TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is making some pretty heavy bets on the healthcare space as it acquired Amcare, which runs high-end children’s and women’s hospitals across China. The buyout cost ByteDance $1.5 billion, according to Bloomberg. A spokesperson for Xiaohe Health, ByteDance’s healthcare business, confirmed the acquisition but declined to comment on the deal size. The transaction is turning some heads in the tech industry. For one, China has over the past few years ramped up anti-competition regulations on tech companies and blocked major consolidation deals, including Tencent’s p ..read more

Just over a year after launching a major project targeting thousands of sites blatantly flouting cookie tracking rules in Europe, local privacy campaign group noyb has fired off another batch of complaints targeting a hardcore of website operators that it says have ignored or not fully acted upon earlier warnings to bring their cookie consent banners into compliance with the EU’s legal standard for consent, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Noyb says the latest batch of 226 complaints have been lodged with 18 data protection authorities (DPAs) around the bloc. As with earl ..read more

A few months on from a tracking controversy hitting privacy-centric search veteran, DuckDuckGo, the company has announced it’s been able to amend terms with Microsoft, its search syndication partner, that had previously meant its mobile browsers and browser extensions were prevented from blocking advertising requests made by Microsoft scripts on third party sites. In a blog post pledging “more privacy and transparency for DuckDuckGo web tracking protections”, founder and CEO, Gabe Weinberg, writes: “Over the next week, we will expand the third-party tracking scripts we block from loading on we ..read more

A ruling put out yesterday by the European Union’s top court could have major implications for online platforms that use background tracking and profiling to target users with behavioral ads or to feed recommender engines that are designed to surface so-called ‘personalized’ content. The impacts could be even broader — with privacy law experts suggesting the judgement could dial up legal risk for a variety of other forms of online processing, from dating apps to location tracking and more. Although they suggest fresh legal referrals are also likely as operators seek to unpack what could be com ..read more

Jonathan Martinez Contributor Share on Twitter Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum and growth marketing nerd who's helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime and various startups. More posts by this contributor What to look for when hiring a growth marketing agency How to improve retention, growth marketing’s golden metric They say pressure makes diamonds. I’d say that’s also true for recessions creating amazing startups. Airbnb, Uber and Groupon are great examples of companies that emerged during the recession in 2008. How does one build, scale and navigate the headwinds ..read more

Peacock, the streaming service of Comcast’s NBCUniversal, ended the second quarter with 13 million paid subscribers, parent company Comcast reported this morning. In the first quarter, there were 13 million paying customers out of 28 million monthly active accounts. This means that Peacock’s paid subscriber base, as of the end of June, stalled with zero growth. Also, Comcast revealed that losses at Peacock widened to $467 million (EBITDA), from an adjusted EBITDA loss of $363 million in 2021. Investors reacted negatively, and Comcast shares declined 6% in pre-market trading. While there were l ..read more

Google is again delaying plans to phase out Chrome’s use of third-party cookies — the files websites use to remember preferences and track online activity. In a blog post, Anthony Chavez, Google’s VP of Privacy Sandbox, said that the company is now targeting the “second half of 2024” as the timeframe for adopting an alternative technology. It’ll be a long time coming. Last June, Google said it would depreciate cookies in the second half of 2023. Before then, in January 2020, the company pledged to make the switch by 2022. “We’ve worked closely to refine our design proposals based on input from ..read more

As regulation, platform dynamics and consumer choice continue to eat into the adtech stalwart known as cookies, it’s leaving a gap in the market for advertising solutions that can work well without relying on cookie functionality. Today, an adtech out of Spain that’s doing just this has raised a big round of funding to double down on the opportunity. Seedtag, a contextual advertising startup that uses AI tools both to “read” content on a page to match that up with advertisers’ aims, as well as to subsequently track how those ads perform, has raised “over” €250 million (more than $252 million ..read more

Chartbeat, a website that tells publishers about their readers, is getting the private equity treatment. Launched out of Betaworks in 2009, the service offered real-time analytics back when Google Analytics made you wait 24 hours to see who was clicking around your site. Eons later, private equity firm Cuadrilla Capital has swooped in to buy it, Chartbeat chief executive John Saroff said on Twitter today. The CEO added that Chartbeat’s staff, including leadership, will stick around following the deal. Axios, which broke the news, reports the deal will let Chartbeat “build a suite of products t ..read more

Snap, the parent company of the popular Snapchat social media service, reported earnings last week that investors rejected. In the wake of its second-quarter financial reporting, shares of Snap cratered from $16.81 Thursday afternoon, before its earnings report, to around $10 per share as of this morning. Snap was not the only victim of its lackluster earnings digest — other companies that make money off of advertising incomes saw their share prices dip on concerns that the social network was not an outlier. Alphabet, Meta, and Pinterest also took blows, cutting their worth ahead of earnings d ..read more