Edition #543
YouTube mixing it up, OpenAI expands to SMB advertisers and 1,741 consent partners.
YouTube renewed their distribution deal with Peacock
There’s lots brewing over at YouTube, FastCompany has how they’re on a decluttering mission, making the app more design-led. Versus the older approach of every layout change, optimized to a specific metric. The effect is improving the overall aesthetic.
They also renewed their Peacock deal, helping in the battle for the CTV Home Screen. They removed 130,000 AI slop channels. And separately they also elevated the amount of views creators need to opt into monetization.
You start to piece these together, and from an advertisers perspective, you start to see that this can mean a richer environment for your brand. The recommendation algorithm is also good but meant for a brand, you never know what your content appears behind.
This has meant, instinctively, you might upload to Instagram instead. And in a competitive market, it’s the content.
Notable stories this week
- Perplexity blocks Time’s ads served to AI agents, calling them ‘deceptive’.
- MFA Ad spend is increasing. Is AI slop to blame?
- There’s no benefit to blocking: Why Man of Many is welcoming 1.3m AI crawler visits a week.
- Track Star is what a media company looks like now.
- Native Advertising didn’t die. Now it’s signal aware and back on plan.
- Apple in talks to pay publishers to improve AI-powered Siri.
- The top 50 US news websites.
- Humans will be a rounding error on the internet.
- The end of Google Search and the internet as we know it.
- Controversy on Spotify’s new ‘skip’ button.
- X replaces ‘misaligned’ revenue sharing program with Original Content Rewards.
- Even the New York Times “isn’t immune” to declining search traffic.
- LinkedIn update feed display to drive more post replies and comments.
- Meta is building their own search engine.
- VideoAmp cuts staff as AI Agents take center.
- OpenAI is coming for SMB advertisers. And is bringing ads to Brazil and Mexico.
- The opportunity and threat of Google buyer direct.
- The implications of AI slop removals.
- How Instrument won Croc’s business in a day.
- Where Media Money wants to go.
- Nexxen raises its full year guidance.
- How Claude’s watermark might work.
- YouTube announces monetization changes that make it harder for new creators to make money.
- New York Post launches “Hamilton” AI chatbot.
- Data Collaboration takes centre stage in the Global Agency Battlefield.
- Zoom relies on creators to boost AI search results.
- 99% of my website traffic is bots.
- The week the open web died.
- “Influencer cliff” looms as platforms prioritize engagement over scale.
- Why Georgia-Pacific bet the future of programmatic on supply, not demand.
- Microsoft Clarity now separates branded and non-branded AI citations.
- Cloudflare wants to tell brands whether AI is actually recommending them.
- Moloch launches an agency partner program, in part to expand beyond mobile programmatic.
- PubMatic appoints Megan Ramm as Globel Chief Revenue Officer to drive growth in AI Ads.
- Europe, Croissants and 1,741 consent partners.
- YouTube is on a major decluttering mission.
- Building A Scaled Email Curation Stack.
Deals/M&A
- Nielsen’s $2b DoubleVerify acquisition is a big play for CMOs.
- Gravity raised $30.5m to place ads inside AI chatbots. Its next product targets the bots themselves.
- Passionfroot raises $15m Series A.
Campaign of the week
- Netflix put a real person in their billboard.
Smartest commentary
- “The online dictionary’s consent banner asks users to wave through tracking by 1,741 separate “partner” companies with a single click. noyb did the math: reading every one of those partners’ privacy policies, at six minutes each, would take 170 hours.” –Shirely Marschall.
Datapoints of note
- Meta Partnership Ads hit $10b.
- 81% of respondents think marketers overstate their AI proficiencies, and another 47% believe senior leadership lags behind all other employee levels.
- Threads MAU hit 495m in June, versus 302m for X and 10.4m for BlueSky.
- Netflix nearly doubles US upfront ad commitments.
- 84% of B2B marketers pay to rent audiences they don’t own, and Breaker says newsletters fix that.
- Since opening its site to AI crawlers earlier this year, the publisher has recorded 1.3 million AI crawler visits each week and referrals from AI platforms are accelerating. Referrals from Claud and Gemini, Google’s LLM, have surged 594 and 539 per cent, respectively. Organic search traffic, it said, has also climbed 49 per cent since February.
Events
- Advertiser CMO breakfast in October.
That’s it for this week.
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