Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
What’s The Password?
The Mouse House meant what it said about banning password sharing.
Starting Nov. 1, Disney+ will bounce subscribers off shared accounts in Canada, with other markets sure to follow, CNET reports. The company sent an email last week alerting Canadian subscribers to the new policy, with the account limited to household members only.
It’s still unclear how Disney will enforce the new rules, but clearly it’s taking inspiration from Netflix, which did similar anti-password sharing tactics in Canada before rolling them out to the US earlier this year.
Both streaming giants are trying to push more subscribers to their brand-new ad-supported tiers either by blocking account hangers-on or by raising ad-free prices. Starting next week, Disney will raise prices for ad-free tiers on both Disney+ and Hulu by $3 per month as an actual deterrent to its subscription revs – because knocking them into the ad-supported tier brings higher average revenue per user.
Leaving little left to question about its intentions with anti-account sharing, Disney is launching Disney+ with ads in Canada on the same day.
Can’t Stop The Bots
Some publishers believe that resistance is futile when it comes to generative AI bots soaking up their content. But they aren’t giving the farm away without a fight, Digiday reports.
More than 240 of the internet’s top 1,000 sites have blocked OpenAI’s ChatGPT web crawler from scraping their sites.
In private conversations, though, publishers say such efforts are essentially “symbolic.” After all, the same content is available on other channels, such as news aggregators, email newsletters and content syndication apps.
Plus, publishers are reluctant to disable Google and Microsoft bots for generative AI since doing so would de-index their sites from search.
However, Google and Microsoft aren’t taking a completely oppositional stance.
Google is giving publishers more control over what content they can allow to be scraped by AI and the contexts in which that content can be used. Microsoft introduced a site-crawler compromise by introducing tags at the page level, which means things like headlines or abstracts might be passed to the search engine while the whole article can’t be scraped.
All Your Usage Base Belongs To Us
Marketers that develop a reliance on generative AI tech should know that the other shoe has yet to drop. And that shoe is called “usage-based pricing.”
Generative AI is popular because it’s new, cool and useful. Advertisers, ad tech and publishers have rushed headlong into generative AI, mainly because it saves time and money (and it’s a useful trick for product placement).
But it’s also artificially cheap. The costs for OpenAI enterprise accounts and usage for similar AI services across the board are deflated because those companies are in early growth mode. Uber and Lyft likewise had lower prices than taxis for years – while they were supported by investor cash – before rationalizing their prices for profit and costing about the same as a normal cab.
The Information reports that the GenAI inflection point is almost here, and startups are trying to shift from payments by account seat to usage-based pricing.
And other SaaS vendors are switching to usage-based pricing, too. Otherwise, they could be charging customers per account seat while swallowing the fast-growing costs of data consumption.
But Wait, There’s More!
Reddit will no longer let you opt out of personalized ads. [The Verge]
Dentsu wants keyword-based contextual targeting and brand safety controls in CTV. [Ad Age]
BeReal denies that it’s losing steam. [TechCrunch]
The Anti-Defamation League releases a report on ads appearing next to hateful content on social platforms, with YouTube standing out as the worst offender. [release]
