The archive that ran out of cash

A company that sells pictures of everything stopped being able to sell pictures of itself. The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in Getty Images Holdings on September 29, 2026, and opened delisting proceedings under Section 802.01D of its Listed Company Manual, the discretionary clause that covers abnormally low share prices rather than the better-known dollar floor in Section 802.01C, which Getty had already breached in March. The shares had settled at 12 cents on September 28, down roughly 93% over twelve months and about 99% since the stock began trading on July 25, 2022 at an aggregate equity value near $2.9 billion.

The timing was not accidental. Getty elected on August 31 to invoke 30-day grace periods on interest due September 1 on its 9.750% notes due 2027 and its 14.000% notes due 2028, and those grace periods expire around October 1. The company said it held enough cash to pay and chose to defer anyway, which is the sort of sentence that moves credit ratings. Moody's cut the corporate family rating from Caa1 to Caa3 on September 2 and took the unsecured notes to Ca. S&P moved to CCC and signalled selective default if the coupons went unpaid at the end of the grace window. By late September the 14% notes were quoted near 47 cents on the dollar, against something close to par in the spring.

The arithmetic underneath is stark. Getty carried approximately $1.47 billion in face-value debt against $51.6 million of cash at June 30, 2026: $1.17 billion of senior secured notes, $510.6 million of term loans mostly denominated in euros, $270 million of senior unsecured notes, and $120 million drawn on a revolver of $150 million that is now fully used. Second-quarter interest expense reached $57.3 million against $36.6 million a year earlier, while operating income came in at $32.4 million. Interest alone exceeded what the business earned from operations.

Two expensive decisions brought the company here. The first was the attempt to merge with Shutterstock, agreed on January 7, 2025 in a transaction valued around $3.7 billion. The US Department of Justice cleared it on February 23, 2026. The UK Competition and Markets Authority did not: its final report of May 15, 2026 required divestiture of Shutterstock's entire editorial business, Getty's board unanimously rejected that condition on June 30, and termination notice went out on July 7 after the second extended end date passed. To fund the deal Getty had sold $628.4 million of 10.500% senior secured notes in October 2025. Through June 30 the merger financing had cost roughly $30.1 million in interest net of escrow income, $13.5 million in financing fees and about $60.4 million in direct deal costs. The second-quarter cash interest on the 10.5% notes alone was $37.4 million. The deal did not happen; the interest did.

The second decision dates to the SPAC structure itself. Getty issued 20,700,000 public warrants and redeemed them in October 2022, and former holders sued. In October 2023 the Southern District of New York awarded Alta Partners $36.9 million and CRCM Institutional Master Fund $51.0 million, each plus 9% pre-judgment interest. The Second Circuit affirmed on January 15, 2026 and denied rehearing on April 16. Getty paid $110.9 million in judgment and interest on April 23 after drawing $120 million from its revolver. Roughly $75.6 million of further judgments remain pending, including $67.8 million directed by a New York state court on July 27, 2026 with interest running from August 22, 2022, and $7.8 million in the federal Berner and Lapp actions. The litigation reserve stood at $99.5 million at the half-year.

What makes the filing unusually useful is where the revenue went. Second-quarter revenue was $229.1 million, down 2.5% and down 4.1% currency-neutral. Creative, the stock imagery business, fell 2.6% to $127.4 million. Editorial, covering news, sport and entertainment, rose 9.2% to $96.5 million. The segment labelled Other, which contains data access and machine-learning licensing, collapsed to $5.2 million from $15.7 million, a drop the company attributed to the absence of the large upfront deals that had inflated the prior-year figure. Purchasing customers over the trailing twelve months fell 10.0% to 636,000. Active annual subscribers fell 25.2% to 240,000. Annual subscriber revenue retention slipped to 88.4% from 93.4%. Asia-Pacific revenue dropped 22.1% currency-neutral.

