Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Heads In The Clouds
Amazon Advertising and AWS are bolstering one another in pursuit of marketing budgets, Digiday reports.
Both Amazon and Google have deeply intertwined their advertising and cloud businesses via clean rooms, which provide an advertising service built on cloud-based privacy tech. (You heard it here first: The bundling of those products will no doubt become an antitrust focal point.)
In the meantime, though, gotta get those ad dollars.
Amazon Advertising had strong Q4 growth, but AWS felt an advertiser pullback because marketers spent less on online ads (even if they spent more on Amazon ads) and thus required less analytics computing power.
That’s why AWS’s data clean room solution is a key component of Amazon’s offering.
“Advertisers are increasingly looking at group negotiations and know that they can get better pricing on both fronts [if they discuss things like cloud computing and media],” one anonymous AWS partner tells Digiday.
The same goes for the Google Cloud Platform, Ads Data Hub, Google Search and YouTube, et al.
“You can start with commercial synergies, and then move on to technological ones,” says the same anonymous exec. “More and more, these conversations are happening at a deeper level.”
No wonder that was an anonymous comment. Bundling could be a big no-no in the eyes of competition regulators.
Check Yourself
Twitter will begin sharing ad revenue with creators on its platform who pay for the Twitter Blue subscription, according to a tweet by owner Elon Musk.
But the announcement opens up more questions than answers regarding this revenue sharing program, The Verge reports.
The one thing Musk made clear is that the rev share can only be collected by Twitter Blue subscribers, meaning that creators have to pay for the privilege of monetization. Legacy nonpaid blue check accounts are out of luck because Twitter will be sunsetting their verification status “in a few months,” Musk says.
Twitter Blue subscribers will get a cut of the revenue from ads that appear in the reply threads under their posts. But Musk’s out-of-the-blue tweet didn’t specify what Twitter’s take rate would be, whether certain content could be demonetized or whether there are eligibility requirements to participate, aside from the Blue subscription. As of Friday, it was also unclear how creators might collect their payouts.
Twitter hasn’t offered a creator revenue share in the past, and it remains to be seen how much money is up for grabs, considering advertisers have fled Twitter since Musk took over, and the company only recently began advertising heavily within reply threads.
Can’t Spell “Paid” Without API
Speaking of Twitter, the company announced that it will end free access to its third-party API starting this week.
As has been true of Twitter changes since Musk’s takeover, the move is a grab for direct payments at the likely expense of ad inventory and the long-term vibrancy of the platform.
“Free API is being abused right now by bot scammers & opinion manipulators,” Musk tweeted Thursday. “Just ~$100/month for API access with ID verification will clean things up greatly.”
On the other hand, fraudsters and phishing scammers are more likely to pay that nominal fee than the thousands of popular free automated accounts. Take @tinycarebot, which tweets pleasant reminders and encouragement, or this account that tweets random lines from “Moby Dick.” And then there’s the internet treasure Emoji Mashup Bot, which posted a fitting send-off).
Álex Barredo, who operates @BigTechAlert, an account that tracks new follows and unfollows among notable industry names, tells BuzzFeed he may move to an API provider that can provide the service without the fee. That’s what most spam bots do already, he says, and Twitter doesn’t block it.
But Wait, There’s More!
The FTC is readying a potential antitrust suit against Amazon over its marketplace control, seller policies and/or Prime bundling practices. [WSJ]
Is this the early version of Microsoft Bing’s ChatGPT interface? [Search Engine Roundtable]
Kargo is acquiring VideoByte in a deal that could be worth up to $100 million. [Insider]
Google’s travel business proves stubbornly resilient as other advertisers retreat. [Skift]
Tech earnings have hit the pause button on the market’s recent rally. [Reuters]
You’re Hired!
Intersection promotes Sheri Ham to SVP and head of national and programmatic sales. [release]
