🗞 What's New: Breaking down the biggest ad networks

Last week, all major platforms released their quarterly earnings:

• Amazon is making more money from ads than Snapchat, Twitter, and Spotify combined. Here's a breakdown of all the reports, including what founders should know when running ad campaigns.
• 8.9 million posts use #picnic on Instagram. Pop-up, luxury picnics are blazing hot at the moment, with plenty of opportunities to build in the space.
• Founder Ben Orenstein hit $20,000 in pre-sales without a demo product or a pricing page. Read on for more about how 1:1 conversations with his audience drove up sales quickly, with Tuple now reaching annual revenue in the millions.

Want to share something with nearly 85,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

📺 Breaking Down the Biggest Ad Networks

from the Growth & Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko

Last week, all major platforms released their quarterly earnings. Here's a breakdown of who made what, and how you can use this information to your advantage.

The biggest ad networks

Here are the major details on ad earnings in Q3 2021:

• Facebook made $29.01B, mostly from ads.
• Snapchat made $1.07B, also mostly from ads.
• Google's ad business made $53.1B this quarter.
• Twitter's ad revenue was at $1.14B.
• Spotify also started making money with ads, closing out at $376M this quarter.
• Amazon's "Other" category, consisting predominantly of ad revenue, made $8.09B.

Some takeaways from these earnings reports:

• Amazon is making more money from ads than Snapchat, Twitter, and Spotify combined.
• Facebook and Snapchat were the most harmed by Apple's ATT privacy update.
• Twitter and Google were less harmed by Apple's privacy update. Both companies described the impact of Apple's ATT update as "modest" in their earning reports. Spotify didn't mention anything; the company was probably so happy about making money from ads in the first place that they forgot about Apple altogether!

The opportunity: According to many analysts, adapting to Apple's privacy changes will take years, not months, especially for large platforms like Facebook. If you advertise on Facebook and Snapchat, you've probably seen lower ROIs after iOS 14.5. It might be worth experimenting with Google and Twitter, neither of which was affected that much. This is probably due to the fact they use contextual-based targeting, as opposed to behavior-based.

Instagram Stories

The news: Instagram has announced that it will allow anyone on its platform to include links in their Stories. Previously, this was only possible if you had more than 10K followers.

The opportunity: Influencer and affiliate marketing on Instagram just got a whole lot easier.

Do you know any Instagram influencers that your target audience follows? If so, chances are that many of those people have fewer than 10K followers. This is especially likely if you're in a smaller market.

With this update, you can contact those influencers and ask them to publish an Instagram Story with your link, in exchange for a free product or cash. You could also provide them with an affiliate link through which they can earn a commission.

How to get started: Go to SparkToro to find influencers followed by your target audience. SparkToro will mainly show you influencers on YouTube and Twitter.

Look for those influencers' Instagram accounts. Chances are, they have way less followers on Instagram than on Twitter or YouTube. If so, you'll likely be able to get a way cheaper price than if you asked them to do the same on their primary platforms (YouTube, Twitter, etc.).

Google websites

A week ago, Google released its latest "Quality Raters guidelines." It's a 172-page document that instructs Google's Quality Raters on how to...well, rate a site.

Here's a recap of the most important points:

1. Pay attention to what other sites say about you: Google instructs its Quality Raters to look for any Wikipedia, magazine, and forum mentions on the websites they rate. A quick Google search for name -name.com (example: indiehackers -indiehackers.com) will give you an idea of what others have written about you.

2. Show off your expertise: Have you heard about E-A-T? It stands for expertise, authority, and trust. Google talks a lot about this acronym, and instructs its raters to do the following:

3. If you're a YMYL site, this will be tougher for you: YMYL, or "your money, your life" sites, are those that:

These are websites that cover topics such as finance, government, news, jobs, safety, health, fitness, and so on. Google Quality Raters are instructed to look at those sites with more scrutiny, paying attention to things like the author's expertise, the site's "About" page, external reviews, and claims.

The opportunity: After you get a certain amount of Google traffic, you're bound to have a Quality Rater looking over your site. Knowing what to do (and, more importantly, what not to do) can mean the difference between increasing your SEO traffic and being penalized.

What acquisition channel do you use the most? Share below!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Growth & Acquisition Channels for more.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

💪 The era of independent creators may override influencers soon.

🌌 Microsoft has entered the metaverse with 3D avatars and immersive meetings.

🤒 Sick days are disappearing in the pandemic remote working world.

👟 Nike has filed for "virtual goods" trademarks in shoes and apparel.

💲 The first new weight loss drug in years is flying off the shelves.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🧺 Exploding Topics: Luxury Pop-Up Picnics

from the Exploding Topics newsletter by Josh Howarth

8.9M posts use #picnic on Instagram. Here's how you can #toasttothegoodlife!

Pop-up picnics

The topic: A pop-up picnic is a luxury outdoor dining spread, set up and cleared away by creative professionals.

The original brand, (aptly named) Pop Up Picnic, is based in San Diego, but several other startups have taken up the same idea. For example, New York-based Perfect Picnic offers themed setups. Brunch picnics, proposal picnics, and birthday picnics are all popular offerings.

The corporate and tourist picnic experiences make up 67% of Perfect Picnic’s revenue, with the remaining 33% coming from online sales. Perfect Picnic brings in $4.7M ARR.