Chief executive Craig Peters named two causes on the August 10 earnings call, and both matter to anyone selling or buying advertising. Revenue from advertising agencies fell 13%, which Peters tied to secular pressure, consolidation among buyers and in-house production that now includes generative tools. And iStock's referral traffic from search engines declined as those engines began answering queries directly, a pattern the broader click-through research has been tracking all year. Getty had already ended iStock's free-trial acquisition programme in June 2025. The same disclosure that warned of substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern, filed August 10, also identified where an AI-mediated web damages a content business: self-serve acquisition and agency production, not enterprise subscriptions and not live news.

The irony is thick. Getty is simultaneously one of the loudest litigants against generative image models and one of their licensors. A multi-year display agreement with OpenAI signed on June 21, 2026 put licensed images into ChatGPT search and discovery, and the shares rose as much as 145% on the news before reversing entirely. A Perplexity display partnership dates to October 31, 2025. Terms of neither were disclosed. Meanwhile the High Court of England and Wales ruled on November 4, 2025 that training Stable Diffusion did not infringe Getty's copyright on a secondary infringement theory, leaving only narrow trademark findings tied to watermarks in older model versions; permission to appeal came in December 2025 and the appeal is expected in November 2026. A US suit filed on August 14, 2025 in the Northern District of California alleges copying of roughly 12 million images with captions and metadata, and sits in fact discovery.

Shutterstock, the partner that got away, is not healthy either: second-quarter revenue down 17% to $221.8 million, content revenue down 17% to $165.7 million, paid downloads down to 98.7 million from 112.6 million, and a $173.7 million goodwill impairment tied to the failed merger producing a $155.9 million net loss. Its shares had fallen around 80% over twelve months by late September, though they still trade.

Debtwire reported on September 11 that Getty was preparing for a possible Chapter 11 filing and working with Alvarez & Marsal. Octus reported lender groups retaining Gibson Dunn and Houlihan Lokey for the term lenders and Akin Gump and Perella Weinberg for the unsecured noteholders. Bloomberg reported confidential talks on debtor-in-possession financing on September 28, with lenders potentially taking control and the Getty family weighing an investment. Guggenheim Securities, engaged in July, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett advise the company. As of September 30 no filing had been disclosed. One further detail will outlive this particular case: the SEC approved an NYSE rule change on August 14, 2026, effective July 1, 2027, requiring immediate suspension and delisting proceedings for any close below 25 cents, with no cure period at all.

Google takes the prices out of European search, then points at Brussels

Yesterday's edition noted Google filing General Court appeals against the Digital Markets Act obligation to share search history with rivals. What has changed since is the inventory of things European users can no longer do in Search, and the fact that a senior Google executive has now put a number of them on the record and blamed the regulator for each.

Nick Fox, the senior vice president who runs Google's Knowledge and Information division, sat for a 42-minute interview on September 25, 2026 with Pietro Valetto, a doctoral student at the University of Antwerp, published to a YouTube channel that had roughly 200 subscribers and 97 views when it was captured. Fox called the compliance work the biggest degradation ever to Search and said it literally makes me sad, itemising three losses in the European Economic Area: real-time flight pricing, the ability to search by trip date, and reduced spam filtering. On the date function he asked why it would make sense for anyone to not be able to search by date.

The pattern is familiar. Free product listings and popular-product carousels vanished from EEA results over September 17 and 18, with declines of 90% to 100% recorded in Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands. Google activated a redesigned EEA results page on September 8. The 60-day compliance deadline attached to the Commission's July 23, 2026 decision, which carried a 890 million euro fine including 460 million euros specifically for search self-preferencing, closed on September 21. Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined the company 403 million euros over location data processing the same day.

The decision Fox objects to does not instruct Google to delete features. Article 6(5) of the DMA prohibits a gatekeeper from ranking its own services more favourably than equivalent third-party services; non-discrimination is the obligation, and removal is one way of complying with it rather than the required one. Competition lawyer Thomas Hoeppner has argued the removals are strategic choices. Google has said it devoted more than 3,000 engineers and more than 40 compliance solutions to Article 6(5) work, and its September 2025 consultation response put the cost to European businesses at 114 billion euros.

