Street Fight Daily: Instagram Growing Rapidly, Gannett Earnings Suggest Bleak Outlook for Newspapers

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Instagram is Growing Faster Than Ever and Now Has 700 Million Users (Recode)
Instagram is growing faster than it ever has before. The photo and video app, which is owned by Facebook, now has 700 million monthly active users, adding 100 million new users in just over four months.

Made for Each Other: Wallets, Loyalty, and Mobile Payments (Street Fight)
David Card: It’s fair to say the local marketing industry has been a little disappointed by the adoption of mobile payments. The combination of a sluggish hardware upgrade cycle and consumer reluctance appears discouraging. But there are catalysts on the near horizon.

Gannett Earnings Forecast a Bleak 2017 for Newspaper Companies (Poynter)
Warnings were that the first quarter of 2017 would be about as bad financially as the final two of 2016 for newspaper organizations. That proved to be the case today as Gannett kicked off the reporting season for publicly traded companies.

The In-Between Stage for Startups: Visions of Growth and the Value of Pivots (Street Fight)
The stages of business growth may have no end point, but the opportunities that lie within them are more abstract than they seem. Moz CEO Sarah Bird says that Jeff Bezos’ well-known assertion that it will always be “day one” at Amazon resonates with her, but that financials can cloud the view of that goal.

Sense360 Raises $7 Million to Track Customers in Fast Food Restaurants (TechCrunch)
Using a cell phone’s location data and video monitoring, retailers have been tracking customers’ movements through stores in an effort to regain some of the ground lost to the online retail experience. At least, that’s the argument from stores. And now fast food restaurants are picking up the rallying cry.

Location Data Shows Which Brands Coachella Attendees Favor (Street Fight)
Attendees at the annual music festival may seem somewhat heterogeneous from the outside, but a new study of InMarket’s anonymized location data gives a sense of the concertgoers’ brand preferences, and insight into the effectiveness of sponsors’ campaigns.

Waymo Is Hitting Uber Where It Hurts (Quartz)
First Waymo, the self-driving car unit spun off by Google parent Alphabet, filed a lawsuit to halt Uber’s work on autonomous vehicles. Now the company has launched its first public trial of self-driving cars in the Phoenix area of Arizona, which happens to be where a self-driving Uber flipped over in late March.

Twitter’s Revenue Slides for First Time Ever (WSJ)
Twitter Inc. on Wednesday reported its first quarterly decline in revenue since going public, highlighting the stagnation the social-media company is battling.

German Data Commissioner Prohibits Mass Data Sharing Between Facebook and WhatsApp (VentureBeat)
Facebook is facing a new European headache over its WhatsApp acquisition after a decision today by the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection prohibits the two services from sharing the data of their respective users.

Fast Fashion Retailer Boohoo Grew Sales by 51% Last Year (Business Insider)
Online fashion retailer Boohoo announced surging revenue and profits on Wednesday, as it published its full-year results.

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