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Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
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It’s not unusual for companies to pay people to watch content. In 2018, Netflix employed 30 people who just watched shows and grouped them into different categories. Nielsen has long paid their Nielsen Families—people who provide the company with data—with gifts. Most recently, influencer marketing company Ubiquitous plans to pay three people $1,000 each to spend 10 hours watching TikTok videos. The goal? Figure out what trends are about to take over the For You Page. Information that Ubiquitous says will then guide how they approach the company’s TikTok marketing strategies for brands, including Amazon, Spotify and Crocs.
“We want to hear from people who actually binge watching TikTok,” says senior director of growth Jeremy Boudinet. “Let's pay someone to do it, and then we'll get the insights from that.”
Using their pre-existing TikTok accounts, the selected scrollers will spend 10 hours observing different trends and styles of content. According to one 2022 study from digital intelligence company Sensor Tower, people spend an average of 95 minutes per day scrolling through their TikTok feed—nearly double the amount of time they spend scrolling on Instagram and Facebook.
Boudinet says the Los Angeles-based company will not monitor the people as they watch videos. Instead, their plan is to simply have an informal conversation with the particpants after those 10 hours are up to identify what they learned.
According to Boudinet, the ideal candidate already has a deep understanding of how trends ebb and flow on the app, and applicants should demonstrate this knowledge in the 50-100 word required essay.
“It's more than like a full day of work just watching TikTok,” Boudinet says. “You're really digging into it and getting stuff from it.”
In October, the company paid one Florida State University student $50 an hour to spend 12 hours on the app. Which is to say, this isn’t the first time Ubiquitous has paid someone to dive into TikTok. At the time, the marketing agency was interested in learning more about how quickly a key word search would result in changes to someone’s algorithm. According to Boudinet, Ubiquitous didn’t make any huge changes to its marketing campaigns based off of the information they gleaned from those experiments. But the insights did inform how it approached TikTok’s algorithm and how quickly brands would have to keep up with trends.
“This sort of stuff will be instrumental in telling us, okay, here's the content that's resonating,” Boudinet says. “We should build campaigns that incorporate these sorts of things, so we'll use it to build better campaigns for our clients.”
The application for the upcoming TikTok Watching job closes Wednesday. The last program received almost 10,000 entries, and Boudinet says they are on track to surpass that number for this one. To select participants, Ubiquitous will judge the applicants essay responses to determine how in-tune with the app they are. Additionally, Boudinet says people who promote Ubiquitous across different social media platforms will have priority consideration. As for why the company is expanding from one viewer to three, he says, that having more people participate will help diversify the amount of content being examined and provide a larger comparison sample.
This time around, Boudinet is hoping the TikTok watchers observe two trends in particular: sound campaigns and video lengths. From trending songs to audio clips, TikTok is known for its viral sounds, and Boudinet wants to figure out how these audios go viral. Ubiquitous researchers have also observed that TikTok might be pushing longer videos to the For You Page as a way to compete with YouTube’s long-form content. He wants to see whether the watchers experience that and how they respond to seeing longer videos on a platform famous for its short-form content.
“We'll look for those macro trends,” says Boudinet. “And then probably within the individuals we'll try to find relevant information we can pull out—what are the visual stimuli that can be applied to a broader product group.”
Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
A new report in Bloomberg suggests that younger workers and college graduates are moving away from tech as the preferred industry in which to embark on their careers. While big tech companies and startups once promised skilled young workers not just the opportunity to develop cutting-edge, exciting products, but also perks and – for the most talented and ambitious newcomers – a relatively reliable path to wealth. (Who could forget the tales of overnight Facebook millionaires that fueled the previous dot com explosion? There were even movies about it!)
But aside from the intensity and hype around employment-eradicating AI apps, the big tech story of 2023 has been downscaling, belt-tightening, and massive layoffs. So far this year, tech companies have laid off thousands of workers, while cutting back on compensation packages, fringe benefits, and some of the other amenities and perks that made these jobs so sought after in the first place.
According to data compiled by Bloomberg, tech has shed nearly 200,000 jobs just since October, more than twice the number of layoffs that have hit the financial sector. Additionally, data on industry pay from Levels.fyi suggests that overall compensation packages within the industry have dipped as much as 25% in the past year. The rate at which these layoffs are happening also doesn’t seem to be slowing down very much, and may still even be increasing month-over-month.
Layoffs aren’t just bad PR that make current employees nervous and potential new hires dubious. They also mean there are simply fewer hands on deck at these companies to collaborate on important jobs; major rounds of layoffs also mean more work for the employees who got to keep their gigs. Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and Twitter have all massively reduced the size of their workforce, including teams that deal with important time-sensitive tasks, such as fact-checking or community moderation. Those jobs don’t stop needing to be done because the people doing them got laid off; it’s just now more work for fewer staffers.
Many tech companies also rely on the promise of lucrative stock options when recruiting top graduates with significantly in-demand skills. But with tech stocks slumping in 2022, and bouncing back this year mainly on the backs of the AI craze, embarking on a new career with a brand like Meta or Amazon suddenly seems less appealing than it did just a few years ago.