Fox also attacked Article 6(11), which requires gatekeeper search engines to share anonymised ranking, query, click and view data with rival engines on fair terms, describing it as a really massive violation of European privacy. The sharing is not hypothetical and not new: Google has offered an anonymised dataset since March 2024 at prices between 1.50 and 9 euros per thousand queries, and exactly one licensee took it up. The Commission concluded on July 16, 2026 that the anonymisation stripped 90% to 100% of unique queries, and the binding scheme instead removes queries searched by fewer than 50 distinct users a year. Rival engines receive Google query data from January 2027. A Google letter in May 2026 claimed users could be re-identified in under two hours. Judge Amit Mehta's September 2, 2025 ruling imposes comparable sharing in the United States.

On traffic, Fox said Google sends billions of clicks to the web through its AI experiences, without rates. The segment figures point a different way: Network revenue fell 4% to $6.97 billion in the first quarter of 2026 and a further 1% to $7.3 billion in the second, while search advertising rose 17% to $63.3 billion. Ahrefs measured a 58% click-through reduction for top-ranked pages sitting beneath AI Overviews in February 2026. European travel bodies put hotel search usage at 80% in 2023 against 37% in 2013, and Mirai research found hotels in DMA regions receiving 30% fewer clicks and 36% fewer direct bookings. Asked what he measures, Fox named the number of queries people are doing. He also disclosed that Google is re-engineering its advertising and search advertising systems, which lines up with new AI Mode formats, Direct Offers, Universal Cart and the testing of exact and phrase match inside AI Mode.

Publishers put a price on being quoted

The business of appearing in a machine's answer is becoming a product line, and its pricing is being set in two very different rooms.

In the first room, publishers are selling it. Future has signed more than 30 clients for its generative engine optimisation product, with renewals, and Ziff Davis is running multiple accounts, in reporting published by Digiday on October 1, 2026. Future chief revenue officer Mike Peralta framed the offer as making branded content work better. Ziff Davis president Steve Horowitz said brands are coming to us because of that trust factor, and because they know that ultimately we're not going to compromise the edit to deliver it. Time, Hubert Burda Media, Funke, Klambt, Axios and the Daily Mail are developing or testing comparable services. One executive said the offering is already making money, and another conceded the fragility of the model: deals are deals, with their own time frames. The Interactive Advertising Bureau expects a measurement framework in November, which is to say there is no standard metric yet for what any of this delivers.

The numbers that create the demand are grim. Google Search referrals to publishers fell 40.2% year over year between July 2025 and July 2026, Discover referrals fell 34.3%, and AI referrals account for 0.01% of publisher traffic. CNN's response has been to treat each off-platform surface as its own business, adding close to a million YouTube subscribers this year to reach 20 million globally alongside 16 million TikTok followers and a billion monthly TikTok views; vice president of off-platform Caterina Andreano said each platform matters to CNN for reach, relevance and referrals, and as a business in its own right.

In the second room, the platform is setting the price, and it is low. Roughly 100 publishers are in Google's AI contribution pilot, and for small and midsize sites the payments amount to less than one-tenth of 1% of their advertising revenue, in figures The Information published on September 29 and Search Engine Roundtable summarised on September 30. The spread is extreme. One early participant collects more than $1 million a year. A later entrant has taken $50,000 to $60,000 in recent months. Several smaller sites have received under $1,000 across several months, including one with a seven-figure arrangement. Participants told reporters they have no idea how the payouts are calculated, and monthly figures move without explanation, in a PPC Land analysis published on September 30 at 20:40 UTC. Barry Schwartz said Google needs to be a little more transparent of how they're paying, noting there is no formula Google is sharing with those publishers. Payments to major titles including Der Spiegel, El Pais, The Guardian and the Washington Post began on December 10, 2025. Google News Showcase, by comparison, covers more than 2,800 publications across 33 countries, and a separate news AI scheme covers more than 200 titles.

Between those two rooms sits a resignation. Conde Nast chief executive Roger Lynch is leaving after seven and a half years to run Mattel, Adweek reported on September 30 at 12:20 pm ET, with independent board member Mike Perlis taking over on an interim basis while a search runs. Lynch arrived from Pandora in 2019 and spent much of the back half of his tenure on exactly this problem; two days before the announcement he was among the publishing executives pressing Congress to compel AI crawlers to identify themselves. Conde Nast's commerce revenue is up 170% since 2020 and digital subscription revenue up 155%, which is the shape of a business that stopped waiting for search traffic. The toy company gets a media executive. The magazine company gets an interim.

