Ad Tech Bears Beat The Bulls; Back When Traffic Was A Good Thing
Ad tech flees public markets as Criteo take-private rumors swirl; Business Insider's traffic falls from 95M to 21M uniques; senators press FTC on AI shopping bots.
Updated
The brief
- Criteo's market cap has dropped below $1 billion amid take-private rumors reported at ExchangeWire's ATS event in London.
- Business Insider's average monthly unique visitors fell from 95 million in 2021 to 21 million in 2026, per Comscore data presented by CEO Christian Baesler.
- Sens. Tammy Baldwin and Rick Scott sent a letter to the FTC citing research that Amazon's Alexa and Walmart's Sparky obscure country-of-origin product information; Amazon denied the claims.
Ad tech's public-market retreat accelerated this week, Business Insider revealed steep traffic losses, and US senators pressed the FTC over AI shopping assistants. Here's the round-up.
Ad tech exits the public stage
After a few optimistic years of ad tech IPOs, the past year or two has been brutal. Plenty of ink has been spilled over The Trade Desk (guilty as charged), which has seemingly gone from the industry's David fighting evil Goliaths to a Goliath itself. At least it's still listed — albeit not in the S&P 500 for much longer.
Other ad tech companies have exited the public markets like escape pods jettisoning from a sci-fi spaceship. Mediaocean acquired and delisted Innovid in 2025. Integral Ad Science's run on Nasdaq also ended last year, following its acquisition by Novacap.
Now rumors point to a potential take-private deal involving Criteo. Digiday reported on the speculation from ExchangeWire's ATS event in London this week. Criteo's market cap has dropped below $1 billion — exactly the point where predatory private equity firms start circling.
To be fair, not every ad tech stock declined over the past year. But the biggest platforms captured almost all of the growth, at least as Wall Street measures it. Where challengers take share, most observers point to other giants like AppLovin or Walmart, while third-party programmatic receives very little investor love.
Business Insider's traffic collapse
Business Insider's traffic peaked in 2021 at roughly 95 million average monthly unique visitors. So far in 2026, that average has cratered to 21 million. Last year it was roughly 28 million.
CEO Christian Baesler reportedly presented the numbers during a Wednesday morning all-hands meeting, according to Status. The underlying data comes from Comscore, with an important caveat: traffic measurement has changed a lot since 2021, mostly for the worse — ask anyone stuck with the new Google Analytics dashboard. Even so, the picture remains grim for Business Insider specifically, and for digital news publishers generally.
Baesler is now looking "elsewhere" for growth. Unfortunately, "elsewhere" usually means burrowing deeper inside the walled gardens. Business Insider's YouTube channels, with 38 million total subscribers, are, in Baesler's words, "under-monetized." He likely feels the same about TikTok and Instagram.
"It's going to be a continued time for transition as we build this future," Baesler said.
Senators question AI shopping bots
On Thursday, Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) submitted a letter to the FTC outlining concerns about Alexa and Sparky, Amazon's and Walmart's respective AI shopping chatbots. The letter cites research purporting that both bots obscure information about product origins — specifically, whether something was made in the US.
Amazon refuted the claims point blank. The company told The Wall Street Journal that "country-of-origin information, when available, is currently displayed on product detail pages," and that Amazon constantly updates Alexa to make this information "even more accessible for customers" when related follow-up questions arise.
The concern extends beyond Walmart and Amazon. If consumers feel AI isn't answering their questions accurately — or, worse, that an agent isn't serving their interests — they'll lose trust in shopper agents generally.
Earlier this week, ChatGPT rolled out an ad format that sends people who click on a brand's ad into a conversation with that brand's AI agent, rather than to its website. That model will struggle if consumers don't trust brand agents in the first place.
In brief
- Publicis dropped out of Coca-Cola's global agency review to take PepsiCo's business, leaving WPP poised to win the Coke account. [Digiday]
- OpenAI publicly disclosed six new instances of "misalignment" — times when its model went badly astray — and shared a new framework for self-reporting future incidents.
- Crocs became a top TikTok Shop seller. [Adweek]
- Existential fears and marketing run amok are shaping the US debate around AI. [Bloomberg]
People moves
Consumer marketing research and analytics company Prodege named Todd Parsons, Criteo's former chief product officer, as CEO.
Based on AdExchanger; digiday.com
Filed under ad-tech, the-trade-desk, criteo, business-insider, ai-shopping
James Calloway
Show full bio
Market editor covering media and advertising at Marketing Herald.
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