According to Insider, anecdotal evidence from job forums like Blind and other communities such as Reddit also indicate that the “rise-and-grand” hustle mindset so prevalent in the industry – which became synonymous with tech culture during the last startup wave – has led to widespread stress, discontent, and burnout among employees, many of whom are purposefully seeking jobs outside the industry now that the big paydays are also drying up. The Washington Post reported that disaffected Amazon employees in Seattle – fed up with layoffs, return-to-office mandates, and some of the company’s other practices – are currently attempting to organize a mass walkout.
Within the tech industry, the massive hype around AI has been something of a reprieve from this torrent of bad news. But from the perspective of young people considering careers in tech, the industry’s love affair with thinking machines may also be triggering some concerns about the future.
In late April, Dropbox announced it would lay off 500 employees – around 16% of its total workforce – and use the savings to build out an AI division instead. CEO Drew Houston explained that “I’m determined to ensure that Dropbox is at the forefront of the AI era.” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna echoed a similar sentiment in May, suggesting that his company will pause hiring for roles that could potentially be replaced with AI in the near future. He suggested, over the next five years, IBM will likely replace 30% of its employees – around 7,800 people – with apps.
It shouldn’t be that terribly surprising when young people develop cold feet about entering an industry that’s already decided they’re irrelevant, with CEOs simply biding their time before they can fire everyone working on the floors below them. But even beyond the personal stakes, it’s also possible that young people are turning their backs on technology due to a reputational downgrade.
That said, some tech firms dominate both the top and bottom of Axios Harris’ annual “brand reputation survey,” which investigates how American adults feel about various companies. IN particuar, tech companies that produce tangible products or offer vital services continued to perform very well on the survey, with Samsung, Amazon, Apple, and Sony receiving positive appraisals from about 80% of surveyed adults. Conversely, social media and related internet companies – including Google, TikTok, Meta, and Twitter – found themselves near the bottom of the list, with reputation scores around the 60% line. That’s around the same level as bankrupted crypto exchange FTX.
Anecdotally too, it appears that many recent grads who would otherwise be pursuing careers in tech are moving over to the banking industry instead. As one global talent partner told Bloomberg, while tech course-corrects by dropping tens of thousands of workers, “on Wall Street, you work really hard and you make a lot of money. That’s the deal.”
In light of this moment, JPMorgan Chase, in particular, has ratcheted up its recruiting. The company’s workforce jumped 8% in the first quarter of 2023 vs. one year ago. All other factors aside, many of the top college grads are simply going to follow the money. Right now, that’s clearly leading them to the financial sector.
David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.
The state of California wants 100% of new passenger vehicles sales to be fully electric by 2035. Last year, the state hit a nation-leading 16%. That’s pretty good, but 84% is still a long way to go.
A new study, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigates which factors have been responsible for the rise in new EV sales nationally. The findings indicate that consumers are increasingly likely to choose an electric vehicle, and nearly all of the gains can be explained simply by improving technologies.
Principally, the researchers tried to tease apart whether improvements in the technology or just plain old consumer preferences have driven EV adoption. Kenneth Gillingham, one of the authors of the new study, said that at the outset, he expected both factors to be working in tandem: As EVs go mainstream, people become more accustomed to them, they ride in them, their friends or family might buy one, while simultaneously, the range, the features, the charging speed all improve and make the case more compelling.
However, the study found that that’s not actually the case. Only the improving tech explained the rise in EV adoption. The result echoes what previous surveys about Tesla have shown: People care less about whether the car is electric and more about what the car can do.
The new study used a survey of potential new car buyers that were recruited online in a nationally-representative sample. Buyers were shown head-to-head comparisons of vehicles, where one was electric and one was not. Both vehicles were identical aesthetically, but differed in their price, powertrain, operating cost, acceleration time, range, fast charging capability, and brand country-of-origin. These traits were randomized, and then the buyers chose which vehicle they preferred. “That's the beauty of this type of exercise,” says Gillingham. “We can keep all the intangibles the same, but focus on differences in things that really matter to people.”
The experiment’s design allowed the researchers to understand how much more buyers were willing to spend on electric cars, and which technologies made the biggest impact on their willingness to pay. Importantly, the researchers could also compare this new data to a similar study conducted in 2013, to gauge how attitudes are changing and make predictions about the future.
Unsurprisingly, the data shows that range remains among buyer’s biggest hang ups when it comes to buying an electric vehicle. For instance, when evaluating the electric 2022 Nissan Leaf, buyers reported that the range of 149 miles–even with fast charging–decreased their willingness to pay by over $10,000 compared to the gasoline-powered 2022 Nissan Versa. In other words, you’d have to knock $10k off the asking price to make the cars equivalent in the eyes of the buyer. However, other features like a lower cost of ownership and a faster acceleration time brought the Leaf almost back to even with the Versa. And if the Leaf’s range increases to 300 miles (which puts it at ~100 miles less than the range of the Versa), as researchers expect in the next several years, the gains in acceleration and cost of ownership suddenly bring the Leaf ahead of its gasoline-powered equivalent.