Who decides what counts as a brand mention

If the output of an answer engine is becoming inventory, then the definitions governing it are worth more than the dashboards displaying it. Two items from the past 48 hours show the definitions being handed over.

Microsoft moved first. The AI Visibility dashboard inside Microsoft Clarity now lets site owners add, modify and remove the brand terms that determine whether a query is classified as branded or non-branded, in a change Clarity staff posted and PPC Land covered on September 29 at 20:24 UTC. Terms can be grouped under a parent Brand Name, which may carry abbreviations, translations, localisations, alternate spellings and common typos; Microsoft illustrated it with Microsoft, MS and Microsoft Corporation grouped together. Results filter by Brand Name or by individual term. The control arrived 57 days after the August 3, 2026 release that first split AI queries into branded and non-branded buckets, and Clarity pre-populates the initial list as a starting point. What the announcement does not say is whether edits reclassify historical data or apply only forward, whether matching is exact, substring or fuzzy, how many terms a brand may add, or how fast changes take effect. A metric whose denominator the reporting party can edit, without a disclosed method and without a stated effect on history, is a metric with a governance problem rather than a measurement one.

The second item shows what happens when nobody edits anything. SEO consultant Lily Ray posted on X at 8:50 pm on September 28 that she had won the number one SEO World Champion award at SEOktoberfest 2026, captioned no listicles required, alongside screenshots of Google's AI Overviews confirming it. The AI answer cited a single source: Ray's own website, whose homepage had been modified at 12:16 UTC that same day, in reporting PPC Land published on September 30 at 07:13 UTC. The event itself ran September 20 to 25 at Stanglwirt in Austria, billed by its organisers as 25 experts and 30 attendees at ticket prices of 5,500 euros for experts, 8,000 for attendees and 8,500 for newcomers. Ray described it as a private, invite-only meeting of 50 of the best minds in SEO and noted that the talks are confidential, so her presentation cannot be shared or summarised online. The organisers published no announcement naming a winner. Google's system nonetheless generated answers stating she was officially the number one World Champion and that her presentation was voted the best of the year by attendees. Ray's X post drew 8,900 views, 112 likes, 15 replies, two reposts and six bookmarks.

The award may well be real. That is not the point the case makes. Ray herself published a fabricated core update article in January 2026 that AI Overviews repeated as fact within 24 hours on the strength of her site alone, and the retrieval mechanics are identical whether the claim is a genuine peer honour or a self-written list. Microsoft is letting brands define their own branded terms; Google is letting a single site define a world championship. Both are definitional authority moving outward from the platform, in one case deliberately and in the other by default.

European streaming buys programmatic faster than America does

FreeWheel's first-half report, covering January to June 2026 against the same period of 2025 across the United States and 14 European countries, lands on a divergence that the usual American framing of connected TV tends to flatten. Programmatic ad views grew 44% in Europe against 25% in the United States, in figures PPC Land covered on September 29 at 20:02 UTC. Overall streaming ad views grew 20% in Europe and 12% in the United States, 13% combined. Unique advertisers buying programmatically rose 25% across both regions.

Europe is growing faster from a smaller base and buying differently. Programmatic accounts for 34% of total ad views in the United States but 22% in Europe. Within programmatic, guaranteed deals represent 71% of European activity and 27% of American activity, which inverts the non-guaranteed split of 29% against 73%. The device mix diverges as sharply: connected TV carries 86% of total American streaming ad views against 53% in Europe, where mobile takes 24% and set-top box video on demand still takes 16%. Inside programmatic impressions specifically, connected TV reaches 92% in the United States and 39% in Europe, with set-top box video on demand at 28% of European programmatic volume. Content splits follow suit, with live programming at 57% of American ad views and 32% of European, European live share growing 8% year over year, and long-form content representing 95% and 97% of video-on-demand views respectively.

