
Join us as Lucas sits down with Yarden Shaked, Co-Founder and CEO of Varos, as they deep dive on recent industry metrics for 7, 8, and 9-figure Shopify brands. The overall market is looking rather strong with revenue up across the board for most brands. The two explore the emergence of TikTok Shop and its percentage of advertising spend across the industry.
The DTC Bull Market Is (Quietly) Back
Despite negative sentiment in the space, real data tells a different story:
Seven-figure brands are up 45% YoY in revenue (March 2024), with returning revenue up 69%.
Eight- and nine-figure brands saw 18% YoY growth, with repeat revenue up 61%.
This signals that many brands are quietly thriving—even if the public narrative says otherwise.
Repeat Revenue Is Surging, But New Acquisition Still Matters
Repeat purchases are driving growth, partly due to platforms like Meta and PMax optimizing for low-hanging fruit (i.e., existing customers). But over-reliance on retention without growing top-of-funnel will eventually stall growth—both new and repeat revenue are needed to scale sustainably.
TikTok Shops Show Promise—But It’s Early Days
TikTok Shops is gaining traction with strong ROAS but still accounts for only ~$1M/month in spend vs. Meta Shops’ $50M. Brands who master the organic + affiliate + ads loop early will win. It’s a big opportunity—especially before it gets saturated like Meta.
Varos Is Doubling Down on Creative Benchmarking
Varos is piloting a Creative Co-op, where brands opt in to view each other’s top-performing ad creatives based on actual metrics like ROAS and CTR. This helps brands stop guessing and create more winners faster—addressing a major inefficiency in digital marketing.
Transcript
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:21:10
Thanks for joining us, bro. It's great to have you. Yahoo is the CEO and founder of varios. He's a close partner of Eros is to darkroom. And we use the technology. I definitely, suggest everyone check it out. It's, market analysis and benchmarking tool.
00:00:21:12 - 00:00:49:05
And. Yeah, and I've heard you kind of liken it to Bloomberg, in the financial world for, marketing and advertising companies. Would you say. That's right. Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, no, no comparison is is perfect. But, but that's a good, good one wider. I mean, basically it's, it helps you, it helps that e-commerce brand understand how they stack up, against their direct competitive set.
00:00:49:07 - 00:01:10:20
And understand if, you know, spike was due to them or was due to the market, and then, you know, they can act on, on the insights that they get from there. So you're kind of like the Oracle of direct to consumer in a way. I don't know if I call it the Oracle, but but I think we definitely have a bird's eye view of, of, of what's going on.
00:01:10:20 - 00:01:35:08
And the, the true the, the true stories that are happening and not the anecdotal ones that, that people are hearing. Yeah. For sure. And you just sent out this email this morning. It was, the title of the email was Bull Market Alert. DTC Shows Continued Growth and efficiency in 2024. So I want to talk about some of the findings and insights.
00:01:35:10 - 00:01:58:22
And then also just like leverage some anecdotes that I've been seeing in the ecosystem, which definitely, I would say reaffirm this email, but it's nice to see that in, in a title. It's like for the past 18 months, you've just been seeing the shittiest news about direct to consumer thought, the market, the economy wars. So this was good to see this morning.
00:01:58:24 - 00:02:21:04
Look, the truth is, it's like I sat by my computer and I was thinking personally about that title, and I said, like, it may be read the wrong way. I mean, there are companies struggling and things like that, but I wanted to I think the sentiment is so low right now, like the the vibe, the feeling, the, you know, the tweets that are out there.
00:02:21:04 - 00:02:45:09
It's it's so negative. But in reality it's actually positive. Like what's going on. And, you know, a virus tries to be the opposite of, of anecdotal. But when virus talks the individual brands and we've got, you know, 6000 brands that we talk to them all the time. They're actually saying, yeah, we're having a good year. I mean, most are on an individual basis, actually doing well.
00:02:45:11 - 00:03:09:23
And we see that in the numbers. So, you know, from a revenue perspective, seven figure brands are up, over 40%, up 45% year over year. You know, throughout 2020. That's in March throughout 2024. It's it's a little while, like 35, 40% eight and nine figure brands are up nearly 20%. Year over year. It's interesting to look at that.
