The Top Line
Microsoft's CFO Amy Hood spelt out a clear aim for LinkedIn. "I'm focused on growing the top-line revenue and accelerating that business and its potential with ours. To add more customers. To increase their impact. To have it grow faster. To accelerate our business. To have the technical integration to deliver customer value... I'm deeply, deeply focused on driving revenue growth." Integration into stalwart Microsoft features like Office 365 will be key to maximising LinkedIn's potential, and boosting its steady growth.
The Big Billion
YouTube announced that the grand figure of 1 billion hours of video is being watched daily across its channels. Yes, 1 billion, daily! Considering the recent growth in live-streaming features across social and Facebook's hard push on video over the past few years, Youtube is in a great position to be taking advantage of video's new prominence. It has championed live-streaming for over half a decade and has made more than a handful of people very rich through advertising on their content. YouTube VP of Engineering, Christos Goodrow put the 1 billion figure in perspective - "If you were to sit and watch a billion hours of YouTube, it would take you over 100,000 years."
Comcast feat. Youtube
America's biggest pay TV company, Comcast, has plans to integrate YouTube into its set-top boxes. Half of Comcast's customers already have the new X1 box that will be needed to browse YouTube. That's 11 million people with instant access to YouTube on their TV. Google and its partners will still keep all their ad-revenue for now. However this shift into co-operation between Google and Comcast shows that the TV industry is more willing than ever to work with digital leaders.
Instagram x10
The option to post albums to Instagram was integrated rather slickly recently. Being able to post a selection of up to 10 videos or photos to a single post, enabled by swiping has quickly caught on. Whether the initial hype dies down will be interesting as reactions have been mixed. We saw a prominent photographer call it a 'scam' on a live Instagram video, implying you would end up wasting lots of valuable content in one post. However, streetstyle bloggers seem to be embracing it as a way to show more content to those most interested, without clogging up their feed with too many similar images. We shall wait and see...
Whatsapp or Whatsnapp?
This is the same title as another blog post of ours. Why? Because our hint towards Whatsapp releasing a status feature mimicking Snapchat has materialised. Whatsapp's 1.2 billion users now have the ability to update all their contacts with their daily life through a story feature, allowing you to post annotated photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. Whatsapp tends to encompass a far wider network of people, combining business, family and friends. The new feature won't compete with Snapchat as it's too public to enable people to share in such a care-free manner, so perhaps a group-making feature will follow to allow selective viewing. It has great potential, but requires a little bit of tweaking. Social doesn't mean everyone.