Private Traffic [July 5, 2022]

The solution was private traffic, an umbrella term for various forms of digital brand outreach that are much more personalized than the one-to-many, one-way email marketing model we’re used to. The traffic is “private” because brands fully own the channels where they communicate with customers and can contact those customers anytime, as opposed to ... See more

In the U.S., email marketing is the default way for brands to initiate and maintain relationships with customers, and it has been for years. But email isn’t popular in China — a lot of people use WeChat for all of their messaging needs, including for business. Private traffic is basically what Chinese brands came up with as an email-free equivalent... See more

Now the question is: What will private traffic look like in the U.S.? I don’t know the answer yet because email marketing is still so prevalent. (And, yes, at least it works great.) But I do know that one-way blasts can’t compete with real-time, two-way messaging, especially when Gen Z’s on one end of the conversation.

Outside of the open web, email, and text, there isn’t a scaled D2C channel that is not controlled by a major platform. So the primary way that startups have to reach customers today is via paid acquisition. That’s why the question an investor asks today to a startup that is scaling is: where are you buying audience and what are your customer acqui

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3. Brands can no longer attain hyper-growth using digital Facebook and Google advertising.

If you look at the sources of traffic for Barton’s companies, the vast majority of their traffic comes from search or direct. This makes their user acquisition far cheaper than any company that relies primarily on paid acquisition. It’s this ability to get free acquisition at scale that made it possible to build companies in these otherwise difficu... See more