Breaking News
One cruel irony of the news business is that news stories drive immense value and earnings – just relatively little for the news publisher.
For instance, there is a growing list of ad industry information resources and publishers that aggregate and curate news from other sources. One example, as profiled in The Wall Street Journal, is the popular social program Breaking and Entering, which provides daily one-minute wrap-up videos of industry news to know (with a Barstool Sports-esque, bro-culture flair).
There are also longtime programmatic entrepreneurs and operators who’ve turned to content marketing and media, such as Marketecture, which owns AdTechGod among other industry social accounts or blogs.
That’s not to mention public relations, which, as a category, earns more than the entire news business. And PR firms’ earnings derive from “earned media” generated by news companies.
Breaking and Entering, for one, is a refreshing change, according to Jaime Robinson, creative chief and co-founder of the agency Joan Creative. That’s because, she says, the publication brings “a lack of taking anybody or themselves so seriously that is, I think, very needed right now in 2025.”
Ads Ain’t Bad For Meta
Meta’s announcement this week that it’s bringing ads to WhatsApp – despite past refutals – is being taken as a betrayal by some users, The Verge reports.
And it’s not just the fact of adding ads to a once famously anti-ad messaging app. Users also fear the specter of privacy invasions.
“Meta has taken a service that promised no ads and minimal data collection and warped it into one more tentacle of its surveillance advertising empire,” says the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s John Davisson.
If Meta was willing to torch WhatsApp’s ad-free reputation, it must have needed the revenue, right? Not exactly, writes Eric Seufert in Mobile Dev Memo. Meta’s ad revenue growth has slowed since the post-pandemic highs of 2022, but has remained healthy.
The real reason Meta brought ads to WhatsApp – and also Threads earlier this year – is because it has university-backed research to support the idea that ads don’t actually degrade the user experience, Seufert writes.
Plus, Meta’s Advantage+ ad optimization platform can now effectively inject more targeted ads without turning off users. So Meta has little to lose and a lot to gain by expanding ads across its touch points.
But Wait! There’s More
Reddit is influencing brand discovery via AI searches. What are marketers doing about it? [Ad Age]
Another day, another (technically illegal) TikTok ban extension. [TechCrunch]
Netflix subscribers in France will soon be able to watch commercial broadcast TV directly through the service. [The Verge]
X sues New York State over a law requiring social media sites to disclose how they handle extremist hate speech. [Fortune]
Amazon, Verizon and other major companies have ended or reduced marketing and sponsorships for Juneteenth celebrations this year fearing political backlash. [Popular Information]
Several executives from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI are being made lieutenant colonels in the Army Reserve. [Gizmodo]
News consumption continues to fragment across platforms as engagement with traditional media continues to fall. [Reuters Institute]
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