The Picnic Collective, another pop up picnic brand, is averaging around 40 picnic setups a week in California.

What’s next: Pop-up picnics are part of the "Instagram aesthetic" meta trend, with the hashtag "picnic" hitting 8.9M posts. Furthermore, 50% of Instagram users say that the platform is the single biggest influence on their shopping habits.

Opportunities: Balloon garlands have seen very strong search growth recently, thanks almost exclusively to Instagram. One kit for making these arch-shaped displays brings in an estimated $94.6K per month (AmzScout). You could offer these, or other specific pieces of decor. Exclusive candles, handmade napkins and tablecloths, photography services, specialty foods, and printing services for invitations, menus, and table settings are all avenues that can be explored.

Other fast-growing areas in the Instagram aesthetic meta trend include cottagecore, farmhouse kitchen, and the donut vase.

Leadership coaches

The topic: American workers spend an estimated $166B on leadership development each year. A survey of industry professionals found that leadership coaching is the most prominent trend within the field of executive coaching.

89% of both internal and external coaches cited “leadership development programs with additional coaching” as a likely or highly likely trend that will expand through 2022.

And a recent Sherpa Coaching Survey found that 61% of all business coaching is now designed to develop leadership, compared to just 43% in 2006.

What’s next: Leadership coaches are part of the "online business coaching" meta trend.

There are an estimated 50K+ professional executive coaches worldwide, and one study found that executive coaching produces a 788% ROI.

Ezra is an app specifically designed to connect leadership coaches to organizations. Of the businesses that have adopted Ezra, 86% report a positive ROI, with 99% satisfaction among those who received coaching. 14K+ sessions have received a five-star rating from participants.

And Noomii is a directory and discovery engine for finding individual coaches across the US and Canada. More than 2K leadership coaches are listed, second only to life coaches.

Opportunities: Can you build a platform that focuses on a niche group? Research the fastest growing groups of founders in any given country or city, and build to cater to them specifically.

Other fast-growing topics within the online business coaching meta trend include ThePowerMBA, BetterU, and SkiIIUp.

Would you check out luxury pop-up picnics? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Check out the full post to see this week's other two exploding topics.

And join Exploding Topics Pro to see trends 6+ months before they take off.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Exploding Topics for more.

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip: Conversational Copy

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

Colloquialisms help you connect. Use less formal grammar.

Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

💰 Ben Orenstein's $20K in Pre-Sales With no Product

from the Listen Up! IH newsletter by Ayush Chaturvedi

Ben Orenstein cofounded Tuple, a remote pair programming app for Mac, as a replacement for a popular app called Screenhero.

Tuple is a low-latency pair programming software product that allows two developers to share their screens with each other and write code in parallel. Two people can code features together, hand off control to each other, and have a conversation on a parallel video call, all while using less CPU power than it takes to run Chrome.

Tuple caters to a niche audience: Software engineers who use Mac computers and are not happy with more generic solutions like Zoom or Slack Video.

The audience and the demand created the perfect combination, allowing Tuple to hit $8K in sales immediately. It went on to hit $20K in sales without even having a pricing page.

During the pandemic, Tuple's revenue quadrupled. Read on for more from Ben!

Rebuilding a hero

Developers loved Screenhero. Within the first five months of its launch, Screenhero had already hit $1M ARR. Once Slack acquired the product, it was merged with the company's video conferencing features, leaving a void in the market.

Ben knew that he could build a profitable business to replace Screenhero. He teamed up with cofounders Joel and Spencer to build the product, but it would take a while to make it work well. They had to build it, scrap it, and rebuild it a couple of times.

They finally launched to 12 teams, and hit $8K in revenue. The success of the launch was largely due to Ben having already cultivated an audience.

The power of an audience

While Joel and Spencer were writing code, Ben was trying to sell the product.

Before starting Tuple, Ben had worked at thoughtbot, a product studio that helps clients design and develop their ideas into tech products. As part of his job, Ben had worked on multiple SaaS apps, writing blog posts and building info products.

He had an active Twitter audience and an email list, consisting primarily of software engineers. Tuple was the perfect app for his audience.

Ben had 5K people on Tuple's mailing list before the app launched, and most of them were willing to give him money even before there was a product.

Here's an interesting comment from one of Tuple's early users:

Instead of blasting out an email to his audience, Ben segmented his email list into batches of 500. He then reached out to them to speak 1:1. With every conversation, he tested a different pricing structure, ranging from $149 per month to $599 per month.

He didn't even have a product to demo! He just told them about the features, shared Tuple's mission to build a Screenhero alternative, and asked them for money. And people paid up!

Every conversation was a signal to the correct price point. Eventually, Ben honed in on the ideal price and set up a self-serve pricing page. By then, he had already closed more than $20k in pre-sales.

Today, Tuple is priced at $25 per month, per user. Enterprises can get it at $10K per year.

Advice for indie hackers

Ben's top piece of advice is to be useful on the internet:

Being useful can help you to build an audience. If you help people, then by the time you launch something, you'll likely have folks backing you!

Also, there's no substitute for 1:1 user conversations. Solving hard technical problems will always be valuable, and speaking directly with your audience can go a long way in determining product, pricing, features, and more.

Check out the full episode on the Indie Hackers Podcast here!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Listen Up! IH for more.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Darko, Priyanka Vazirani, Josh Howarth, Harry Dry, and Ayush Chaturvedi for contributing posts. —Channing