The report was authored by Brandt Plomaritis, Hifza Rahim and Adam Twyman of FreeWheel's Advisory Services team, drawing on aggregated platform data from Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Targeted-audience ad views grew 5% in the United States and 11% in Europe, with demographic targeting at 53% and 59% of targeted volume respectively. Completion rates across Roku, Samsung TV and Amazon Fire TV came in at 94% for pre-roll, 98% for mid-roll and 91% for post-roll. Ad-supported subscriber share reached 89% in the United States and 85% in Europe. Set against September 2018, when television-screen share of digital video ad views was 57% in the United States and 30% in Europe, and programmatic took 14% of ad views overall, the direction is not in doubt.

The caveats are load-bearing, and FreeWheel states some of them. There are no CPM, fill rate or revenue figures anywhere in the document, and no absolute volumes for either region, which makes the regional comparisons relative rather than comparable. Completion-rate and contextual findings rest on undisclosed sub-groups, including the claim that contextual ad views grew at 5.8 times the rate of overall ad views among publishers actively using contextual products. Share changes are not consistently labelled as percentage points or relative moves. Two pages carry a notice that the content was created in whole or in part using artificial intelligence, without saying which sections.

Viant takes the exchange out of the deal, and Locality argues shorter is not better

Viant expanded its Direct Access programme on September 24 at 9:00 am EDT to cover private marketplace and programmatic guaranteed deals, routing those transactions through ad servers rather than exchanges and charging no intermediary fee for the hop it removes. Jounce Media benchmarking puts the reach of the expanded path at 94% of programmatic demand, in a PPC Land account published on September 29 at 15:46 UTC. FreeWheel, Magnite's SpringServe and Integral Ad Science's Publica carry the deals; the supply-side platforms lose the toll.

Richie Hyden, Viant's senior vice president for supply and connected TV, said that by extending Direct Access to support deals the company is closing the gap for how advertisers actually transact CTV, via deals. Chief financial officer Larry Madden has attributed an average 35% CPM reduction to the programme. DIRECTV Advertising's chief advertising sales officer Amy Leifer said premium content deserves a supply path built for its value. WHOOP's senior brand media manager Courtney Manning said every dollar we spend on CTV needs to work harder, and that Direct Access has let the brand put more budget into working media. Connected TV represented 46% of Viant platform spend in the third quarter of 2025, and the share of connected TV spend flowing through Direct Access was reported at 85% on June 11 and more than 80% on August 10, with 90% expected as Publica publishers onboard. Second-quarter revenue reached $104.3 million, up 34%, with a $1.8 million net loss. The company announced a secondary offering of 8.5 million Class A shares on September 16, with an underwriters' option on a further 1,275,000, and the stock fell about 11% in extended trading.

The fee comparisons are the part buyers will read twice. The Trade Desk charges a flat 4.5% for OpenPath; rivals wrapping guaranteed deals charge about 1%; Viant is charging nothing for the removed step. IAB Spain's April 2026 work put 41% of programmatic investment reaching genuine measurable viewable impressions, with 26.1% consumed by transaction costs across demand-side fees, data and supply-side charges. IAB research of July 14, 2026 found buyer confidence at 57% for guaranteed deals against 33% for the open exchange, and a January 2026 survey put 76% of buyers rating curated and private marketplaces as important. eMarketer projects $38 billion of US connected TV advertising in 2026, with the format passing linear spend in 2028.

A dissent arrived the next day from an unlikely direction. Tom Wolfe, senior vice president of programmatic strategy and partnerships at Locality, argued that a shorter path isn't inherently a better path, in an AdExchanger podcast published on September 30 at 3:50 pm. His complaint is that the sector optimises for fee reduction and intermediary removal while ignoring signal degradation as inventory crosses fragmented systems, and that the useful objective is data path optimisation: making sure the signals travelling with an impression arrive intact. Wolfe extended the argument to local television, where he contends national strategies get imposed on markets that do not resemble each other, an auto-intender in dense Philadelphia behaving unlike one on rural roads around Dothan, Alabama, in ways no zip-code approximation captures. On artificial intelligence he was blunter still: the advantage sits in the data feeding the models rather than the models, which he compared to everyone having Microsoft Excel in the 1990s.

