Affle agrees to buy Perion for $420m as FTC sues Toast over fees

The consolidation of the independent advertising technology sector took another step on Sunday, November 1, when Affle, the Indian mobile advertising group, agreed to buy Perion Network for $11.70 a share in cash, an equity value of about $420 million. The price is a 34.5% premium to Perion's closing price on Friday, October 30, the last trading day before the agreement was signed. Perion is listed in New York and Tel Aviv. The buyer is Affle 3iL Ltd., a subsidiary of Affle International, which is part of the India-listed Affle 3i Limited.

The financing is straightforward. Citibank is providing debt, and the deal carries no financing condition. Perion's board approved the agreement unanimously but negotiated a go-shop period, running until 11:59 pm Israel time on December 11, during which it may solicit better offers. Closing is expected in early 2027, subject to a shareholder vote and the US Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period. "We believe the proposed transaction offers compelling value and greater financial certainty for Perion's shareholders," said Eyal Kaplan, Perion's chairman.

The arithmetic says much about how public markets value smaller ad technology companies. Perion held $228.3 million in cash and securities on September 30, about 54% of the equity value, by PPC Land's calculation. The price is roughly 3.7 times the midpoint of Perion's 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance of $51 million to $53 million. In other words, Affle is paying less than $200 million for Perion's operating business once its cash is set aside. "Over the past several years, we have transformed Perion into a differentiated advertising technology company," said Tal Jacobson, Perion's chief executive. The company had been moving towards connected television, retail media and digital out-of-home screens. The announcement did not disclose the termination fee, the treatment of share options, Perion's third-quarter results or any updated outlook.

For Affle, which built its business on mobile app install campaigns in emerging markets, the purchase brings a foothold in US and Israeli advertising technology and in formats beyond the phone. For Perion's customers and staff, the effects were not described. The go-shop clause leaves room for another bidder, although the low valuation suggests the market has not been crowded with them.

The FTC targets restaurant fees and health plan leads

The Federal Trade Commission opened two fronts against deceptive marketing on Thursday, October 29. In the first, the agency and eight states sued Toast over hidden fees and "$0" hardware claims. Toast, the Boston company that sells software and payment processing to restaurants, is accused along with four subsidiaries of advertising hardware for $0 that restaurants ended up paying for, promising "24/7/365" support that customers could not reach, billing for add-ons that were never ordered and making cancellation slow and expensive.

The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, also alleges that Toast charged diners a 99-cent fee on online orders over $10 from about September 2021 until late July 2023, kept the money, and did not disclose that the fee was its own. It describes a "gray, fine-print disclosure scroll box which appears towards the end of the enrollment process." The FTC voted 2-0 to file. "These practices are illegal, and the FTC will continue to take aggressive action," said Christopher Mufarrige, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection. Toast said in a statement that it "strongly disagrees" and will fight the case, arguing that the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act does not reach negotiated business contracts. Toast reported 2025 revenue of $6.15 billion, about 82% of it from financial services. The total relief sought and the amount Toast earned from the diner fee are redacted. The plaintiffs also allege an early termination charge of $150 for each remaining month on some no-contract accounts, and say no refunds of the diner fee have been issued. The case is notable for its target: Toast sells to businesses, not consumers, and the FTC is applying consumer protection law to the way a software company markets to restaurant owners.

The second front concerns lead generation. As open enrollment for the Health Insurance Marketplace began on November 1, FTC staff sent warning letters to 25 companies that market health plans or generate sales leads for them, cautioning that violators face civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation. The letters list four categories of likely deceptive claims, covering benefits, the comprehensiveness of coverage, costs and false incentives, and restate the Telemarketing Sales Rule bans on prerecorded sales calls and calls to numbers on the Do Not Call registry. "Making healthcare more transparent and affordable is a top priority for the FTC," Mufarrige said.

