PROXIMITY BASED ATTRIBUTION TAKES OFF:  Over the past few years marketers have used consumers’ latitude/longitude cell coordinates to serve ads.  The execution here is pretty simple – if you’re within range of a store an ad for that retailer can be served to your mobile device.  But what about harnessing the power of proximity in reverse to prove an ad campaign drives foot traffic?  That’s the gist of the new partnership between Pandora and Foursquare.  The attached AdWeek link includes details of how the program works along with some early successes.  This type of tracking works especially well for brands whose primary KPI is foot traffic.  A good example is an account like Subway, who can now measure how often Pandora listeners visit a store after being exposed to an ad compared to those who were not exposed.  Sufficed to say, this is a powerful new tool for marketers to use as they try to link mobile ads to foot traffic.

TRADITIONAL TV SLOW TO PICK UP DIGITAL ADVANCEMENTS:  eMarketer is featuring some fairly interesting stats on the state of linear TV in the attached link.  While there’s a decent amount of buzz around Addressable (targeted) TV and Programmatic buying, neither is taking a significant bite out of the overall TV revenue pie yet.  Addressable TV is still hard to scale – at 72M data-linked addressable set tops in the US there’s only about a 30% reach of the population, which is limiting to reach-based TV campaigns.  And Programmatic buying still seems to be swim-laned to OLV, with only 5% of traditional TV being transacted this way.  Both buckets are starting to grow though, as illustrated in the two charts below.  So it’s worth keeping an eye on this trend over the next few years.

NN SUPPORTERS TAKE TO THE STREETS:  Finally, in case you missed it yesterday an “Internet-Wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality”.  The day was marked by a few real life protests, like the one pictured below at the FCC HQ in DC.  But mostly this went online, as 80,000+ publishers wielded the power of their collective audience to rally against the FCC’s plan to dismantle NN.  Overall the public relations push back seems to be working.  Over the last two months over half a million public comments have been filed with the FCC, which have been overwhelmingly in support of NN.  The tech industry’s positioning that it’s a power grab by Big Cable to be able to charge more for premium data delivery seems to be working.  Will this effort ultimately save NN, or at least soften the rules changes?  Only time will tell.

Have a great Thursday guys!

VOICE ENABLEMENT THE STAR OF AMAZON PRIME DAY:  While Amazon doesn’t formally release its Amazon Prime Day sales results, industry forecasts are pointing to another record breaking day.  All in yesterday’s sales revenue is expected to finish around $2.1-2.2B (that’s “B” for billion in just one day), with $1.6-1.7B coming from the US.  Trying to measure YoY growth is a little difficult since Amazon Prime Day is now 30 hours longs (started Monday night), and is in 30 countries this year compared to 10 last year.  According to the attached AdWeek article the star of this year’s APD is definitely Amazon’s Echo device.  Early estimates are that Amazon sold 3x the number of Echoes worldwide as they did on APD in 2016.  This comports with the overall surge the industry is seeing in voice-enabled device purchases, as connected home IoT technology goes mainstream.  Nice to see Voice taking such a leading role in the eCommerce-sphere!

DUOPOLY DOMINATION OR MUTUALLY DEPENDENT LOOP?:  The first thing that becomes clear upon reading the attached article from The Wrap is the utter domination that the Google/Facebook duopoly has over the print industry.  Not only does G/FB haul in more ad revenue than the entire global print industry (think about that for a minute), the print publishers are now beholden to the pair for distribution.  In other words, print publications no longer have enough readers to stay in business, so they’re forced to push their content through G/FB, which ends up making their masters even more powerful.  But behind that headline there’s another more subtle dynamic to the relationship.  In a weird way G/FB needs the print publishers for a steady stream of content almost as much as the publishers need them for distribution.  Because if the publishers cease to exist there won’t be enough content on G/FB to satisfy their audiences.  So this creates a paradox where G/FB wants to take as much print rev as possible, yet need the publications to stay in business.  So how will this play out?  There’s an interesting guess in the last paragraph of the article about G/FB buying blue chip publishers to ensure a steady stream of content.  Wouldn’t that be ironic?

SPOTIFY’S SMOKING GUN:  Over the last 24 hours the story of fake artists on Spotify has picked up traction.  According to the industry site Musically most of the top 50 pseudo-artists can be traced to small group of music producers in Sweden, which is Spotify’s home country.  The theory is that Spotify has commissioned these artist to create ambient style music to beef up the content of its “Chill” formats, which are usually just long form instrumental tracks. Technically speaking there’s nothing illegal about Spotify paying composers to create original music which is played on their platform.  But the optics of paying producers to create bulk music under several different artist names stinks.  It’s a credibility buster for the listener, because how can you be sure you’re discovering a legitimate new artist or just a song off a music production assembly line?  And it also hurts actual artist and labels who are losing royalties every time Spotify plays house maid “music”.

