📰 AdTech and media

Status

Status reports that Rogan, Schulz, Dillon and Theo Von, who helped Trump reach young men in 2024, are now openly attacking him ahead of the midterms.

Status

Status reports Fox News's audience has declined sharply heading into the midterms, a warning sign for a president tied to the network.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Stratechery

Ben Thompson finds Anthropic's core business very profitable but warns competition may eat the profits and investors face endless dilution.

Digiday

Amazon's ad business neared $20 billion in the quarter even as the company reported negative free cash flow.

AI

Stratechery

Ben Thompson predicts AI pressure will end the open, anyone-can-host internet, and that the more local web after it may be better.

AI

Digiday

WPP says Apple's Safari block on identity resolution has barely touched it, strengthening its case for InfoSum.

Digiday

Digiday says these midterms could be a turning point for influencers in political campaigns.

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Media, Ad Tech and the End of the Open Web.

Platformer

Casey Newton argues Google's AI search squeeze and Reddit's traffic drop are one loop that shrinks the open web.

AI

AdExchanger

Google earned $127.6 billion in Q3, nearly all from ads, yet advertising barely came up on its earnings call.

Advertising

AdExchanger

The ad trade sees the DoorDash-Instacart deal creating a retail media rival to Amazon, Walmart and Uber.

Retail media · M&A

The Refresh

AdTechGod's Refresh argues DoorDash-Instacart matters more for advertising than for delivery.

Advertising

Digiday

Campaigns hired creators earlier and in larger numbers this cycle while disclosure rules lag.

AdExchanger

Meta now scores every eligible ad for every impression with a new LLM-based ranking system.

AI

AdExchanger

Apple's iOS 27 blocks the domains of identity vendors including LiveRamp, Permutive and ID5 in Safari.

Digiday

Ad tech is moving identity work server-side in response to Apple's Safari crackdown.

Advertising

Wired

Miles Klee argues in Wired that advertising helped turn the web from a library into a store.

Advertising

AdExchanger

Stagwell bought Freestar, which sells ad inventory for more than 1,000 publishers.

M&A

Next in Media

Skydance is considering moving its ad serving from NBCU-owned FreeWheel to Google.

Advertising

The Current

The NFL drove 6.7 million streaming sign-ups in September.

The Hollywood Reporter

TelevisaUnivision's U.S. ad revenue fell 24% without World Cup rights while Mexico revenue rose 51%.

Advertising

The Rebooting

Outside segments subscription offers by reader activity, and adding print lifts renewals 5% to 7%.

Marketing Brew

Brands see run clubs as table stakes for marathon sponsorship ahead of the NYC Marathon.

Digiday

Apple's Safari block on identity-resolution providers is pushing ad tech toward the IAB Tech Lab's server-side Trusted Server.

Advertising

Digiday

Apple's growing ad business puts its Safari blocklist under scrutiny.

Digiday

Digiday's Future of TV briefing finds that CTV advertising has a genre-labeling problem.

Advertising

Digiday

Lush quit Meta, TikTok and X ads and still grew.

Digiday

Three months after the World Cup, fashion brands are signing stars like Bellingham and Yamal.

Digiday

A year in, DMG Media's creator-led social-only briefs account for 30% of its New Media revenue.

Status

Bob Woodward's memoir names confidential sources, most of them now dead, prompting a debate over whether anonymity outlives a source.

Digiday

Anthropic's advertising spend rose from $33 million in 2024 to $147 million last year, according to the S-1.

Advertising · IPO

The Rebooting

The Rebooting's Media 2031 project bets on a K-shaped information market, data licensing, headless distribution and human connection.

Digiday

Small independent agencies pay about 29% all-in to reach DSPs through resellers, against 17% for holding-company buyers.

Digiday

Apple's Safari now blocks identity-resolution domains used to match people across websites, hitting publisher revenue.

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues AI-driven security threats have ended the open internet and that software's future is small and private.

AI

The AI Commerce Brief

Walmart's Agent Gateway lets approved AI agents shop for customers but routes them through its own agent, Sparky.

AI

Status

Skydance paired a five-day office mandate with buyouts, and CNN and CBS News leaders sent staff contrasting memos.

Private equity

Marketecture

Of $44 billion in creator ad spend this year, about $24 billion goes to paid amplification versus $11.6 billion to creators.

Advertising

Digiday

Political ad spending has raised TV and streaming prices for regional advertisers in battleground states this quarter.

Advertising

Digiday

Publisher trade bodies are pushing back on Meta's new scraping terms and urging lawmakers to act.

Digiday

Omnicom won Coca-Cola's US and Canada media business while WPP keeps the global remit.

Digiday

Salesforce's purchase of Braze, at roughly seven times revenue, raises vendor lock-in questions for marketers.

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

AI

Deadline

The FCC's lone Democrat urged broadcasters to resist the chair's threats against stations airing what he called fake polls.

Status

Vanity Fair published a $2 billion allegation about Jared Kushner from Matthew Cole's book and has not explained its vetting as legal threats mount.

