October 14-2024: A Recap of What Happened in The Digital Space Last Week

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Here is a recap of what happened in the digital space last week that you need to know. To catch up with previous updates, click here.

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The Most Downloaded Apps in the World in September

??Instagram ranked #1 globally for first-time downloads, but its 54M total was 10M fewer than in July

??TikTok, again at #2, also saw a decline, with 45 million downloads—down 4 million from the previous month.

??Facebook and WhatsApp maintained their #3 and #4 spots with 39M and 35 downloads, respectively, both down from August's totals of 43M (-9%) and 42M (-17%).

??ChatGPT broke into the top 10 at #10 in August and climbed to #8 in September

More from App Figures

LinkedIn

• LinkedIn says 10 million people have signed up as freelancers on its Services Marketplace.
• Do you play the LinkedIn that they introduced May this year? Well they are adding a new game called Tango
• LinkedIn has new update on “Open To Work” message, which allow you to add “About me & what I’m looking for” section.

X(FKA Twitter)

• Brazil’s Supreme Court authorized the return of X after Elon Musk complied with its demands, including taking down some user accounts and appointing a legal representative for the platform in the country.
• X now has 547. 9M Monthly Active Users with 8.9B daily video views according to their Q3 2024? data usage?

• X is Making Changes to Creator Revenue Sharing! X will start paying creators based on engagement with your content from Premium users—not ads in replies. Its giving a pyramid scheme. Like, if you have more people who have paid for the badge engaging with your content, the more you earn
• You can now format X post texts as bold and Italic on mobile. The feature has only been available on Web

NB: A few weeks ago Elon Musk announced he is making changes on how bold appears on the timeline cause his eyes were bleeding? with overuse of bolds on feed??. Now, When a post has bold and Italic, it won't appear until you click on it.

Meta

• You can now react to WhatsApp status with a green heart emoji.

• Meta is testing the ability for businesses to turn off comments on ads, and expanding the ability for them to control which profiles their ads can appear on, from Instagram to Facebook
• Meta is testing a feature to let you post Instagram Reels directly on Threads.
• Instagram blames some moderation issues on human reviewers, not AI.
• Facebook is launching a GenZ focused redesign that focuses more on entertainment and local offerings in a bid to woo younger users
• Facebook added a new feature for profiles, “Notes”.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has surpassed Jeff Bezos as the world’s second richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
• WhatsApp is working on bringing a feature to search shared images on the web to a future update of the app.

TikTok

• TikTok’s research reportedly acknowledges negative effects on teens. According to Kentucky’s lawsuit, the company’s own research shows that “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.”
• TikTok is introduced new advertising solutions to help brands achieve real business results with the launch of new automated Performance Tools, additional Measurement Capabilities and new Privacy Technologies
• TikTok wants to turn millions of Americans into paid shopping influencers.

Google

• Since Google was found to be a monopolist of Search, Department of Justice in US have begun proposing solutions to correct the company’s illegal behavior and restore competition to the market for search engine.
• According to a Wall Street Journal report, Google's share of the $88.8 billion U.S. search advertising market is expected to fall to the lowest point in over a decade as a diverse set of competitors like Amazon, Perplexity AI, and TikTok deliver alternative search experiences?
• Verification coming to Google Search! Google is experimenting with a new verification feature in search that should make it easier for users to avoid clicking on fake or fraudulent website links.

• Google will begin to show ads in AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries it supplies for certain Google Search queries, and will add links to relevant web pages for some of those summaries as well.

Amazon Affiliate Marketing-Influencers

• Amazon is expanding the official Amazon Influencer Program? targeting Kenyan influencers. Here’s What You Need to Know?

Spotify

• Spotify added a new, second filter for “Podcasts”, “Following”.

AI

• Meta has a new video AI generator, Movie Gen
• The Most Popular Generative AI Tools by Web Traffic

1. ChatGPT 2.3B

2. Gemini 133M

3. Poe 43M

4. Perplexity 40M

5. Claude 32M

??OpenAI’s ChatGPT recorded over 2 billion website visits in March 2024, beating out all other generative AI tools by a wide margin.

• OpenAI announced to open offices NYC, Seattle, Paris, Brussels, and Singapore, in addition to its existing locations in San Francisco, London, Dublin and Tokyo, as part of the company’s global expansion efforts.

Transportation

• Elon Musk unveils futuristic autonomous Robovan and Robotaxi/Cybercab at Tesla’s We, Robot event

Additional Resources

• 21 of the Best Social Media Analytics Tools for 2024
• How have social media algorithms changed the way we interact

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