00:03:09:23 - 00:03:37:09
Look at that contribution from repeat customers. Yeah. And I'm just going to read this for everyone on the on the podcast. So for seven figure brands, total revenues up 45% year over year. Like Yarden said, new revenue is contributing 29% of that gain and returning revenues up 69%. Across how many businesses is this Yarden. So so the total data set is 6000 brands.
00:03:37:09 - 00:04:02:05
The Shopify like seven is I, I don't know the exact number, but it's, you know, at least 500 probably more. Wow. Okay. And then eight and nine figure brands are up 18%. That's total revenue from their e-commerce channel. This is direct to consumer only. Shopify from their Shopify shop. And it's up 5% from new revenue and returning revenues up 61%.
00:04:02:05 - 00:04:23:19
So yeah, big contributions from recurring revenue makes sense that smaller brands have more contribution from new customers since their need to grow top line. And yeah, it's easier to grow when you're a smaller brand, but 18% growth across the category is pretty good. So just to double click on that was that 500. This is from 500 brands or is this six that those 6000.
00:04:23:19 - 00:04:44:07
So so so sorry. So like the so so 6000 is the total data set in various when we look at Shopify data for seven figure brands. That's like you know, a subset of that. And I can pull that exact number, but it's between 500 to 1000 is like in that, you know, sliver. Okay. Yeah. For sure.
00:04:44:07 - 00:05:05:22
Yeah. So that's great. That's actually these are like really positive indicators. Yeah. It is the the repeat revenue is like a yellow flag in a way, because, you know, obviously, you need you can't just fly on the reaps you revenue, like you're not going to grow your business from, you know, the same customer just buying and buying again.
00:05:06:03 - 00:05:26:08
So you do need to fill that top of funnel. And, you know, the numbers wouldn't be as positive if, if they weren't being helped so much by the repeat revenue. But the the new revenue is also up. It's not that it's down. I mean, if it was down, that'd be, you know, there's, Yeah, there's there's a real yellow slash red flag there.
00:05:26:08 - 00:05:57:23
Yeah. But hey, it might be a leading indicator of future stalled growth. Yeah. Honestly, from my perspective, that's where it makes sense. Most businesses as they start to grow, they focus a lot obviously on client retention because that's what good businesses are built on. Yeah. The brands that overindex on retention though, as a stopgap for their inability to continue to scale new revenue, those those businesses have really, really tough growing pains in the future.
00:05:58:03 - 00:06:22:11
I've seen that time and time again. Yeah, yeah. It's it's you need both you just need you. You just need both. And I think one of the, you know, one of the theories that we have around this of why the RRP revenue is up so much is because with the adoption, of Advantage plus and p max, it's becoming a lot harder to not like.
00:06:22:11 - 00:06:52:05
It's becoming a lot harder to sort out between new and existing customers and, you know, with, with the platforms pushing to all these customers, they're trying to get the lowest hanging fruit and the low hanging fruit is the repeat, purchases. And so there's a lot more spend going, to those, and, you know, sometimes I think even if you put the caps it there's some version that that's happening and that's the theory is, you know, we're trying to prove that more and more with the data.
00:06:52:05 - 00:07:21:06
But, I think, you know, as we see the adoption grow to, to these, you know, total platform have the, have the, you know, ball in their hands to go pick the customers. That'll keep happening. And these percentage increases, are these this is like new revenue as opposed to last year. So like, if I did 5 million and new revenue last year, I'm doing six mil this year, so I'm up, you know, whatever that is.
00:07:21:06 - 00:07:48:15
17%. Yeah. Exactly. Like I'd say. Let's say the numbers for March hold, eight and nine finger brands are up nearly 20%. That means that if you did, $10 million, last year, you would do 120 million, 12 million this year. Yeah, that makes sense. One thing that I look at, trends here, my screen, one thing we look at when we're like assessing client health is we look at this Cohorting chart by C3.
