Tailwind provides social media and email marketing tools to small businesses. They’ve only raised $10.7 million but have just added their seventh acquisition, paid ad management platform Nectar 9. The goal is to offers small business owners a single tool for all types of marketing.
Regardless of what CMOs see from their lofty perch, the demand for data management tools continues to grow in the trenches. Low-code data import tool Flatfile is meeting this with capabilities that simplify connection to new data sources. They just raised a $50 million Series B, bringing total funding to $95 million.
We don’t like bad news any more than you do, Dear Reader, but that’s what bubbled up today. Integral Ad Sciences reports that ad fraud rates jumped substantially in the first half of 2022, even as time-in-view continued to shrink and brand risk rose. On the brighter side, anti-fraud protection reduced fraud rates by more than 90% compared with campaigns lacking fraud detection. Lots of detail here by country and device if you happen to need it.
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.