Edition #503
AI Browsers, Bilts Roomies & new web paradigms.
With Perplexity placing a bid for Google Chrome this week, it has AI Browsers under the spot light. Having had a play with them, the best analogy is, it’s like an enhanced web experience.
For no extra effort from the web, it adds a new dimension and actions you can take. Can you get by without one today? Well yeah, we all did not long ago.
But the play is to just use it as your regular browser, and discover the new use cases. Once you have them, maybe you won’t.
Comet, DiaBrowser, Opera Neon (coming), ChatGPT Browser (coming), CoPilot in Edge.
These are very much desktop software paradigms though, to work on mobile, the experience needs to be different. There isn’t enough screen real estate, and maybe this is what pushes more ‘speech driven’ actions.
If you haven’t had a play though, worth it. At some point, Google Chrome will launch a mainstay, FireFox will too – and Safari will.
As to web paradigms, it changes how ads are viewed, what ‘engagement’ means on a site, what sort of information you share. Remember the whole web is built around this not existing, but every new website from here on out will be built with it in mind.
It also is adding a lot of confusion around the AI Bot/Crawler debate, LLMs crawl content to include in their index, AI agents will also visit content. The difference is an AI agent is acting on behalf of someone or an application. So the web will find new norms for this. An imperfect analogy is web accessibility standards, we all need new protocols. I even saw YC has an email platform for AI agents in its batch.
Notable stories this week
- Analysis of 1827 Real User Prompts from ChatGPT.
- Inside Bilt’s Popular Roomies series.
- Dick’s Sporting Goods Launches Entertainment Studio.
- The Trade Desk’s AI platform sparks concerns over biased inventory.
- Why Brands Like State Farm and Argos Are Going All-In on Social-First Episodic Videos.
- Airbnb shifts ad focus ‘from TV to social’ as marketing investment grows 19%.
- Kevel partners with Carwow.
- Bilt rewards is behind Roomies.
- Reddit will block the Internet Archive.
- The new startup using AI to solve growth marketer ‘chaos’.
- AI startup Perplexity makes bold $34.5b bid for Google Chrome’s browser.
- As creator fees rise, so does the confusion over what to pay.
- Clankers, Grocers and bot-lickers; AI slurs are here to stay.
- Google has been quietly using Gemini AI to weed out ad fraud and invalid traffic.
- Sarah Kehaulani Goo, former EIC of Axios, will be President of Washington Post’s creator network.
- Trade Desk downgraded as Amazon, AI reshape digital market.
- WalletHub removed 40k pages from Google and other AI search engines.
- Most AI crawlers ignores LLMs.txt.
- In AI and data, WPP Media revives a playbook it thinks it can finally win.
- Streaming enters its profit era.
- Atlas Obscura’s next chapter.
Deals/M&A
- Advertising mogul Sorrell approached about S4 Capital deal.
- Vice Media raises $75m credit facility.
Campaign of the week
Smartest commentary
- “Creating @RoomiesRoomiesRoomies as its own entity was crucial for authenticity. If this lived on the main Bilt account, people would immediately see it as branded content and approach it differently — admittedly probably much less. By giving Roomies its own space, we let it be entertainment first. People follow because they’re invested in the characters and story, not because they’re thinking about a product or being talked into adopting something. I think that separation has been key to the organic growth and genuine engagement we’re seeing.” –Cyrus Ferguson.
Datapoints of note
- A pilot program run between December 2023 and October 2024 resulted in a 40% reduction in mobile IVT stemming from what Google calls “deceptive or disruptive” ads, which may include a variety of hidden ads or unexpected pop-up ads that violate its placement policies.
- ChatGPT now referring 8% of traffic to Vercel.
- Meta says most time on FB and Insta is spent watching videos, and only 7% of time on Insta & 17% on FB involves consuming content from friends.
- Pinterest grows ad revenue 17%.
Events
- Drinks in London coming up in August, let me know if you want to join.
That’s it for this week.
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