00:07:48:15 - 00:08:11:12
I think I've showed you this before. Yarden actually. Yeah. But it basically just shows like customers acquired, in different cohorts. And then we showed them different colors by the year in which they were acquired. So you can see like, all right, this business, is really acquiring. It's retaining, you know, a certain percentage of their customers that they acquired in 2015.
00:08:11:14 - 00:08:36:12
Yeah, for a long time. These are so great. It's still going. Yeah. Exactly. So this obviously makes it easier because you have a foundation on which to grow. So every year you want to see new customer acquisition increase ever so slightly, even if it's a smaller and smaller margin. That's fine. And if you have, you know, a highly consumable product or a good repeat mechanics, you know, you can start to stack revenue.
00:08:36:16 - 00:09:02:10
And I love breaking down revenue compositions in this way, because you can start to see, the real drivers of revenue for your business, either from a customer behavioral perspective of a customer, a product perspective, or, you know, the different times when different customers buy, maybe it's quarterly or other sort of seasonal components. Yeah, that's an amazing, amazing visual.
00:09:02:10 - 00:09:24:21
Like you, you like, you talk about like having a strong base of returning customers. Like you can literally see the base year in, in that. Right. Like that's growing. Yeah. So this is like a first order visualization that we do to assess the health of a business. It's no surprise in the agency space, especially when you're focused like we are on paid acquisition.
00:09:25:01 - 00:09:44:00
A lot of the customers that you talk to, you have problems with paid acquisition. So they're like they're seeking solutions. And it usually has to do with downward gravity on new customer acquisition. So you do a visualization of this. And you you can just do this through by getting access to Shopify. And you can see, all right.
00:09:44:00 - 00:10:09:08
What has the general trajectory of the business been over the past five years. And you can see the health of the business and what sort of foundation they're they're they're kind of, their revenue has been built on. Yeah. As you dig in, you dig in deeper and deeper here. You can uncover, you know, the reasons why revenue might be declining, why they've been growing, recurring repeat revenue so much.
00:10:09:08 - 00:10:30:21
Is it because of a couple SKUs? Is it because of key customer cohorts? And that, I think, allows you to be a lot more scientific about growth. Yeah, yeah. I want to just talk about so markets back, you saw this today. You chose to publish that email today. What did you been seeing for the past 18, 18 months?
00:10:30:21 - 00:11:03:11
Yeah. Look, I mean, it's is hard to it's it's it's confusing, right. Because you have you have the Covid era, which was a boom. Okay. And I could talk about this forever too. Yeah. And then, you know, things kind of normalized, by normalized, I mean, you know, went down, like to reality, and, and and then, and, you know, Meta and Google were kind of learning in the new and the new period.
00:11:03:11 - 00:11:33:20
And there were there were issues here and there. But meta really had its heyday, like, like it's doing, you know, it's been doing really well and gaining a ton of share a while. It, in the past year and a half, but we haven't been seeing revenue increases like this. And we didn't see that in 2023. Which is the point of the email in 2024 that, you know, things are starting to build, back up on, on themselves and may not get back the Covid era, but you know, the businesses are growing.
00:11:33:20 - 00:12:00:01
And something that I've been saying is that that's really, really important to note is people spent 20, 23 is a year of of profitability, a year of, you know, efficiency, profitability. How do we, you know, reduce headcount? How do we, you know, reduce spend in different places and that put them in a situation that now they have this, you know, way more efficient base than they did years ago.
00:12:00:03 - 00:12:22:05
And the markets are back to growing. So the markets are back to growing. Things are getting more efficient on, the paid media side, and that puts brands in, in an optimistic situation. Yeah. For sure. I think the I mean, from my perspective, 2023 was just like bare like flat market and. Yeah, you know, I think that was really difficult.
00:12:22:05 - 00:12:50:17
A lot of businesses were recalibrating. I think from your perspective, just going back yard and like saying it's really confusing when what do you mean by that? Like it's just you're seeing so many different sort of data points. That it's I mean, it's like like when, when, when we look at when we look at 2022 or 2023, I mean, what are we comparing it to, you know, like those are bad years compared to 2021.