Have a great Wednesday guys!

#FAKEARTISTS?:  The Daily Gabe Special Investigations Unit picked up on the story yesterday about Spotify playing songs by fake artists.  While I usually don’t spend time on rumors and innuendos, this one seems to have too much detail in it to be dismissed.  So here’s what’s being alleged.  On some of Spotify’s more ambient playlist stations artists are being played millions of times who don’t seem to exist outside of Spotify.  Take the example of the artist known as “Enno Aare”, who has 17M plays on Spotify without any independent identity outside of their platform.  So why would Spotify manufacture an artist?  To save money, of course.  Because if they play a pseudo-song from a made up artist they don’t have to pay the normal royalties cost.  Spotify is vehemently denying this claim.  You can imagine the credibility buster it would be with listeners if this were proven to be true.  As it stands Spotify is in the uncomfortable position of having to prove artists they’re playing are real living people to skeptical labels who represent the actual artists.  Guessing we haven’t heard the last of this story.

TOP DIGITAL STATS:  You can tell AdWeek is just getting out of their Fourth of July doldrums with this week’s edition of the Top Digital Marketing Stats.  None of the points is too compelling except for that first one.  As you may be aware, Amazon Prime Day is happening today.  Actually it started at 6:00p last night and runs through midnight tonight, thus creating a 30 hour sales day.  I’d expect a slew of stats from this year’s event by tomorrow morning – yes, we’ll cover this diligently.  In the meantime, enjoy some meh stats from the past week.

UNDERSTANDING WHERE YOU CAME FROM HELPS YOU SEE WHERE YOU’RE GOING:  Today’s last article is more of a longer form weekend read, so maybe save it for when you have some extra time.  In 2015 makeuseof.com compiled a comprehensive chronology of the history of music consumption.  If you’re a student of music, like me, it’s a fascinating journey from the most primitive phonographs, to the dawn of Radio, to Apple’s download revolution, to the sea change of streaming.  For me there are two striking takeaways in this article.  First, the music itself is the thing.  Over the last 150 years there have been countless iterations of how music is distributed.  But the artists and the songs themselves remain the constant common denominator regardless of the distribution platform.  Secondly, it’s amazing to see how quickly things are still changing.  This article was written in 2015, but that seems like a lifetime ago.  Since then streaming has supplanted CDs and downloads as the top music consumption platform, and several of the streamers mentioned in the article are out of business as the bleeding edge of our industry begins to consolidate.  It’s a fascinating journey that’s worth the read if you work in the music industry.

Have a great Tuesday guys!

#FAKERATINGS FOLLOW UP:  On Friday when I featured a story about NBC misspelling the name of its NBC “Nitely” News to avoid having the lower-rated Memorial Day program counted in the week’s overall ratings, I wondered why the other networks weren’t howling over the scam.  So why the silence?  Apparently they all do it!  Over the past year ABC has intentionally misspelled its evening news six times, and CBS has done it 12 times.  The networks are taking advantage of a Nielsen loophole called the “titling rule”, which allows for special names of things like Christmas and Thanksgiving specials.  Obviously the rule wasn’t designed for abuse like this.  Besides being flat out unethical, the intentional renaming of shows to inflate average ratings hurts brands/agencies who overpay for TV rating points every time this happens.

SAMSUNG GETTING ITS REVENUE SWAGGER BACK:  If it’s Q2’17 earnings are any indication, it looks like Samsung has fully recovered from the Galaxy Note battery fire fiasco of 2016.  Samsung is poised to announce its quarterly earnings results this week, which will include an estimated $12B in earnings . . . in just three months.  If this total holds it will top Apple for the same period.  Most people think of Samsung as the perennial runner up to Apple in the smart phone race.  But the primary revenue driver comes from their microprocessor business – Samsung has just surpassed Intel as the world’s top chip manufacturer.  In fact, Samsung is even the top supplier of chips to Apple for its iPhones.  Just goes to show you how interconnected the entire tech industry is behind the facade of the consumer facing brands we all use every day.

