Good morning, it’s Lucinda Southern here, Adweek media editor, hope you had a healthy weekend.
Fresh into Monday with some acquisition news that community forum Reddit bought lip-syncing video app Dubsmash. The terms of the deal haven't been disclosed.
This is 15-year old Reddit’s first major acquisition. You may remember TikTok rival Dubsmash from its heydays in 2015.
The two platforms complement each other, according to Scott Nover’s reporting. Dubsmash elevates under-represented creators: The company said that about 25% “of all Black teens in the U.S. are on Dubsmash” and 70% of creators are female. Reddit has had some perception issues that this could help alleviate.
Economic downturns are a good time to snap up value buys, The Information also reported that Facebook and Snap held talks to buy Dubsmash in August.
Waves of consolidation are rolling through media, so perhaps it’s unsurprising Reddit is pushing into mobile video, where usage has surged during the pandemic. There are pockets of silver linings as we grind on towards the end of the year.
In other news, it's hard to ignore the work that needs to be done in order to rearchitect the ad ecosystem once Google Chrome pulls its support of third-party cookies, I'm sure you won't need reminding.
Over the course of the last few weeks, Ronan Shield, Andrew Blustein and I spoke with concerned stakeholders about Privacy Sandbox, open forum W3C—which may not be as open as attendees would like—and the fine balance Google has to strike to appear to appease all sides.
Check out the piece for a view of where we stand right now in proceedings.
With that, I’ll remind you that you can take out an Adweek Pro Subscription for access to all our reporting and more.
Thanks for reading and stay safe,
Lucinda.
