Paid Agents
Did Shopify and OpenAI just get scooped?
A secret revealed by, uhh …. ChatGPT [H/t Brandon Doyle], shows that ChatGPT’s new public web bundle includes a “shopify_checkout_URL” string.
Nothing official is confirmed, and there’s no guarantee a checkout deal between the two comes to fruition. Still, the idea has excited great speculation.
Brian O’Kelley made a pitch for this kind of partnership to support the open internet. As in, rather than default to or use one exclusive partner for payments, ChatGPT should enable numerous options for publishers or merchants.
Might ChatGPT and Shopify forge a kind of affiliate partnership? The URL tag in the code string can be interpreted that way.
Even in cases where generative AI search and a payment processor have been inked, there’s still no clear direction in terms of monetization. Earlier this month, the Perplexity AI search engine added a licensing partnership with firmly.ai, which does checkout integrations.
Taz Patel, Perplexity’s head of advertising, told AdExchanger that Perplexity won’t collect affiliate fees – so no cut when it generates a sale. The checkout feature also has no advertising at the moment, but only merchants who are partners get the one-click payment option.
Consent, Tag And Equity Management
Didomi, a Paris-based consent management platform, made twin announcements on Tuesday. For one, the company added 72 million euros (about $83.4 million) from the private equity (PE) firm Marlin Equity Partners for an undisclosed stake. Didomi is using that in part to acquire Addingwell, a tag management platform also based in France.
The deal “strengthens Didomi’s position as a key and ambitious player in the consent management and privacy market,” writes Didomi co-founder and CEO Romain Gauthier in the release.
Jeremy Nakache, Marlin’s managing director, said the firm can “help them reach the next level through sustained organic growth and potential new acquisitions.”
Marlin has a track record of acquisitions and integrations. Bazaarvoice, for instance, was taken off the Nasdaq by the PE firm in 2018. Since then, it’s acquired two influencer tech platforms, Affable and Influenster, the contextual commerce companies Curalate and Granify, and AddStructure, which analyzes consumer-generated content for ecommerce search and marketing analytics.
Also, deep cut, the Sizmek-Rocket Fuel frankenstack, which was assembled by Vector Capital, fell apart in 2019 shortly after the investor who believed in the thesis and oversaw the acquisitions left Vector for … Marlin Equity.
News You Can Lose
After Canada passed a law requiring social media to pay news publishers for sharing their links, Meta banned news from Instagram and Facebook in Canada.
Meta’s ban impacts what news Canadians are seeing ahead of the April 28 election. And only one in five Canadians knows Meta made the change.
Now hyperpartisan misinformation aggregators are filling the void, The New York Times reports.
Take Canada Proud, a right-wing account with 620,000 Facebook followers that shares inflammatory, inaccurate content in organic posts and ads.
Over the past month, Canada Proud averaged 200,000 Facebook engagements a day; Canadian party leaders don’t get that much engagement. And Canada Proud has become Meta’s 15th biggest Canadian advertiser, having spent more than $250,000 since January.
Canada Proud sometimes posts updates that cite actual news outlets. But some of these posts fabricate quotes that weren’t in the original story cited.
Other accounts studied by NYT post Facebook ads with links to AI-generated pages that mimic real news sites.
If Meta had not removed news from Canadian feeds, the law would have required it to pay publishers $44 million annually.
But Wait! There’s More
Google paid Samsung “enormous sums” to preinstall its Gemini AI on phones and devices and use it as its default LLM. Samsung also got a cut of the ad revenue from those Gemini apps. [Bloomberg]
The FTC is suing Uber for alleged deceptive billing and cancellation practices. [WSJ]
4chan might be dead, but its legacy lives on in the modern internet. [Wired]
Experts say that the current trend of crowdsourcing AI benchmarks has serious flaws. [TechCrunch]
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