Nextdoor’s Next Step; Sports Surge Drives Upfronts
Nextdoor isn’t ruling out AI data licensing, but it has concerns; NBCU touts sports and streaming as drivers of its record Upfronts; and Scholastic follows kids and parents to YouTube.
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Daily News Roundup
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The Amazon Approach, Minus Amazon; Peeking Over Paywalls
Amazon’s DSP enjoys many advantages; More on the Cloudflare controversy; the European Commission moves forward with its age verification laws.
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AI Search Clickthroughs Aren’t Clicky Enough; How Content Farms Bought The Farm
Can Google AI overview and other search chatbots cancel each other out?; say goodbye to both Demand Media and Linda Yaccarino.
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Amazon Pays Up For Old Media; Begun, The Browser Wars Have
Amazon locked in two more publishers for its AI shopping engine; AI companies are working on web browsers now; and platforms have a hard time telling AI from reality.
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Get Your Clicks While You Can; WPP’s No Good Very Bad Year
AI Overviews are even dinging Google Search ads’ traffic; WPP downgrades its earnings forecast; and Google’s AI competitors launch their own web browsers.
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Don’t Trust The AI Salesman; The Upfront Slowdown
AI Overviews makes dodgy product recommendations because it scrapes marketing copy; discrepancies in TV ratings hamper upfronts negotiations; and why mar tech companies are building software fortresses.
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Can Cloudflare Really Block Google’s AI Crawlers?; Knock It Off, Knockoffs
Google challenges Cloudflare’s anti-scraping tech; are dupes plagiarism?; and web traffic is careening off a cliff.
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Microsoft Washes Its Hands Of Ad Tech; Google’s Network To Get Work
Microsoft is deprioritizing ad tech; Google wants to get back into publishers’ good graces; and Meta has been quietly developing proactive chatbots.
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Amazon’s Damned-If-You-Don’t Pitch; Why Regular Isn’t Easy
How Amazon uses the threat of knockoffs to win brand business; YouTube introduces new creator video metrics; and Substack is the latest platform to pivot to video.
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The Hold On Holdcos; Temu’s Baaaaack
Have agency holdcos put too many eggs in the AI basket?; Temu has come back to us now at the turn of the tariff tide; and Cloudflare wants to help sites from getting scraped.
Must Read
Magnite Targets CTV, SMBs And Google's SSP Market Share
The SSP is betting on the DOJ’s antitrust remedies, plus closer relationships with agencies, DSPs and mid-sized advertisers, to help it eat some of Google’s lunch.
Zillow Pilots Containerized RTB, As It Rethinks The Equation Of Quality And Cost
Zillow is the pilot brand advertiser to test a new programmatic buying strategy known as containerized RTB. The strategy embeds the DSP or ad-buying platform intelligence, in this case the startup Chalice Custom Algorithms, within the SSP, which is Index Exchange.
Shell Shutters Its Volta EV Charging And Media Division
Volta Media, which is owned by the gas station and energy giant Shell, will be shuttered by November and its network of more than 2,000 charging stations will be dismantled this year.
People Inc. Has A New Name, But It Still Faces The Same Old Google Search Traffic Drought
People Inc. – the former Dotdash Meredith – is fighting on multiple fronts to keep its business growing as Google Search declines precipitously as a source of referral traffic.
More Like No Yield: A New Book Explores How Google Soaked Up The Web’s Ad Profits
“I tried to write it so it’s not exclusively for ad tech nerds,” Ari Paparo told AdExchanger of his new book, about Google’s advertising dominance. “And I mean that affectionately.”
CleanTap Filters Out ‘Sorta CTV’ Placements Before Buyers Can Bid On Them
CleanTap, an ad tech startup launched by the founder of Method Media Intelligence, wants to separate the wheat from the chaff in CTV by serving as a curation layer between DSPs and SSPs.