Twitch Competes On Bandwidth Usage; Groupon's New CEO Is Optimistic

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

All Fun And Games

“Last year the analytics firm Deepfield found that Twitch regularly broke into the top four users of Internet bandwidth, trailing only Netflix, Google, and Apple,” according to a deep dive into the video game streaming platform from a pair of Bloomberg reporters. That’s an impressive stat, even with the outsized bandwidth drain of live streaming. Live video game viewing is almost a $4 billion category and features a wide variety of incremental revenue opportunities – which is likely why Amazon’s Twitch now finds itself in contention with Google’s YouTube, where the most popular “artist” of all time is actually a Swedish video gamer. Read it.

Rock On Groupon

Groupon’s newly ascendant CEO, Rich Williams, composed a note claiming the company had made strategic mistakes in the past, but was misunderstood by the media and analyst community. Peter Krasilovsky gives his take at the Local Onliner (and isn’t particularly impressed). What happened to former initiatives like offer personalization, food delivery, loyalty and point-of-sale programs, self-serve deals and the publisher network? But Groupon does have a million merchants and 50 million members. Read on.

The Brick-And-Mortar Burden

Walmart and Target are doing just fine, thank you very much, but both have seen stunted digital growth this year despite high expectations. Ecommerce represented only 0.15% of Walmart’s growth in the past quarter compared to the same period last year, according to MarketWatch reporter Tonya Garcia. Laura Kennedy, a director at Kantar Retail, says, “Amazon is changing what people expect not just from the online experience but from the overall shopping experience,” citing product reviews, wide assortments and free shipping. More.

Spend Money To Make Money

When a company with a noteworthy media budget goes bankrupt, it’s often the ad networks and tech companies that get stiffed in Chapter 11. For example, Garett Sloane writes for Digiday that when Rdio went down the tubes, it owed Facebook $500,000. The problem keenly impacts app publishers. Sloane cites one publisher who says Facebook’s app-install market is oversaturated, and many times more expensive than Google’s. More.

But Wait, There’s More!