Terms Of Surrender
Media companies and legal professionals see Meta’s new commercial terms as a data grab at the expense of site owners and a way to avoid paying AI licensing fees.
Meta’s current terms of service stipulate that business accounts on Facebook and Instagram consent to having their social media content scraped to train Meta’s AI models. But starting on October 30, Meta is extending its scraping privileges to all websites linked on its platforms, Niemen Lab reports.
There is no way for businesses to opt out, other than to stop advertising with Meta altogether.
Meta says the update consolidates a maze of policies in one place and doesn’t change any rules. Some legal experts warn otherwise. They argue that “the new language creates an opening for Meta to argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions,” like robots.txt files, according to Niemen Lab.
Danielle Coffey, president & CEO of the News/Media Alliance, calls the new terms “an appalling, bad-faith policy, and a clear abuse of the company’s market power” in a statement posted to social media.
It’s a “remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service,” Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, tells Niemen Lab.
Topic adds it “would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market.”
The Search Is Over
British news publisher The Independent’s social-commerce revenue narrowly surpassed SEO-based commerce revenue for the first time last month, its CEO Christian Broughton said at Digiday’s recent Media Strategies event in London.
Hooray! The turnaround plan is working!
If only.
The Independent doesn’t disclose its revenue mix, so it’s hard to say for certain whether it’s seen impressive growth in social commerce.
Rather, it could be the case that SEO-driven commerce (or, in layman’s terms, affiliate marketing) has been usurped by social commerce because of a precipitous, AI-driven drop-off in search traffic.
According to Broughton, the old business model in which publishers could buy and earn abundant traffic from search engines and social networks and monetize that traffic with ads is “dead.”
Ouch. No wonder social commerce has taken the baton.
Broughton cited four areas of investment that are expected to account for more than half of The Independent’s revenue this year: AI (because you have to fight fire with fire, we guess), creator-led studio work, ecommerce and memberships.
Trust Bot Verify
Ecommerce sellers must answer a tough question: “Do they embrace outside agents in hopes of a sales boost, or do they resist them?”
The Wall Street Journal notes that there are countervailing forces behind the question.
There’s the obvious traffic incentive for integrating with agents. But then there’s all the hassle AI agents bring: automated purchases to authenticate, inevitable returns and customer service issues, credit-card chargebacks.
Amazon blocks third-party AI agents because it has the leverage to do so and it knows the vast value of its data. But other big-name companies like Walmart and Target cut licensing deals with OpenAI, Anthropic, et al.
And it’s not just retailers that have to decide which incentives will win out.
Real estate brokerages and listings marketplaces like Zillow and Compass are clashing over how sellers can list and market their properties and how much transparency to give users.
The Journal, in a separate story this week, weighs the potential antitrust challenges of Compass, which became America’s largest brokerage this year, paying sellers to delist their properties from other platforms.
There’s another angle to the sudden lack of transparency in listings markets, though: Companies are preserving their data exclusivity – and thus their value to LLMs.
But again, there’s a tension between preserving your data value and licensing it for quick cash. Zillow, for instance, signed a deal with Google to license data for Gemini AI.
But Wait! There’s More!
Elon Musk has given about $190 million to the Republican party’s main Super PAC for Senate races. The Super PAC spent $159 million so far on advertising to support Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate in Musk’s home state of Texas. [The Texas Tribune]
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wins an electoral court challenge accusing Meta’s algorithms of being biased toward his opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, in the upcoming election. [NBC News]
If you’re an Android user looking to download WhatsApp, be careful – a clone of the app is appearing as a sponsored option above the real version when users search for it on the Play store. [The Verge]
Cops used AI-generated images of a child to catch a suspected predator on a dating app. [404 Media]
Half of holiday spending now comes from Gen Z and millennials. [Chief Marketer]
You’re Hired!
Jenna Bromberg is appointed CMO of Arby’s. [release]
Mike Feeley joins PubMatic as VP, North America. [LinkedIn]
Crossmedia names Avi Ben-Zvi to oversee paid social ops. [MediaPost]
