November 4th-November 10th // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Fox and Roku are official…
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Top Headlines 👀
Fox closes its $22B Roku acquisition ahead of schedule🔒 - Fox announced the deal in June and expected it to close in 2027. It’s paying $160 per share, which equates to a $22B purchase price, with about $14.2B in cash and the rest in Fox stock. Roku, Tubi, Fox One, and other digital products will sit in a new division called Fox Digital Platforms. Tubi Media Group CEO Paul Cheesbrough will be the division’s CEO, and he’ll co-chair it with Roku founder Anthony Wood. Mustafa Ozgen, Roku’s president of devices, products and technology, will become Roku’s CEO. Tubi CEO Anjali Sud and Roku Media president Charlie Collier are leaving. Fox expects about $400M in yearly cost savings within two years, which likely means layoffs.
Opinion: Roku was the last big independent TV operating system. Fire TV is owned by Amazon, Vizio is owned by Walmart, Xumo is owned by Comcast and Charter, and Google TV is owned by Google. Disney, NBCU, Paramount, WBD, and others all depend on Roku for distribution, and most give Roku a share of their ad inventory to sell. Their inventory now goes to their rival network’s sales team.
Streaming was supposed to end the cable model, where the cable company also owned some of the channels. That model is back. Every major TV operating system now belongs to a company that also has its own shows or IP. Networks will now just fight with TV operating systems instead of cable companies.
New York Times Company in exclusive talks to buy Letterboxd for about $330M🔒 - Letterboxd is a film review site with 30M users. Nothing is final yet, and talks could still fall apart. In July, it was reported that Netflix was interested in Letterboxd and bankers were floating a $250M price tag. A24 and Sony also bid, but A24 dropped out as the price rose. The Times would connect its ad tech to Letterboxd and keep it running as a separate site. The deal could help the Times reach its goal of 15M subscribers by the end of 2027, up from 13.8M today.
Opinion: It’s the Wordle and Athletic playbook again: buy a beloved niche brand and use it to grow the NYT bundle. The data is an added perk. Letterboxd knows what 30M film fans watched, rated, and plan to watch next, and the Times can sell that data to studios and streamers. The human-written reviews can also be licensed to AI companies.
Amazon advertisers can now target shoppers that buy elsewhere via Attain🔒 - Attain is a data firm that collects purchase data from 15M people who opt in through its rewards and budgeting apps. Advertisers can build audiences from that data in Amazon’s recently rebranded DSP, DVA+. They can then target people who shop at Walmart, Kroger, Sephora, and other retailers with display and video ads on Amazon properties like Prime Video and across the open web. Most third-party data companies access Amazon demand through a middleman like LiveRamp, but Attain plugs straight into Amazon's DSP. Attain already helps Amazon advertisers measure in-store sales, and now it’s offering targeting.
Opinion: Amazon wants DVA+ to be the default DSP for CTV and the open web, even for brands that don’t sell on Amazon. Off-Amazon shopper data makes that possible. Walmart loses, since brands can now reach its shoppers without paying Walmart Connect. LiveRamp loses too. Since Publicis owns it now, data companies have a reason to go around LiveRamp and plug straight into DSPs.
Viant buys AI video ad maker Waymark for $20M - Waymark’s tech uses AI to write, design, and voice TV commercials from a few brand assets. Comcast, Fox, NBCU, and other publishers are customers, using it to create commercials for local advertisers. Viant sees the deal as a way to bring smaller brands to CTV, since many can’t afford traditional TV production. Viant will combine Waymark with its targeting suite and TVision attention data to match ad creative to the right audiences. It’s Viant’s fourth deal since 2024, following IRIS.TV, Lockr, and TVision.
Opinion: Viant has now added AI creative tech to contextual (IRIS.TV), identity (Lockr), and attention (TVision) tech. All four deals target the same mid- and long-tail CTV dollars that Walmart, Amazon, Pinterest, Comcast, and MNTN are now chasing.
Q3 Earnings!
AppLovin (👍): Revenue was up 55% to $2.185B, beating estimates. Its consumer ads business (translation: non-gaming ads), which came out of beta last year, grew more than 100% YoY. Q4 revenue guidance beat the consensus. Shares rose 23% after hours.
The Trade Desk (👍): Revenue was down 0.5% to $736M, beating estimates. The DSP saw strong demand from health and political advertisers, and political spend on its platform topped the 2024 presidential cycle. Current quarter guidance topped estimates. Shares spiked 26% after hours before falling, finishing up 2%.
