TikTok has bowed to pressure to remove a supposedly addictive rewards program in many European countries. The TikTok Lite app had been awarding points to members for watching and liking posts and inviting others to join. The E.U. says TikTok failed to disclose the risks associated with using the app, including its addictive potential.
Last year, then-Twitter tried to address advertisers’ brand safety concerns by partnering with DoubleVerify and IAS, which promise to stop ads from appearing near objectionable content. But industry gadfly Adalytics has just found that those services often fail to block ads when they should. The study didn’t focus on X although the same problems probably apply.
Channel partner marketing software serves brands that sell through independent dealers or franchisees. As you might imagine, it requires specialized features and is sold by relatively few vendors. The list just got smaller: partner marketing vendor Ansira has acquired competitors BrandMuscle and SproutLoud and plans to fold their teams and technology into its current offering.
YouTube is not just a video platform, of course, it’s also a powerful search engine and it has begun testing a Google AI Overviews carousel that will appear in results for selected queries. Given the threat AI Overviews is perceived to pose to click-thru traffic in Google Search results, there’s a question about whether the YouTube initiative could depress click-thrus to brand and creator videos. Right now, the feature is only visible to a sub-set of U.S. premium users.