One third of CTV users have made purchases directly on their TV according to “The Shoppable TV Report: 2024 and Beyond” from LG Ad Solutions. Seventy-one percent always have their phone in their hand while watching TV; the same percentage have seen a QR Code and almost 50% have scanned one. Strong figures for the early days of a new purchasing channel.

Pretty much every business software vendor has added some flavor of generative AI-based assistance to its interface, and Snapchat reports seven million users pay $3.99 per month for gen-AI in Snapchat+.  But Microsoft has taken it up a notch by charging $20 per month for “Copilot Pro”, which expands gen-AI in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, and OneNote, and a $30 per month “Copilot for Microsoft 365” for businesses.  You can just see the dollar signs dancing in their eyes.

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.