Growth in the CDP industry slowed to a crawl in the first half of 2023, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report. Net employment, funding, new vendors and growth among previously listed vendors all fell to record or near-record lows. Still, some firms are doing fine: 20% of the firms listed had an estimated employment increase of at least 10%.
No one likes to spend money on “made for advertising” (MFA) sites that have few actual visitors, although the outrage seems stronger among publishers than advertisers, who see the waste as a cost of doing business. Still, for the advertisers who do care, NewsGuard has just launched a service to let advertisers build lists that exclude MFA sites from their campaigns or build lists of non-MFA sites to include.
We think that one reason industry growth has slowed is the near-total loss of early-stage venture funding. But we could be wrong: this Capchase analysis of 900 SaaS businesses finds that self-financed companies grow just as quickly as venture-backed firms. They also report that, whatever the gurus say, the best performing companies focus new customer acquisition not retention. Interesting.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.