Amazon’s ad business continues to grow, reaching $10.7 billion the second quarter of 2023, up 22% from the same quarter last year. Amazon still trails Meta ($32 billion for the quarter, up 11%) and Alphabet ($58 billion for the quarter, up 3% ) but the gap is closing.
Online event platform Hopin, once among the hottest of Covid-fueled tech ventures, has sold its core event and session products to RingCentral. Price was not disclosed but is unlikely to have equaled the $1 billion invested in Hopin.
TikTok’s ad revenue, variously estimated at $13.2 billion or $18.0 billion for all of 2023, doesn’t come close to Amazon, let alone Google or Meta. But the company is working to grow it. Its latest effort is a cookieless ad targeting tool called PrivacyGo. It takes a data clean room-type approach with the additional privacy-protecting features.
Customer engagement platform MessageGears will partner with content localization and translation platform Smartling to streamline email translation and localization for 450+ languages. The workflow is automated but actual translations are still done by (machine-assisted) humans.