Did someone say location data? Narrative will sell you that, along with demographics, devices, purchases, Web behavior, TV viewership, and other data from 30+ providers. Its online marketplace aims to remove the traditional hassle from customer data buying. Narrative just raised an $8.5 million Series A, bringing their total funding to nearly $14 million.
Let’s peer today at life’s second-most interesting topic: consumer behavior. We’ll start with this Unruly report (that’s the company name; the report is well-behaved) on connected TV viewers. Headline finding is 73% of U.S. consumers would rather watch ads on free TV than pay for ad-free TV content. Times being what they are, consumers are even more likely to seek free options: 35% have tried a new ad-supported streaming service since the pandemic began and 79% plan to continue.
Whatever happens to Audience Network, Facebook is working hard to build its ecommerce business. Its latest step is Facebook Shop, a new section in its main app that lets users buy from multiple merchants. This is a big step up from the Facebook Shops that exist on merchants’ own pages. Raise your hand if you think becoming more dependent on Facebook is a good idea.
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.