00:12:50:19 - 00:13:15:05
But like 20, 2021 from my perspective, like when we talk to clients and they're like 2021, we need to get back to that sort of growth. It was an anomaly. Like it just was. Yeah, exactly. So you look at 2022 and like so three, these were in a way better years. Right. Because you're comparing them to recent periods.
00:13:15:07 - 00:13:40:06
And people had scaled. So like they start like the economics don't work anymore in this time. But it probably was just like normal years for reality. But now I, I'm saying, you know, bull market 2024 is not that there's not yellow flags. It isn't that they you know, things are back to Covid, but it's basically, you know, people have recalibrated their business, as you say.
00:13:40:08 - 00:14:01:24
You know, they've got to focus on efficiency. They've got to focus on repeat, customers as well. But top line, is starting to grow year over year. And they're starting, you know, to able to reskill. And that is why I'm optimistic. That about the space. There's obviously, kind of problems in the space and about profitability here.
00:14:02:05 - 00:14:27:03
But but the number is like point to a good direction. Yeah. I think generally I think it depends on the business. But generally e-commerce is a tough it's a tough business selling products online, especially when you have many SKUs. The best businesses that do it. Well, you have their focus on a few SKUs or one skew. They have high reproducibility or subscription.
00:14:27:03 - 00:14:49:12
And like they can kind of build operations around that and scale. What have you been seeing with subscription like curious from your from your side. Like we don't look at that in the data too much. I mean like have this subscription ecom world has that take it off as it worked. I from my point of view, the best e-commerce businesses are subscription businesses.
00:14:49:14 - 00:15:15:15
But can most if it's if it is subscription that's not being forced to right now. That was my yeah. So like a really good example. Sorry to interrupt, guys. I, was just I just had a Arjun and Ryan from Jolie on the podcast. And I mean, they have one skew high margin. It, it has 90 day subscription built into it.
00:15:15:15 - 00:15:34:04
If you install that in your shower and you use it every, you're literally going to use it every day. You're going to need filters every three months. Like otherwise like kind of defeats the purpose and the price of it. It's it's 11 bucks a month. It's $33 every 90 days. So if you truly believe, hey, this is cleaning my skin.
00:15:34:04 - 00:15:50:13
This is making me look better. This is a beauty product. You're going to spend that. That's like with the way they've engineered that business. And this is what we talked a lot about at the podcast. You should check it out. Was how that like that is a really, really solid business model. I mean, that's the razor blade, right?
00:15:50:13 - 00:16:11:21
That's the same. Yeah. As opposed to Ryan's last business sneakers greats like we talked about this. How many different sizes and styles do you need to create? How much spillage and waste and returns are just inherently baked into that business model. So I think founders like two things you really need to figure out is like, what's going to be a great business model that works for you.
00:16:11:21 - 00:16:35:20
And then I think the second thing that's also equally as important is where is there white space in a market that is ideally growing? And I think if you do those things right, you can potentially have Covid years every year. Yeah. We still see brands that are having crazy, you know, triple digit growth every year. And it's not because they launch during Covid, it's because there's a ton of white space in the market and they have a product market fit.
00:16:35:22 - 00:16:55:04
Yeah. That's true. Sorry, Chris. No, I was just going to say I think that the during, you know, kind of 2020, 2021, you saw like a lot of parents trying to force subscription into their business model. And then I think people just started to get really annoyed with it. Like on the consumer side. But now it seems to be that the brands that are doing well do have subscription tied in.
00:16:55:04 - 00:17:18:16
But to Lucas's point is 100% like a core component of the business. Not like a not just like, oh, it's a value add for it. So, the example that I can use is, there's a there's a company that I subscribe from for wipes, and for my kids, not for me. And, you know, that that that is inherently like a subscription based model that you need for parents.
00:17:18:16 - 00:17:41:07
And I think that that's great. But there was another time when, when we first had kids that it seemed like the calculus on what they made available for how often you subscribed was, like, way off. So it was it was bags for our diaper pail and like, it would come with like 500 bags and they wanted you to to they only offered, a 90 day subscription and you're like, dude, I'm not.
