Amazon Court Ruling Could Affect Your Online Store

Today In Digital Marketing is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. This week, Tod touches on:

• Ability to Create a Twitter Space Rolling Out
• Twitter Rises to 199 Million Daily Actives
• Amazon's Ad Sales Soar 77%
• Amazon Liable for Bad Marketplace Deals: Court
• Is YouTube Not Even Playing Fair?Below is the transcription from this weeks topics

Ability to Create a Twitter Space Rolling Out

Twitter's answer to Clubhouse, which it calls Spaces, may be just days away from a full launch. Some accounts are now about to create a Space. I got that ability last night.

If you want to check to see if you have it, tap and hold the Compose New Tweet button on the mobile app, and you will see a Spaces icon. All you do then is give your Space a name, and you're on!

This could cost Clubhouse a big share of usage. Remember, many of the most popular Clubhouse rooms are hosted by people who have large Twitter followings.

And Clubhouse is still invitation-only, and only works on iPhones.

As they say in the newspaper business, watch this Space.

Twitter Rises to 199 Million Daily Actives

Twitter reported its financials for the first quarter of this year.

They're now up to 199 million Monetizable Daily Active Users, getting some growth momentum back after a small slowdown in the previous quarter.

In terms of revenue, Twitter was up 28% year-over-year, crossing the $1 billion mark for the quarter. They specifically pointed out demand for ads promoting mobile apps was strong.

The company says it doesn't expect Apple's changes to have a major impact for its advertisers, but they're in a kind of wait-and-see position — like we all are.

This will be a big year for Twitter — Spaces is out, I'm sure there'll be some kind of video format to challenge TikTok, we already know they're working on a so-called Super-Follow which will monetize tweets, plus their integration soon with the email newsletter product they bought.

[More at SocialMediaToday.com]

Amazon's Ad Sales Soar 77%

I guess this shouldn't be a surprise — Amazon continues to benefit from the stay-at-home economy.

The revenue they got [PDF] from ad sales jumped 77% from a year earlier in the first three months of this year. When you factor in revenue from everything else, they were up 44%.

One interesting note: Nobody talks much about Amazon Prime Video, which is their Netflix competitor, but apparently streaming hours climbed 70% year over year.

As good as those numbers are, nobody's quite sure what's next, especially with people slowly returning to their offices, or travelling more.

Even so, eMarketer says it expects Amazon's U.S. ad business will grow 30% this year to exceed $20 billion for the first time, and will surpass $30 billion by 2023. Almost all of which at the expense of Google.

Amazon Liable for Bad Marketplace Deals: Court

So while the accountants are bringing Jeff Bezos good news, the lawyers are most certainly not.

You might recall last year, a California appellate court ruled that Amazon was liable for marketplace items it fulfilled.

Now, an appeal of a different case has gone even further — California ruling this week that this liability even applies if Amazon doesn’t do the fulfilment.

This could have a huge impact on any of these marketplaces — and might even provide you with a bit of a shield if you sell things on them.

The case was brought by a woman who was surfing Amazon for a hoverboard for her son. She found one she liked and ordered it. Amazon took payment, sent the details to the manufacturer, named TurnUpUp, and that manufacturer handled the shipping. But it didn't get there in time for Christmas.

The court ruled that Amazon can't shuffle responsibility — because the manufacturer wasn't allowed to communicate with the customer directly. Everything, including returns, had to go through Amazon.

Amazon claimed it was basically just an online mall.

But, as Eric Goldman wrote on his blog:

Owners of malls typically do not serve as conduits for payment and communication in each transaction between a buyer and a seller. Moreover, they do not typically charge a per-item fee rather than a fixed amount to rent their storefronts. Instead, these actions – 1) interacting with the customer, 2) taking the order, 3) processing the order to the third party seller, 4) collecting the money, and 5) being paid a percentage of the sale – are consistent with a retailer or a distributor of consumer goods.

That ruling was in California. In Illinois, a different case last month — coincidentally also about a hoverboard — reached a different finding. The court wrote: "the key criterion for being a seller is exercising control over the product, not over the purchasing process."

Is YouTube Not Even Playing Fair?

The online video site Roku today said it would no longer allow new users to use the YouTube app, after claiming YouTube overplayed its hand in negotiations.

Quoting Techcrunch:

Roku had argued that as a part of its attempts to renew the carriage agreement for YouTube TV, Google was asking for special treatment, including a preferential ranking of YouTube content in search results, and even the permission to override Roku customers’ default settings when the YouTube app was open. That is, if a customer used the voice search button to ask for music, Google wanted YouTube Music to play the request — even if the customer had set another app, like Pandora, as their default.

Roku also said YouTube's parent company was asking for more customer data than industry standard practices, and said if Roku didn't take the deal they'd increase the hardware requirements for YouTube, which could mean Roku's players wouldn't be able to play vidoes.

A Google spokesperson disputed the claims.

Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com.