Cloud Fair
Last month, Cloudflare announced its much-heralded Content Signals Policy, which updated millions of websites’ robots.txt files so as to restructure the way crawlers access content. As in, restrict LLM web-scraping bots.
The policy allows website operators to opt in and out of scraping for specific use cases, including showing up in search results, training AI models and inputting content into AI models.
Cloudflare is hoping it can thread the needle between being useful to publishers, not causing publishers to lose search traffic and actually functioning as a block on LLM scrapers. Google currently bundles its AI crawler with the main search crawler, so nobody can risk its removal.
Whereas publishers are relatively powerless on their own, Cloudflare’s scale makes it more challenging for Google to simply choose not to scrape the affected sites or to ignore the new protocol altogether.
“Almost every reasonable AI company that’s out there is saying, listen, if it’s a fair playing field, then we’re happy to pay for content,” Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, tells Ars Technica. “The problem is that all of them are terrified of Google.”
So Long, SkipMode
TiVo has officially gotten out of the DVR business, as AdExchanger recently covered.
But even though the rise of on-demand and streaming services made much of TiVo’s original product obsolete, some consumers still don’t want to let go yet.
One man even told the Wall Street Journal that he uses his TiVo specifically to skip commercials and plans to adjust his current viewing habits if he now has to sit through all those ads.
It’s not a negligible number of households still hanging on to that lifetime subscription. In early 2023, parent company Xperi claimed that TiVo’s technology was present in 30 million homes. Compare that to TiVo’s current cross-screen advertising platform, which reaches 15 million households in 2025.
So where are those customers going to go instead? Odds are many will drop their cable provider without TiVo. But will they switch to streaming providers?
After all, having to spend more money on pricier subscription tiers to avoid commercials might be a nonstarter for these devoted ad-skippers.
“I still love my TiVo. And I’m at my wits end with all these streaming services that are ridiculously overpriced,” one user on the TiVo subreddit wrote in response to the news.
Not So Sweet
Nestlé has had a rough couple of years. Its stock chart looks like an underground rollercoaster. And a new CEO joined last month because his predecessor was unceremoniously let go upon discovery of an undisclosed romantic relationship with a direct subordinate. Not a Coldplay thing.
The headline news for Nestlé, which reported earnings Thursday, is a 16,000-person headcount reduction. The company is in straits largely because its baseline commodities, cocoa and coffee, have shot up in price.
Also, as execs told investors, the company must increase its marketing spend. Procter & Gamble, by contrast, said it spends less on marketing, having refined its online reach. There is, in other words, no easy fat to cut from Nestlé’s marketing budget.
Marketing investments, according to new Nestlé CEO Philipp Navratil, can include product innovation, distribution, packaging and digital capabilities overall.
Nestlé will invest more in “growth opportunities,” he said, “not only marketing spend per se.”
“I think one of the things we will look at going forward is whether marketing as a percentage of sales is the right individual metric,” Nestlé CFO Anna Manz told investors. “But that’s something we will come back to over time.”
But Wait! There’s More!
Apple TV (no more plus sign!) and Peacock are teaming up on a new streaming bundle. [The Verge]
Is Google’s new Nano Banana AI image generator an Adobe-killer? The company sure thinks so. [Business Insider]
Whoops! Reddit’s AI-generated Answers product is giving bad advice in medical subreddits, including suggesting heroin for pain management. [404 Media]
Essay: Digital media’s original sin was believing that digital journalists were in the tech business. [Talking Points Memo]
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