (2.3B) than any social site other than Facebook (2.7B). And while we’re at it, here’s another wild stat: YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine in the world (you can guess the first).
Google Plans Privacy Change Similar To Apple
Google announced it is adopting new privacy restrictions that will cut tracking across apps on its Android devices. The Alphabet-owned company said it is developing new privacy-focused replacements for its advertising ID, a unique string of characters that identifies the user’s device.
Our Take: The importance of first party data continues to grow by the day. How are you identifying user drop offs with opportunities to provide valuable content so a user submits data rich information?
Take a listen. Catch you next week!
