Taboola is intercepting users before they visit any web site by placing a news feed on home screens on Samsung, Xioami, Oppo, and other smartphones.  The links will go to a web page that features advertising and then send users to the original news sources, which will be Taboola-curated reliable news sources.   This entirely avoids the challenge of moderating user-sourced content that plagues social media.

Martech spending in the U.S. will exceed $20 billion in 2022, according to this eMarketer forecast. Wow, that’s impressive…oh wait, it’s a tiny fraction of the $344 billion global martech spend estimated by other sources, based largely on Gartner’s well-known estimate that martech is about one-quarter of all marketing spend. Further perspective:  Salesforce alone had $26 billion in revenue last year, although not all of that would count as martech.

Let’s catch up today on news that went unmentioned while we obsessed about TikTok, Google, Microsoft, and the rest. First, some CX acquisitions: Stockholm-based experience analytics vendor Netigate bought Netherlands-based digital feedback collector Mopinion while Colorado-based survey platform Alchemer bought San Diego-based review and comment collector Chatmeter. We also have “AI-native operating system for advertising” Veylan buying media sales platform Advisr and, far from least, investment firm Thoma Bravo spending $1.4 billion to buy SaaS pricing and sales solution PROS Holdings, Inc.