DNA, The Ultimate Acronym
California Attorney General Rob Bonta recently published a note exhorting Californians to “take control and request that a company delete their genetic data.”
Bonta is referring to 23andMe, the genetic testing and DNA data company now entering bankruptcy.
Operating a genetic testing business is difficult.
People only do the test once, and although the data is tantalizing from a monetization point of view, it must never be touched … until, uh, it’s acquired by private equity. Remember when Ancestry.com was sold to Blackstone in 2020?
In other words, it’s not a bad instinct to distrust a company that collects your genetic data, regardless of the stated reason.
In 2018, 23andMe sold a $300 million stake to pharmaceutical conglomerate GlaxoSmithKline, which shortly thereafter transformed into an exclusive data licensing partnership.
Instacart, Uber and countless other DTC startups are viable because they monetize customer data for advertising. It’s hard to stomach the idea that this might also be the case for DTC genetic testing.
Ancestry, by the way, was run by longtime Facebook vet Deb Liu between 2021 and January of this year. Anna Wojcicki, meanwhile, the CEO and founder of 23andMe – who departs this week with the bankruptcy announcement – was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin during the company’s early years. She’s also the sister of prominent former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who recently passed away from lung cancer.
What Happens To A Dream Referred
Last Wednesday, thanks to Threads, Newsweek had its biggest traffic day in five years, Digiday reports.
Other news sites, including Politico and Forbes, reported similar recent jumps in social referral traffic from Threads.
Yay! But it’s worth taking a step back, because there’s some sleight of hand happening here. Rather than great news for, well, news, this surge is actually a sign of how the once-teeming rivers of social media traffic have dwindled to almost nothing.
Platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn deliberately throttle visibility for any posts with outbound links and, Threads aside, Meta has pretty much spat out the whole news category. Facebook removed Instant Articles in 2023 and has deprioritized content shared by publishers since 2018.
So, yes, it is good that Threads has brought a little traffic bump for social news referrals. But, mostly, it demonstrates how desperate publishers are for a scaled platform that gives them even half a chance.
Pod One Out
Without even really trying to, YouTube has become the biggest platform for podcast consumption.
But podcasting is a tiny sliver of YouTube’s overall business, so podcasters haven’t had the same custom toolkits as on Spotify and Apple. Specifically, podcasters couldn’t serve dynamic host-read ads within the YouTube stream.
YouTube’s stance has been that accounts should hand their inventory over to Google and just collect the ad revenue share. Don’t be silly and imagine you’re better at this ads thing than Google.
But what about dynamic host-read podcast ads? That’s a unique bit of inventory with particular appeal (i.e., high CPMs), so it would make sense to create a mechanism to sell those placements directly.
And, imagine that, Semafor reports that YouTube is preparing to test new dynamically inserted host-read video ads.
For most YouTube users, host-read ads will be a small if not meaningless change. But for podcasters, it could mean much better direct ad deals, and it would incentivize hosts to push listeners (wait, viewers) to find them and subscribe on YouTube.
As always, YouTube can trip and fall into a category and still become the dominant force within a few years.
But Wait! There’s More
Without Google’s cookie cutoff, buyers show little urgency to adopt alternative IDs. [Digiday]
President Trump’s tariffs and tough talk have soured European businesses on US cloud giants. [Wired]
Meanwhile, a Trump H-1B visa crackdown could hit Big Tech hard, with Amazon suffering the most. [Rest of World]
Anthropic’s Claude AI is still only halfway through “Pokémon” after playing for roughly a month. (For context, the infamous Twitch Plays Pokémon stream beat it in 16 days with a daily average of 80,000 human participants.) [Ars Technica]
You’re Hired
Pinterest names Kate Hamill as its new VP of enterprise sales for North America. [Adweek]
Placements.io hires retail media vet Mark Donohue as its general manager of retail media. [release]