Both positions can be true, and the figures suggest they are. Viant is removing a fee from a hop. Wolfe is pointing out that the hop was also carrying information. Nothing in either account quantifies the signal loss.

Thirty years of local ratings move into a browser tab

Guideline made WRAP Cloud commercially available on September 29, 2026, moving a television audience analysis platform with 30 years of history from desktop installations to hosted software reachable in a browser. Local daily ratings and multi-market reports now run without local installs, virtual desktops or manual data file handling, in a PPC Land account published on September 29 at 19:23 UTC. Single sign-on, role-based access and market-level entitlements enforced at the interface level come with it, and the legacy desktop edition remains supported.

John Yang, lead product manager for the WRAP suite, framed the change as WRAP isn't changing, what's possible with WRAP is, and said every new report, dataset and AI capability the company builds now reaches every customer the day we ship it. Chief product officer Steve Silvers said the hosted edition puts 30 years of trusted analysis in front of everyone who needs it, and described it as the blueprint for every Guideline product. Model Context Protocol integration and embedded agentic workflows are listed as planned, with no dates. Pricing, launch customers, regional availability, ratings data providers and the scope of any MCP exposure were all left unstated.

The context explains the urgency. Guideline administers $300 billion of media budgets across 60,000 media plans and 10,000 active users, with proprietary spend and pricing data representing $200 billion of annual media investment across 65 countries. It extended local CPM benchmarks to connected TV, audio and podcasting on April 30, 2026 and linked MediaTools to Mediaocean's Prisma in June. Local television spans 210 designated market areas, and CIMM has identified a measurement gap of 20% to 30% in them. Nielsen cut its local tuning threshold from five minutes to one on August 31, 2026, an 80% reduction that addressed 24% of tuning events previously going unreported. Nielsen's national measurement now combines a 42,000-home panel with device data from 45 million households, and its Ad Intel AI platform, released July 27, 2026, covers 5.5 million brands in 90 countries. Comscore received MRC accreditation for demographic television metrics on April 8, 2025 and reported more than 15 broadcast client agreements on April 21, 2026.

Independent measurement kept expanding on the streaming side in the same week. AudienceProject added Canada to its Netflix advertising measurement, taking the integration to six markets alongside the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, PPC Land reported on September 29 at 20:05 UTC. Across the five European markets the firm puts Netflix's average unique reach to television at 54%, a figure published without sample size, campaign count, reporting period, target definition, deduplication detail or co-viewing adjustment. Partnerships director Robert Singleton said independent cross-media measurement plays a key role in proving the reach and incremental value delivered. Netflix cited 250 million global monthly active viewers on its ad plan at its May 13, 2026 upfront, works with more than 50 measurement vendors, and is targeting $3 billion of 2026 advertising revenue against $1.5 billion in 2025, with more than 4,000 active advertisers. Nine further markets are scheduled for March 1, 2027.

Amazon argues the clock is the problem

Amazon's measurement pitch this autumn is that the attribution window is an artefact rather than a boundary. Analysis of more than 2 million campaigns run in June 2026 produced an estimate that roughly 20% of the sales value generated by Amazon advertising lands outside the standard 7-to-30-day window, Digiday reported on October 1, 2026. Lily Tong, director of measurement at Amazon Ads, said roughly 20% of the sales value for a brand shows up over time, and characterised the window as a cutoff date for measurement.

The product scaffolding has been going up for two years. The Long-Term Sales metric, in beta since October 2024, tracks new-to-brand shoppers and their first actions after exposure, including brand searches and cart additions, then projects a twelve-month value from historical patterns. Full-Funnel Campaigns, announced in November 2025, move budget across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, display and streaming with longer horizons in view. Extended lookback windowsare promised, which would let marketers check projections against outcomes, and omnichannel metrics showing off-Amazon effects currently cover consumer packaged goods and automotive. Amazon extended Marketing Cloud's lookback window from 13 months to 25 earlier this year, which is the same argument expressed as a database setting.

