U of Digital Newsletter - 1/23/25 (free)

Author

Shiv Gupta
January 23, 2025

January 15th-January 22nd

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. TikTok is banned, no wait, it’s back! But only for 75 days. Then what? Oh and The Trade Desk made their 2nd acquisition or all-time!

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Summary: The Trade Desk will buy programmatic metadata startup Sincera for an undisclosed price tag. Launched in 2022, Sincera will continue to operate independently, according to Sincera CEO Mike O’Sullivan, providing advertisers, publishers, and ad tech vendors with data from the programmatic ecosystem to help them accurately value ad impressions. Sincera crawls sites and programmatic auctions to surface data like which digital identifiers are being used the most, which ad tech providers have been implemented by which publishers, who has poor quality inventory, and much more. Integrating Sincera's tools into The Trade Desk's demand-side platform (DSP) will help publishers and advertisers understand which data signals drive the most value. 

source: Sincera.io

The deal, which is only The Trade Desk’s second public acquisition in its history, will close this quarter.

Sincera and The Trade Desk already have some history. The Trade Desk used Sincera's data for its recent ranking of top 100 publishers of the open web. The Trade Desk’s venture group also invested in Sincera's $4.2M seed round in 2023.

Opinion: Well this is a fascinating and surprising deal! The Trade Desk doesn’t really acquire companies, so you have to wonder what Jeff Green has up his sleeve. Here are the few possibilities:

  1. Simple: Give TTD customers a really cool, new tool to granularly pick over programmatic data and inventory in order to better optimize their TTD campaigns. Use it as a hook to attract more customers and differentiate from competitors. Shut down Sincera outside of TTD.

  2. Ambitious: Continue to offer Sincera as a standalone data platform to the entire industry to help lift all digital advertising boats, especially as it pertains to data and inventory quality. Position TTD even more so as the freedom fighters of the “Premium Internet”.  

  3. Jeff Green 4D Chess: Sunset Sincera and have the really smart Sincera guys build new shit for TTD that we can’t conceive…

We think it’s #2. Time will tell.

Summary: President Donald Trump signed a flurry of executive orders upon taking office Monday, including one that delayed enforcement of the TikTok ban for 75 days. Trump also said that in return for saving TikTok, the US government should become a half owner of its US arm. If China blocks a U.S. deal for TikTok, Trump threatened to respond with tariffs.

TikTok went dark on Saturday, before the ban was set to take effect on Sunday, but service was restored hours later, after Trump said the company and its partners wouldn't be fined to continue operating the app. The app still isn't available to download from Apple and Google's app stores as of Tuesday afternoon. Last week, TikTok told advertisers that their campaigns would pause because of the ban, but they would still be able to access their data. The platform then told advertisers that their campaigns would resume serving ads to U.S. audiences on Sunday, but LIVE campaigns would be limited.

Meanwhile, competitors like X and Bluesky are introducing new product features like dedicated video feeds to try to lure TikTok's 170M US users over to their own platforms. Others like Reddit, Snap, Meta, and YouTube are offering incentives to creators and advertisers. And, of course, potential suitors are circling, including Elon Musk, "Shark Tank" host Kevin O'Leary, an investment group led by the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and even YouTube star MrBeast.

Opinion: If Chinese parent company ByteDance wasn’t willing to sell TikTok to an American company despite the ban, what changes now? What does an extra 75 days do?

Trump may exert pressure in some creative, potentially dangerous ways (e.g. threatening China, getting Congress to repeal the original ban, making some kind of under-the-table deal, etc.) which may prevent TikTok from getting banned. But we’re not holding our breath. 

This story will continue to be suspenseful for some time. Other social platforms will surely benefit from the suspense and uncertainty. More importantly, the outcome will set an interesting precedent for how the private sector will become intertwined with the government under the current administration. For example, if it becomes clear that this administration will be more “pro big business,” perhaps Big Tech will become emboldened (and monopolistic) again? Major implications for the ad space ahead…

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