Amazon is expanding the reach of its display ad business by serving sponsored product ads on other websites including Pinterest, BuzzFeed, Hearst Newspapers, and Mashable. Targeting will apparently be based on page context, campaign keywords, and cost-per-click targets rather than individual customer profiles. It’s a good way for Amazon to grow without triggering anti-trust concerns.
Large language AI models like ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing have generally been trained on data scraped from the open Web without any particular permission. Microsoft has now decided that’s really not so fair, at least if Microsoft is the one whose data is being scraped. They recently changed their Terms of Service to prohibit people from extracting data from Microsoft’s own AI tools.
Mobile adtech company InMobi has purchased Quantcast Choice, a consent management platform used by hundreds of publishers. It’s an interesting extension that illustrates the growing importance of privacy management in the ad publishing world. Quantcast Choice will remain free to use, both companies promise.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.