The biggest story in tech no one’s talking about is Uber discovering they’d been defrauded out of $100M - or 2/3 of their ad spend.
And all bc Sleeping Giants kept bugging them to block their ads on Breitbart.
Kevin said in an interview last year that we were a pain in their ass and he wished we’d get hit by a bus lol
https://t.co/74s3AZPuHT
Travis was seeing our tweets and would ping Kevin saying “WTF. Have you not handled this yet?”
A significant % when they’ve already lost so many riders due to #DeleteUber.
Let’s do some math here. 10% of $150M is $15M. It seems like spending that $15M had NO impact at all on their business.
He begins seeing weird things like users clicking on ads and then being logged into Uber 2 seconds later...physically impossible.
Turns out their vendors were making shit up.
When you type the word “Uber” into your Google Play, it auto-fires a click to make it look like you clicked on an Uber ad and attribute the install to themselves.🤯
Over $100M worth of ads was doing jack shit. Uber’s customers were coming in organically, on the strength of their brand, WOM, referrals, etc.
So now he turns to general campaign performance & optimization (the standard stuff) and realizes he can knock off another $20M in wasteful spend.
Lol.
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More from Business
There are so many #HotTakes on the future of news and tech and digital this week. Now nearly half a year distant (and what a year - 2020, ugh!) from CEO and board @mcclatchy, I'd like to add a few thoughts: 1/
As @jbenton said in @NiemanReports : @mcclatchy transformation shows it STILL is possible NOW 'to be operationally profitable while still doing good journalism.' Not easy; Covid made it harder. But POSSIBLE and DONE by the great team in 2020 @mcclatchy. 2/
As @jbenton wrote: the #DIGITALTRANSFORMATION @mcclatchy 'shows a company that has managed the digital transition better than most; at last public count, it was making nearly half its ad revenue in digital and digital subscriptions were up 45% year-over-year.' Such focus 3/
On the future is digital is the SOLE way the still-powerful brands of local news and information will be able to have a business in the inevitable 'printless' future (Not today, not tomorrow, but printless someday) 4/
And the crisis in local news is relentless, unabating and by most measures WORSENING. More titles going dark; huge losses to our communities, because solely a blend of new digital startups AND existing footprint offer the scale 5/
I'm glad to see @jbenton's excellent analysis shows what a good job McClatchy CEO @cforman has actually been doing. The fault for bankruptcy goes *way* back to prior regimes piling up unmanageable debt. He rescued the company. 1/https://t.co/EEbxWXBNvW
— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) July 16, 2020
As @jbenton said in @NiemanReports : @mcclatchy transformation shows it STILL is possible NOW 'to be operationally profitable while still doing good journalism.' Not easy; Covid made it harder. But POSSIBLE and DONE by the great team in 2020 @mcclatchy. 2/
As @jbenton wrote: the #DIGITALTRANSFORMATION @mcclatchy 'shows a company that has managed the digital transition better than most; at last public count, it was making nearly half its ad revenue in digital and digital subscriptions were up 45% year-over-year.' Such focus 3/
On the future is digital is the SOLE way the still-powerful brands of local news and information will be able to have a business in the inevitable 'printless' future (Not today, not tomorrow, but printless someday) 4/
And the crisis in local news is relentless, unabating and by most measures WORSENING. More titles going dark; huge losses to our communities, because solely a blend of new digital startups AND existing footprint offer the scale 5/