Signal is trusted by techs elite yet barely made a dent in everyday lives with iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram & Social media DM’s winning the race for owning chat groups and broadcast messaging. Signal’s biggest pro is their high level encryption (its actually an industry standard) and privacy first app.

Their CEO Meredith Whittaker is now a non press tour against LLM’s, calling out targeted ads, cross‑platform data matching and LLM assistants create a pervasive architecture of surveillance where chats, our behaviour and preferences can be logged, modeled and then monetised, even when companies offer settings that appear to limit data use & offer privacy first chat. Expect all of the major players to push privacy in coming months while becoming more intrusive through their AI offerings.

Signal costs $50m a year to run, when you rely on donations to stay afloat it will be interesting to see how long their mission can sustain them

23andme are back (this time as a non profit) and looking to better utilise AI and data to discover more about health and disease.

Users found out their had secret siblings, they were adopted and had different parents when using the service, then the major hacks happened.

It is story is a modern reflection on our relationship with health and the importance of our private and most personal data (in the next 18 months we will look back at the amount of information we give away to these companies and AI and when it is then hacked we will just shrug and then wonder why we did it) but I can’t help but feel like the editing was more aligned to a PR piece (The Circuit is a YT great series and I always enjoy the day(s) in the life behind the scenes) than a story about how it’s going to write some wrongs and help people in need…

There is a big problem in prediction markets, I have covered this a lot, to me they have created a secondary betting market which has created a creative marketing case study, this time around Polymarket paid young influencers to pretend they scored huge win fails and won big on predictions (bets).

Polymarket is taking a leap out of the stake playbook, flood the zone with loads of ads, clips and make bold statements across social (alongside paying for embeds on substack) to capture mindshare.

Kalshi isn’t innocent but have gone up-market (here’s a couple of their weird ads) while Polymarket have continued their questionable tactics. Winning in this market will come down to regulation and making millionaire stories seem like anyone can when investigations have found out its in the know people making outsized bets (insider trading). This video deepdive breaks the market done incredibly well.
It’s ok thou Meta are now exploring creating their own version (meta are desperate to create/clone something that drives transactions on their services) what could go wrong?

This is an interesting future look at how AI is redesigning our content consumption, Eli was part of the upworthy remembered as the ultimate clickbait site and investigated/predicts the future. Its billed as we’re living through the end of the feed and the rise of the agent. In this next era of social tech AI doesn’t just recommend what we see, it will for many decide how we connect, who we trust, and what we share.

The question in the deck & podcast is: will it deepen democracy or hollow it out?

FWIW I believe agentic (having your own agent or agents) will control a lot of consumption and for some it will improve information diets and remove poor content calories, but for most it will just surface the biases and increase the bad calories consumption. Maybe it is time we wise up a little more to the problem of tech, feeds & automation and start controlling how we go deeper into topics and interests (from both sides).

ChatGPT Hits 1b MAU (monthly active users) In Record Time 📉 While hiring 2x CMOs recently, its proving how big and broad they went to hoover up users (but oddly their market share has never been so slow dropping under 50%). AI is an industry that many now jump between tool to tool (model to model) to try and hit productivity, with all of the AI backlash and struggles in hitting ROI from huge AI investment expect AI to be marketed less and the benefits (baked in features) marketed more.

Sephora’s move to ChatGPT native discovery “We really see that these LLMs are where consumers are now starting their discovery journey, and so we want to be where the consumer is,”
“If the consumer moves to LLMs, we are also going to have the best Sephora experience there.”  

How AI has changed the publishing industry and killed many categories 3 years in - “I’d rather write books for 10,000 people who are genuinely changed by them than crank out short-form videos for 10 million people who forget about them within days or minutes.” 

AI is coming for your instruction manuals replacing with a QR code sending you to a chatbot to help you use/build/construct. Smart until it breaks or won’t let you download the manual

There are few artists who get how to provide a value exchange for their fans but Charli XCX (and her team) are ones who get how to be on the platforms they need to be on, offer something unique, invite only social, offering fresh music away from streaming and offer high ticket collectors items for her true fans.

Taylor was the first to swiftly connect with her fans on Tumblr and then donate to their gofundme pages and then sell limited drops to create a real fandom.

In a world where many are just copying their competitors, going into the archive and re-distributing with a value exchange at the centre is always smart marketing for artists and their fans. Treatonomics 101.

The open internet is dying and going behind thousands of paywall. Whether that’s through platforms, AI killing clicks to websites, or creators, journalists and influencers trying to value their content. Being found or discovered is easier and harder all at the same time.

The fight for fandom and hosting “direct” follower-ship is heating up, especially since the algorithmic changes (from followers to interest based feeds). Many creators have compelling yet complicated options, but most platforms are creating another home with another feed to generate more money from your fans (connecting fans to more creators), rightly or wrongly.

Most platforms are at odds with cashing in on the creator gold rush (before creator fatigue and LLMs/AI killing more of the market) without actually building a better and richer experience, they push more ads & ad solutions, more recommendations & driving paying subs to other creators (no-one talks about the churn this creators) & failing to focus better delivery of the creator updates.

I super confident if I asked you how you would want updates I bet the answers would be bucketed, through push, through WhatsApp or iMessage and fewest will be email despite most content is in the newsletter format.

Expect the creator space to be tested in the next few months and the way they expand out is asking for more and providing more options for delivery options and the most accurate distribution.