Meta opens Threads to advertising

Plus: No, you can’t buy Super Bowl ads on Tubi

Author

Gupta Media
January 31, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are red-carpet ready:

↘️ META: $8.33 CPM | ↗️ TIKTOK: $2.82 CPM | ↗️ SNAPCHAT: $5.90 CPM

In this week’s edition: 

  • 📺 You can now buy YouTube’s hottest ad unit by the hour

  • Everything you need to know about Amazon’s new pause ads ⏯️

  • 🏈 No, you can’t buy Super Bowl ads on Tubi

But first…

🧵 Meta is testing ads on Threads

It’s the news we’ve all been waiting for: this week, Meta confirmed it is testing ads with “a small number of advertisers to help people discover the brands they love.” For now, Meta is testing an image ad that appears between pieces of content in the Threads home feed:

For brands, that means the Threads feed will be a new placement in Ads Manager that advertisers can opt into by checking a box. Good luck being one of the few lucky testers: it’s not available via allowlisting, and Meta’s team hasn’t yet released a timeline for rolling this out to everyone. Meta’s talking points on the opportunity: 

  • Threads has over 300 million monthly actives, and three out of four people on Threads follow at least one business.

  • For brand safety, they’re integrating Meta’s existing inventory filter to give brands control of the sensitivity level of organic content their ads appear next to in Threads feed.

  • They “aim to support most major objectives available in Ads Manager.”

  • They’re keeping the volume of ads in Threads intentionally low as they test and learn, and therefore expect that delivery to Threads will be low.

♾️ Meta: Have you ever been served a Facebook carousel ad that was “pre-scrolled” beyond the first card? A Meta rep confirmed that they’re rolling out “Custom Positioning on Carousel Ads” on mobile feeds. “This personalized pre-scrolled positioning displays the media position most likely to resonate with each user, without altering the card order.”

📸 As Instagram continues to vie for the attention and affection of TikTok creators, it announced a new video editing app called Edits to sweeten the deal. Widely described as a CapCut clone and teased in the days just before the TikTok ban went into effect, it’s now available (we suggest searching for “Edits, an Instagram app”)—while CapCut, like TikTok and Lemon8, remains unavailable from the Apple and Google app stores.

⏯️ Amazon is testing Pause Ads on its video offerings. In order to be eligible, brands need to hit budget and flight-time minimums, but the ads are being offered with flat-rate CPM. 

  • Pause ads can promote on-Amazon and off-Amazon products. On-Amazon ads will have users interact by clicking on their remote to “add to cart,” while off-Amazon ads will use a QR code.

  • For now, there is no ability to add targeting, and while Amazon Brand lift studies are available, third party studies are not.

📺 YouTube Masthead is a monster ad feature: 100% share of voice for the platform’s premiere ad unit across all YouTube devices. Now, Google is rolling out Cost Per Hour (CPH) buying for Masthead ads — a major shift that allows advertisers to get more targeted and specific with their investments. The primary use-case here would be “major brand moments,” according to SearchEngineLand—think events, product launches, cultural moments, and holiday rushes.

🔊Breaking news from our recent chat with Spotify: 

  • As of this past December, Spotify’s revamped conversion pixel can track revenue and other event parameters.

  • The option to optimize for conversions will be coming later this year.

  • Spotify Brand Lift studies are coming soon.

Elsewhere, a new report shows that Spotify is losing market share to YouTube in key genres and audiences—particularly in electronic and dance music. In 2024, according to Duetti, “YouTube grew its ‘wallet share’ [in electronic music] by 17 points—while Spotify lost the same amount.” 

🏈 No, you can’t sneak into Super Bowl advertising on Tubi, which announced last week that it’ll be carrying the Big Game. “Unfortunately we do not have any available inventory,” they report. “The game will be a simulcast of the broadcast on Fox so ad breaks will mirror what's on linear.”

Fear not: As more live sports and events become available to stream, more highly-valuable inventory is hitting the market for advertisers to buy programmatically. The question is: can programmatic platforms handle the influx in ad transactions? Digiday breaks down the live-sports-fueled “tsunami of supply” problem. 

☠️ TikTok DeathWatch has become TikTok SaleWatch

Typically at this time of year, we ask: will the groundhog see its shadow? Instead, brands and creators want to know: has ByteDance seen the light? That is: are they ready to sell, or do we get six more weeks of a ban that few people seem to want and the government (thus far) has refused to enforce? Signs point to a long winter. According to Time magazine, the list of potential buyers has gotten longer—in addition to Elon Musk, it now includes Perplexity, Microsoft, and maybe Oracle—but the president’s deal-making pronouncements have confused legislators on both sides of the aisles, and many of the proposed deals still appear to be illegal. 

Go deeper: 

🐘The Elephant In the Room: Our weekly office poll!

In an international AI shakeup, last week the Chinese app DeepSeek rocketed to the top of the app download charts. Some of our developer friends like it quite a bit. Will it unseat ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini as a marketing wizard’s wand of choice?

Who you got?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

📊 Last edition’s poll results: Did your TikTok “For You” feed feel different after the ban? 

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yes 

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ No

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week to fill your inbox with more tips, tricks, and treats from the addressable universe.

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