Privacy, fraud, and other concerns may loom but the third party data industry had a great 2018, growing by 17.5% over the previous year, according to a Winterberry Group study for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Total spending on data and solutions was nearly $19.2 billion. Data management solutions, which includes Customer Data Platforms, grew by 25% to just under $5.0 billion. Download for details.

Oh wait – what about hacks at tech-savvy Amazon, Facebook, Equifax, and so many more? You can add Quora to the list: “approximately 100 million” Quora users’ data was compromised including name, email address, and public comments, the company said yesterday. They’re “very sorry for any concern or inconvenience this may cause.”

YouTube is not just a video platform, of course, it’s also a powerful search engine and it has begun testing a Google AI Overviews carousel that will appear in results for selected queries. Given the threat AI Overviews is perceived to pose to click-thru traffic in Google Search results, there’s a question about whether the YouTube initiative could depress click-thrus to brand and creator videos. Right now, the feature is only visible to a sub-set of U.S. premium users.