“We’re Passing the Savings Along to Ourselves!”

Google is forcing some advertisers to stop using credit cards to buy ads.
 
Some businesses say could cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars overnight.

Google Forcing Some Advertisers Off Credit Cards

Google is eliminating the ability for some ad accounts to pay using a credit card — and some companies say that could add hundreds of thousands of dollars to their bill overnight.

Google last week sent an email to some advertisers saying their credit cards will no longer be accepted as payment at the end of next month, and they’ll need to set up a bank transfer or, hilariously, mail a paper cheque.

In the email, Google said accounts that don’t do this in time will have their ads account suspended, adding “There are no exceptions.”

Size doesn’t seem to matter.

The email goes on to say this impacts what Google calls “high-growth customers.”

But Nikki Kuhlman, Director of Search Strategy at JumpFly, posted:

On Reddit, there are countless comments along the same lines. One reads:

Why is Google doing this?

That depends on who you ask.

Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, said it was “To deliver a more consistent billing experience across our advertisers,” and said only a small number of advertisers were affected.

We asked how many is “small” and did not get a reply by deadline. It’s also not clear how this move would make anything more “consistent.”

Some speculate this isn’t any more complicated than Google trying to claw back the money that would have gone to credit card fees:

This could cost advertisers a lot.

One finance company founder said the change would cost them a quarter of a million dollars per year:

Another entrepreneur, Eric Mitz, posted:

But maybe there’s a bright side, as one person asked on social media:

There was no reply.

Correction: Last week, our trivia question was about the first ad blocker. Our initial search suggested the first one was in 2022. Some people believe the first ad blocker was “Internet Fast Forward” for Netscape, released in 1996. Thanks to Sean for catching that!

U.S. Says Adobe Makes it Too Hard to Cancel

The US government yesterday filed a lawsuit against Adobe, accusing it of deceiving consumers by making it difficult to cancel subscriptions to its popular design software, including Photoshop.

The lawsuit said Adobe concealed expensive cancellation fees and designed a complex cancellation process to deter customers from terminating their contracts.

That early termination fee, which can sometimes be hundreds of dollars, was — the government says — buried in fine print and behind small text links that nobody really clicked. It says the company’s website and customer service representatives made canceling subscriptions even more challenging — dropping calls, transferring between reps, and so on.

If proven in court, these practices would violate an Obama-era law called the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act.

The lawsuit is asking for compensation for affected consumers, civil fines, and a permanent injunction to prevent future violations.

For its part, Adobe says its subscription services are “convenient, flexible, and cost-effective” and that it is “transparent with the terms and conditions of our subscription agreements and have a simple cancellation process.”

Adobe made $14 billion in revenue from subscriptions last year. In 2019, that number was about half that amount.

Trade Desk vs Yahoo: The Bitter Dispute

Media buyers who deal in programmatic ads are watching a dispute between The Trade Desk and Yahoo very closely — with a deadline to resolve the spat having been passed just hours ago.

The Trade Desk is one of the largest demand-side platforms and it recently accused Yahoo of misclassifying its video inventory as in-stream, a type of online video that typically fetches higher prices from buyers.

They say if Yahoo doesn’t fix this, they’ll cut off access to Yahoo’s video inventory. That deadline passed last night.

If they go through with their threat, that would remove access to Yahoo’s video inventory across open market and library deals immediately, and all Yahoo video inventory, including one-to-one private marketplace deals by the end of next month.

There’s been radio silence so far today, so for all we know the negotiations are still ongoing.

Yahoo says it’s trying to work within The Trade Desk’s video inventory standards but claims that the solutions it has tested haven’t performed well.

Threads Gets an API: Third-Party Apps Coming?

Meta’s social media app Threads might be about to break even more into the mainstream.

The company has launched a full-service API which will let apps and tools publish content, set reply and quote controls, retrieve replies to their posts, hide, unhide or respond to specific replies.

The API had been in testing with some of the larger third-party social platforms like Hootsuite, Sprinklr, and Sprout Social.

Notably, the API is free to use — going against the recent trend by X and Reddit to lock its back-end tools behind a paywall.

More Threads apps coming?

This could very well mean that alternate Threads apps will become available.

This would be a significant shift from Meta’s policies in the past — the company vigorously goes after any third-party Facebook or Instagram apps that try to access those services.

Twitter once had a thriving ecosystem of third-party apps like Twitteriffic and Tweetbot; most of those were forced out of operation when Elon Musk bought Twitter and locked down its API. Reddit later copied this strategy as well.

Meanwhile, the two biggest alternatives to X other than Threads — Mastodon and Bluesky — both welcome third-party apps.

We have yet to see if Meta will allow other people to develop Threads apps, but if they do it would certainly be a benefit to consumers.

How it might hurt marketers

Another thing still unclear — how ads would show up in any third-party app.

One of the benefits to the now-closed third-party X and Reddit apps was that the API didn’t feed ads through the stream. This, of course, limits the reach of ad campaigns.

What could we see?

Now that Threads has an API, any number of things become possible — including a more direct connection with the Fediverse. Right now, Threads has a sort of one-way connection that works for post content but not really for replies.

We might also see a much more robust analytics platform emerge than Threads’ own somewhat anemic offerings.

YouTube to Let People Add “Context” Notes

From the “what could go wrong” category comes news that YouTube is working on a way for viewers to add corrections to videos, similar to how other social platforms provide community-sourced context notes.

Notes are still in testing, and they’re only being shown to some mobile users in the U.S.

One potential concern is that the Notes themselves could be used to spread factually inaccurate information.

YouTube says anything like that will become “part of how we’ll learn from the experiment.”

McDonalds Pulls AI Out of Its Drive-Thrus. For Now.

And finally, score one for the humans: McDonalds says it’s removing AI from its drive-thrus and would really like us all to just pretend it never happened.

You might have seen the TikTok videos of people driving up and having to give their order to an effusive but aggressively unhelpful AI voice.

@that_usa_guy

Trying the McDonald’s AI drive thru….Again @McDonald’s Corporate #fail

My favourite was the woman who ordered water and some ice cream. The AI added four ketchup packets and three slabs of butter to her order.

Then there was the customer who asked for one coke, but the AI bot overheard someone in the next lane ordering something, and added nine cups of iced tea to her order.

McDonalds says it hasn’t given up on AI. It’s still working on some ideas that might roll out by the end of the year.

God help us all.

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