The letters accuse no recipient of wrongdoing, and the companies were not named. The template, signed by Lois Greisman, associate director of the Division of Marketing Practices, says more letters will follow on a rolling basis. Each unlawful call or advertisement can count as a separate violation, which is why the per-violation figure matters to an industry that runs on volume. The letter cites six resolved cases against health plan marketers, which PPC Land totalled at $455.7 million in monetary amounts, mixing redress orders with judgments. Open enrollment lasts until January 15, 2027.

A federal court in California, meanwhile, kept alive a case about how retailers display discounts. On October 22, Judge Stephen V. Wilson denied Brooks Brothers' motions to compel arbitration, dismiss and strike class allegations in a suit over an $89.50 strike-through price. The plaintiff, Dominick Martin, bought a polo shirt online in January 2025 for $39.99, shown beside a struck-through $89.50, and alleges that the higher price had not prevailed in the three months before, as California law requires for former-price claims. The court held that the footer and checkout "terms" links did not bind a shopper who bought without an account. "Plaintiff plausibly alleges all claims under all three causes of action," the judge wrote. The order does not decide whether $89.50 was the real prevailing price, and it warned that class certification "might be particularly challenging."

AI agents reach the checkout

Microsoft Clarity published a study on October 29 that measured what AI agents actually do on websites. Across more than 5.2 million sessions classified as agentic, from 230,511 Clarity projects between August 13 and September 9, checkout appeared in 25.21% of agent sessions against 14.65% of human sessions on the same sites. Outbound clicks ran the other way, at 14.28% for agents against 26.99% for people. Form submissions were similar, at 19.85% and 18.56%. "Most analytics stacks were built to understand human visitors, not agents acting on their behalf," Clarity's staff wrote.

The figures come with caveats. Microsoft names the OpenAI, Google and Anthropic ecosystems but no specific products, and does not describe how it detects agents. "An agentic-classified session may also include a human handoff," the post says, meaning a person may have finished what an agent started. PPC Land's arithmetic suggests the published percentages rest on about 1.22 million sessions, not the 5.2 million in the headline. Clarity also made its Agent Activity Dashboard generally available the same day. If the pattern holds, agents are not browsing; they arrive with a task, and the task is often to buy.

The same blog showed AI at work inside Microsoft itself. In a post titled "How We Made clarity.js 4.5% Smaller Without Sacrificing Compatibility", Manu Nair described how an AI coding agent ran more than 50 build-and-test experiments and cut 1,257 compressed bytes from the Clarity script, which runs on billions of pages. Each cycle took about 35 seconds. "5-byte improvements aren't worth a human's time, but they're worth 35 seconds of automated experimentation," Nair wrote. A larger saving of 2,308 bytes was not shipped because it would break Angular sites. "Ultimately, we couldn't ship this optimization because of compatibility requirements," Nair wrote.

Detecting agents that do not announce themselves is harder. Resemble AI released an agent detection product on October 29 and said its behavioural model, which reads cursor movement, typing rhythm and on-page actions, identified at least 98.8% of agents built to hide their automation in an internal test, while six established tools, including Akamai, Cloudflare Turnstile and Google reCAPTCHA, caught only 3.1% to 14.8% of disguised agents. "Agents will inevitably need to follow the same rules," said Zohaib Ahmed, the chief executive. The company did not disclose its sample size, the agents tested or a false-positive rate for humans, and its own tables show one rival reaching 50.2% on session-takeover agents, which conflicts with the 14.8% ceiling in its release.

Publishers count the cost of AI answers

Digital Content Next, the New York trade association whose members include The New York Times, asked Judge Sidney Stein on October 29 to accept a proposed amicus brief in the copyright litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft. The brief says members lost 26% of unique visitors between 2023 and 2025, and that referred web traffic fell by a median 22% year on year over eight weeks in 2026, up from 10% in 2025. Advertising made up 84% of participating members' digital revenue in 2025, and total revenue fell 5%.

