1. Jeff Bezos To Step Down As Amazon CEO, AWS Chief Andy Jassy To Take Over In Q3 (MediaPost)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will leave his post later this year, turning the helm over to the company’s top cloud executive, Andy Jassy, according to an announcement on Tuesday. Bezos will be taking a strategic position as executive chairman of Amazon’s board. Amazon surpassed a $1 trillion market cap under Bezos’ leadership in January of last year — it’s now worth more than $1.6 trillion.
2. Google Ads and Cloud Send Alphabet Profit Skyrocketing to $15.7 Billion in Q4 (FirstPost)
A couple of quarters after the Covid-19 pandemic hit its financial performance, Google’s parent company has recorded a 69% jump in operating income and 23% lift in revenue year-on-year. Alphabet has quickly recovered from the business impact of Covid-19, according to its fourth-quarter earnings. Advertising revenue across Google and its streaming video service YouTube lifted 22% in Q4 to $46.2 billion, helping to push its parent company’s revenue and income to meteoric heights.
3. Google’s Cookie Drama Is Drawing Antitrust Scrutiny (DigiDay)
In the wake of multiple antitrust lawsuits and a US congressional probe, Google’s attempt to get rid of the third-party cookie is attracting regulatory attention, Digiday reports. On January 8, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority launched an investigation into whether Google’s proposals for replacing third-party cookies “could cause advertising spend to become even more concentrated on Google’s ecosystem at the expense of its competitors,” according to a CMA announcement about the investigation.
4. Google’s Search Engine Not As Good As Its Competitors For News, Research Finds (The Guardian)
A research by Monash University finds Bing and Ecosia delivered substantially more professionally produced news as compared to Google. The top 50 results delivered by Google included only 70% of professional news websites, compared with 94% for the same search term on Bing and 82% on Ecosia.
5. Facebook Messenger Lands On Oculus Quest (TechCrunch)
During their quarterly earnings call, Facebook had talked a lot about their success with VR and their own wins peddling their latest Quest 2 VR headset. The headset being a powerful piece of hardware is equipped with few VR ports of mobile apps. Soon Quest and Quest 2 users will gain access to Messenger chats inside the app and use the in-VR keyboard to pound out a quick message or use the headset’s voice-to-text feature.
Two months after DoubleVerify’s CTV fraud attack, the digital media-measurement and media verification platform says a new scheme – called ParrotTerra – has spoofed 3.7 million devices and 2.7 million IP addresses per day. This attack is on track to steal between $30 million and $50 million.
7. Podcasts Give Advertisers a Unique, Direct Line to Consumers (AdWeek)
Ad spend on podcasts jumped 11% year over year in Q4 of 2020, according to data from ad sales intelligence company MediaRadar. Between an endless stream of content and a promising return on investment, CEO Todd Krizelman believes this number is only going to grow.
