Meta

People Inc.’s referral traffic from Google search is down 70% over the past two years, and by 26% in Q3 alone. But its digital revenue is still growing, albeit slowly.

A generic label tells consumers that AI was used to build an ad, but leaves them to guess where reality ends and fiction begins.

Why now’s the time for big ad tech mergers; Meta formalizes its play for CTV ad budgets; and Jezebel’s brand safety scare.

Last week, a district court judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading Facebook users about how it handled their data. Does it matter?

Meta now scores every eligible ad for every impression at more than a billion ads per second, one of three ad ranking upgrades Meta announced on Wednesday.

Despite spending billions in lawsuits and high Muse operating costs, Meta’s third quarter earnings still showed significant growth.

Meta updates its AI and advertising policies; Is social commerce replacing SEO?; and online listings are a lot less transparent these days.

Prime time is coming to the feed. On Thursday, Meta announced a new feature, called Ads Super Burst, that lets advertisers lock in a window of between three and 24 hours on a single day across Facebook and Instagram.

By all means, measure outcomes. Optimize toward sales. Make television more accountable. But if the product is basically a pixel, an attribution window and a CPA column, that doesn’t mean we’ve transformed TV into Google. 

Xbox gets into the TV biz; Meta is testing a new monetization model; and who wants to be a hold, anyway?

Agencies are differentiating their tech stacks by building custom agentic AI tools for their clients. And they’re rethinking owning those AI tools – particularly since licensing them creates new revenue streams.

AppLovin sues Unity over data leakage; Meta’s creator business faces an uphill battle in competing with YouTube; and AI search wrongly blames Converse’s old CMO for its current ad controversy.

Advertisers can now buy YouTube Shorts ads alongside open web inventory; Meta just wants to be wanted; and Meta’s Muse shows the danger of blindly trusting AI agents.

California protects an individual’s right to sue when a company violates data privacy law. So privacy compliance means understanding what a jury of consumers will tolerate. 

Given how much the market has changed since the Google trial began, and the wiggle room in the ruling itself, publishers aren’t expecting much relief from the court’s behavioral remedies.

Indie agency KWG says sell-side curation can target more high-performing inventory with better match rates and lower data fees than buy-side curation.

Where teens were once swept into the same cohort as 18-34, brands will have to have separate strategies and tactics to engage them. And this shift comes just as Gen Alpha comes of age.

TikTok users can now include polls and videos in comments; vertical video app Shortical introduces AI ads; and Meta’s upcoming personal agent may cause more problems than solutions.

Why does the buy side remain so smitten with handing control to autonomous systems owned by companies whose economic interests are not its own?

The great Meta migration is in full swing. Ex-Meta employees are, filling the ranks at Open AI, TikTok, Amazon Ads and Roku and bringing their expertise with them.

Reuters wraps its series on Meta’s shrinking headcount; The Trade Desk has a new centralized AI interface; and USA Today Co. will restructure its content for bots.

Meta alumni are on the move – and they’re bringing the world’s most successful ad playbook with them to the next generation of would-be ad platform greats, with OpenAI at the top of the list.

This documentary streamer found new life as an AI trainer; the NFL is taking public shots at Nielsen, but is it a negotiating tactic?; and Nielsen’s new focus on 18+ audiences dings streaming viewership.

Spotify’s ad-skipping has podcasters freaking out; Steaming growth is saving the TV upfront; and OpenAI wants some SMB clients.

Freewheel will begin reporting show-level data; Xbox will let users stream games for free if they watch ads; and Meta and Google can develop AI ads without even a prompt.

A combination of layoffs, lawsuits and AI operating costs set back Meta’s Q2 earnings, despite increased revenue.

Somewhere between what the ad industry says and what the market rewards is often where the truth lives. Here are the three industry storylines most in need of debunking.

Google and Meta are quietly rewriting the rules of ad measurement, and they’re doing it with open-source marketing mix modeling tools that many marketers don’t even realize they’re using.

Advertising in AI-native destinations and experiences is already starting to look less like a series of experiments and more like an emerging market.

Instead of relying on rigid audience segments, modern systems can interpret a real-world moment in real time, combining layers of information to better predict what someone might actually care about right now.