Who Needs Sports?
The Washington Post is bracing for massive layoffs that have employees questioning owner Jeff Bezos’s commitment to the newspaper’s long-term health, Status reports.
WaPo reportedly plans to slash 100 of its 800 newsroom positions next month, with the cuts likely to primarily impact the sports, metro and foreign news teams. In total, 300 positions may be eliminated across the company.
Why the layoffs? WaPo’s advertising and subscription businesses have been struggling for years.
WaPo infamously lost a quarter million digital subscribers, or 10% of its subscriber base, after Bezos spiked the paper’s planned endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 US presidential election. As of June, its paid print circulation was just 97,000. On top of that, Johanna Mayer-Jones, WaPo’s ad chief, was reportedly eyeing an exit back in October – although she’s still currently with the company.
The decision to focus newsroom layoffs on the sports desk bodes ill for WaPo’s turnaround prospects. Its major news rivals, including The New York Times, have doubled down on sports as a way to attract advertisers that are hesitant about appearing beside hard news coverage.
Oh, and the layoffs are expected to hit just as the Winter Olympics are set to begin in February.
Stock In Trade
The Trade Desk is dealing with all sorts of in-the-weeds programmatic drama. There’s its fierce rivalry with Amazon putting pressure on margins, not to mention in-fighting with Prebid over transaction IDs.
But there’s another issue: TTD’s leadership churn.
Programmatic vets surely took note of Jud Spencer’s departure in December and CRO Jed Dederick’s exit not long before that. Meanwhile, the COO role was unfilled for years before Vivek Kundra came aboard last year. And there hasn’t been a CTO since Dave Pickles left in 2023.
Now, Alex Kayyal, who joined as CFO only six months ago, is stepping down, Adweek reports. TTD also had another CFO transition 18 months prior.
The Trade Desk’s CFO turnover may not ring all that loudly in the programmatic space, but Wall Street investors consider it an important signal. And, indeed, TTD’s shares dropped by more than 6% after the announcement.
In a research note, Wells Fargo wrote that the news about Kayyal only adds to TTD’s “continued fundamental and narrative volatility.”
Losing the narrative, as they say, barely registers in third-party programmatic. Favorable headlines about Amazon DSP can stack to the sky without much affecting TTD’s actual performance. But when the Wall Street narrative breaks, it goes straight to the market cap.
The Ads Add Up
Few places are pricier to run ads than the Las Vegas Sphere or during an NFL game – unless, apparently, you’re buying a placement in ChatGPT.
That’s right.
Scarcely a week after OpenAI announced its plan to launch ads in the coming weeks, ChatGPT has reportedly set a baseline CPM of approximately $60, according to The Information. That price rivals some of the most coveted inventory out there.
Sixty bucks would be at the high end for a YouTube campaign, while CPMs on Meta, by comparison, are often in the $10 to $20 range. And OpenAI doesn’t even have an attribution or a pixel network to track and credit conversions.
On the other hand, recall that Netflix launched with a $60 CPM baseline, which has long since rationalized to $30 or less.
Being among the earliest advertisers in ChatGPT will no doubt carry some bragging rights, sure. Just imagine all the screenshots and organic sharing those ads will generate.
Still, The Information writes, with OpenAI’s ads business in its infancy, “many advertisers will likely hold off on devoting significant parts of their budgets to ChatGPT ads until they see whether those ads are driving sales.”
Not everyone is willing to shell out for a shiny object.
But Wait! There’s More!
Inside the debate over agentic advertising and standards. [Digiday]
How MrBeast Burger, the YouTuber’s eponymous food and delivery brand, went so very wrong. [Business Insider]
The European Commission is investigating whether X’s Grok chatbot violates the Digital Services Act’s rules on illegal content sharing. The EC also extended its ongoing probe into X’s recommendation engine. [release]
WPP Media introduced a new suite of “Super Agents” within its AI marketing platform, WPP Open. [release]
Data suggests that YouTube has overtaken Reddit as the most frequently cited social platform in AI-generated responses from large language models. [Adweek]