00:17:41:12 - 00:18:01:05
How many diapers do you think I'm utilizing in that time period? And we subscribed for it for like two months or, you know, two, I guess it would be, you know, six months in the end. And it was just like, we didn't need diapers again for, you know, five years. So just felt forced into the equation that, that that to me is going back to just like common sense marketing.
00:18:01:05 - 00:18:21:08
It's like subscription. Is it going to work for the product? Like if you're a founder and don't know that, like you haven't been talking enough with your customer and or your product? Well, right. So I think that's just where, when, when it gets to ecom, I think people like kind of get a bit more desensitized from like actual life.
00:18:21:08 - 00:18:43:07
They're like thinking about metrics and numbers and they're like, oh yeah, subscription. That would be great. People will subscribe to this. They just kind of like miss the point sometimes of like, first of all, subscription should be more of like a conversation. Like it shouldn't feel forced to be like, hey, listen, if you're ordering this a lot, maybe you should subscribe and you'll get some sort of savings on on having a subscription.
00:18:43:09 - 00:19:05:05
So that's how I think about it. You're on and I'm interested just from mute. So you guys are getting you into more of the creative, domain? Obviously creative is so important to performance. It's like, the lion's share of what we do at the agency and what we talk about. And, I think what everyone recognizes as important.
00:19:05:08 - 00:19:44:22
I know you're starting to beta test some products, and expand into that domain. Tell us your thought process about that. Yeah. I mean, I think, it doesn't take, it doesn't take a genius to see that creative is kind of the last or whatever that you're going to be able to pull in terms of, in terms of performance and efficiency, on, on the ad channels and the interesting thing about Theros is we actually, you know, we literally see, what creatives are, are the highest performing, across a whole category.
00:19:44:24 - 00:20:07:14
And, you know, we're trying to find ways, smart ways and safe ways to really help, you know, the category, become more efficient and build creatives that, you know, to have more winners. Because right now, in the space to make a winner is too hard to make. Fired to winning creative is too much of a crapshoot.
00:20:07:16 - 00:20:32:00
It doesn't happen enough. And if we can, if we can fix that, we will. And so, you know, now we're we're, in a closed beta, where basically what we're doing is, it's like a double opt in. So the, brand on Eros needs to, agree that they want to be part of this, creative co-op, which we call it.
00:20:32:02 - 00:20:59:07
And then, basically, they can all, all the brands that are in it other than guardrails that you can't see for your own category, you can see the highest performing creatives of other brands, in, in this co-op, based off actual performance metric. So based off, you know, percent of spend as a percent of total the ad account or row ads or cost per purchase click through rate, you can see what videos have the highest hooks and then go take out those hooks.
00:20:59:07 - 00:21:23:14
So it's literally like you see the winning creatives and you can go take inspiration or go remake those, if you want. And like I am very bullish on that. I think that it's going to be, the way to go. And, you know, I think it's like, not zero sum at all. I think it's actually like, positive for, for all the, for all the participants.
00:21:23:16 - 00:21:50:10
And so, yeah, we're, you know, we're trying it, right now with, you know, some select brands, and, you know, our goal is for them to get two winners a month out of, out of the usage of this. You know, it's really interesting some, some things that sometimes where I audit, different sort of meta accounts and ad libraries for particular industries, like, I see basically the same exact ad libraries.
00:21:50:10 - 00:22:13:22
I call it commoditize creative. I see the same ad libraries. Yeah, that competing products are running. It's like the same sort of hooks, the same sort of UGC ads, really the same value propositions. And a lot of these brand founders are not looking at their creative library. Yeah. Or they are looking at their creative library. Some aren't, but they're not looking at their competitors creative libraries as like diligently as we are.
00:22:13:24 - 00:22:37:11
And, it just begs the question of like, how important it might be to just be super differentiated from the style of your ads. Also, that they're talking about. But look, I mean, even when you look at you look at competitive ad library, I mean, the problem is right, is that and I think this is also one of the problems of when you say like it becomes commoditized, it's like, okay, you look at your comparison ads, he's got 100 ads.