Vanity Fair

The disputed book excerpt alleging Kushner had access to $2 billion in secret foreign accounts, which Kushner calls categorically false.

FouAnalytics

A verification report said 99.84% CTV while the DSP showed 32.9%, raising the question of what the vendor actually measured.

Status

Alex Gibney says YouTube, TikTok, Meta and X blocked or refused ads for his Musk documentary, and he is concerned about its future at Musk-backed Skydance's HBO.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on Musk: Power, Platforms and a Four-Hour Film.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on Musk: Power, Platforms and a Four-Hour Film.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on Musk: Power, Platforms and a Four-Hour Film.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on Musk: Power, Platforms and a Four-Hour Film.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on Musk: Power, Platforms and a Four-Hour Film.

FouAnalytics

Augustine Fou shows uploaded NPI and hashed-email lists match only 4 to 13 percent of records, with look-alike padding and bots replaying high-value IDs.

FouAnalytics

Fou's earlier column explained how attackers used real identifiers, not audience segments, to target specific journalists with spyware via ads.

Surveillance

FouAnalytics

Fou's explainer on bid licking, where fraudsters copy and replay high-value user IDs that DSPs then bid on as if they were real users.

FouAnalytics

Augustine Fou explains how attackers used phone numbers and network IDs, not inferred audiences, to deliver spyware to journalists through ads.

Surveillance

The Current

Netflix is rolling out in-DSP ad measurement with The Trade Desk and Yahoo as marketers at the ANA pivot back to brand-building.

chiefmartec

Scott Brinker argues martech is shifting from apps to open infrastructure, which could balance buyer power even as consolidation continues.

Digiday

Omnicom won Coca-Cola's North American media business weeks after PepsiCo ended a nearly 30-year relationship.

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues Netflix has a solid business but increasingly looks like a business rather than a growth franchise.

Status

FiftyPlusOne spent about $900 to prove that Wedgewood Polls, cited in midterm coverage and averages, was fake.

Stratechery

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Space

Status

Status reports Politico corrected its story about Susie Wiles and the Hannity interview under White House pressure, frustrating some staffers.

AdExchanger

Meta's revenue grew 26 percent in the third quarter even as its Muse agent's compute costs keep it unprofitable.

Platformer

Casey Newton and Kevin Roose launched Machine Gods with NPR, arguing for 'AI realism' between skepticism and acceleration.

AI

The Rebooting

The Atlantic is moving to usage-based deals with AI data resellers after early licensing deals produced fewer than 20 subscriptions from a viral story.

AI

Digiday

CNN International is building for agent-sold advertising and is still chasing its first agent-sold dollar.

Advertising

Digiday

Walmart Connect is bypassing agencies to offer brands on-site lift studies ahead of the holiday season.

Digiday

Prebid proposes having Google bid into Prebid's auction rather than the reverse, targeting early 2027 without Google's agreement.

Advertising

AdExchanger

David Nyurenberg argues that selling CTV as a performance channel undervalues TV's role in creating demand.

Marketecture

Ari Paparo finds agentic shopping mostly hype for now, with 37 of the top 51 shopping sites reportedly restricting agents.

Digiday

Apple's WebKit team laid out its case for blocking identity-resolution companies in Safari while its own ads business grows.

Digiday

Independent agencies say The Trade Desk and Amazon DSP deny them direct seats and fee relief despite their spending commitments.

Business Insider

Netflix's revenue grew 12 percent to $12.9 billion, its slowest growth in three years, and it cut its ad revenue forecast to $2.7 billion.

Advertising

Stratechery

Ben Thompson's Stratechery took Stripe as its first exclusive sponsor and updated its ethics policy to disclose the conflict.

Status

CBS's owned stations will carry DraftKings branding on their election coverage through Election Night.

Elections

Digiday

Apple explained that its Safari blocklist targets identity resolution, while its job board shows a growing ads business.

Digiday

Apple's Safari blocklist is pushing publishers back toward IAB Tech Lab's Trusted Server.

Advertising

Digiday

Ad executives at Advertising Week New York were mostly asking whether they are on Apple's blocklist.

Advertising

Status

CBS News president Tom Cibrowski went to London to steady the foreign bureau after its new chief's confrontational all-hands.

The Rebooting

Reuters News president Paul Bascobert argues AI is a production disruption for publishers, not a distribution one.

AI

Variety

AI cut a Christmas movie's estimated production cost by about 90%, an example of the production shock The Rebooting describes.

AI

Digiday

Forbes joined Google's paid News AI pilot as publishers look for value beyond the click.

AI

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues Apple's HomeView rests on trust in integration and privacy, but the real question is whether buyers will commit their homes to Siri AI.

Surveillance · AI

FouAnalytics Practitioners

Augustine Fou cites three studies showing ad-targeting identities are often attached to bots or wrong, so Apple's Safari block costs advertisers less than feared.

Advertising

Marketecture

Marketecture finds most top shopping sites blocking AI agents, with travel the one category where agentic buying is taking hold.

AI

The AI Commerce Brief

Brands may need to "win twice," with the shopper and with the shopper's agent, as brand agents emerge to represent products to other AI agents.

