Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Up For Sale
Disney is considering selling ABC and its eight local stations. Nexstar Media Group is a possible buyer, Bloomberg reports.
Disney CEO Bob Iger recently said he’s open to selling some of the company’s TV networks. Linear is a loss leader for the Mouse House, which wants to become a profitable streaming business.
Disney and Nexstar have only held preliminary talks, and it’s not yet certain whether the local broadcaster is best suited as ABC’s new owner.
Nexstar owns and partners with stations affiliated with Fox, Paramount and NBCUniversal, which might object to a competitor station getting thrown into the mix. Plus, Nexstar would have to divest one of its own stations to stay within the legal limit.
ABC also shares telecasts with other Disney-owned channels, such as ESPN, so a sale means dealing with new revenue sharing and distribution agreements.
“There’s a lot of questions that [still] need to be answered” first, said Tom Carter, adviser to Nexstar’s CEO and board. “We’re not leaning into any of this stuff without a clear path.”
A Programmatic Plea
Twitter (fine, X) is getting desperate for advertisers. The platform is tapping Google Ad Manager for more programmatic advertising to fill its coffers, Ad Age reports.
People and brands have ditched X since Elon Musk’s acquisition and all the brand-safety drama that followed. But even if users aren’t coming back, the platform could still get more demand if it makes more of its inventory available programmatically.
For now, only inventory on X’s timeline (aka the main feed) will be available through Google.
Timeline ads (compared to ads in comments or search results) have the most brand-safety reporting from third-party verification providers like DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. The reporting gives advertisers details about the types of posts that surround their ads.
X needs to demonstrate brand safety if it ever hopes to bring back momentum to the platform’s ad sales growth. (It also needs users, but that’s a different story.)
And if advertisers still aren’t buying in, they can exclude X from ad buys they make through Google.
Delete History
California’s state legislature passed the Delete Act last week, the LA Times reports.
Assuming it’s signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the law will go into effect in 2026. By filing a single request, consumers could demand that any personal information data brokers have collected on them be deleted.
The law would apply to the more than 500 data brokers that operate in California. It would affect financial and credit institutions, political campaigns and “people search” sites. Consumers could opt to exempt certain brokers from the deletion request.
Under California’s current privacy law, consumers have the right to request that businesses delete their information. But that right only applies to data collected directly from a consumer, which is a potential loophole for brokers to exploit if they obtain consumer data through other means.
A similar proposal at the federal level, which would put the FTC in charge of creating and overseeing a mechanism for data deletion requests, was reintroduced in Congress this summer, according to CyberScoop. But federal data privacy regulation has consistently stalled, so don’t hold your breath on that passing anytime soon.
But Wait, There’s More!
Comedian-turned-producer Byron Allen makes Disney a $10 billion offer for ABC. [The Verge]
EU fines TikTok $370 million for mishandling kids’ data. [NYT]
TikTok and the US government are negotiating a deal that would allow TikTok to continue to operate in the US. [WaPo]
Is Instacart’s proposed IPO price justified? [TechCrunch]
VideoAmp quietly lays off 10% of its staff after announcing a $150 million funding round. [Axios]
Here’s a tool for checking whether Twitter is throttling links to sites (like Instagram). [The Markup]
Big surprise: Twitter users don’t want to call it X. [Ad Age]