00:22:37:15 - 00:22:59:15
Okay. Only two of those are winners. Other 98 are like immediate or they're testing through. Now you're going to look at 100. I'd say, oh, that ad looks cool, right? That, feels like it's going to work or that's easy to remake. I'm going to go remake those. And so everyone is kind of remaking other people's ads, but they're not making remaking on actual performance metrics.
00:22:59:17 - 00:23:26:22
They're making it on like, eyeball like, yeah, it's really interesting. So you're basically like, hey, these are the top performers. Why? Like, that's, you know, we can we can figure out my job. Yeah. That's your job. Yeah. That's seriously what I would do is say, okay, let's break down why these are top performers. And there's definitely frameworks for that has to do with the hook, some sort of problem solution statement or like, wait, there's many different ways to break down ads.
00:23:26:24 - 00:23:47:10
And then I would just create new formats like steal those, steal those ads, create totally new formats to display them creatively. And see how those do. Yeah. For me brands need to one get get the the they need to figure out what their format of that is like. It needs to be stylistically different. That's like a branding and design exercise.
00:23:47:12 - 00:24:18:24
And then they need to create ads that actually convert, which is what you're going to help them video, you know, show them how to do. Yeah, yeah I think look, I think you like like the important thing here is a lot of times with, with arrows, I, you know, when I'm walking people through their dashboards like we see what their problem is, you know, because it's like a very simple dashboard of like you've got Roas and cost per purchase, which is like, you know, your end goal and then you have the funnel of CPM, click through cost per click conversion, AOF.
00:24:19:00 - 00:24:38:10
And then you can understand like highlights and read. You know where you are like per metric red, yellow, green compared to your competitive set and the places that you have red. Let's say, you know, Roas is red. And then in the funnel. So I'd say click through rate is red. You know that that's what you need to fix.
00:24:38:10 - 00:24:56:20
And so if someone needs to fix the gray can go over to here and you can see okay, well white creatives have the highest click through rate. Or if you, you know, zoom in to videos and you say, actually my video is the problem, is a, you know, the average watch time. It's not the 50% view thrus.
00:24:56:20 - 00:25:15:13
It's it's actually the hook. Then, okay, I need a better hook. And so like or, you know, I want lower CPM. Let me see what creatives are bringing to our CPM. And so you can you can really like figure out what's broken when you're in the core various platform and then get into creative of figuring out how to solve that problem.
00:25:15:16 - 00:25:37:05
That makes sense. Go ahead. Because I was just going to say, I think what's really exciting about this kind of like era of, of the cross section of data creativity is like, I think we swung the pendulum so far during like the growth hacking era that like creative got really crappy. But now it seems like we're able to actually utilize the data to make things interesting.
00:25:37:05 - 00:25:53:06
And so we're kind of getting back to a place where creatives become fun again. Not so boring. And speaking as a marketer, like not boring to participate in, you know, five years ago, it's just it felt really boring and like the art was taken out of it, you know? So I'm excited to see how people are utilizing the day to day.
00:25:53:07 - 00:26:20:14
Yeah, Jordan, I see that tick tock. Year over year, CPMs are up 54%. That's not that surprising, right? More people are adopting advertising as a platform, and their demand has probably stayed the same, pretty much because the platform hasn't grown that much. I don't think this year it's kind of like flattened out a little bit. My thinking about that, right.
00:26:20:16 - 00:26:47:05
That yeah, I think TikTok is an evolving, evolving ad platform. I think those spend is down actually is up and spend is down. So I think look, I think people are looking at TikTok in in new, new ways. First of all, you know, as we as we spoke about, it's becoming a year of, of more efficiency, both this year and last year.
00:26:47:07 - 00:27:09:20
So and part of what that means is, you know, scale back all the testing and all the new things and do what, you know, do you know, bring money, which is really, you know, usually meet and partially Google, and not not necessarily, you know, the other channels. So people are scaling down from that perspective. But people are learning to work with TikTok in new ways.