AI

Digiday

Amazon uses Thursday Night Football both to win brands that don't sell on Amazon and to upsell sellers that rarely buy sports ads.

Digiday

The Verge reorganized its audience team around loyal readers to prepare for a future without Google search traffic.

Status

Christiane Amanpour is leaving CNN after more than 43 years, with her show ending in May.

No Fluff Weekly

A developer counted about ten billion tokens of AI compute behind four open-source ad tech systems, then found two repos had no license.

Advertising · AI

Status

MS NOW reported on air that the FBI director had landed in Russia when he was in Virginia, and at least one other outlet passed on the same tip.

Variety

Bela Bajaria is out as Netflix's chief content officer, replaced by Peter Rice, as viewing hours grew just 2 percent in the first half.

Variety

A24's Elizabeth Holmes documentary opened to $15 million, the biggest debut on fewer than 1,000 screens since Borat.

Film and TV

The Juggernaut

130 million names have been removed from India's voter rolls, and the Supreme Court has ordered election officials to respond.

Regulation · Elections

The Juggernaut

The Juggernaut's context piece for its report on an Illinois teen accused of plotting a mass shooting at a Hindu temple.

The Juggernaut

Navi Pillay became the fourth Nobel Peace Prize winner of South Asian origin.

The Juggernaut

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on Washington: The Five-Day Press Secretary and the Investigators Under Investigation.

Status

Status argues much of the press uncritically amplified Tesla's Roadster, which stays airborne for only seconds and may never be delivered.

Status

Status reports on why Lesley Stahl nearly quit 60 Minutes amid turmoil at CBS News.

Status

Status covers clashes inside CBS News over its foreign and Israel coverage.

Status

Status reports on the fallout from a CBS News meeting where foreign editor Shayndi Raice threatened reporters with firing.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on Media: The Flying Car That Mostly Didn't, and Turmoil at CBS.

Status

Katie Zacharia was fired as White House press secretary after four-plus days, following a widely panned first briefing and two tough Fox News interviews.

AI Brief by Marketecture

David Berkowitz lists where the AI agent Instinct still falls short, from presentations to knowing his birthday.

AI

Stratechery

Stratechery asks how big the market is for expensive home devices built on subpar AI.

AI

Digiday

Reach wants its paid Google AI content deal to become a licensing template and has sent OpenAI a cease-and-desist over scraping.

AI

AdExchanger

Independent agency InterMedia is buying CTV ads conversationally through an AI integration in production.

AI

Variety

Netflix is cutting about 1,000 jobs, roughly 6% of staff, its largest reduction to date.

Refacto AdTech

Refacto AdTech argues Fox's Roku deal, the Prebid-Google remedy and Magnite's agentic buying are all fights over control of the ad pipe.

Advertising

Digiday

Addressability returned as a headline concern at Prebid Summit, with speakers calling unified media platforms the new ad networks.

Digiday

Dentsu wants entertainment to become its own agency account, separate from creative and media.

The Rebooting

People Inc. now blocks every bot that comes to its sites unless the company behind it has a deal.

The Rebooting Show

The founders of Fausto argue print is having a medium-sized revival as a hedge against AI.

AI

Status

Status reports CBS News' London foreign desk held an awkward team cruise a day after an explosive all-hands meeting.

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Venture capital · AI

Digiday

Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun says the group is skipping CMOs and pitching CEOs directly, crediting AI anxiety for third-quarter wins.

AI

Digiday

Publicis has made a habit of winning major accounts like PepsiCo and LVMH outside the traditional review process.

Check My Ads Institute

The court's remedies in the US ad tech case are behavioral only, so breakup advocates are now looking to the European Commission.

Advertising · Antitrust

Status

Meta's sudden ban on ByteDance advertising surprised some inside Meta, prompting talk of retaliation and antitrust concerns.

Advertising · Antitrust

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

AI

Where's Your Ed At

Ed Zitron argues AI annualized run rates are unreliable, noting OpenAI and Anthropic's combined first-half revenue fell $19.1 billion short of one Anthropic run-rate claim.

AI

Digiday

Apple's private Safari blocklist for ad tech vendors dominated conversation at Advertising Week New York.

Advertising

Digiday

OpenAI is adding a visual ad format, attribution tools and brand-suitability pilots to ChatGPT Ads.

AI

Digiday

BaD Mktg runs an agency with two employees and heavy use of AI.

AI

Digiday

CNN is bringing its All Access subscription to the U.K. and Canada to convert international audiences into paying subscribers.

Status

Audio obtained by Status shows a CBS News foreign editor warning staff that insubordination is grounds for firing and clashing with correspondent Holly Williams.

Digiday

A week after Apple's Safari block cut off major cross-site trackers, the ad industry is tallying early losses.

Marketecture

Alan Chapell argues Apple's privacy rules let it decide who does business on Safari, while Google appears absent from its blocklist.

Surveillance

AdExchanger

AdExchanger reported that iOS 27 blocked identity vendors and The Trade Desk's ad-request domain on Safari.

The AI Commerce Brief

A 40-shopper study found product cards drove 85 percent of AI shopping choices and the first seller won three picks in four.

