HBCU GO has also secured distribution for the SIAC sporting events on the CBS owned-and-operated stations in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Dallas, Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Detroit, Sacramento, Miami, Tampa and Pittsburgh.

“This is a historic moment,” said Byron Allen, founder/chairman/CEO of Allen Media Group. “The HBCU GO team is excited to partner with SIAC to distribute their conference games to a broader audience. We are committed to bringing the best of HBCU culture and sports to our global platforms.”

“We are thrilled to announce our partnership with HBCU GO,” said SIAC Commissioner Anthony Holloman. “Through this innovative streaming platform, we invite fans from around the world to join us in celebrating the indomitable spirit of SIAC sports and culture.  This new era of digital engagement opens doors to boundless opportunities and ensures that every thrilling moment will be etched in the memories of our dedicated supporters. We extend our sincere gratitude to HBCU GO for their invaluable collaboration, and we can’t wait to share the excitement and passion of SIAC sporting events with fans everywhere.”

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Marc Malkin, Variety senior culture and events editor; Angelique Jackson, Variety senior entertainment writer; and Rachel Smith, Entertainment Tonight correspondent, will host the gala carpet, featuring interviews with stars from film and television attending the Golden Globes. The pre-show will air live Sunday at 3:30 p.m. PT/ 6:30 p.m. ET and include exclusive footage of the stars’ arrivals on the red carpet, plus interviews between the Golden Globe nominees and the correspondents.

Jo Koy will host the 2024 Golden Globe Awards, marking the comedian’s first appearance as a host for a major awards show.

The 81st Annual Golden Globe Awards are set to air live on CBS and will be available for streaming on Paramount+ on Sunday, Jan. 7, at 8 p.m. and 5 p.m. ET/PT.

Variety parent company PMC owns The Golden Globes along with producer Dick Clark Productions in a joint venture with Eldridge.

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She has more than two decades in technical operations and ad sales beginning with OnMedia where she began her career developing a crucial ingest and processing system for Ampersand orders and quickly advanced to broader responsibilities. Her most recent position was as senior director of ad sales operations, where she led the IT, client services and traffic teams. Schneider also spearheaded key technical projects and was instrumental in OnMedia’s initial integration with Pilot, demonstrating her versatile leadership and technical expertise.

In her new role, she will be responsible for the technical orchestration of onboarding new clients, managing third-party integrations, and spearheading user training programs. “Her contributions will be crucial in refining ShowSeeker’s onboarding process, optimizing technical workflows, and sustaining direct and transparent communication with client stakeholders,” the company said.

“Bringing Rose Schneider on board as our vice president of technical operations underscores our commitment to leading the way in technical innovation and operational excellence,” said Dave Hardy, ShowSeeker CEO. “I am confident that her background and track record will serve to enhance efficiencies across our entire technical and development organization. Rose has garnered the deep respect of her previous staff, industry peers, and companies throughout the ad tech community. We are fortunate and thrilled to have her join our team.”

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Samba TV’s depth and breadth of the company’s measurement capabilities, powered by its first-party data, were key components of Snap selecting Samba TV, the company said. As a result of the partnership, media and entertainment brands advertising on Snapchat can measure conversion outcomes using Samba TV’s currency-grade VTR solution “to gain a clear understanding of how their campaigns drive new viewers to linear and streaming programs, and measure lift across their media strategies.” Snapchat advertisers can also use Samba TV’s data to make more holistic and data-driven decisions to optimize their spending on the social media platform.

Ashwin Navin, Samba TV Co-founder and CEO, said: “As a world-renowned social platform with a devoted audience, Snapchat is a powerful medium for promoting new entertainment options and brands in general. Our measurement reveals the best practices for how to leverage Snap for discoverability and brand engagement with a unique demographic accessible on the platform. With over three quarters of Gen Z and millennials discovering new shows and movies from these platforms alone, Snapchat has emerged as an essential partner in marketers’ overall media strategy.”

Christopher Plambeck, Snap Inc. head of marketing science, said: “Companies around the world are tapping into the unique audience and value of Snap as an advertising channel for media and entertainment brands. Therefore, it’s crucial we have accurate and holistic measurement of the impact of advertising on tune-ins for our brands. By leveraging Samba TV’s television and streaming measurement capabilities, our advertisers can better optimize their tune-in campaigns to more fully understand campaign impact and [return on ad spend].”

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Here’s a look back at some of the biggest stories in social media in 2023 — and what to watch for next year:

Goodbye Twitter

A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk walked into Twitter ‘s San Francisco headquarters, fired its CEO and other top executives and began transforming the social media platform into what’s now known as X.

Musk revealed the X logo in July. It quickly replaced Twitter’s name and its whimsical blue bird icon, online and on the company’s San Francisco headquarters.

