Reach over 200m with ads in Prime Video

We have 5 stories this week, including some new nuggets on Amazon advertising, a new AI video creation tool coming from Google, paying for privacy, and how augmented reality can improve vacuuming.

Some interesting nuggets on Amazon and advertising

Amazon has had a good year. Its share price is at an all time high, and the company is approaching a $2 trillion valuation. In his annual letter to shareholders, published this week, President and CEO Andy Jassy reveals a few stats about how their advertising is playing a role in this. Last year they hit $47bn in ad revenue, mostly from ads on their sites and apps. In addition advertisers can now advertise on more than 30 TV and services they run, including FreeVee and Twitch, and also potentially reach ‘over 200m’ monthly viewers on Prime, which they added ads to earlier this year (subscribers need to pay extra to opt out). In my experience the ads on Prime blend in well (2 at the start of an episode), and with a slate of popular shows developing (new series of Clarkson’s Farm and The Boys are coming in the next couple of months, plus Lord of the Rings season 2 and Mr Beast’s competition show at some point) this should work well for them. Amazon’s next quarterly results come out in two weeks; expect more big numbers on ad revenue.

Meet Google Vids - an integrated video creation tool

Alphabet, also at record highs, also approaching a $2 trillion valuation, showed off a new video creation tool, Google Vids this week. Vids feels less ‘creative’ than OpenAI’s Sora, and is more for creating videos for work, as a paid tool for business users. It works in the browser, and integrates with Google Docs, Slides and Sheets to help create videos from templates, using stock pictures or & video, wth the ability to generate a script and then bring it to life with a choice of AI-generated voices. It should be released in June, and this feels like something that would be useful from day one, helping people to make quick videos as a better way of communicating, crafting pitches and so on.

Google’s defence of the future of search

Also from Alphabet: CEO Sundar Pichai recently spoke at an event at Stanford where he outlined some thoughts about the future of search. His argument is that they have been successfully evolving away from the ‘10 blue links’ for some time, particularly since the rise of mobile where the results page has to look different to the desktop version. The key to Google’s value is that people trust it, and this needs to be top of mind when they use AI to help to produce the answers to questions - it is all about responsibility and carefully deploying the new technology when answering queries.

DuckDuckGo brings in paid search

Last week there was a rumour that Google could charge an extra fee for AI-enhanced search. This week DuckDuckGo, the privacy-centric search service, announced that it will start to charge $10 a month for enhanced privacy within its search. The service uses an enhanced VPN to keep details completely anonymous, with a random ID for identification, rather than user names. It is a reminder that privacy and control of data is still a very big deal online, with a greater push from many services for real names and so on; people are willing to pay to keep their data and online activities hidden.

& finally - AR to check your vacuuming

One of those stories that makes you check that it’s not April 1st. A new feature is coming to Dyson vacuum cleaners. Owners of the Gen5detect model will be able to attach a LIDAR-enabled smartphone to their device, then see in real time where they have cleaned, and then scan the whole room to check that they have not missed any bits. While is obviously a niche device, Dyson claims that it is also an illustration of the lengths they go to in their obsession to use engineering to make cleaning as effective as possible.

Watch the video here