AI

Digiday

S4 Capital's Monks lets AI agents run unsupervised for 36 to 48 hours and budgets compute alongside salaries.

AI

Digiday

Some publishers still doubt agentic ad buying will deliver meaningful revenue.

Advertising

Digiday

PepsiCo CEO Ramon Laguarta defended moving the company's global media account to Publicis.

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Ad Tech: Apple's Wall and the AI Shelf.

Status

Status reports screenings of Lesley Stahl's West Bank report were so contentious she discussed quitting, which CBS disputes.

Variety

Netflix may cut about 5 percent of its workforce after acknowledging slower growth.

Labour

The Juggernaut

The Juggernaut traces how the chili pepper, cultivated by Indigenous peoples of the Americas, remade South Asian cooking.

The Juggernaut

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Status

Status reconstructs how ABC News published, deleted and quietly republished an error-filled story on the Trump sons' investment in Anduril.

Variety

ESPN confirmed Pat McAfee will host an alternate Super Bowl broadcast and select Monday Night Football games.

Status

Status asks whether David Ellison, who now controls CNN and CBS, will stand up to a White House that expected a more pliant CNN.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on The Press in the Crosshairs.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues that Apple's walled garden now feels like a set of limits in the age of AI.

AI

Status

Skydance shares fell in their first sessions over roughly $80 billion of debt from the $111 billion Warner takeover.

Deadline

CBS Sports' David Berson will run sports across Skydance as TNT Sports chief Luis Silberwasser exits.

Digiday

Panels at Advertising Week New York warned that creators' Hollywood deal terms can put their IP at risk.

Advertising

Digiday

Apple's Safari blocklist is pushing publishers back toward IAB Tech Lab's Trusted Server.

Advertising

chiefmartec

Scott Brinker argues AI is opening alignment and coordination gaps in marketing, and that 2027 will be about coherence.

AI

Stratechery

Ben Thompson interviews former Facebook elections chief Katie Harbath about tech's role in politics.

Elections

Status

David Ellison toured CNN's newsroom after Skydance closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Press freedom · M&A

Variety

The $111 billion Paramount-WBD merger closed, forming Skydance Corp. with plans to combine Paramount+ and HBO Max.

M&A

Adweek

Skydance now controls Paramount and WBD with about $80 billion in debt, and layoffs are coming.

Labour

Business Insider

Apple's iOS 27 update blocked domains used by The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, ID5 and Permutive, disrupting ad serving.

Surveillance · Advertising

AdExchanger

A WBD study found Comscore and iSpot nearly 19 million impressions apart measuring the same campaign.

Digiday

AppLovin is suing Unity, alleging its ad SDK harvested AppLovin auction data to train competing models.

Forbes

Forbes reports TikTok cut its list of instant-ban advertiser violations by more than half, after which scams surged.

Advertising

Adweek

Morning Brew is acquiring creator-led CPG media brand Express Checkout as creator revenue grows.

M&A

The Rebooting

The Daily Beast's three-person product team built five internal AI workflow apps under a 'BeastOS' initiative.

AI

Digiday

The Economist launched a cheaper audio-and-video tier aimed at younger subscribers.

Forbes

Skydance now controls two film studios and networks including CNN, CBS and HBO, with nearly $80 billion in debt.

M&A · Film and TV

Status

Condé Nast will introduce interim CEO Mike Perlis at a Monday all-hands as the publisher's leadership thins out.

Digiday

Ad executives at Advertising Week want to know whether Apple's iOS 27 has put them on its tracker blocklist.

Advertising

Status

At his first big press conference in over a year, David Ellison was asked whether the newly merged Skydance has already been politicized.

Digiday

Advertising Week's first chief creator officer says his $100 million creator-deal goal is already pledged.

Advertising

Digiday

Monks now runs AI agents unsupervised for days and budgets for tokens and talent from the same pot.

AI

The Rebooting

David Sirota argues mainstream news carries its owners' perspective and that independent outlets should avoid capture by any single funder.

Platformer

Speakers at The Curve floated limits on how intelligent AI systems may become, though no enforcement mechanism exists yet.

AI

Where's Your Ed At

Ed Zitron argues rising Treasury yields and widening spreads make the debt needed for the AI buildout far more expensive.

AI

Variety

Disney is seeking up to $12 million for backup Super Bowl LXI spots despite saying in August it had sold out.

Stratechery

Ben Thompson's Claude agent flagged a hack of his Mac Mini, and he argues Apple's permission controls make Macs hostile to always-on agents.

Digiday

OpenAI is adding a visual ad format, measurement tools and brand-suitability testing to ChatGPT to attract bigger ad budgets.

AI

Status

CNN chief Mark Thompson told staff he will stay under Skydance, but Status reports he has not yet signed a new contract.

Digiday

Advertising Week New York opens with an industry rebuilding itself around its own workers, many unsure where they will fit.

Advertising

The State of Play

Google and OpenAI are fighting a cola-war-style sponsorship battle in Indian cricket after last year's real-money gaming ban removed a major advertiser category.