00:27:09:20 - 00:27:35:04
It's not just just ads. You know, they're learning to work with affiliates. You know, we did an analysis of TikTok shops, and TikTok shops is growing really fast, but it's still really small. But but on the ad side, our shops, it's growing really fast. And so, you know, TikTok has had a problem, over the years that I think everyone knows, which is, they're under attributing, they're under attributing conversions.
00:27:35:06 - 00:28:24:13
And it's very hard, it's very hard to, you know, prove out to the top level of the company, that this is bringing in back direct money. And so it kind of gets, scaled down. Yeah. I think that's changing now, like most of our conversations, it's very clear in from our vantage point that if you're a brand and you have really strong, measurable growth on TikTok through individual videos, from an engagement or a view perspective or shares and saves, which are really important organic metrics to look at, you can start to actually build build a following relatively quickly, and you can attribute growth, and success of some of those
00:28:24:13 - 00:28:58:24
organic assets, to Amazon sales, and sometimes to direct to consumer sales as well. But I think the silver lining actually, in building an organic function that's like producing high quality video content really quickly for reels and for TikTok, is you get a really solid, fertile ground to test new ad assets that you know are going to perform on Facebook and Instagram and meta when you run them, because they're in highly consumable formats that are native to the platforms, i.e. what we typically know as UGC.
00:28:59:01 - 00:29:20:00
So that's how we're counseling our clients. It's like I think having an organic function is such an asset to brands today. And people are starting to understand that even if they can attribute, you know, a certain amount of purchases like they do in ads manager to, you know, TikTok, organic or, you know, obviously what we're talking about now is TikTok ads.
00:29:20:02 - 00:29:47:22
Yeah. Yeah, that makes total sense. I mean, and like overall, I, I'm actually very optimistic, like in terms of like TikTok as a channel for, for DTC, just because they're doing a lot of things like I think that they're playing it smartly. I think that, you know, originally when when TikTok ads kind of became, relatively, a common, a common thing, you know, right now they have like five, 10%, 5 to 10% of share wallet that we track, we carry out.
00:29:47:22 - 00:30:11:19
The hardest thing was, making creative. That's relevant for that, right? You know, all these companies, are really good at making creative on meta, but now you have to make, you know, a completely different style creative to go with TikTok. So it was a little bit of a big lift, to, to get started there and then TikTok came out of the creative center to make it a lot more helpful, and they came out with a really good platform, to help you there.
00:30:11:19 - 00:30:32:24
And now a lot of the spend is, going towards brand, and it's like a hard, a little bit harder to attribute. So they're coming out with TikTok shops where you can say, hey, here's how many years, how many orders you got. And it all, it all stays on TikTok's platform. And that's probably how the people there want to consume it more, and they're going more towards an Amazon style.
00:30:32:24 - 00:30:53:24
So they're actually doing a lot of things. And like I think that they're they're pulling it together and tying everything together really well between organic and affiliates and ads, and shops, and they're doing a lot of smart things. So these numbers are like a little bit red, but I don't think that they're telling the whole story, in terms of what's going on on the platform.
00:30:54:01 - 00:31:19:24
Are you going to start reporting more on TikTok shops? And because I agree, like, ads are just a it's a part of what they do. They're going for the holy grail where you have this closed loop ecosystem where you can run ads, you can buy products, and you have kind of affiliate baked in. It's they can I think it's going to be, I think they're going to be able to execute on it like 100% in a way their Instagram wasn't able to.
00:31:20:03 - 00:31:39:09
Yeah. Yeah. You know, yeah. And to your question, I mean, so so we actually just modeled the data out this month and so it won't be in the dashboard probably next month. But but yeah, I think it's an important also report on meta shops like, like we we model them together because we really wanted, to compare them.
00:31:39:11 - 00:32:11:16
And it's interesting I mean, TikTok shops now driving a lot higher Roas, than, than meta shops is what is the volume look like? I think everyone's just so curious why, in these early days of TikTok shop, it's way smaller than you'd expect. I mean, let me pull up, I mean, pull up the actual data here, but it's it's I mean, I was surprised by how much people are talking about it and how how much smaller from the from an ad perspective because like, like, again, I think, you know, people are pushing organic or affiliates to it.