Willingness-to-purchase (WTP) for attributes for Nissan Leaf relative to Nissan Versa
Those same sorts of patterns played out over and over again in the study, where eventually the tech improves to a point where suddenly the electric vehicle just looks like the better car and buyers make the switch. If technology continues to improve at the current pace and EV costs continue to decline as they have been, the researchers estimate that by 2030, most buyers will choose the EV in a head to head comparison to an equivalent gas-powered car. “If those projections come to bear, it’s entirely feasible that we literally could have half of the new cars and SUVs being electric by 2030,” says Gillingam.
Of course the question is, will the market be able to actually supply enough vehicles to meet that demand. The new study demonstrates just how massive the potential market might be in just seven year’s time. The feasibility of actually getting supply chains in place, manufacturing online, and building enough vehicles to capture that demand, however, remains another question outside the scope of this research. The opportunity is there, though, says Gillingham. “If you are a large automaker, you probably are gonna want to have an electric version of many of your best sellers, given how large the market appears to be.”
David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
On this episode of Behind Her Empire, mindbodygreen co-founder and co-CEO Colleen Wachob shares her perspective on managing stress and navigating self-worth as an entrepreneur and the importance of celebrating the wins in your business.
Wachob and her husband founded mindbodygreen in 2009, a digital media and lifestyle brand at the forefront of the wellness movement. To date, mindbodygreen has over 15 million monthly users and the Wachobs were pioneers in the industry.
“We wanted to kind of reframe the conversation, reawaken the conversation,” Wachob said. “When we look at wellness, and longevity, we're like it is literally our job to be at the forefront of this conversation and we don't have time for these protocols, for these routines, as parents as entrepreneurs, but regardless of what life stage you're at, how do we think about well being as something that we integrate into our lives and not something else that we add.”
Prior to building mindbodygreen, Wachob spent a decade at Fortune 500 companies like Gap, Walmart and Amazon. During this time, she was working long hours at Amazon and wasn’t listening to the sounds of her body. She suffered from a catastrophic pulmonary embolism at 32.
“As a woman especially with children, you always have to kind of listen to those signs from your body when something's out of whack,” Wachob said. “So I think I dismissed that in my brain even though I knew it could be part of this puzzle. But that started a really long healing journey for me, of looking at my entire life and evaluating what was working, where I needed to be shifting…My hope and having gone through that ordeal and kind of sharing it is that we, especially as women can get better about listening to the whispers in our body when something's off so that it doesn't take such a catastrophic event to make a change.”
This near death experience made her realize she needed to make changes in her life. Her first step was to prioritize her health and mental wellbeing which meant regular check-ins with herself — similar to how you’d run a business.
“If you have business objectives, business goals, KPIs, it's like why are you giving all of your valuable mindshare only to your business,” she said.
Wachob said that as entrepreneurs, you need to use those same frameworks and principles in running a business and apply them to your own life.
She added, “what's important to you is going to evolve not just through the decades of life, but through the quarters of life and I think prioritizing that time to check in and evaluate the type of life you want to have. We're only here for 4,000 weeks, we’ve got to make sure we make the most of it.”
Once Wachob was finally in tune with her body, she jumped right into mindbodygreen. She knew that it was going to be tough, but she believed in what she and her husband built.
“What was wonderful about those early days was we had blinders up to all of the naysayers,” she said. “It took about a year to get even just 100,000 unique visitors on a monthly basis.”
That’s why Wachob advises any entrepreneur looking to start their own business to understand their purpose because while the journey can be tough, the ‘why’ can help you overcome those obstacles.
“If our business was not connected to my life’s work and literally principles that have healed and transformed my life,” she said. “I don’t think I could do it… There are so many ups and downs on the journey and it’s not, to me, the physical work that I have any issues with… it’s more the mental mindset, that can expand in ways that at times are unhealthy. So if it was not a mission, that I was deeply connected, deeply rooted and deeply passionate about, I don’t think that I would be able to do this for 14 years.”
She understands that starting a company is difficult, but it’s important to celebrate all of your wins, big or small. Oftentimes, she said that entrepreneurs are so focused on the future and all of the things that can go wrong,that they forget to enjoy any of the victories.
“I get so excited about celebrating any type of win and any type of insight because it does lead to that momentum and discovery of new insights,” she said. “And unless you are part of a very well funded organization that can just throw a lot of money at problems, your business is likely not going to be one of linear growth and if you are experiencing that, you know one of my life lessons is I wish when we had those days, that I celebrated and enjoyed it a little bit more because I think when those moments happen, whether it be platform synergy, or whether it be an ad that's really resonating, a new partnership that maybe knocks it out of the park for you enjoy the win.”
dot.LA Reporter Decerry Donato contributed to this post.
This podcast is produced by Behind Her Empire. The views and opinions expressed in the show are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of dot.LA or its newsroom.
Hear more of the Behind Her Empire podcast. Subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radioor wherever you get your podcasts.
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
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