The battle for primacy in livestream shopping finds TikTok fighting for its right to operate in the U.S. as YouTube, Snap and Meta all chase the trend as the next best bet for online selling.
News that sports merchandise eCommerce firm Fanatics has brought on former Alphabet and Snap executive Nick Bell as CEO of its new Fanatics Live division broke on Thursday (Feb. 2).
“We see a big opportunity here to create entertaining commerce experiences because that brings people together and really opens up the collector market to a much wider base of fans,” Bell said, as cited by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. “We want the commerce aspect of this to be the byproduct of entertainment.”
See: Fanatics Picks Snap, Google Vet Nick Bell to Lead Livestream Shopping Venture
That was more a shot across the bow of YouTube and Meta than embattled TikTok, which only a day before (Feb. 1) met with U.S. Republican Representative Mike Gallagher, who wants to ban the live stream video platform in the U.S. over cybersecurity concerns stemming from associations with the Chinese government.
After that meeting, in which TikTok executives gave Gallagher and other lawmakers a presentation on security measures, Gallagher spoke in a press release of “the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party” and of “protecting Americans from the threat posed by CCP controlled apps like TikTok.”
Meanwhile, TikTok was on a media blitz this past week, showing its Transparency and Accountability Center in Culver City, California — essentially a multimedia PR exhibit showing the inner workings of TikTok algorithms to assuage the cyber espionage fears of critics.
See: TikTok Joins Ranks of Tech Firms Facing EU Privacy Crackdown
Shortform Video Makes Major Moves
TikTok’s problems with some U.S. lawmakers can’t be all that upsetting to rivals at YouTube, Meta and Snap, all of which are moving decisively deeper into livestream selling.
On the Alphabet Q4 2022 earnings call Thursday (Feb. 2), CEO Sundar Pichai said YouTube shorts are “now averaging over 50 billion daily views up from the 30 billion I announced on the Q1 2022 call.”
Read: Alphabet Sees Google as ‘Core Part’ of Everyday Commerce
Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler added that Alphabet is “pleased with our continuing progress in early monetization,” adding that “we’re focused on providing creators with the best content creation and monetization tools, new, richer features and analytics capabilities that help individualize and optimize their content strategies.”
Livestream also featured prominently in Meta Q4 2022 earnings released Wednesday (Feb. 1). CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts and investors that the company has to balance the larger share of ad dollars from Feed against the growing popularity of Reels.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s challenge is “improving monetization efficiency or the revenue generated per minute of Reels watched. Currently, the monetization efficiency of Reels is much less than Feed. So, the more that Reels grows, even though it adds engagement to the system overall, it takes some time away from Feed and we actually lose money.”
Read: Meta Sees Promise in Monetizing Apps With Shop Ads, Click to Message
He added that “the key to unlocking that is improving our monetization efficiencies that way we can show more Reels without losing increasing amounts of money. We are making progress here and our monetization efficiency on Facebook has doubled in the past 6 months.”
In December, Snapchat parent Snap Inc. introduced catalog-powered Shopping Lenses, which the company said “are specifically designed to offer Snapchatters a way to seamlessly interact with, try on, and click to purchase multiple products in a single Lens by simply swiping through the Lens Product Cards — a new user interface built just for shopping.”
Snap added that for businesses, “Shopping Lenses are driving scale, efficiency, and performance for their key consideration and conversion KPIs.”
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