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Social Media Is Dying
As someone who makes a living by using the actual products that Meta, Google, Tiktok & Twitter sell (AKA I'm a Digital Marketing Director who pays to put those annoying ads in your feed), I'm shocked by the amount of "Nero Fiddling while Rome Burns" I'm seeing from most of my peers. Tiktok's new method of trapping users in an endless cycle of scrolling provided the first breath of fresh air in the digital marketing space since Meta and Google's stranglehold commenced, and it's caused a lot of people to (mistakenly, in my opinion) believe that something new is or will be coming down the pipeline that is going to make these existential threats to the current way of doing business some how ... just not be that big a deal?
And with Google's new bonehead move of promoting the head of YouTube Shorts (yet another rip off of the vertical scrolling video boom) to the CEO of YouTube indicates that Google is just as pants-shittingly-terrified of TikTok as Meta is and making some pretty large bets that the addiction portion of these algorithms are going to be enough to overcome the gradual throttling of the actual adtech that's made these platforms so much fucking money.
I think TikTok is the only one that's really poised to survive these sea changes, because they don't really give a shit about what you do after you leave the app (which is how MOST of Meta + Google's products tag people with labels like "Would Pay for $30 Socks" or "Probably Would Click On An Ad About a Monthly Subscription Box of Tactical Gear") but instead focus on honing in, with incredible quickness, what sort of weird ass green-screen content is going to keep you on the app for as long as possible while limiting your conscious understanding of just how the fuck 3 hours have passed while you watched a bunch of recipes being made and dudes talking about why 15 minute cities are spelling the end of civilization.
But just because TikTok figured out how to make crack from Meta and Youtube's cocaine, that doesn't mean that things are just going to be rosy for marketers moving past 2024. Of course, that's almost 4 quarterly reports away, so it might as well be 100 years in the future.