The brief builds its argument around a phrase from a Microsoft internal document cited by the news plaintiffs: "Our AI content strategy has started a 'doom loop'". Jason Kint, the association's chief executive, summarised the filing on LinkedIn: "DCN's amicus in NYTvOpenAI/MSFT gets at RAG economics 101". The brief cites the plaintiffs' statement that 40% of ChatGPT conversations using retrieval rely on news publisher content. It does not say how many members contributed to each survey, nor how the traffic declines were separated from other changes in search and social distribution. The judge has not ruled on whether to accept it.

A separate question is which brands AI systems recommend. Bluefish, a New York company that sells AI visibility software, said on October 27 that ChatGPT and Google put a different brand at the top of AI answers in 35% of 5,810 buying topics, and launched Paid Media Briefs, a product that suggests keywords, headlines and landing pages for Google's AI Max and Performance Max campaigns and for ChatGPT ads. "AI is collapsing those boundaries," said Alex Sherman, the chief executive, describing the line between organic and paid. Bluefish did not name the categories, collection dates or method behind the 35% figure, and published no prices.

Google's Gemini edits files and faces a refiled suit

Google said on October 29 that users of the Gemini app can now preview and edit documents, PDFs, slide decks, spreadsheets and code that Gemini generates without leaving the chat. PDF editing works on the web and mobile; the other formats are web only. "These capabilities are now available to all users in all languages where Gemini app is available," Google said in its announcement. Workspace administrators have no separate control for the feature; the only lever is turning the Gemini app on or off. Alphabet reported on October 28 that the Gemini app has passed one billion monthly users, up from 900 million in May. Comscore put Gemini at 30% of US AI prompt volume in June, up from 17% in January, while ChatGPT's share fell from 70% to 50%. Editing inside the chat keeps users in Google's product for longer, which is the same logic that has driven AI Overviews in search.

Gemini's reach into Gmail is the subject of a lawsuit that will not go away. In Thele v. Google, a proposed class action filed in November 2025, the plaintiffs allege that "on or about October 10, 2025, Google secretly turned on Gemini for all its users' Gmail, Chat, and Meet accounts". Judge Noël Wise dismissed the first amended complaint in July for lack of concrete injury, with permission to amend, and the plaintiffs refiled on August 18, adding a third plaintiff, a California unfair competition claim and new allegations about how consent screens are designed. Google moved to dismiss again on September 29 and denies changing anyone's settings. No ruling has been reported.

Television, streaming and charts

The IAB Tech Lab published an opinion piece on October 29 by Aviram Sharon, co-founder and chief executive of InTheGame, arguing that six CTV ad formats can shorten streaming ad breaks without losing revenue. His method moves some advertising out of the pod and into pause, menu, squeezeback, overlay and in-scene units. "Streaming inherited the commercial break from broadcast, and with it a habit: put every ad in the pod," Sharon wrote in the post. He cited a 2024 FreeWheel study in which breaks at unnatural moments bothered 71% of viewers and cut brand recall by 14%. The post offers no revenue or completion data for the formats, and does not disclose that his company sells them.

On the buying side, OpenX released a report on October 15 showing that supply-side targeting reached 51% of connected TV deal spend on its US marketplace in 2025, up from 9% in 2022, while third-party audience data fell from 78% to about 40% of that spending. "A lot of the tools that I traditionally would go to the DSP for, I'm now bypassing and going straight to an SSP," said Audrey Elman, media director at Polaris. The research, conducted with eight buy-side executives who are all OpenX clients, gives no dollar values or prices.

Amazon added a catalogue to Prime Video. All 25 official James Bond films, from Dr. No in 1962 to No Time to Die in 2021, are streaming on Prime Video, Amazon said in a guide published on October 29. "The 25 official James Bond films are streaming in one place on Prime Video," it said. Denis Villeneuve will direct the next film, with Steven Knight writing, and casting began in May. Amazon did not say how long the films will remain, in which countries, or whether they run with ads, which Prime Video now shows by default in the United States. Prime Video's ad-supported audience reached an average of 315 million viewers worldwide by the end of 2025, up from 200 million disclosed in 2024, so a complete Bond catalogue is also a large block of ad inventory.

