NBCU

NBCU’s streaming losses were down to $100 million in Q2 from $348 million year-over-year, representing significant progress as the platform nears break-even.

SaaS companies are abandoning interoperability in search of more revenue; Spotify’s ad business is growing slower than expected; and sports is an upfronts winner for Disney and NBCU.

Netflix cracks Nielsen’s top 3 channels, but YouTube is still tops; CTV is maturing as a marketing channel, but it comes with zits; and Google rolls out another core update for search.

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.

CTV advertisers have carried over one-to-one programmatic logic from display and online video into a channel that behaves nothing like them. We need to stop chasing CTV impressions and start chasing impact.

Streaming is rapidly becoming a top performance channel for brands like NOBULL that are looking to drive outcomes up and down the funnel.

To zero in on premium inventory, The Trade Desk is analyzing metadata signals about ad placements and pushing adoption of its alternative ID. It’s also betting the farm on CTV.

In today’s newsletter: Amazon stands out among Upfronts CTV rookies; Google reveals how much revenue its ad tech divisions make; and women hold more marketing leadership positions than men, but churn is worse for women.

In today’s newsletter: Walmart’s hottest growth drivers are ads and subscriptions; why The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0 could be regulators’ next target; and how the growth of CTV content fortresses is preventing breakout streaming hits.

The SSP revised its full year outlook down by $10 million, due to a DSP partner adopting first-price auctions and weakness in key ad verticals. But it highlighted mobile in-app as a new key revenue stream.