“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk posted on the site.

Because of its public nature and because it attracted public figures, journalists and other high-profile users, Twitter always had an outsized influence on popular culture — but that influence seems to be waning.

“It had a lot of problems even before Musk took it over, but it was beloved brand with a clear role in the social media landscape,” said Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at Insider Intelligence. “There are still moments of Twitter magic on the platform, like when journalists took the platform to post real-time updates about the OpenAI drama, and the smaller communities on the platform remain important to many users. But the Twitter of the past 17 years is largely gone, and X’s reason for existence is murky.”

Since Musk’s takeover, X has been bombarded by allegations of misinformation and racism, endured significant advertising losses and suffered declines in usage. It didn’t help when Musk went on an expletive-ridden rant in an on-stage interview about companies that had halted spending on X. Musk asserted that advertisers that pulled out were engaging in “blackmail” and, using a profanity, essentially told them to get lost.

Continuing the trend of welcoming back users who had been banned by the former Twitter for hate speech or spreading misinformation, in December, Musk restored the X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pointing to an unscientific poll he posted to his followers that came out in favor of the Infowars host who repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax.

LGBTQ and other organizations supporting marginalized groups, meanwhile, have been raising alarms about X becoming less safe. In April, for instance, it quietly removed a policy against the “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals. In June, the advocacy group GLAAD called it “the most dangerous platform for LGBTQ people.”

GLSEN, an LGBTQ education group, announced in December that it was leaving X, joining other groups such as the suicide prevention nonprofit Trevor Project, saying that Musk’s changes “have birthed a new platform that enables its users to harass and target the LGBTQ+ community without restriction or discipline.”

Hello X. And Threads. And Bluesky

Musk’s ambitions for X include transforming the platform into an “everything app” — like China’s WeChat, for instance. The problem? It’s not clear if U.S. and Western audiences are keen on the idea. And Musk himself has been pretty vague on the specifics.

While X contends with an identity crisis, some users began looking for a replacement. Mastodon was one contender, along with Bluesky, which actually grew out of Twitter — a pet project of former CEO Jack Dorsey, who still sits on its board of directors.

When tens of thousands of people, many of them fed-up Twitter users, began signing up for the (still) invite-only Bluesky in the spring, the app had less than 10 people working on it, said CEO Jay Graber recently.

This meant “scrambling to keep everything working, keeping people online, scrambling to add features that we had on the roadmap,” she said. For weeks, the work was simply “scaling” — ensuring that the systems could handle the influx.

“We had one person on the app for a while, which was very funny, and there were memes about Paul versus all of Twitter’s engineers,” she recalled. “I don’t think we hired a second app developer until after the crazy growth spurt.”

Seeing an opportunity to lure in disgruntled Twitter users, Facebook parent Meta launched its own rival, Threads, in July. It soared to popularity as tens of millions began signing up — though keeping people on has been a bit of a challenge. Then, in December, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a surprise move that the company was testing interoperability — the idea championed by Mastodon, Bluesky and other decentralized social networks that people should be able to use their accounts on different platforms — kind of like your email address or phone number.

“Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol,” Zuckerberg posted on Threads in December. “Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. I’m pretty optimistic about this.”

Mental Health Worries

Social media’s impact on children’s mental health hurtled toward a reckoning this year, with the U.S. surgeon general warning in May that there is not enough evidence to show that social media is safe for children and teens — and calling on tech companies, parents and caregivers to take “immediate action to protect kids now.”

“We’re asking parents to manage a technology that’s rapidly evolving that fundamentally changes how their kids think about themselves, how they build friendships, how they experience the world — and technology, by the way, that prior generations never had to manage,” Dr. Vivek Murthy told The Associated Press. “And we’re putting all of that on the shoulders of parents, which is just simply not fair.”

In October, dozens of U.S. states sued Meta for harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.

In November, Arturo Béjar, a former engineering director at Meta, testified before a Senate subcommittee about social media and the teen mental health crisis, hoping to shed light on how Meta executives, including Zuckerberg, knew about the harms Instagram was causing but chose not to make meaningful changes to address them.

The testimony came amid a bipartisan push in Congress to adopt regulations aimed at protecting children online. In December, the Federal Trade Commission proposed sweeping changes to a decades-old law that regulates how online companies can track and advertise to children, including turning off targeted ads to kids under 13 by default and limiting push notifications.

What To Watch For In ’24

Your AI friends have arrived — but chatbots are just the beginning. Standing in a courtyard at his company’s Menlo Park, California headquarters, Zuckerberg said this fall that Meta is “focused on building the future of human connection” — and painted a near-future where people interact with hologram versions of their friends or coworkers and with AI bots built to assist them. The company unveiled an army of AI bots — with celebrities such as Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton lending their faces to play them — that social media users can interact with.