00:32:11:19 - 00:32:47:00
You're just talking about from a spend, not a revenue perspective. Yeah, exactly. So from a spend perspective, the total spend that we track, is about, like $700,000. It's and it's nearly $1 million a month, let's say, on TikTok shops where, just for context, on meta shops, we track $50 million a month. Okay.
00:32:47:00 - 00:33:15:11
So so it's still small now. And, you know, the median spend of the advertisers that are on TikTok, shops on Eros are spending around, $8,000 a month, which is, you know, not nothing, but it's not, again, the median spend on meta shops for this car is 16,000. Yeah. A month. So the volume is still low.
00:33:15:12 - 00:33:42:15
It's still it's still early, but, you know, change could change fast. I think the sentiment from like, four months ago to this month, for certain types of merchants, like TikTok shop requires like, it just requires a different muscle. You need to figure it out and kind of blend a lot of these different skills together. But I'm seeing revenue trend in a really positive direction for some of the brands that figure it out.
00:33:42:17 - 00:34:11:02
Yeah. They have kind of organic strategies. They're getting affiliate lifted. They're focusing on ads like they're they're starting to drive hundreds of thousands of dollars through the platform. Exactly. And it's, it's it's kind of a web. And and if you figure it out, it's it's it's really powerful and I think it'll become more powerful. And, you know, we've seen it with every one of these platforms that the money is made early on, like, and then it you know, gets kind of commoditized and yeah, you need to be a superhero.
00:34:11:04 - 00:34:28:24
You can still make it work, but you have to, you know, it gets a lot harder. They're incentives to figure things out early when your competition isn't doing it. Honestly, if I'm a brand founder, I'm trying to figure out how to, if my product works for TikTok shop, I'm trying to figure that out as much as I can.
00:34:29:01 - 00:34:52:22
Yeah, it's just too big of an opportunity when you're fighting. Take meta against other competitors who are spending a lot more than you on the platform. Totally, totally, totally. And, you know, it's it's it's a bet. And that's, that's work out. Sometimes they do, sometimes they do. But I love, Nick Shackleford. I'm Twitter, so, scared money they'll make money.
00:34:52:24 - 00:35:17:03
I love that a lot. And it's true, man. It's true. Yeah. And we could, you know, I think I think it's also worth mentioning, like, there's a lot of talk, right now about, like, issues in degradation on on meta or the since February, I don't know how much, how many cards, on the side of have been worried about that.
00:35:17:05 - 00:35:48:04
But, you know, we worked a lot into that in, in the data and the, the story, the story of what's happening is the story on social media is the end of the world. But the truth is, is that actually, it's like a little bit of the end of the world for a few companies. So 13% of the companies that we track are significantly, deteriorated on a grow as basis, which is, deterioration of more than 25%.
00:35:48:06 - 00:36:17:05
But I'm the most part, brands work so affected. I mean, actually, on a, on a median perspective, spend was up 40% on meta, and Rose was, only down 3%, which is actually like putting up really good numbers from an ad platform perspective. You know, when you consider that the increase scale, so, you know, from what we've seen in the data, there are some brands that got really affected.
00:36:17:07 - 00:36:41:23
But it's definitely not the majority. And but for those brands, it's unclear why. They, they got affected. And it's, you know, it's really tough to, to have that bad, like bad pick. And for some reason, the algorithm is not performing for you. And we're starting to see less and less of those. Like, it start to come back a bit.
00:36:42:00 - 00:37:02:22
But like, I would use your platform to say, you know, if you're on social media or you saw like a Bloomberg article that's like, meta is dying, it's it's not, it's it's it's not the case in reality. And, and and the data shows that, like for most brands, they should be actually a pretty good place.
00:37:03:01 - 00:37:25:12
I think that's a great place to, to cap us off, Yarden. Thanks so much for your insight. The Odyssey bull market is back. We're looking forward to continuing to move into 2024. Jordan, thanks so much, Ben.
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