Criteo Loses A Comma
Criteo shares dropped by 24% yesterday after reporting sluggish, down-trending Q2 earnings. The company’s market cap dipped below $1 billion for the first time since the 2020 stock market crash.
Criteo is dealing with tough headwinds. Retargeting has lost steam, for one. And so Criteo needs big growth elsewhere to buoy the softening of its long-time core business.
Also, there was an awkward financial misstep. Criteo jumped the gun by forecasting certain enterprise ad platform commitments that never materialized, so its reported earnings have consistently fallen below its guidance to investors this year.
Criteo has avoided naming the specific companies that reversed their ad commitments, but one such example is Target’s Roundel, which Criteo CFO Sarah Glickman accidentally disclosed – with an audible “Oh no, I’m sorry!” – during an investor call in February. Also, btw, Glickman is departing the company after six years, although she’s sticking around until the end of September in an advisory role to help with the transition.
Criteo CEO Michael Komasinski noted that enterprise clients “have changed investment tactics and we were unsuccessful in retaining that budget as they shifted to other tactics in the funnel.”
Relatedly, Criteo’s largest growth sources from its Q2 earnings include relatively new platform channels, such as Meta, Google Search and, the latest, OpenAI.
“We need to be able to capture that share shift when that happens,” Komasinski said.
Playing The Long Game
Sports streaming distributor FuboTV’s earnings for last quarter are a mixed bag.
The company closed the quarter with $1.48 billion in revenue. After streaming the 2026 FIFA World Cup, FuboTV narrowed losses to $25.7 million, down from a $38 million net loss last year. Its subscriber count grew 2% year over year, bringing its total to 5.75 million paid subs.
On the brighter side, FuboTV touted that its integration with Disney Ad Server is complete. Which is no surprise, considering FuboTV and Disney closed a deal early last year to merge the former with the latter’s Hulu + Live TV offering. Now that the tech stacks are merged, FuboTV claims the result is both higher fill rates and the ability to command higher rates for ads.
FuboTV and Disney aren’t the only companies bragging about the benefits of combining tech stacks. Paramount Skydance made similar claims during its earnings call this week.
FuboTV also credits its presence on Disney platforms, including ESPN, for its slight subscriber uptick.
At this point, FuboTV and Disney are so close, their cycles are synced. (As in, their earnings cycles – both companies reported their Q3 fiscal earnings on Wednesday.)
Ew
Meta tends to get in trouble for three major reasons lately: running exploitative or scammy ads, pushing AI-generated content or tools without proper guardrails and causing harm to children.
Amazingly, this story has all three.
Wired reports that over the last nine months, Meta has run “dozens of paid ads” that depict minors in a sexually suggestive light, including some explicit examples of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Researchers at the Tech Transparency Project found over 50 ads containing abuse content in Meta’s ad library, all of which were published between November last year and the start of August. The ads weren’t actively being shown to most users, but they were still visible in the ad library before Meta recently removed them.
When the BBC conducted a similar investigation earlier this year, it found about 30 ads promoting CSAM had been running on Instagram in India. When one of the ads was reported, Instagram replied that it “does not go against our community standards.”
Content moderation at scale is already a constant game of horrific Whac-A-Mole. This scandal only serves to highlight how much AI technology can exacerbate, both by streamlining the creation of explicit material and by failing to adequately flag that material once it goes live.
But Wait! There’s More!
Despite increased profits and revenue growth, The New York Times’ stock dropped over 13% due to its projected decrease in subscriber growth. [WSJ]
Google faces a class action lawsuit in the UK over allegedly abusing its dominance over mobile, apps and search advertising. [Bloomberg]
Reddit intends to show more evergreen content to its users and make its search bar more visually engaging by integrating advertising modules. [Search Engine Journal]
Sony is looking to build out its ads team for PlayStation. [Digiday]
App developers may be inadvertently leaking users’ locations to advertisers, thanks to SDKs that collect location data. [Mashable]
