It Pays To Advertise
PayPal is filling in what its advertising business will look like. Last year, PayPal hired Mark Grether, who previously started Uber ads, to lead the new retail media-esque segment. The company promptly began selling ads on its own apps: PayPal and Venmo.
This week, PayPal announced an off-site ads extension that serves ads across programmatic supply partners, with its payment data used for attribution and audience segmentation. But buyers must use the PayPal ad tech for the self-serve platform.
Off-site advertising is a logical extension. But would PayPal ever decouple its data from the ad tech? So The Trade Desk or whichever third-party company might use PayPal’s data for attribution or audience segmentation without going through PayPal?
Nope. Not happening. That’s what Grether told AdExchanger on Wednesday during the Possible conference in Miami.
“We’ve made the strategic decision to never sell data,” as a matter of privacy and user trust in the business, he said.
PayPal overlaps with Shopify, but the latter company doesn’t really touch ad tech. Its strategy is to be a data provider primarily to walled gardens. Even within the commerce media space, there is more than one playbook.
GAID Tidings
With Google reversing its cookie policy (again), what’s going to happen to the Android phone’s advertising identifier, GAID?
That’s the question Eric Seufert asks in his latest write-up for Mobile Dev Memo, wondering if the mobile identifier will now officially be welcomed back into the Google fold.
Google first announced its plans to do away with GAID in February 2022, alongside its introduction of the now-infamous Privacy Sandbox. At the time, the plan was to eliminate the mobile identifier within less than two years.
Of course, by the time 2024 rolled around, GAID was still alive and kicking. But even as Google was altering its plans from total cookie deprecation to a user choice model, the prognosis still didn’t look good.
However, Seufert argues that GAID is inherently more useful to Google on Android than web-based cookies are on Chrome (especially now that the browser’s ownership might be subject to change post-antitrust ruling). “If Google can promote more advertising revenue flowing through Android, it will benefit directly,” he writes.
So perhaps congratulations to GAID are in order for making it through the wilderness?
OpenAI, Still Scraping By
The open web is free for people – but it’s not free for scraping bots. Ziff Davis is the latest in a slew of media companies taking OpenAI to court over copyright infringement, alleging that AI bots are plagiarizing its content and diluting its intellectual property.
AI scraping is only getting bolder as publishers move to block more AI bots. “Gray bots,” generative AI bots from companies, including OpenAI, Google and TikTok, can scrape sites and access paywalled content without publishers’ consent. In case this wasn’t contentious enough, gray bots are also causing website operators’ costs to skyrocket; since January 2024, there has been a 50% increase in bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content, primarily attributed to AI bots.
Publishers have followed “opt-out” instructions and utilized tools like robot.txt to disallow access to specific sites and URLs, but AI bots have been bypassing these requests. Jason Clampet, CPO of travel news site Skift, told Digiday that the site was still getting scraped by GPTBot about 60,000 times a week after implementing robots.txt, and Ziff Davis’ lawsuit claims that GPTBot’s activity actually increased after their opt-out requests.
Clearly, these bots don’t like to play by the rules.
But Wait! There’s More
The US economy shrank (specifically, the country’s GDP fell 0.3%) in Q1, for the first time in three years. [WaPo]
AI firm Swivel raises $5.8 million to automate ad monetization tasks for publishers. [Adweek]
Content moderators for Meta, ByteDance and Alphabet are organizing to improve working conditions. [The Verge]
Clothing company REVOLVE is facing a lawsuit for allegedly improperly disclosing its sponsored content. [LA Times]
Michigan’s attorney general filed a lawsuit claiming that Roku illegally collected personal information of children without parental consent. [Variety]
Wikipedia promises it will not use AI to replace human volunteers. [TechCrunch]
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