Buyers are not uniformly convinced. Radoslav Mazganov, a vice president at Hyperzon and Moburst, said we haven't seen it move the needle, and reported off-Amazon spend showing up without matching sales. Bryce Hamlin, a vice president at Power Digital, located the constraint in data availability rather than methodology. One offline sales study found Amazon streaming television advertising returning more than $2 of incremental off-Amazon sales per dollar spent. The structural objection is simple enough to state: a projection whose inputs, historical comparison set and error bars are undisclosed is a forecast the seller publishes about its own effectiveness, and extending the measurement window is the one change that makes any advertising look better.

The company was busy on the inventory side too. Amazon and Yelp launched Sponsored Services, putting ads for plumbers, electricians, landscapers, home cleaners, roofers and movers onto product detail pages, order confirmation pages and package tracking pages in the United States, PPC Land reported on September 29 at 19:01 UTC. Call and Quote buttons keep the interaction inside Amazon. Jenn Donohue, director of local ads at Amazon Ads, said the objective is making local business access and shopper support easier than ever. Katy Lightsey, head of services operations at Yelp, described it as reaching consumers at the point of purchase and turning everyday purchases into real jobs. Yelp has reason to want the placement: Services advertising revenue was $240.96 million in the second quarter of 2026, 0.1% above the prior year, with average paying Services locations at 259,000 against 260,000, and the $270 million cash acquisition of Hatch in January 2026 to automate lead handling still to earn out. Amazon advertising services revenue was $19.8 billion in the same quarter, up 26%. The order confirmation page, long one of the quietest surfaces in commerce, is now a local lead generator.

Insurers arrive to price the mistakes

The compliance layer forming around generative tools in advertising is not only regulatory. Insurance companies are becoming a new player in the AI discussion, Betty Louie, partner and general counsel at The Brandtech Group, said at Programmatic IO in remarks AdExchanger published on September 30 at 12:30 am. Underwriters asking what a workflow does, and declining to cover what cannot be explained, create an accountability requirement that arrives faster than statute and binds through contract rather than enforcement.

The gap they are pricing is documented. A Gartner survey in April 2026 found 60% of companies using AI will encounter unexpected charges or budget overages for want of human oversight, and 56% deployed tools without clear policies in place. Nicholas Godlove, legal director of AI and global privacy data at Yum Brands, called company-wide policy implementation extremely difficult given the spread of technologies and use cases, and said his own policies have grown more restrictive over the past two to three years. Alan Parker, chief innovation officer at BBDO North America, described a delivery and maintenance team running regular performance tracking on agentic workflows, which is a quality assurance function wearing an innovation title.

Louie's operational test is auditability: an AI product should allow an error to be traced back to a specific large language model, specific data sources, and a determination of whether a human or a machine caused the failure. She also described the legal position as developing pretty quickly and still relatively fragmented, citing the EU AI Act of 2024, New York's synthetic performer disclosure rules and India's mandatory labelling requirements. Article 50 of the EU regulation has been binding since August 2, 2026, with ceilings reaching 3% of turnover, and the machine-readable marking conformity date falls on December 2, 2026. Insurers do not need to wait for any of those deadlines to start asking questions at renewal.

Cloudflare starts building for a break that has not happened

Cloudflare used its Birthday Week to commit to issuing its own web certificates, targeting the first production Merkle Tree Certificates in the first quarter of 2027 and full post-quantum security by 2029. The company has signed an agreement to acquire the GlobalSign root, trusted since 2012, to carry reach across older devices while the new format spreads, in a PPC Land account published on September 29 at 17:07 UTC. Steve Goldsmith's post described the plan, with companion pieces from Mari Galicer and Sharon Goldberg on post-quantum certificates and migration. The stated design goal is to fail small and contain impact, with reproducible builds, attested hardware security modules and a public incident dashboard promised, plus ACME Renewal Information under RFC 9773 required for all new issuance.

