First-party data is the new whatever-commodity-you-think-is-most-precious (personally, I go with Fritos). So the lust to assemble more of it drives many industry deals. For example, TV measurement vendor iSpot recently bought Tunity, an app that lets users listen to TV audio in public places like bars, if you remember what those are. There’s some advertising revenue to be gained but the real value is tracking out-of-home TV viewing.
The suit filed late 2020 on behalf of a 12-year-old, accuses TikTok of processing children’s data unlawfully. It seeks damages on behalf of millions of children and the claimant is being sponsored by the former Children’s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield.
Semrush helps companies optimize their online content, so you might wonder why they’d buy Kompyte, a company that gathers B2B competitive intelligence online. The answer is they’re assembling a cache of data that helps salespeople do a better job. Information scraped from the web might not exactly qualify as first-party data, but it’s definitely something that Semrush can use as it likes.
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.