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GM Star Wars fans, May the Fourth be with you (yeah, all year long)! This week was so entertaining when it comes to marketing, AI, and crypto news, that we don’t want to make you wait any longer. Let’s jump straight into it 😉 Enjoy the read! 🧡💚
💥 What’s buzzin’ in marketing?
source: Snap
💡 Snap is going AI. After its stock took a hit from weak Q1 earnings, Snap announced that it will begin testing sponsored links in its AI feature for Snapchat+ subscribers. The company also plans to open up Spotlight (a new TikTok-like video ad format) to global advertisers and introduce a new takeover ad product called First Story that lets you buy the first Snapchat Ad between Stories.
💡 Big changes at Google. The company is transitioning to real-time bidding auctions for apps to help advertisers find optimally-priced ad inventory. What’s more? Google AI will help you find the best combination of Youtube ads to improve the reach and efficiency of your Video Reach campaigns. Also, Youtube is expanding its Select feature to Shorts, helping you find the best context for your vertical ads.
💡 Twitter is introducing a new feature that will allow media publishers to charge users on a per-article basis. The Musk-owned platform is doing it to boost its revenue after the social media platform saw advertising income drop last year. Users can now either buy a monthly subscription or pay per article.
💡 Puls Premiere on TikTok. The hottest video platform is introducing an extension of the Pulse program, which will give select publishers a chance to sell ads alongside all of their posts on TikTok and collect 50% of the ad revenue. Among “select publishers” are NBC, Condé Nast, and BuzzFeed.
🚀 3 moves that improve crypto adoption
The crypto industry is growing in new projects and solutions - no doubt. But it is not easy to convince someone to jump into the new tech wagon and start using blockchain-based products. Why? Because these people have to try (and often pay for) products they've never used, made by companies they've never heard of. That’s why it is so important that big brands naturally incorporate blockchain features into their core products. And the last weeks showed us that it is, indeed, doable!
UNO. Venmo rolled out crypto-to-fiat onramp features letting its 70 million users transfer crypto to other Venmo users, external wallets, or any other PayPal account.
DOS. Visa is expanding its crypto team with new developers to “build intuitive features that expose profound new value for (…) customers”.
TRES. MasterCard is teaming up with Solana and Polygon to launch Crypto Credentials, aiming to facilitate the interactions between its customers and blockchain businesses.
The more big players that join crypto to make the onboarding easier, the better. This could help bridge new users into crypto and make adoption easier.
😤 Kennedy: 30% tax on crypto miners? Nah
Robert F. Kennedy Jr criticized Joe Biden's proposed 30% Digital Asset Mining Energy (DAME) tax on crypto miners, calling crypto technologies "a major innovation engine."
The White House's argument for the tax is that crypto mining imposes economic and environmental costs that firms do not pay for. The White House cited pollution, intensive energy consumption, and financial risks to local utilities as problems associated with crypto mining. The DAME tax would impose payments on crypto miners equal to 30 percent of the cost of the electricity they consume.
Kennedy believes the real reason for the tax is to "suppress anything that threatens elite power structures" and argues that cryptocurrencies can help ensure freedom by providing privacy to dissidents and ordinary citizens.
📉 Meme-coin craze pumping gas prices
Investors are driving up transaction costs on the Ethereum network as they engage in a meme-coin craze over the frog-themed toke Pepecoin.
The daily median gas price on Ethereum, which indicates transaction costs, hit a 12-month high of 87 gwei, increasing over 50% since the launch of Pepecoin on April 18. The increase in gas prices represents strong demand for Ethereum, particularly from meme-coin traders, according to analytics firm CoinMetrics.
source: Milk Road
The Pepecoin frenzy has led to its market capitalization surpassing $500 million within three weeks of launch, making it “the most memeable memecoin” in existence. Similar frenzied activity has also been observed with smaller coins such as CHAD, 4TOKEN, and DINO.
🤝 Avalanche expands Metaverse with Alibaba
Avalanche has partnered with Alibaba Cloud to develop metaverses on the blockchain. The aim is to offer companies within the Alibaba ecosystem a fast and easy way to launch and maintain their own metaverses, supported by middleware provider Metaverse Universal Assets DAO.
Avalanche hopes to offer businesses an easy, low-cost way to expand their brands into the Web3 virtual world. In December, Alibaba began deploying infrastructure-as-a-service on Avalanche. Raymond Xiao (Alibaba’s head of International web3 solutions) said the partnership is designed to help businesses elevate customer experiences and "drive innovations and new possibilities for their businesses."
👾 OUR PICKS ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
👾 Hard to follow all the advancements in the AI sector. But this Twitter thread can help you catch up.
👾 AI is cool and very useful. But some use it as money-generating “news” outlets, providing unreliable and false information. Not cool 👎
👾 Not as useful as it could be, but we couldn’t resist 🤭 Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak let us know what he thinks about Tesla’s AI calling it “a study of AI gone wrong" that will try "to kill you every chance it can”.
🔥 HOT BITS & BITES
Facebook (Meta) has limited location-targeting options
USA’s Florida and North Carolina against CBDC
Cryptoys announced Star Wars-themed NFT drop
Twitter restores free API access for “critical purposes”
Microsoft announced the next wave of AI innovation with Bing and Edge
Amazon plans to rework Alexa into something more similar to ChatGPT
BNP Paribas will link digital yuan to bank accounts to promote CBDC
🏖 FUN FACT
💡 Did you know that Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum’s founder) used to sleep on Ripple CTO’s couch while trying to secure an internship with the company?
Yes, the story was shared lately by Matt Hamilton while debating on the true nature of decentralized finance (DeFi) projects
😜 MEME OF THE WEEK
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