The size problem explains the second format. ML-DSA-44 signatures run 2,420 bytes against 64 bytes for ECDSA P-256, and its public keys run 1,312 bytes, which is why Merkle Tree Certificates exist rather than a straight algorithm swap. Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 resolver began validating ML-DSA-44 signatures on September 10, 2026. Post-quantum key agreement has been on by default since October 2022 and reached 52% of TLS 1.3 traffic in November 2025. Certificate lifetimes are compressing on a CA/Browser Forum schedule that caps validity at 200 days from March 15, 2026, 100 days from March 15, 2027 and 47 days from March 15, 2029, which makes automated issuance a requirement rather than a convenience.

Two structural facts sit underneath. Let's Encrypt issues 10 million certificates a day across 500 million sites and passed 4 billion active certificates in 2025, and Cloudflare's post states there is no comparable free, automated alternative, which is a concentration risk described by the party best placed to reduce it. And the traffic the certificates protect is increasingly not human: 57.4% of HTML requests in the week ending June 5, 2026 came from bots, and chief executive Matthew Prince has forecast a bot-to-human ratio of 1,000 to 1 within five years. Chrome 154, expected in October 2026, enforces HTTPS in a way that affects 1% to 5% of web traffic. Customers should not have to pick a side of a multi-decade migration, the company wrote, which is a fair statement of the engineering problem and also a description of a market Cloudflare is entering.

A brand cuts marketing spend 78% and reports sales up 221%

Digital Brands Group published a set of percentages on September 29 and no dollars at all. Revenue for its AVO brand rose 221% between August 1 and September 11, 2026 against the same 42 days of 2025, while digital marketing spend fell 78%, PPC Land reported at 17:22 UTC. Return on ad spend over the window came in at 3.65 times against a stated target of 5 times, a gap requiring roughly 37% more revenue per advertising dollar. Weekly net revenue from new school partnerships rose 442% from week one to week six, which is to say week six was 5.42 times week one.

Chief executive Hil Davis said the company is encouraged by the combination of strong revenue growth and substantially lower marketing expenditures, and that the target is to achieve a 5x ROAS, which would provide a foundation to scale digital advertising. New board member David Sosnowski, described as having been a growth architect at Vuori during a 2400% revenue expansion, is building a redesigned AVO e-commerce platform scheduled to launch between October 1 and 7, 2026.

What the announcement withholds is most of what would make it legible: actual revenue, actual advertising expenditure, gross margin, profitability, the split between new and existing university partnerships, and the attribution method behind the ROAS figure. A 221% rise on an undisclosed base can represent a large business or a small one. The combination of a 78% spend cut and a 221% revenue rise also raises the ordinary question about any such pairing, which is whether the prior spend was buying demand that existed anyway. None of the disclosed figures answers it.

Also noted

  • September 30, 2026. Google Maps now requires users to sign in to read all reviews on a business listing, as well as to sort them or add new ones, a change spotted by Syed Amir, Michael B. Snow and Jean-Sebastien Girard and read as a defence against scraping. Search Engine Roundtable
  • September 30, 2026. Google is testing a sponsored products grid that mimics the organic product grid, which Brodie Clark said blends in massively and will confuse users. Search Engine Roundtable
  • September 29, 2026. VIOOH opened more than 500 digital out-of-home screens in Spain and Portugal to programmatic buying, extending a supply-side footprint that already automated more than 100 deals in the first half of 2026. PPC Land
  • September 30, 2026. AdExchanger set out why marketing mix models can establish that connected TV worked without establishing why, a limit that sits awkwardly beside the channel's growing share of measured spend. AdExchanger
  • September 29, 2026. The IAB Tech Lab finalised version 2.3 of its podcast measurement rules, extending the counting guidance to video podcasts. PPC Land

By the numbers

  • $1.47 billion. Getty's face-value debt against $51.6 million of cash at the half-year. Source
  • 44%. European programmatic streaming ad view growth in the first half, against 25% in America. Source
  • 26.1%. Share of Spanish programmatic investment absorbed by transaction costs before inventory. Source
  • 57 days. Interval between Microsoft splitting AI queries by brand and letting brands redefine the split. Source
  • March 15, 2029. Date certificate validity caps fall to 47 days, forcing full automation. Source