Snap (👎): Revenue was up 14% to $1.72B, missing estimates. Daily active users hit 495M, missing estimates. Lower spending from CPG advertisers, due to macro pressures in the US and Middle East, hurt sales. Current quarter guidance topped estimates. Shares fell more than 10%.
Magnite (👍): Revenue was up 14% to $204.2M, beating estimates. CTV was up 39%, helped by stronger-than-expected political ad spend. Magnite raised its full-year outlook. Shares rose 11.5%.
PubMatic (👎): Revenue was up 17% to $79.6M, beating estimates. CTV revenue was up more than 30% and mobile app revenue was up nearly 40%. Current quarter guidance calls for 15% revenue growth. Shares slipped 4% in after-hours trading.
MNTN (👎): Revenue was up 15% to $80.3M, missing estimates. Changes to its sales pay structure drove away about 40% of MNTN’s experienced sellers, hurting new customer growth. MNTN cut its full-year outlook. Shares fell almost 40% after hours.
Criteo (🤷): Revenue was down 11% to $416M, beating estimates. Retail media revenue fell 23%, mostly because two big retail clients cut back their work with Criteo. Criteo reaffirmed its full-year guidance. Shares fell 4% pre-market before rebounding, closing up 3%.
Unity (👍): Revenue was up 32% to $622M, beating estimates. Unity posted its first profit since IPO. Ad revenue was up 90% to $432M, driven by Vector, its AI-powered ad platform (+126% revenue YoY). Q4 guidance predicts 105%–107% ad revenue growth. Shares rose 17% pre-market.
Viant (🤷): Revenue was up 29% to $110.4M, crushing estimates. CTV ad spend was up nearly 40% and now makes up more than half of total spend. The DSP announced its acquisition of Waymark. Current quarter revenue guidance: 20% growth. Shares fell 7% after hours.
Zeta Global (🤷): Revenue was up 46% to $493M, beating estimates. Growth was driven by adoption of its Athena AI tools, and “Super-Scaled Customers” grew 18% to 212. Zeta raised its current quarter guidance. Shares fell 3% after hours, then recovered.
Digital Turbine (👎): Revenue was up 27% to $178.7M, beating estimates. Investors didn’t like Digital Turbine’s plan to increase spending on AI. Shares fell 35%.
Teads (👎): Revenue was down 26% to $235.1M, missing estimates. CTV revenue grew 37%, but Teads is dealing with debt and sharp revenue decline. Teads stopped giving guidance. Shares fell 16.5% premarket before plunging further.
Taboola (👎): Revenue was down 7% to $462.3M, missing estimates. Publisher ad impressions declined and its Next Engage rollout was slower than expected. Taboola lowered its full-year outlook. Shares fell 22% premarket.
Skydance (👎): Revenue was up 4.8% to $7.03B, beating estimates. Paramount+ revenue was up 21%, but TV ad revenue fell 8%. Skydance warned that underperforming Warner Bros. films will cut $200M from Q4 earnings. Shares fell 9%.
The New York Times🔒 (👍): Revenue was up 9.7% to $768.5M, beating estimates. The Times added 420K digital subscribers, and digital ad revenue was up 12%. Shares rose 5.8% premarket.
Opinion: The Trade Desk, Viant, Zeta, PubMatic, and Criteo all beat estimates and their stocks still fell or barely moved. It’s as if ad dollars are worth less. It’s not a good time to be an ad company (unless you’re AppLovin).
Investors are looking further out. AI search keeps cutting publisher traffic, and the political money that boosted advertising revenue quarter is gone. AI-driven disruption is coming. Expect more ad tech companies to get bought or merge in 2027.
Other Notable Headlines 🤓
ChatGPT is about to show brands their mention count - OpenAI is testing a tool that shows brands how often ChatGPT mentions them and how many clicks those mentions get. Brands won’t see what users asked or how they compare to competitors.
Reddit dangles Q4 ad credits to win over new advertisers - New advertisers get free ad credits on campaigns that go live before November 20th. Agencies like Reddit’s user engagement, but many only test with small budgets because Reddit’s measurement is lacking.
Shopify noses further into ad tech with Campaign Autopilot expansion - The AI tool buys ads on Meta, Microsoft Advertising, and Snapchat for Shopify merchants, who only pay when they generate a sale.
Online magazine Salon, an early staple of internet discourse, announces it will shut down - After 31 years, Salon says independent digital journalism has become too hard to sustain as a business.
That’s It For This Week 👋
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