So billion prices project is now Pricestats and they have an index with state street if anyone wants to pull that. the creator is an economist and has some interesting stuff.
from a paper in Sep, here are changes in online prices across countries through May.
here is a reweighting of the CPI by a more relevant covid consumption basket, also broken down by low and high incomes
Here are his estimates of stockouts by product category in the US, and a cross country comparison
And his not surprising finding on stockouts is they are a meaningful driver of price inflation, but also have transitory impact
one more on online prices, the m/m change in US vs 10 year average. Can see the major deviation early this year that will be flowing through the y/y until next spring
SNAP: "we remain very confident in the underlying performance of our advertising products and when we look at incrementality testing, when we look at first-party data, like on platforms swipes or installs, we see those conversions happening at similar rates they did in the past"
FB: "Targeting is a longer-term challenge. DR products are built on user-level conversions and as a result of iOS changes, we don't see same level of conversion data coming through.. have to rebuild our targeting in optimization systems to work with less data.. multi-year effort"
SNAP: "our first party measurement tools and studies continue to show our ads are effective.. approximately as effective as prior to these changes. it's the really loss of signal required significant changes to our overall technology and we believe mostly a measurement challenge"
Ok, so Facebook did some great free research for the other social platforms. To levelset, here is Facebook estimate of monthly active persons in the US age 16-23 and year over year growth.
Here is a young adults daily journey through social apps. Starting the day with Twitter, like the rest of us junkies. Ending the day financially planning on Reddit is some wild ass euphemism for planning tomorrow's YOLO's on WSB.
Here's how FB thinks young adults view the various social apps
feels like the main Q around IDFA is whether this a loss of measurement problem or is this a loss of targeting i.e. loss of performance problem?
the two main impacted platforms say the former but the latter makes more sense because otherwise why would spend pull back?
On the SNAP call back, roughly:
"if the targeting still works and advertisers are pulling spend aren't they going to lose sales? Why aren't they spending anyway without the measurement?"
I get that you pause to calibrate models/measurement, but is that what we are seeing?
Ok, so smart people have spoken. The iterative nature of measurement feeding back into targeting is causing performance loss.
Some good stats in here, wish there was less editorializing. Marketing at Instagram was. 6%/revs in 19 vs 1% in 21, mostly aimed at teens. Insta DAUs up 24% y/y in Sep 2020. Time spent for teens reached 3-4 hours during Covid up 2x vs 30-45 mins for adults nytimes.com/2021/10/16/tec…
I see a lot of descriptions of the labor market as tight, time will tell, but constrained seems more apt.
As to casual declarations of stagflation, we've really defined that term down. Even GS reduced growth estimates has real GDP next year up 4% offset by raised 23/24 growth.
we're 9 months past the start of vaccinations, half the world is still in some form of lockdown, millions of Americans aren't working because of a virus, it just feels like people are too eager to try and use pre pandemic frameworks to analyze today's still bizarro landscape.
Delta wave pushed back whatever normal means by at least 9-12 months. Let's see what 2H 2022 brings when 70%+ of the world is vaccinated, people are freer to move around and feel safer going to work and play, and hopefully much of the deformities in the economy have worked out.