Advertising · AI

The Wrap

Warner Bros. film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy learned of their ouster from a press report before David Ellison called to confirm it, days before the Skydance deal closes.

Variety

Further reading from the day's section on Skydance's Closing Week: The Debt Math.

Film and TV

Status

After cutting more than 90 union jobs across 17 papers, McClatchy has offered staff almost no explanation while promoting new hires for its A.I. content lab.

Labour · AI

Status

Status's earlier reporting on the union fight over McClatchy's push to use A.I. in its newsrooms.

Press freedom · Labour · AI

The Juggernaut

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Status

David Ellison named the combined Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery Skydance, and the company must find about $6 billion in annual savings under roughly $80 billion of debt.

Status

Ellison is keeping Mark Thompson as CNN's chief for now, with implications for him and CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.

Press freedom

Status

MS NOW's decision to air Trump's taxpayer-funded ads has drawn fierce blowback inside the network.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on Ellison's Skydance: The Merger Gets a Name and a Bill.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on Ellison's Skydance: The Merger Gets a Name and a Bill.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on Ellison's Skydance: The Merger Gets a Name and a Bill.

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues agents are the ultimate aggregators and that consumer agents like Meta's Muse are tech's biggest prize.

Stratechery

Stratechery argues Meta's new enterprise platform is a distraction from owning the consumer agent market.

Stratechery

Stratechery finds OpenAI's Dev Day products confusing but sees a strategy underneath, including Sign in with ChatGPT.

Transit · AI

Digiday

Mid-sized marketers such as Wyndham, Opella and BetMGM are building in-house teams to mass-produce creative with AI.

AI

Digiday

Publishers' SPUR group released a standard for tracking how AI tools use their content and invited OpenAI and Google to advise.

AI

Digiday

More than 300 publishing executives are lobbying Congress for a federal bill against unauthorized AI scraping.

AI

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Agents, Apple and the Ad Stack.

Advertising

Status

Disney's president gave an ominous answer about Jimmy Kimmel's future as Ellison named his combined company Skydance.

The Hollywood Reporter

Caitlin Clark's first Nike signature shoe nearly sold out within two hours.

Digiday

Seven months after launch, marketers still cannot prove what a ChatGPT ad did, which is holding budgets at test level.

AI

Digiday

Amazon says its ads sell more than they get credit for, and agencies are asking it to prove the claim.

Business Insider

Retail media reaches $203 billion this year across more than 200 networks, and one study found five different definitions of an attributed sale.

Retail media

AdExchanger

iOS 27 stops The Trade Desk bidding on Safari inventory, and neither company has explained why.

ADWEEK

Dots gives each agent its own computer and browser, access to thousands of apps, and the ability to keep working unattended.

AI

Digiday

Advertisers can now buy a filter for the AI-generated content flooding YouTube inventory.

Advertising · Climate · AI

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Nobody Can Measure Anything.

AI

The Rebooting

WSJ audience strategy head Vivyan Tran describes using personas to grow the paper's readership beyond older business executives.

The Washington Post

Further reading from the day's section on US Politics and the Midterm Machine.

Advertising · AI

Digiday

AppLovin asked a California court to restrain Unity from collecting and using device data generated through AppLovin's mediation requests.

Digiday

Retailers are deploying agentic assistants to bridge physical stores and online ordering.

AI

Digiday

A survey of 13,000 US marketing professionals found client-side turnover rising and average CMO tenure down by more than a third.

Status

MS NOW will air at least one of the administration's taxpayer-funded ads days after running more than a dozen segments scrutinizing the campaign's funding and legality.

M&A

Deadline

NBCUniversal holds exclusive MLB wild-card rights under a three-year, $600 million deal across NBC, NBC Sports Network and Peacock.

Labour

The Rebooting

Further reading from the day's section on The Accord Nobody Has Read.

AI

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

Goldman puts hyperscaler break-even at $308 billion in annual AI revenue against roughly $183 billion that exists, about 64% of it from Anthropic and OpenAI.

Data centres · AI

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Agents Show Up for Work.

AI

Digiday

More than 300 publishing executives went to Washington to press Congress for a statute against unlicensed AI scraping.

AI

Status

Comcast is weighing keeping its dozen owned-and-operated TV stations in the parent company rather than sending them out with the NBCUniversal spinoff.

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on The Scraping Fight and the Ad Machine.

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on The Scraping Fight and the Ad Machine.

AI

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on The Scraping Fight and the Ad Machine.

AI

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues agents are the ultimate Aggregator, and that Meta provisioning every US user a virtual machine is what makes consumer agents usable.

Marketecture

Myles Younger argues the ad-supported-AI consensus rests on treating AI as publishing, when it behaves more like labor, a utility or an appliance.

AI

Status

Paramount is nearing a deal to pay an eye-popping sum for Alex Holder's documentary about the late Senator Lindsey Graham, which reportedly includes candid footage of Paramount boss David Ellison.

Digiday

Employers at Digiday's AI Marketing Strategies event said they are actively discouraging entry-level hiring, with remedies limited to training people who already have jobs.

