Experience management vendor Qualtrics is being purchased by private investment firm Silver Lake for approximately $12.5 billion in cash. Qualtrics was purchased for $8 billion by SAP in 2018, and then spun off as a separate company in 2020. SAP had announced it was exploring a sale of its Qualtrics stake in January, so the deal is not much of a surprise.

“Charm offensive” isn’t in the playbook at Meta, which has announced it will block access to Canadian news sites if the country passes its proposed Online News Act in current form. The law would require Meta to pay news organizations when someone posts a link to their materials. A similar threat failed spectacularly in Australia last year but that isn’t deterring Meta from trying again.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.