BILL GATES’S CRYSTAL BALL:  One of the things I love are those look back articles from years ago when someone tries to predict what our lives will be like at some point in the distant future.  In the attached Business Insider link 15 of Bill Gates’s “20 years from now” tech predictions are revisited.  His guesstimates about how technology will be woven into the fabric of life are remarkably spot on.  In fact, almost every element of all 15 points have come to fruition.  Some of these seem pretty basic – like online monitoring of your home (#5).  But others, like the rise of mobile devices (#2) and social media (#6), have been total game changers for our society.  If you’re working at Microsoft these days you might wistfully wonder what their role in this future tech world would have been if Mr. Gates had stayed at the helm.  As for me, I’m just bummed that he didn’t call out the Jetson’s flying cars to be on road by now. . . which I’m still patiently waiting for.

Have a great day guys!

STORM (SOUND)CLOUDS GATHERING:  SoundCloud has been in the news lately.  Over the past several weeks there’s been speculation of a sale to Deezer, Spotify or even Google.  However, since none of these buyouts have come to fruition SoundCloud is now taking steps to cut costs.  Yesterday SoundCloud announced the layoffs of 173 employees, which is a startling 40% of their workforce.  The cuts include the closure of all offices except NYC and their Berlin HQ.  The issue, of course, is a lack of revenue (ad rev or subscriptions) compared to their mounting royalties costs.  When SoundCloud started they were a free music file sharing service (think Napster 2.0), who was living on the fringes of the legal music streaming ecosystem.  Then in 2015 they legitimized their business by signing formal royalties deals, which also allowed them to monetize their service and make money.  The only problem is that they’re not selling enough to stay solvent.  I know that RIFs happen from time to time in digital media, but this was feels more like a cut into bone than just a trimming of fat.

APPLE GETTING BACK INTO AD MONETIZATION?:  So this is interesting.  For all of Apple’s brilliance as a creator of world-changing devices they’re notoriously bad as an ad sales platform – think back to iAd’s closure in 2015 if you need an example.  Apple’s poor performance in ad sales has actually created a self-fulfilling circle where they spend more time/energy creating ad blockers than they do on monetization.  With this in mind consider that some of Apple’s platforms, like Apple News, have amassed impressive user scale – 47M monthly uniques in just the US.  But they aren’t selling ads to monetize this audience.  This leaves Apple at a cross roads.  Do they stick to their guns and leave potential ad rev on the table or give in to temptation and start monetizing?  Business Insider is reporting a potential strategy pivot in the attached link.  The guess is Apple will start allowing 3^rd party publishers to run ads within their content which appears in the Apple News feed. And to do this Apple will allow guest publishers to use their own AdTech (even arch enemy Google’s DoubleClick) to serve these ads.  If this comes to fruition the digital playing field could suddenly have a big new competitor to contend with.

NBC SAYS GOODNITE TO RATINGS INTEGRITY:  Finally this week, I’d like to send you off with an incredible story about NBC’s Nightly News ratings which may have you second guessing the entire TV ratings system.  Here’s what happened.  On the Monday of Memorial Day (May 26^th) NBC misspelled their embedded digital program title as “NBC Nitely News”.  Because of the misspelling Nielsen’s automated system didn’t pick up and input that day’s ratings into the weekly average.  And because holiday Mondays’ ratings are far below normal levels, the omission of Memorial Day caused NBC’s weekly average (calculated using the other days of the week) to shoot up.  What?!?  Bottom line . . . a simple misspelling skewed the national TV ratings for a whole week and most certainly impacted pricing on millions of dollars of TV buys.  The industry is wondering if this was an intentional move by NBC to scam the system.  I’m wondering how Nielsen’s system could be so shoddy that they completely missed this error.  Yikes . . . or should I say Yites!

Have a great Friday (and weekend) guys!

*** Editor’s Note:  After being out of the country for the past few weeks I’m excited to get back to my blog.  Hopefully you survived my summer hiatus and will enjoy some fresh posts! ***

THE GOLDEN AGE OF AUDIO IS UPON US:  Over the past few years a theory has emerged that streamed music consumed on mobile devices will increase overall consumption of audio.  Now we’re starting to see evidence of this surge, thanks to a new Buzz Angle Music study.  Over the first six months of 2017 US music consumption has increased 10% over the same period in 2016.  The key to making this calculation is a formula which equates consumption across different platforms called Total Album Project Units (TAPU).  Under TAPU one purchased album is equal to 10 downloaded songs, and is equal to 1,500 streamed song plays.  By combining all three of these consumption paths into this standardized weighting formula we now have a sense of overall music consumption, which allows for the YoY comparison.  As you can see in the graphic and link below the growth in music consumption is being completely driven by streaming, which is no surprise to anyone who works in this sector.  Expect to see this trend line continue over the next several years as we enter the Golden Age of Audio.  BuzzAngle-Music-2017-Mid-Year-U.S.-Report

