Friday Digital Digest 09/08/2024 - Google loses lawsuit, X is on the move, and Reddit is steadily growing.
We’re here to ease you into the weekend with our latest #digital and #social newsletter. This week’s stories include Google losing their search dominance lawsuit, X are on the move and Reddit has added 8.5million new users to the platform in Q2.
Our Digital Digest section also looks at Instagram’s new portrait format for grid and what this means for your grid aesthetic moving forward!
NEWS
Last month Elon Musk announced that he was going to move X out of San Francisco and earlier this week a note was sent round to staff to confirm this was going ahead and that they would be moving to locations San Jose and Palo Alto (sharing xAI’s space).
Earlier this week a federal judge ruled that Google’s search business is a monopolist and has acted as such to maintain it. This defeat could have huge ramifications in the search world and change how Americans gain their information online - undoing decades of dominance. Will ‘Ask Jeeves’ make a return?
Reddit has been steadily gaining users in Q2 which takes its active daily users up to 91.2 million, and whilst many platforms have seen stunted growth in US and Europe Reddit has bucked this trend.?
The National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT) have been brought in to monitor social media amongst the riots that have happened across the country this week as misinformation has spread very quickly and stoked far-right sentiment and violence.
领英推荐
The deal means that Google circumnavigated its own rules so that Meta could serve targeted ads to those aged between 13-17. The campaign was labelled as ‘unknown’ in the system which Google knew skewed to U-18s. Google’s rules prohibit: personalised and targeted ads to u18s and serving ads based on demographics, it also has policies in place to avoid circumvention of these rules. Not a great look.
DIGITAL DIGEST?
???Instagram Grid Goes Portrait ???
Tech Issues Today has reported that Instagram is experimenting with a portrait style grid instead of the usual square grid which has not changed since the launch of the platform in 2010.
This has caused a bit of a stir as now all square photos have had their sides cropped off making the overall look of carefully curated grids look aesthetically off.
The bigger picture here (geddit?) is that this signals a more permanent move from Instagram in prioritising videos and reels rather than static photos. Instagram is not the first platform to try and capitalise on the success TikTok has had with videos with LinkedIn also now weighting videos on their platform as they generate higher engagement than text or photos.
It’s now recommended that you should be posting onto your feed in portrait or 4:5 ratio moving forward to avoid any design issues.?
WORTH A READ ??
This week we’re highlighting the best newsletters covering all things social and digital, helping you get a grip on what's going on globally, and staying ahead of the curve.
The Creator Economy - This newsletters gives you the lowdown on the creator industry, from up and coming creators, to emerging industries within the sector, deals and platform updates.
Web Curios - Is a regular-ish newsletter of interesting things around the net. Current topics are the Olympics and the US election.
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