Will Meta “GIF Up” GIPHY? Facebook parent company Meta is in the hot seat again. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s competition watchdog, has called on Meta to offload Giphy, the GIF search engine and content animation service it acquired in May 2020, citing multiple anti-competition concerns in a press release. The CMA […]
Ads Are There For You Publishers attempting to cut themselves a slice of the commerce pie are running into an unlikely – or maybe not so unlikely – competitor: Google. Seems like everywhere they turn, there’s Google with a new way to penalize them for experimenting with alternative revenue sources. Take BuzzFeed, which has emphasized […]
Subscription Conniptions We live in a “subscription economy” now, writes Nieman Labs. You don’t buy the Aladdin DVD; you subscribe to Disney+ “until you die or your card expires.” But as subscriptions become more important business metrics, particularly in news and entertainment, it’s important to be honest about what companies mean when they report subscriber […]
Bolt From The Blue Twitter Blue, Twitter’s $3-per-month subscription service, was met with applause this month by digital media and news publishers thrilled to see a tech platform cut them a rev share. Participating publishers offer ad-free articles on Twitter’s in-app browser and earn a share of the Twitter Blue subscription pool in return. The […]
Street Appeal Outbrain will acquire Video Intelligence, a contextual targeting startup focused on video and CTV, for $55 million. It’s Outbrain’s first big move since the content recommendation company IPO’d in July. The deal makes sense. Web advertising isn’t dying, despite reports you may have heard. Then again, it’s also not in an impressive growth […]
Safari, Don’t Call It A Comeback Veteran browser developer Bruce Lawson recently penned a manifesto of sorts calling for Apple to “set Safari free.” But there is reason to believe the Safari WebKit group is being dusted off after a decade spent in storage in Apple’s attic. WebKit evangelist Jen Simmons tweeted out the group’s […]
All Charged Up It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s another random company launching an ancillary ad business! Volta, which operates almost 3,000 electric vehicle charging stations, introduced the Volta Media Network on Thursday. But the rollout is less random than it seems. According to Volta, a retail media play was always part of its […]
Un-Cornering The Market For years, the public market was quicksand for ad tech. Investors were unimpressed by early public companies like Rocket Fuel, Sizmek and Millennial Media, to name just a few. Wall Street also didn’t want to bet against advertising-dependent companies in competition with Google and Facebook. (The Trade Desk was a notable exception.) […]
Can You Samba Alone? Samba TV filed its S-1 on Tuesday, often the precursor to an IPO (although many are filed in vain). Samba is one of a few automated content recognition (ACR) companies that are specialists in recognizing and attributing content played on a smart TV. But the ACR market is tough for independents. […]
Turn The Other Cheap Zoom CEO Eric Yuan shot down proposals to introduce ads in 2019 and again in 2020, when some executives floated a chance to capitalize on the influx of traffic and new users during the pandemic. One person who heard Yuan’s response says he called the idea of ads on Zoom “cheap […]
