This is The Level Ups. Modern business news for the future business leader (in plain-Jane English).
What a day.
An interview like no other.
Liz Truss screwed the entire country in 46 days and left.
Bad news for social media companies living off ads.
Let’s get into it.
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes.
Drop Everything And Listen to This:
I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.
AI has created an interview between a fake Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs (and it’s both fantastic and scary).
Listen to it here. It'll be gone soon though.
There’s nothing more for me to say. Just listen to it and believe me. This is world-changing.
The 46-Day Disaster:
British Prime Minister Lizz Truss resigned on Thursday after pressure from pretty much everyone in the U.K. It’s a new record for the shortest term as PM.
Weeks ago, you might remember I covered the U.K’s tax cuts (in the final four of this post).
It started on Sept. 23, when the new Finance Minister upended several long-standing fiscal rules by announcing 45 billion pounds ($50 billion) of unfunded tax cuts, including a tax break for the richest.
You know what happens when you do that. Everyone wonders where the money’s going to come from. The GBP took a nose dive straight into a dumpster. This time last year, 1 GBP was worth $1.40. Now, it’s worth $1.12.
You know what’s crazy? She’ll be paid £115,000 until she dies because she was PM. Along with all the other perks like the security service. Not the most money in the world, but not bad for rough 46 days on the job.
Her replacement will be Rishi Sunak. More on this in a future release, but what a way to start Diwali, right?
Tough Days for Snapchat
Its parent company Snap Inc kicked off social media earnings by reporting its slowest quarterly sales growth ever, thanks to a steep drop in advertising dollars.
A few reasons why:
Apple’s privacy changes make it hard for social ads to work as well as they used to. That’s the “Ask Apps Not to Track” button.
TikTok is cutting into everyone’s market share, especially Snap.
It sends huge waves of fear into social apps that live off ads.
These digital ad companies have lost roughly $1 trillion in value this year. You don’t have to be a business genius to know how bad that is.
It’s a crisis of sorts. If one of these apps (Snap, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) has a good feature, the others will steal it. Tough to appeal to advertisers when everyone’s offering the same things, and it’s just a numbers game.
Advertising as a core money-maker is not what it used to be. Not in this market.
But the good news: nobody likes the ads on social anyway.
Thanks for reading.
See you tomorrow,
Darwin