We haven’t written much about the tribulations of Nielsen’s core media measurement business, which would make a fine soap opera of its own. The latest plot twist has an “Empire strikes back” vibe, with Nielsen announcing plans to convert its much-maligned TV audience measurements into something fashionably cross-platform and people based. Stay tuned.
MeritB2B has its roots in B2B marketing lists but they too have expanded into technology and services. They just acquired True Influence, which collects B2B buyer intent signals and provides related account-based marketing and demand generation services.
Ecommerce checkout platform Bolt has purchased Tipser, whose technology converts any “digital surface” into a purchasing opportunity. You can almost see them drooling as they describe the ability to shop in “an online publication, a mobile marketplace, a price comparison site, a social media platform, or a search engine” using Tipser’s “turn-key publisher marketplaces, touchless merchant integrations, and headless implementation capabilities”. Pinch me so I know I’m not dreaming.
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.