The future of marketing — and, in a way, everything else — is getting a shakeup.
It was announced in May but the deal to sell the website maker to private equity firm Permira is now closed, following some haggling which raised the final price from $6.9B to $7.2B. CEO Anthony Casalena is staying on board and keeping his ownership stake — he told me on Decoder in 2023 that it wasn’t “the most fun time to be a public tech company,” so we’ll see if he likes being a PE CEO any better.
There was a flurry of headlines earlier this week claiming vinyl sales were down 33 percent this year, which would have been the first decline in 17 years. Don’t fret, though: it turns out sales were actually up 6.2 percent — Luminate, the firm which handles most of the music industry’s metrics, changed its methodology at the beginning of the year.
In Luminate’s mid-year report, the company stated: “While the new modeled methodology more accurately represents the independent retail market, we do not have comparable historical data to provide an accurate year-over-year trend. Therefore, independent retail physical sales are not included in our H1 2024 vs. H1 2023 U.S. physical sales reporting.”
The Discogs blog has a full dive, including an explanation of the metrics change. Counting things: a never-ending challenge.
[Discogs]
After years of demand, our friends over at Eater just released their app for iOS, which helps you find nearby restaurants they’ve covered with over 10,000 maps in more than 100 cities. (Tip: if you’re looking to show off to friends and family, the Heatmaps are a great way to discover the hottest new restaurants.)
Download it from the App Store right now and read more about the app on Eater. (And for all of our disclosure enthusiasts, Eater is owned by Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.)
The cofounder of the world’s largest education app thinks AI and gamification can supercharge language learning.
Can AI actually change our love-hate relationship with our tools?
Couple things here: It’s the DOJ, not Lina Khan’s FTC, that is currently pursuing a breakup of Google and in the middle of a giant Apple antitrust case, so it’s not even clear Cuban has pointed his ire at the correct target with this comment. And what a wild political re-alignment when AOC and JD Vance agree that Khan is doing a good job!
If you thought standard-issue ad tech was a little weird and creepy, get ready for the future: platforms letting marketers use all their data to make an infinite number of AI-generated ads specifically targeted to individual viewers. Digiday reports on TikTok’s Smart+, which competes with similar offerings from Meta and Google:
Marketers can let TikTok’s AI handle the heavy lifting — building and delivering ads to drive conversions, leads, or app downloads. […] The pitch is all about simplicity and speed — no more weeks of guesswork and endless A/B testing, according to Adolfo Fernandez, TikTok’s director, global head of product strategy and operations, commerce.
Super normal, everyone! No potential issues here!
That’s straight from Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu, who took great exception to our story from September 25th, which was sourced to a Fast Company article about his comments at one of their events. Jesse told me the actual daily user number was around 20,000, spiking up to 34,000 the day the company’s new LAM Playgrounds were launched, and that his actual comment was that 5,000 of those people were using the Rabbit at any given time. For context, Jesse also told me Rabbit has sold 100,000 R1s so far.
Fast Company has corrected its story, and we’ve updated our story as well. You can hear the whole conversation on Decoder.
Rabbit’s large action model is here, sort of — but everyone else is coming fast.