Next year, AI will be “integrated into virtually every corner of the platforms,” Enberg said.

“Social apps will use AI to drive usage, ad performance and revenues, subscription sign ups, and commerce activity. AI will deepen both users’ and advertisers’ reliance and relationship with social media, but its implementation won’t be entirely smooth sailing as consumer and regulatory scrutiny will intensify,” she added.

The analyst also sees subscriptions as an increasingly attractive revenue stream for some platforms. Inspired by Musk’s X, subscriptions “started as a way to diversify or boost revenues as social ad businesses took a hit, but they have persisted and expanded even as the social ad market has steadied itself.”

With major elections coming up in the U.S. and India among other countries, AI’s and social media’s role in misinformation will continue to be front and center for social media watchers.

“We’re not prepared for this,” A.J. Nash, vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm ZeroFox, told the AP in May. “To me, the big leap forward is the audio and video capabilities that have emerged. When you can do that on a large scale, and distribute it on social platforms, well, it’s going to have a major impact.”

The post The Year Of Social Media Soul-Searching: Twitter Dies, X And Threads Are Born, AI Gets Personal appeared first on TV News Check.

The researchers say the findings show a need for government regulation of social media since the companies that stand to make money from children who use their platforms have failed to meaningfully self-regulate. They note such regulations, as well as greater transparency from tech companies, could help alleviate harms to youth mental health and curtail potentially harmful advertising practices that target children and adolescents.

To come up with the revenue figure, the researchers estimated the number of users under 18 on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube in 2022 based on population data from the U.S. Census and survey data from Common Sense Media and Pew Research. They then used data from research firm eMarketer, now called Insider Intelligence, and Qustodio, a parental control app, to estimate each platform’s U.S. ad revenue in 2022 and the time children spent per day on each platform. After that, the researchers said they built a simulation model using the data to estimate how much ad revenue the platforms earned from minors in the U.S.

Researchers and lawmakers have long focused on the negative effects stemming from social media platforms, whose personally-tailored algorithms can drive children towards excessive use. This year, lawmakers in states like New York and Utah introduced or passed legislation that would curb social media use among kids, citing harms to youth mental health and other concerns.

Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, is also being sued by dozens of states for allegedly contributing to the mental health crisis.

“Although social media platforms may claim that they can self-regulate their practices to reduce the harms to young people, they have yet to do so, and our study suggests they have overwhelming financial incentives to continue to delay taking meaningful steps to protect children,” said Bryn Austin, a professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard and a senior author on the study.

The platforms themselves don’t make public how much money they earn from minors.

Social media platforms are not the first to advertise to children, and parents and experts have long expressed concerns about marketing to kids online, on television and even in schools. But online ads can be especially insidious because they can be targeted to children and because the line between ads and the content kids seek out is often blurry.

In a 2020 policy paper, the American Academy of Pediatrics said children are “uniquely vulnerable to the persuasive effects of advertising because of immature critical thinking skills and impulse inhibition.”

“School-aged children and teenagers may be able to recognize advertising but often are not able to resist it when it is embedded within trusted social networks, encouraged by celebrity influencers, or delivered next to personalized content,” the paper noted.

As concerns about social media and children’s mental health grow, the Federal Trade Commission earlier this month proposed sweeping changes to a decades-old law that regulates how online companies can track and advertise to children. The proposed changes include turning off targeted ads to kids under 13 by default and limiting push notifications.

According to the Harvard study, YouTube derived the greatest ad revenue from users 12 and under ($959.1 million), followed by Instagram ($801.1 million) and Facebook ($137.2 million).

Instagram, meanwhile, derived the greatest ad revenue from users aged 13-17 ($4 billion), followed by TikTok ($2 billion) and YouTube ($1.2 billion).

The researchers also estimate that Snapchat derived the greatest share of its overall 2022 ad revenue from users under 18 (41%), followed by TikTok (35%), YouTube (27%), and Instagram (16%).

The post Social Media Made $11B In U.S. Ad Sales From Minors appeared first on TV News Check.

Prime will include ads beginning on Jan. 29, the company said in an email to U.S. members this week, setting a date for an announcement it made back in September. Prime members who want to keep their movies and TV shows ad-free will have to pay an additional $2.99.

Amazon is also planning to include advertisements in its Prime service in the United Kingdom and other European countries, as well as Canada, Mexico and Australia next year.

The tech giant follows other major streamers –- such as Netflix and Disney –- who have embraced a dual model that allows them to earn revenue from ads and also offer subscribers the option to opt out with a higher fee.

Amazon said in its email that it will “aim to have meaningfully fewer ads” than traditional TV and other streaming providers.

The ads, the company said, “will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.”

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