AI

Digiday

The general manager of AWS Certifications discusses whether certifications can bridge the AI-era skills gap.

AI

Digiday

Executives described prioritizing direct audiences, diversified revenue and AI strategies, with 60% naming subscriber acquisition their central focus.

M&A · AI

The Hollywood Reporter

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Status

The White House is barring CNN from Air Force One on a day-by-day basis through a gap in the court order that restored its credentials, and the five TV pool networks are now deciding nightly whether to cover the President at all.

The Hollywood Reporter

Meta called its earlier rejection of the Alex Gibney documentary's ads an error and YouTube said its system had temporarily restricted the trailer, while X and TikTok still appear to be running nothing for the film.

Variety

An Academy rule change allowing festival winners to auto-qualify means India has two films in the Best International Feature race for the first time.

The Juggernaut

Further reading from the day's section on South Asia and the Wider World.

The Juggernaut

Further reading from the day's section on South Asia and the Wider World.

Marketing Brew

Marketing Brew's three most-read stories of the month cover BetterHelp's comment-section growth strategy, Whoop's leadership overhaul, and K18's 150-pound hairball activation.

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues Amazon blocked Meta's shopping agent because its physical-world investments are a moat an agent cannot route around.

Stratechery

The follow-up argues Meta needs Walmart to bridge Amazon's moat, reframing Walmart's e-commerce buildout as leverage.

Stratechery

Thompson argues pacing the AI frontier is also strategically convenient, giving labs time to close gaps between model capability and surrounding infrastructure.

AI

Digiday

AI efficiency gains have turned into job losses in advertising, and marketers say creative standards fell along with the headcount.

Advertising · AI

Status

Warner Bros. Discovery staff at HBO, CNN and the studio have spent the week waiting on a leadership announcement, with answers described as slim to none.

Film and TV

Status

Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner dismissed his own journalists' objections from the stage and sat silently as Peter Thiel attacked the press.

Status

More than 120 POLITICO and Business Insider staffers wrote to Döpfner objecting to Axel Springer honoring Peter Thiel.

The Rebooting

Brian Morrissey argues the open web is being replaced by centralized AI chokepoints that reprice publishers as commodity suppliers.

AI

Digiday

Google keeps AdX and DFP after its antitrust loss but faces six years of rules requiring AdX to bid into competing publisher ad servers.

Advertising · Antitrust · AI

Digiday

Retail media networks want brand budgets, but proving brand impact can require more than $500,000 in spend.

Retail media

Digiday

Creators are increasingly taking sweat equity and angel stakes instead of flat sponsorship fees.

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on The Media Business: Musk's Money, Ruddy's Grudge, and the Final Commoditization.

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on The Media Business: Musk's Money, Ruddy's Grudge, and the Final Commoditization.

The Refresh

AdTechGod's read is that regulators spent years opening Google's stack while AI companies build closed ecosystems of their own.

Advertising · Regulation · AI

Adweek

Further reading from the day's section on The Media Business: Musk's Money, Ruddy's Grudge, and the Final Commoditization.

Women's sport

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Status

The anonymous senior administration official whose quotes the White House cited as grounds for banning Politico was Vice President JD Vance.

Digiday

Senior publishing executives graded each DOJ remedy from one to ten, and the composite verdict is real progress that falls short of materially changing how publishers compete.

Advertising

Digiday

Google avoided a breakup, and this breaks down who actually benefits from the remedies it got instead.

Advertising · Antitrust

Digiday

The Times sees a more publisher-friendly AI licensing ecosystem than a year ago but says the marketplaces still have a long way to go.

AI

Digiday

Microdramas are pulling brand dollars and audiences, and the open question is whether the format converts that attention into measurable return.

Digiday

The videos large language models cite reveal how differently AI search behaves from traditional Google search.

AI

The Rebooting

Brian Morrissey argues publishers must choose between human communities and serving AI agents, with nothing viable in the middle.

AI

Digiday

Gemini's AI citation share nearly doubled from 17% to 30% while Claude climbed from 2% to 11%, per Comscore.

AI

Digiday

OpenAI is edging toward an ad business as ChatGPT's user growth cools.

AI

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Agents at the Gate.

AI

Status

Politico and Business Insider staff are objecting to parent company Axel Springer honoring Peter Thiel in Berlin this week.

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on The Press Ban and the Paramount Endgame.

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on The Press Ban and the Paramount Endgame.

The Hollywood Reporter

The Brunson family's new brand-advisory firm will represent clients across sports, business and philanthropy.

Samsung Newsroom

Front Office Sports Tonight joins Samsung's flagship television network in the platform's first such deal.

Film and TV

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Sports Business: New Leagues, New Money.

Advertising

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues that pacing the AI frontier would relieve four commercial problems the labs already face, from data-retention pushback to training costs excluded from Anthropic's profitability claim.

AI

Digiday

Newly unsealed internal emails show OpenAI and Microsoft discussing the harm their products cause to the publishers whose work they scrape.

AI

Marketecture

Ari Paparo lays out what the ruling actually changes for publishers, exchanges and buyers, including the end of Unified Pricing Rules.