On YouTube, LISA's single "Tarantino" entered the global Top Songs chart at No. 1 with 71.7 million views in the week ending October 29, pushing Shakira and Burna Boy's "Dai Dai" to second for the second time in seven weeks. The song, the lead track of the EP "PRESS PLAY" released on October 23 and tied to a PlayStation campaign, led national charts in the US, UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia. "Dai Dai" fell 1.6% to 43.9 million views and no longer leads any of the 16 national charts PPC Land sampled. LISA's debut week was less than half the 155 million views her earlier single "SaWaDiKa" drew on arrival in September. YouTube's chart files carry no field separating organic views from paid promotion, which matters as labels increasingly buy video ads to lift a release.

App stores, ad prices and passwords

Apple cut its standard App Store commission in Taiwan. From October 31, the rate on in-app purchases and paid apps on iOS and iPadOS falls from 30% to 26%, a change Apple said followed "discussions with the Taiwan Fair Trade Commission." The commission accepted the cut as a commitment on October 30 and suspended, rather than closed, its investigation, which it can resume if Apple fails to comply. The 15% tiers for small businesses and subscriptions after their first year are unchanged, and no alternative payment options were added. Developers keep 74% of a standard sale instead of 70%, about 5.7% more per transaction. macOS, tvOS, watchOS and visionOS are not covered. Apple has argued that its ecosystem generated $1.4 trillion in billings and sales in 2025, a figure from a study it commissioned from Analysis Group.

PPCmate, a self-serve advertising platform for pop-under and push formats, published average prices paid between September 30 and October 29 that show US pop-under ads costing 28 times Pakistan's rate: $5.31 per thousand impressions against $0.19. Mobile pop-unders averaged $2.09, against $1.34 on desktop. "A $0.20 CPM market that never converts is more expensive than a $5 one that does," the company wrote. It did not disclose impression volumes or advertiser counts.

DoubleVerify distributed a report on October 29 finding that marketers still spend almost 10 hours a week on manual campaign optimisation, 9 hours 58 minutes in 2026 against 10 hours 12 minutes a year earlier. Half now use third-party AI bidding tools, up from 42%. "It appears that marketers still want or need humans to crunch the numbers," the report said. The survey of 2,020 marketing decision-makers in 25 countries was run by Sapio Research in February. DoubleVerify sells the tools it describes, and the report does not mention Nielsen's pending acquisition of the company.

A survey from All About Cookies, a US site that reviews privacy software and earns commissions from products it mentions, found that 36% of 1,000 US adults had secretly logged into a partner's account using a password the partner did not know they had. Streaming passwords were the most shared, by 84%, followed by phone passcodes at 74%. "Sharing a Netflix login is one thing," the survey noted, before turning to accounts that hold money and private messages. The research vendor, panel and margin of error were not disclosed.

Microsoft Advertising, finally, extended the window for server-side conversions. PPC News Feed reported that the UET Conversions API now accepts events up to three months old, up from one week, which suits advertisers with long sales cycles. Microsoft's integration guide notes that events must still fall inside a conversion goal's attribution window to count. Hana Kobzová spotted the change.

What comes next

The calendar ahead is set by regulators and deal deadlines. The midterm elections take place on Tuesday, November 3. Perion's go-shop period ends on December 11, and the Affle deal is expected to close in early 2027. Health Insurance Marketplace enrollment runs until January 15, 2027, while the FTC sends further warning letters to lead generators. Toast has said it will contest the FTC's case, and Google awaits a ruling on its second motion to dismiss the Gemini Gmail suit. In New York, Judge Stein must decide whether to hear from publishers who say AI answers have already cost them a quarter of their visitors.