Edition #520
Off schedule, social & TV, creating for Netflix and AI performance reports.
A little off schedule this week, with travel interruptions at my end! Apologies.
My friend Noah was on Odd Lots recently, talking Claude Code. If you’ve heard of Claude Code but not really dug in, give it a listen (or a watch). Why the tech world is going crazy for Claude Code.
The other undercurrent in this weeks stories, is how digital video is coming back to TV. YouTube creators are striking more tv deals, social platforms are working to bring their content to physical TVs too. And even Substack is beta testing a TV app.
Some of you may have caught Ben Affleck’s comments on creating movies for Netflix, how you have to be way more overt with the plot, having it mentioned in dialogue multiple times. And you need to grab the audiences attention within the first 5 minutes with a big ‘event’. A different pacing to traditional movies.
And that’s because you’re competing against, people on their phones, different tabs on the laptop. Or just any endless number of activities.
It’s this that I think about, when I hear digital creators trying to push their content on physical TV. There’s some elements that will work but I don’t think it’s an immediate shoo-in. However, the main thing they’re leaning on, is being able to bring their audience with them.
There’s murmurs of an acquisition spree coming this year, and with $1-$2 trillion of IPOs in the backlog, why not. Heading into a declining interest rate environment, paired with AI improving operating leverage, it’s a perfect storm for combinations to drive multiples.
In short, you almost couldn’t get better conditions.
Notable stories this week
- Apple test blended ads in App Store Search.
- WTF is liquid content.
- ChatGPT users are about to get hit with targeted ads.
- Meta stock climbs 8% on revenue beat.
- Generational Breakdown: Gen Alpha.
- OpenAI lines up advertisers.
- Facing ‘AI slop’ and a trust problem, AI platforms invest in Super Bowl-level brand ads.
- The strongest signals yet of brand storytelling’s entertainment future.
- At Davos, Trust is a performance metric and CMOs are the owners.
- Why platforms are turning social video into living room TV.
- What the agentic web means for brands.
- Meta to test premium subscriptions on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.
- The AI takeover of all media is coming.
- Bari Weiss outlines editorial vision for CBS News.
- Can Video Podcasts succeed on Netflix where gaming could not?
- YouTube is reaching a ‘tipping point’ in convincing advertisers it really is TV.
- Future of Marketing Briefing: X claims an ad comeback, reality proves out a different thesis.
- Not all creators are the same: How the creator economy breaks down by business model.
- Prebid takes over AdCP’s code for creating sell-side AI agents.
- YouTube Overtakes Reddit as Go-To Citation Source on AI Search.
- Cloudflare’s Human Native acquisition signals a new content economy for publishers.
- Programmatic advertising on TV is set to increase this year.
- Bing Webmaster Tools testing new AI performance report.
- Yahoo debuts Scout, an AI search and companion experience.
- Google exploring ways to allow sites to opt out of AI Overviews & AI Mode.
- OpenAI is hiring engineers, not ad sellers, first to build its ad business.
- YouTube will soon let creators make shorts with their own AI likeness.
- Substack challenger Beehiiv expects revenue to nearly double on newsletter boom.
- Microsoft’s free Xbox Cloud Gaming is coming soon with ads.
- How apparel brands aim to win the spotlight at the Winter Olympics.
- TikTok turns to pixels to show advertisers what happens beyond its walled garden.
- X on what’s next for creator revenue sharing.
- X open sourced their algorithm.
- X is paying $1m to the top article of the next creator payout period.
- Substack is launching a TV app.
- How AI is reshaping advertising for the first time in a decade.
- Get ready for an adtech IPO rebound.
Deals/M&A
- Khaby Lame, has sold a stake in his company in an all stock deal valued $975m.
- JWX acquires Aug X Labs to transform existing content into multi-platform experiences.
- Camera raises $1.6m to protect the open web’s media quality.
- GIGR (Playad.ai) raises $5.4m to build multi-agent AI marketing workflows.
Campaign of the week
- Hims & Hers Big Game Commercial.
Smartest commentary
- [On AI, rapid change vs gradual] “The middle path requires something harder than prophecy. It requires patience, empiricism, and the willingness to admit we don’t know how this plays out. That’s not a satisfying story. But it might be the right one.” –Jackie Snow, Contributing Editor, Quartz.
Datapoints of note
- Newsletter ad spending surged 40% on Paved in 2025. Newsletter advertising adoption reached 64% of marketers in 2025, representing a 25% increase from the previous year.
- Beehiiv now draws more than 40,000 monthly active users, including nearly 15,000 paying subscribers, with roughly one in seven new writers arriving from Substack.
- Netflix now has 325m paid subscribers.
- 78% of B2B marketers said interactive and experiential content increases repeat engagement. But only 33% of them regularly build it into their campaigns.
- The in past 4 years, YouTube has paid creators over $100b.
- MrBeast has 1b followers. 68b annual views. 1.4b uniques.
- Threads usage overtakes X on Mobile. Threads 141.5m DAU vs 125m on X.
- Evercore sees OpenAI Ad revenue as $25b by 2030.
- Telly has 35,000 TVs in the field.
Events
- Next breakfast is coming up, let me know if you’d like to join.
That’s it for this week.
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