Kayne Sours On Tidal:  When Jay-Z and some business associates launched Tidal in March’15 they had the stated intention of paying artists the royalties they deserved and give listeners a premium streaming experience.  Ironically, those royalties payments are at the heart of a new dispute between Tidal and Kayne West.  The attached Music Business Worldwide link outlines the Louis Vuitton Don’s claim (yes, that’s one of Kayne’s many self-given nicknames), that Tidal owes him $3M for royalties related to an exclusive release of his latest album.  Further complicating matters is the fact that Kayne owns 3% of Tidal, since he was one of its 15 founding artists.  Are you confused yet?  Not sure if this will devolve into a lawsuit on either side.  Regardless, it’s sort of a PR black eye for the streaming platform which was supposed to be the most artist friendly of all.

Pandora Gets It’s Data Cloud On:  Finally today, I know this came out last week but it’s important to highlight Pandora’s new partnership with Oracle’s Data Cloud.  This arrangement is significant since it will link exposure to an audio ad directly to sales results.  The first application of this partnership will be focused on Auto – Oracle will quantify sales metrics of Pandora listeners who’ve heard a specific ad and then made a purchase of the advertised vehicle.  This will unlock an important attribution tool for the Auto EOMs who have been trapped in last-click-attribution-hell with the lower funnel endemic publishers like Cars.com, Autotrader, etc..  Besides Auto, you can imagine how this data arrangement could be used in other categories like Retail, QSR, and Financial Services.  The term “foaming at the mouth” is used by an industry insider to describe the potential market demand in the attached AdAge link.  This feels like the first of many Audio + Data = Results stories we’ll see over the coming months.

Have a great Thursday guys!

***  Editor’s Note:  Beginning this weekend the one and only employee at the Daily Gabe will be out of the country for the next two weeks.  So we’ll be taking a mid-summer hiatus from blogging starting today through the Fourth of July.  Expect the DG to return in all of its glory on Thursday, July 6^th. ***

WHAT’S YOUR GRIND?:  Instead of my normal format today I’d like to leave you with some inspiration from the one and only Mark Cuban.  If you’re a regular viewer of Shark Tank you’ve probably heard him ask the question “what’s your grind?”  If show participants don’t know what he’s asking, or even pause in their response, he immediately pulls out of the deal.  So do you know what the Grind is?  In Mark Cuban’s book it’s a person’s born-with determination to work harder than most other humans could to build something from the ground up.  In Mr. Cuban’s case the Grind was sitting in his college dorm for 20 hours a day writing source code for CompuServe, which would eventually be acquired by Yahoo and make Mark Cuban a billionaire.  His entire approach to business is an all-out battle to win, so he only does business with others who are hard wired to Grind with that same intensity.  That’s why he often asks “what’s your grind?”  If you need more background the interview with Mark Cuban in the attached ABC News link is a few years old but perfectly frames out his way of thinking.

After thinking about Mark Cuban’s philosophy for the last few years I’ve come to believe that in order to be successful in your work you need to have belief in, passion for, and a purposeful conviction in whatever you’re doing.  If you have these elements you effectively have your Grind.  One’s Grind could push them towards some positive goal, or even help avoid something negative.  Regardless of what it is, your Grind will get you out of bed before your alarm clock to chase that one thing.

On a personal note I also think I’ve figured out what my Grind is.  In order for this to make sense you need to know a little bit about my work background.  For the first 17 years of my career I worked in Broadcast Radio.  During most of that time I naively lived in my radio fishbowl, oblivious to what was occurring in the media universe just outside my door.  Then in 2011 I made the leap across the digital divide, and I literally could have been a poster child for the phrase “you don’t know what you don’t know”.  Once I started working for a digital publisher I quickly realized I hadn’t kept up with my industry.  So I had to catch up fast and then stay current.  That’s why I became obsessed with learning everything I could about digital media and be as well read as possible in my new industry.  In all honesty, this driving obsession to be digitally fluent eventually led me to create this blog.  I was reading so many trades every morning I thought why not teach myself WordPress and share what I’ve been learning?  So I think that’s my Grind – to be as much of an expert and thought leader as I can in digital media.  I believe this has helped me succeed in the current chapter of my career, and I hope it will keep me digitally sharp for years to come.

