On the B2C side, marketing platform MessageGears announced a $12 million funding, bringing its total raise to $18 million. MessageGears provides segmentation, campaign, and messaging functions but connects to external databases rather the building its own CDP.
Lots of privacy news today, Dear Reader. Let’s start with a $5 billion class action suit against Google for collecting information about people using the “incognito” browser mode. It’s unclear whether the case has a chance of success but it’s still a sign of the times.
Trying to stay positive: LeadMD found that 54% of B2B buyers are still buying despite COVID-19, while 26% have stopped making purchases. (The other 21% weren’t planning to buy anything to begin with.) Just 4% think brands should stop all marketing, although 15% think they should do less and 26% think they should be more sensitive.
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.