Edition #502
On ads are the ultimate micropayments platform, LOADS of AI stories, Vogue goes amiss & acquisitions.
“If you really want to get to a billion and then five billion people, you can’t do that with a paid offering… you need an indirect business model. Ads are the obvious one.”
-Marc Andreesen.
Every now and again, someone talks about making micro payments for content. And the reason it never works is, decision fatigue. It’s easier to get someone to decide once to subscribe to a publication (and they earn $70-$100 from that decision) than to ask someone to make 100 decisions at $1 each.
But ads are the ultimate micro payments, they’re fast, frictionless, you see an ad, you get access. And they’re scaled.
As Marc points out, if you want to get access to the most amount of people, you need ads.
Notable stories this week
- New on Substack A/B testing headlines.
- Snap expands Sponsored Snaps.
- Venture firm hires ex-journalists for AI comms ‘accelerator’.
- How Perplexity ranks content.
- How Google is pitching AI mode search ads to marketers.
- Can an ad tier solve Apple TV+?
- Building goals-based optimization for B2B.
- Is Beehiiv the Next Billion-Dollar Newsletter Startup?
- Reddit wants to be a search engine now.
- New York Post to launch the California Post in LA.
- Spotify user growth soars but social charges impact profit.
- Spotify’s Lee Brown joins DoorDash as Chief Revenue Officer.
- Creators flock to dedicated platforms as AI content floods social media.
- AI is unlocking more ad conversions on Instagram & FB. And Grok will play a big role in X’s ads.
- Nielsen launehes outcomes marketplace.
- A wish list with limits: What publishers want to see from Google’s AI licensing deals.
- ChatGPT confessions gone, they are not.
- At the tail end of Upfronts, Nielsen finds itself back in the doghouse.
- Dotdash rebrands to People Inc.
- Brands prioritizing engagement, loyalty in influencer marketing.
- Is AI killing Google Search? It might be doing the opposite.
- Google Ai Mode bringing more links inline.
- OpenAI has hired PHD to handle global media buying and planning.
- Google’s new Web Guide search experiment organizes results with AI.
- The Great Decoupling of search and the birth of the agentic web.
- The Substack AI report.
- How three newsrooms are using AI to grow, engage and retain audiences.
- Vogue put AI generated ads in its magazine.
- Advertisers and marketers navigate crowded, fragmented measurement industry.
- AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks.
- TikTok to roll out new tool for advertisers to follow people beyond the app.
- Zillow pilots containerized RTB.
- Google announces Veo 3 Fast for programmatic video advertising.
- Why ad fraud rates haven’t budged in 15 years.
Deals/M&A
- Contentsquare enters definitive agreement to acquire Loris Ai.
- Ad giant Publicis is shopping for AI companies.
- Skift Acquires Women-Focused Events, Membership Asset, Audio/Visual Co.
- Conversion, an AI-native marketing automation startup, has raised $28 million in Series A funding.
- This Ad Tech OG’s AI-Powered Analytics Startup Just Raised $9M In Series A Funding.
- This is the pitch deck Kontext used to raise $10m to power real-time ads in AI chatbots.
- Inside the creator economy’s M&A boom.
Campaign of the week
- Lewis Hamilton & Perplexity, giving the live product demo.
Smartest commentary
- “Yes, some will use it to generate generic slop. Or to automate what can’t be automated. Yes, performance marketing will become even more of a race to the bottom. But let’s be honest—that was already happening. The sea of sameness didn’t start with AI. It started when we stopped taking risks.” –Stef Hamerlinck.
Datapoints of note
- The streaming share of ad impressions has grown some 44% for the first half of 2025, its overall share of total TV/streaming ad impressions is still at a modest 16% share compared to linear TV.
- From the Substack AI report, of 2000 publishers. 45.4% said they’re using AI.
52.6% said they’re not. - ASC campaigns win early (9% better at midpoint) but Manual campaigns destroy them long-term. Manual [optimizations] delivered $12 MORE revenue per $100 spent by the end.
- Skift should hit $25m in revenue this year.
- The United States spent $271.2 billion on digital advertising in 2024, more than any other country, yet fraud still affects 16.73% of ad transactions.
- NYTimes revenue jumps 9.7% off back of growth in advertising & subscriptions.
- After opening a Sponsored Snap from the chat feed, users exhibit significantly higher engagement per full screen ad view, driving a two times increase in conversions, a 5x increase in click to convert ratios, and a 2x increase in website dwell times compared to other inventories.
- Patreon crosses $10b creator payment milestone.
- ChatGPT crosses 700m weekly active users.
Events
- Drinks in London coming up in August, let me know if you want to join.
That’s it for this week.
|
|---|