Our content series gives you the lowdown on what’s been happening in the tech world this week and what it could mean for product professionals. This week, we're looking at Meta getting hit with a fine, Ad services shutting down, and a new product feature launched by Atlassian.
How much do you trust your product? Perplexity, the AI-powered search tool, is starting to experiment with ads, and they’re letting us all in on the experiment. Perplexity is allowing sponsors to submit sponsored questions (which will be marked as such) to the list of related questions. The answers, however, will still be generated by Perplexity’s technology. This is either a great show of confidence in their product or an opportunity for Perplexity’s ad sales staff to explain why a generated answer disparages the sponsor in response to a sponsored question.
Meta gets hit with €800m fine by the European Union. The parent company to Facebook, has been accused of competition law breaches related to its Facebook Marketplace product. According to the European Commission, Meta abused its dominant position on the market to
Margrethe Vestager, the Commission’s executive vice-president in charge of competition policy, said: “We have fined Meta €797.72 million for abusing its dominant positions in the markets for personal social network services and for online display advertising on social media platforms.
“Meta tied its online classified ads service Facebook Marketplace to its personal social network Facebook and imposed unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers. It did so to benefit its own service Facebook Marketplace, thereby giving it advantages that other online classified ads service providers could not match. This is illegal under EU antitrust rules. Meta must now stop this behaviour.”
In response to this fine, a spokesperson from Meta said, “We will appeal the decision. In the meantime, we will comply and work quickly and constructively to launch a solution that addresses the points raised. We aim to make announcements shortly to reassure our European users that Facebook Marketplace is here to stay.
Atlassian has announced the launch of Confluence databases, allowing users to collect and organise data. This new feature aims to help product teams avoid repeating information and increase alignment across projects. Atlassian will collect data from apple like Jira, which can be presented in different formats inside its new product.
Ads or subscriptions part one. Back in 2022 when Netflix introduced lower cost ad plans, there was a great deal of uncertainty about what the results would be. Two years on, Netflix has reached 70MM monthly active users globally and over 50% of new Netflix sign-ups are for the ads plan in ad-supported countries.
Based on two examples, it appears that people would rather watch ads (or at least have their shows interrupted by them) than pay a subscription.
Ads or subscriptions part two. Amazon is shutting down Freevee, its free ad-supported streaming television service. It isn't shutting it down because it wasn’t getting a lot of viewers, but rather because it was pulling viewers away from Prime Video’s paid subscription service. Apparently, ads really aren’t that annoying, even during campaign season.
Sonos’ rocky road. Sonos’ fourth quarter results are still showing the signs of an overly ambitious app overhaul back in May. Bugs from that app redesign prevented people from connecting with their speakers, slowed the launch of the company's new headset, and resulted in a 15% decline in sales in the fourth quarter. It’s certainly a cautionary tale if you ever look at an app redesign and rhetorically ask, “What could go wrong?”
This weekly briefing offers a product-specific lowdown of what is happening worldwide and what it means for product teams. Like what you see? Let us know in the comments below, or email us at editor@mindtheproduct.com
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