Do you agree with me?  Do you think everyone needs a Grind as their driving force to succeed?  If you do, have you figured out what your Grind is yet?

RADIO’S MOMENT OF REVENUE TRUTH:  Yesterday the research firm Magna released a mid-year update of its global media forecast.  No surprise that the headline is once again Digital, which now commands 40% of the aggregated global media spending.  But the picture doesn’t look as rosy for Radio.  If you go all the way down to paragraph 14 in the attached Inside Radio link you’ll see some fairly ominous numbers.  Magna is forecasting at 4.4% decrease in Radio’s broadcast revenue this year, and expects another 4% decline in 2018.  Those are big decreases!  Besides the overall shift from broadcast to digital, Radio is getting crushed by decreased spending in some of its bread and butter categories like Auto and Retail, and they don’t have last year’s Political money to cover those losses.  To me this feels sort of like that moment on a roller coaster when you’ve just crested the hill and are starting to gain momentum towards the steep drop ahead.  For Radio’s sake Magna better not be right.

YOUTUBE LEAVING THE “SAFE HARBOR”?  Yesterday ASCAP announced it had reached an agreement with YouTube to pay its member songwriters publisher royalties on a per song basis.  Publisher royalties are relatively small compared to the performance royalties paid to the artists, but this is still an important development.  It’s the first time YouTube has agreed to pay music royalties outside of their “safe harbor” loophole.  As a quick reminder, publishers who distribute user uploaded music can do a rev share deal with those artists instead of paying per song royalties – that’s referred to as the “safe harbor” work around.  So by agreeing to a per song payment system with ASCAP is YouTube creating a precedent the artists/labels can use to negotiate a better performance rights deal?  I know the folks at Google (YouTube’s owner) aren’t dumb, so they’ve probably played this one a few moves down the chess board already.  It will be interesting to see how this develops.

TESTING THE THEORY THAT ANY PUBLICITY IS GOOD PUBLICITY:  So how far is too far when it comes to attention getting promotions?  I think minor league baseball’s Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp (yes, real team) are attempting to answer that question with their latest PR stunt.  Tonight the team will be running its first “You Might Be The Father” promotion by handing out pregnancy test kits as fans enter the game.  The tongue-and-cheek tie in is if the test comes back positive you should make your way back to the ballpark on Sunday for the team’s Father’s Day promotion.  I kid you not, this is a real thing happening tonight – see the attached link.  When pressed about the insensitivity of the promotion the Jumbo Shrimp’s Marketing spokesperson doubled down by saying “it will be an evening filled with suspense, intrigue and manila envelopes.”  Once you get past the poor taste of this event, there’s actually some marketing logic being applied here.  Minor league teams have to try really hard to get noticed and must go the extra mile to get fans in the seats.  And given the amount of free publicity generated by this stunt, the Jumbo Shrimp may have just found marketing gold along with a few extra paternity lawsuits.

Have a great Thursday guys!

BANKS ARE MAKING LEMONADE OUT OF RETAIL LEMONS:  The term “Retailpocalypse” is usually reserved B&M retailers who are experiencing an erosion of business within physical stores as sales shift to online ecommerce channels.  But we don’t often think of this with other location-intensive industries like banking.  As is the case with their retail cousins, banks are seeing the same decrease in foot traffic as more FS transactions occur online or at self-service kiosks.  The attached Tearsheet article, explains what’s occurring in the industry and provides a pretty handy interactive chart tracking the location counts of the largest national banks.  But this downsizing trend isn’t all bad news for the banks.  Some are seizing this inflection point to reinvent what it means to visit a bank.  Apple Store-style coffee bars are replacing marble floors and vaulted ceilings, and “side by side banking” is supplanting traditional teller lines.  All of this amounts to a fairly impressive counter punch by banks who could otherwise get lost in the vacant storefronts of yesteryear’s banking model.

ZELLE IS THE NEW GREEN:  Staying with banks for a minute, there’s another significant tech advancement about to happen in the FS industry.  For some background, alternate FinTech companies like Venmo and Paypal have started to encroach on traditional banking.  This has created a dilemma for the national banks who are trying to preserve their legacy business while staying nimble on new tech-enabled financial services.  In response to this threat a conglomerate of 30+ banks is about to launch a new app platform for inter-bank cash transfers called Zelle.  This will allow consumers to instantly move money across any participating bank from a mobile device. (As an aside, does this feel like a Christmas miracle for all the money launderers out there?!?)  Back to my point . . . the technology behind Zelle has actually been around for several years through a system called ClearXchange.  But now they’ve finally gotten all the big banks to commit into one unified platform, which will instantly create the industry standard.  TechCrunch has a comprehensive write up in the attached link.  Maybe I should start taking Zelle payments for subscriptions to the Daily Gabe?  Hmmm . . .

