Facebook Reducing their Ad Presence
Facebook revamped their system, making posts from businesses, brands, and media less prominent. CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook today, “I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.”
The winners in this change will be users and their sense of community since they should find Facebook more rewarding and less of a black hole of wasted time viewing mindless video clips and guilty-pleasure articles. And long-term, it should preserve Facebook’s business and ensure it still has a platform to provide referral traffic for news publishers and marketers, albeit less than before.
The question will still remain: to what extent is Zuckerberg willing to cut back on advertising money in exchange for social interactions?
(Source: BBC, TechCrunch)
Dropbox Going Public
Dropbox has filed to go public, setting in motion what could be one of the most closely-watched tech IPOs of the year. The company valued by private investors at $10 billion has tapped Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to lead the listing process. Dropbox reportedly aims to list within the first half of 2018.
Having the ability to rapidly share files cross-platform has been a useful asset to many businesses. With Dropbox’s IPO, we should see many players wanting a share in this cloud-based company.
(Source: Bloomberg)
Billion Dollar Veggie Company
Meicai, a China startup that helps farmers sell vegetables to restaurants, has raised $450 million. The Beijing-based startup raised the money at a valuation of about $2.8 billion as it seeks to expand in the costly fresh-foods market. Meicai, which means “beautiful vegetable,” was founded in 2014 with a goal of sourcing vegetables for about 10 million small and medium-sized restaurants in China. It allows owners to use an app on their smartphone to order specialties like bok choy and eggplant directly from farms.
We are at the age of direct market. Producers are directly marketing to the consumers, in this case, farmers to restaurants. Eliminating the middleman may open doors for other value-added activities that will drive an increase in shareholder value across many other fields.
(Source: Bloomberg)