Antitrust

Digiday

The court ordered Google to open its ad tech stack, but interoperability alone may not loosen its grip on the market.

Advertising

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Ad Tech After the Verdict.

Advertising · Antitrust

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Ad Tech After the Verdict.

Retail media

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Ad Tech After the Verdict.

Status

CNN is scheduled as the designated TV pooler for today's UN General Assembly trip, forcing the press corps to decide whether to cover a trip one of its own has been barred from.

Status

Reporters from all three outlets were turned away from the White House grounds and had hard passes confiscated.

Variety

Ruffalo publicly urged California and other states to reject a settlement clearing the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal.

Regulation

The Wrap

Warren reiterated that the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery combination would be a dangerous merger.

Regulation · M&A

The Juggernaut

Bo French called a photo of South Asian UT Austin fans 'a problem,' drawing backlash from Republicans including Senator John Cornyn.

The Juggernaut

Shalini Thakur reported her stalker and obtained a restraining order in May and was killed in a Sacramento parking lot on September 8.

The Juggernaut

Further reading from the day's section on Green Cards, Longhorns, and a Stalking Case.

The Juggernaut

Further reading from the day's section on Green Cards, Longhorns, and a Stalking Case.

Status

Paramount is in advanced talks to settle the antitrust suit blocking its $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery merger, with an independent oversight board for CNN among the concessions discussed.

Regulation · Antitrust · M&A

Status

Trump said he would bar CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House over their coverage.

Status

Ratings for the Bari Weiss overhaul of '60 Minutes' are the backdrop to concerns inside CNN about coming under Ellison ownership.

Status

Status reported the Truth Social post banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House blindsided the outlets and some administration officials.

Stratechery

Ben Thompson argues Dario Amodei's proposal to pace the AI frontier is unrealistic and geared mostly toward political control.

AI

Puck

Ian Krietzberg interviewed the Silicon Valley congressman about his five-point plan for AI regulation.

Regulation · AI

Digiday

Judge Brinkema's unsealed opinion imposes behavioral remedies and a code of conduct on Google rather than a breakup.

Advertising · Antitrust

Digiday

Digiday examines who actually benefits now that Google has avoided a structural breakup.

Advertising · Antitrust

Business Insider

Business Insider translates the judge's ad tech remedies ruling out of legal jargon.

Advertising

Digiday

Axios has hit its 2026 revenue goal and is building structured feeds aimed at AI models and agents.

AI

Puck

Further reading from the day's section on AI Keeps Breaking Containment.

AI

Puck

House members left Washington after less than 72 hours, sparing Republicans a vote on a resolution to impeach Pete Hegseth.

Status

Status argues Puck's lead media reporter has gone to unusual lengths to defend Bari Weiss's CBS News overhaul while Puck pursues a deal with a Paramount investor.

Puck

Dylan Byers argues the pile-on over the 60 Minutes premiere ignored the NFL lead-in and Nielsen's new methodology.

Digiday

Critics told Digiday the licensing scheme looks less like a meaningful payout than a legal fig leaf.

AI

Puck

Further reading from the day's section on The News Business Under Siege.

Digiday

Sports marketing experts say F1's US growth has room left and brands shouldn't read a streaming-transition dip as a collapse in fandom.

Transit

Digiday

The obvious loser in the holding-company account shuffle isn't the real one, according to Digiday's media-buying team.

Digiday

Agencies are grappling with a cost structure split between AI subscriptions and metered token usage, and an unresolved question of who pays.

AI

Digiday

94% of year-to-date US luxury resale revenue on TikTok Shop is coming from livestreaming.

Adweek

The Trade Desk is cutting roughly 15% of its workforce after its valuation fell from $69 billion to under $7 billion and it lost its S&P 500 seat.

AdExchanger

Google is adding experimental ad-detection metrics to its Chrome User Experience Report, raising the question of who defines ad quality.

Search Engine Land

Microsoft will require advertisers to disclose synthetic content and preserve provenance data.

Advertising · AI

The Refresh

Amazon joins a long and growing list of ad tech, creative and measurement firms wiring campaigns into ChatGPT.

Advertising

Puck

Dario Vitale is joining Emporio Armani as creative director at a house currently shopping a significant stake in the business.

Puck

Peter Hamby talks with Alex Bruesewitz about Trump being underwater with men under 30 and the manosphere turning critical.

Status

Business Insider's new chief told staff in a recorded all-hands it is essential to move with urgency away from its traffic-based model.

Digiday

AI platforms like Perplexity are courting creators, much as social networks once poured money into TV advertising.

Advertising · AI

Digiday

An investment banker explains why public ad tech companies are disappearing.

Advertising

Digiday

Reuters' dynamic paywall is growing subscriptions while strengthening rather than cannibalizing its ads business.

Puck

Actors including a Terrifier cast member are using California's expanded deepfake statute in disputes over likeness and pay.

AI

Puck

Big Ten fans need eight platforms this fall, and distributors are still fighting over who owns the aggregation layer.