RADIO BASHES OTHERS BY IGNORING IT’S OWN FLAWS (AGAIN):  And finally, I know I’ve been pushing back on the radio propaganda machine a lot lately, so please indulge me as I call out another junk piece.  In this one the author describes radio, and it’s PPM collection method, as the only medium which lives up to its promise of tracking people who are hearing ads.  What?  Is this the same PPM system which can’t get MRC accreditation in a majority of MSAs because it’s sample size is too small?  Is this the same PPM system which can’t measure cell phone only listeners (aka millennials)?  Is the same PPM system that be gamed by a hardware device called Voltair, which allows broadcasters to artificially improve their stations’ signal pickup?  And finally is this the same PPM system which gave four measurement devices to the same household in Tampa and skewed the ratings on an HD side channel station so much that it became the top station in market for W18-34?  I could go on with the problems but I think you get my point.  Radio has now resorted to the sad business of trying to tear down others while acting like their platform is as pure as the new fallen snow.  This latest blog post, covered by both Radio Ink and Inside Radio, is another example.  Ick . . . I’m going to take a shower now!

Have a great Wednesday guys!

RADIO’S “LOOK AT THE BIRDIE” SELL:  In full disclosure, nobody likes a good radio fight more than me.  So when I see an eyebrow raising article like the attached Radio Ink link, I just can’t help myself.  While I’ll always respect honest competitive sales pitches, the author’s rationale in this situation is just wrong.  Pureplay streamers are winning an ever-increasing share of audio dollars because of specific product advantages.  Lower ad clutter allows each clients’ commercials to stand out relative to radio, individual listeners’ registration data allows for precision targeting you can’t get in a broadcast format, and ad delivery is guaranteed by server-side reporting instead of after-the-fact Nielsen ratings estimates.  I wonder if any of these points were discussed during the sales call the author describes?  And the idea that you can cover 90%+ of the streaming audience with a Broadcast campaign is pure fiction.  In order to achieve this reach you’d have to buy a commercial on every AM/FM station in a given market and run an ad on all stations every 15 minutes.  Does that sound efficient or realistic to you?  Bottom line . . . radio broadcasters should use their time/energy to improve their own product and stop peddling the fallacy of aggregate reach, or expect to see radio’s ad revenue and relevance in the media landscape continue to erode.

CORD-CUTTING INTO TV’s FUTURE:  comScore just released an in-depth analysis of OTT TV viewership from households who have cut the cord (no cable subscription), compared to the same OTT consumption from households which still have cable.  As a reminder OTT stands for Over-The-Top (Top referring to set top), and is the umbrella term for any digital video delivered via internet.  In the Captain Obvious department, the headline of this research study is that cord-cutters watch 60% more OTT than cable households.  Viewing hours on the top streaming services are noted in the chart below.  But the real and more worrisome headline should be about total TV consumption by cord-cutters.  Average monthly linear TV consumption in US households still stands at 225 hours.  By comparison cord-cutters are only watching 79 hours of TV per month – so just 35% of the traditional total.  TV executives will argue that cord-cutters are more likely to be light TV watchers anyways, which makes them less likely to pay for full-bundle cable services.  Regardless, it’s a scary prospect for the TV sector to think that once the cord is cut overall consumption plummets.

GETTING SHORT ON SNAP:  Finally today, I usually don’t spend too much time on Wall Street speculation, but there’s an eye-popping development brewing with Snap, Inc.’s stock which is worth noting.  The Street is now reporting that investors have bought over $1B is “Shorts” against Snap’s stock.  For those who aren’t fluent in Street-speak, a Short is a time-based bet that the stock will go lower than its current market price.  So the more Shorts being bought the greater the anticipation that the stock price will go down.  Considering that Snap is already down 22% since its IPO just a few months ago it’s pretty amazing to think the stock could fall that much further.  The reasons for the pessimism are the usual suspects – worries over continued user growth, a deceleration of ad growth, competitive threats from other Social publishers, etc..  Of course only time will tell if the prognosis is true.  But it’s hard to believe the entire investment community could be making a billion dollar miscalculation on this one.

Have a great Tuesday guys!