NEW TECH FEUD BREWING:  Well you knew it was just a matter of time before this happened.  Google and Amazon are beginning to snipe one another by pulling their products from the other’s platform.  As described in the attached Verge link, Amazon threw the first punch by blocking Google’s IoT products like Nest thermostats and Chrome Cast from being sold on Amazon.com.  Now Google is retaliating by prohibiting YouTube from being accessible through Amazon’s Fire TV devices.  While you could argue Google’s YouTube pull is a savvy hardball way to get tough with Amazon, the real loser of this battle is the consumer.  You can imagine the reaction an excited new Fire TV user would have when they find out that they can’t access YouTube with their new device?  This tech tug-of-war reminds me of the “us vs. them” battle between Apple and Microsoft.  For years the tech industry suffered because consumers were divided into two camps.  Hopefully that mistake doesn’t repeat itself with this next generation of digital heavyweights.

THE DAMPENING EFFECT OF “PODCAST CACHING”:  Yesterday Triton called out four audio publishers (iHeart, Stitcher, Spotify, and Google) for the practice of podcast caching, as noted in the attached RAIN link.  In simple terms caching is when a publisher saves a copy of the podcast and then distributes it via download instead of streaming it the way normal digital audio is sent out.  This practice creates two problems for the industry.  First, a cached and then downloaded podcast loses its tracking analytics.  Because once listeners download a podcast to their own device you can’t tell how often or long they listen to the content, much less determine if the ads within the podcast were heard. The second problem is that you can’t dynamically insert ads in real time into cached/downloaded podcasts.  The chart below shows the breakout of integrated ads (which are usually “brought to you by” sponsorship mentions), compared to dynamically inserted ads which you typically hear within streamed content.  Triton’s beef is that caching is inhibiting the revenue growth of podcasting as a whole, because many more clients would invest if more ads were served dynamically and you could track the usage metrics.  It feels like Triton is making a good argument here.  If we want to get serious about podcasting as a viable ad offering the industry needs to drop caching and commit to streaming.

SO JUST HOW BIG IS THE INTERNET?:  When thinking about the digital landscape we typically deal in US-only metrics and are usually focused on mobile usage instead of just the worldwide web, literally the “www”, as a whole.  So for perspective it’s sometimes good to step back and look at the total online usage numbers just to gage the internet’s impact on humanity.  According to eMarketer in the attached link, during 2017 about 3.46B humans will log on globally at least once a month.  For context there are about 7.7B of us in total, so that’s a 47% penetration rate.  As you can see in the graphic below 2019 is expected to be a seminal year for the internet, when over half the total global population will go online monthly.  Since some corners of the globe don’t even have regular access to electricity the internet will never reach everyone.  But pretty soon the majority of us will be members of the digital generation.

Have a great Thursday guys!