Fabled magazine publisher Time Inc. is being bought by slightly-less-fabled publisher Meredith Corporation for $2.8 billion cash. The $18.50 share price is a 46% premium over the stock’s recent level but well under the $25.95 all-time high in 2015. Meredith’s investment is supported by $650 million from the arch-conservative Koch brothers, who promise no involvement in editorial decisions. Sure.
Sometimes what companies do is less interesting than how they choose to present it. For example, Jumpshot tracks consumer behavior with a global panel of 100 million devices. They’ve chosen to describe that as a way to “unlock walled-garden data” so marketers can connect ad exposures to behaviors inside walled garden domains like Amazon and Google. They’re also positioning themselves as a campaign optimization solution, another hot topic. Two trends for the price of one.
But let’s end on a positive note: three firms that I classify as Customer Data Platforms made it onto the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list issued last week. They were Datorama (ranked 35 with 5,149% growth rate), Signal (rank 193 with 548% growth rate), and Tealium (rank 195 with 538% growth rate). Congratulations to them and happy Thanksgiving to all.
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.