Brands talk Shop with TikTok

A glitch in the matrix. Happy Tuesday, Future Party people. Some of you may have noticed you’ve been receiving double emails lately. Sorry about that. While we’d love to blame solar flares or Mercury being in retrograde for the technical difficulties, the truth is we’ve been working on a few cool updates to the newsletter. Exciting, right? As we continue to build behind the scenes, hang tight and know that we're working out all the kinks.

In other news… TikTok tests Shop in the US, streamers downsize to cut a profit, and Silicon Valley bets big on generative AI.

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The Future. TikTok’s onboarding more brands for their US Shop feature, which allows companies to sell products on TikTok via a full online checkout service. The platform has had mixed success with Shop globally, but if the test phase yields good results, Shop may come to the States for good.

Checking out checkoutTechcrunch covered the feature’s structure and its growing collaboration with brands.

TikTok Shop is still in a “testing phase” in the US and has no public release date for the feature’s full rollout.

Right place, wrong time?TikTok’s expanding its e-commerce efforts just as other major players are scaling theirs back. Facebook shut down its live shopping offering last August, and Instagram just announced they’ll be nixing theirs too. That said, Amazon and YouTube are still trying out similar services.Evidence suggests that social commerce like TikTok Shop is less successful in Western markets than in Asia, but TikTok has bucked trends before. Only time will tell.

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The Future. With a correction in the streaming industry making competition stiffer than ever, smaller industry players like Peacock and Paramount+ are downsizing and tweaking their pricing models to cut a profit. The initiatives might work, but their necessity suggests that these players might not be in the game much longer.

Ch-ch-changesBoth Paramount+ and Peacock’s parent companies outlined the many tweaks they’d make based on their 2022 performance.

Dope or desperate? It’s hard to see how Peacock could expect their subscriber growth to remain strong. Q4’s signup numbers benefited from the World Cup and the past NFL season — two events that the streamer can’t artificially repeat in the coming quarters. And it doesn’t help that Peacock and Paramount+ have some of the highest churn rates in streaming.

Still, both platforms have enough original content that they may become attractive acquisition targets for bigger players like Netflix or Hulu. If they want something to brag about, why not a buyout?

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The Future. Ready or not, the generative AI revolution is here. Any business involving words, images, sound, or code stands to gain from the new tech that Silicon Valley is calling “the next platform.” In the race to capitalize, tech companies would rather beg for forgiveness than ask for permission to deploy generative AI. Because the chance of market dominance is so tempting, Big Tech might put any negative repercussions from their large language models on the back burner until they strike gold.

What’s a platform?In the tech industry, a platform is any foundation (with disruptive potential) for building and running business applications — from the personal computer to the Internet to the iPhone. A new platform generally emerges once every 10 years.

What’s the Tweet on Silicon Valley street?

Still, Big Tech has been referring to their generative AI tools as public tests and betas because they know they’re imperfect. If the public can overlook their flaws until all the kinks are smoothed out, Big Tech has a big hit on their hands.

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The best curated daily stories from around the web

As people continued to spend on food delivery despite economic uncertainty, DoorDash’s revenue in Q4 2022 jumped 40% from the previous year to $1.8 billion. The company ended 2022 with a record 32 million monthly users. To combat inflation, DoorDash has been offering discounts to new subscribers, tweaking its app to encourage more spending, and moving beyond food to incentivize people to return. It’s also been trying to keep restaurants from raising delivery prices while offering them new services. People will always find a way to not leave the couch.

Read More → wsj

After it gave thousands of employees low-performance reviews, Meta appears to be bracing for another round of layoffs. About 10% of Meta staff have been told they’re underperforming, which is higher than in previous years. Employees who receive two negative reviews in a row are put on an improvement plan. Meta anticipates the poor ratings will inspire some people to quit in the weeks ahead. What a time to work in tech.

Read More → insider

The company recently announced it’ll let cannabis brands, retailers, delivery services, and products run paid ads for the first time. While the move comes with restrictions, its impact “speaks to the growing acceptance of cannabis as a mainstream wellness category,” says Kate Lynch, EVP of marketing at Curaleaf. It could also help destigmatize cannabis use, normalize the plant on a global social media platform, and jumpstart business conversations. Will federal legalization be next?

Read More → adweek

The game platform is developing an AI tool that lets players create items such as buildings, terrain, and avatars, modify their appearance and behavior, and give them new interactive properties via text prompts rather than complex code. Roblox says the code-making AI relies on in-house technology and capabilities from outside sources. It’s training the AI only on game content in the public domain and ensuring users don’t object to having their creations fed into algorithms. Because generative AI often yields unpredictable and problematic results, it can also cause games to misbehave. Trial by fire, people.

Read More → wired

Per the New York Fed, credit card balances increased by $61 billion in Q4 2022, which brought Americans’ total outstanding credit card debt up to $986 billion. That’s a far cry from their Q1 2021 position when balances were actually 17% below pre-pandemic highs. “For a while, Americans took advantage of stimulus payments and the fact that they were spending less due to pandemic concerns to make major progress paying down their credit card debt. But robust consumer spending, the hottest inflation readings in 40 years, and sharply higher credit card rates have combined to push credit card balances to a new record high,” says Bankrate analyst Ted Rossman. Ouch.

Read More → fastcompany

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Today's email was brought to you by Luke Perrotta and Kait Cunniff.Editing by Nick Comney. Publishing by Sara Kitnick.