Puck

An unbuilt Isamu Noguchi sculpture garden from Lever House's original plans is on view for the building's 75th anniversary.

Puck

Lauren Sherman picks the few brands, like Fforme, Lii and Eckhaus Latta, that still know how to sell after NYFW.

Variety

The Television Academy is in advanced talks to take the Emmys telecast off broadcast television for the first time since 1949, ending the 31-year wheel deal.

Puck

Marianna Sotomayor shadowed the House speaker pitching Texas donors while colleagues privately brace for defeat and succession chatter builds.

Digiday

Brands with long consideration journeys are citing shifting search behavior to make the case for more media dollars, with 61% of US consumers using an AI assistant for shopping research last quarter.

AI

Digiday

Marketers are realizing AI decides whether a brand is mentioned at all, not where it ranks, and a measurement industry is forming around that.

AI

Digiday

The advertising AI boom favors Google, Meta and Amazon even as marketers say they are uneasy about it.

Advertising · AI

Digiday

EA is betting that giving brands multiple franchises in one buy wins bigger advertising budgets.

Advertising

The Rebooting

Former Aftonbladet AI lead Martin Schori argues publishers are heading toward either AI-powered information services or deeply human products, and most are stuck trying to do both.

AI

Status

Bari Weiss's revamped 60 Minutes premiere posted its worst debut ratings of the 21st century, which one TV executive called a death spiral.

Puck

Dylan Byers assesses the early reviews and finds the new 60 Minutes looked largely indistinguishable from the show it replaced.

Puck

Eriq Gardner reports a federal criminal inquiry arising from the Aspiration affair changed Steve Ballmer's calculus about fighting the NBA.

Puck

Matt Belloni previews the WME and TKO chairman's memoir 'Roll the Calls,' written with J.R. Moehringer.

Puck

CFDA president Steven Kolb physically restrained two PETA protesters at a runway show and was placed on leave the next evening.

Puck

Democratic operatives launched the Tomorrow Together super PAC to turn public anxiety about AI into a political weapon.

AI

Where's Your Ed At

Ed Zitron argues the OpenAI Hugging Face hack was a reckless cybersecurity test rather than a rogue AI, and that a real slowdown cannot coexist with the labs' compute commitments.

AI

Puck

Bill Cohan and the FT's Robin Wigglesworth discuss how the bond market could react with inflation at 3.5% and a Warsh-led Fed expected to hike.

Digiday

Google is scaling a pay-per-value AI content licensing program that critics call a legal fig leaf for publishers.

AI

Digiday

OpenAI's next ChatGPT ad format sends a click to a conversation with a brand's AI agent instead of the brand's website.

AI

Digiday

Further reading from the day's section on Media and Marketing When the Customer Is a Bot.

Advertising · Antitrust · AI

Marketecture

Marketecture traces advertising's shift toward AI shopping agents, noting 73% of parents planned to use AI in back-to-school shopping.

Advertising · AI

Digiday

Bot and AI-agent traffic is poisoning advertisers' retargeting pools, with one agency reporting an 80% rise for e-commerce clients.

Advertising · AI

Puck

Former Substack executives argue creators must sell apps, games and services as AI erodes search and social traffic.

AI

Status

Status reports Bari Weiss personally secured the 60 Minutes interview with an airman shot down over Iran, an exclusive former staffers called propaganda.

Variety

A leaked report predicts devastating economic damage if David Ellison moves Paramount out of California, though experts doubt the threat.

Status

College GameDay gave Ted Cruz nearly ten minutes to push the Protect College Sports Act, drawing boos and questions about equal time.

College sport

The Juggernaut

Background on BAPS after Eiffel Tower staff struck over its request to limit interactions with women.

The Juggernaut

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

The Juggernaut

Further reading from the day's section on What I'm reading next.

Puck

Further reading from the day's section on AI labs talking about slowing down.

AI

Status

At the first Status Summit, former CBS News chief Wendy McMahon warned the DNA of 60 Minutes is being rewritten in real time under Bari Weiss.

Status

Photos from the first Status Summit, held at The Times Center.

Puck

Dylan Byers on Bari Weiss's 60 Minutes season.

Puck

Matt Belloni asks whether Jimmy Kimmel cuts his budget to survive.

Status

Further reading from the day's section on media's candid moment and ad tech's blind spot.

Advertising

Status

Further reading from the day's section on media's candid moment and ad tech's blind spot.

Advertising

FouAnalytics Practitioners

Augustine Fou argues log-level ad data records what the seller claimed when listing the ad, not where the ad actually ran.

Puck

Rahm Emanuel told Peter Hamby that Democrats thought demographics were destiny and got intellectually flabby, and prescribes a return to Clintonism.

Puck

Leigh Ann Caldwell got Republican strategists to name their party's four worst Senate campaigns.

Puck

John Ourand ran the numbers on ESPN's $60 million-a-year bet on Pat McAfee.

Puck

Further reading from the day's reading list.

Stratechery

Further reading from the day's section on the AI risk debate moving from abstraction to policy.

AI

Puck

Further reading from the day's section on AI risk: whether Google can still win the model race.

AI