On this week's episode of The MadTech Podcast, Rob Beeler, founder & CEO of Beeler.Tech joins ExchangeWire's research lead Mat Broughton and CEO Rachel Smith to discuss Pulse Premier, the Guardian's contextual targeting deal, and more.

TikTok ad product goes halves with publishers 

Is this a good deal for publishers? Could we see Meta or Google offering something similar?

TikTok is introducing a new product which will allow publishers to offer ads on their videos. Pulse Premier, which is an extension of the short-form video giant’s Pulse offering, will give participating publishers 50% of the revenue generated by the ads that follow their content.

The move, which is a pivot away from TikTok’s focus on independent content creators, opens up another revenue opportunity for the platform. TikTok global head of monetisation product strategy, Ray Cao, says that Pulse offers advertisers more transparency over where their ad spend goes on the platform.

The Guardian partners with ad tech firm for contextual targeting

Will we see more agreements like this? How big of a problem is data scraping for publishers?

The Guardian has partnered with an ad tech company that will categorise its articles for contextual targeting. The tie up with Illuma will help enable advertisements to be placed alongside relevant or related content on the newspaper’s website.

The publisher took aim at ad tech companies who scrape data from their site for contextual targeting without permission, stating that their activities create worse experiences for advertisers and readers. The Guardian celebrated the partnership as a means to keep control over its intellectual property while remaining open around content distribution.

CMA launches investigation into AI regulation

How could regulation impact the development of AI? What role should the tech industry have in determining how AI is policed?

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been asked by the UK government to examine the current state of AI. The watchdog is one of several regulatory bodies who have been tasked with investigating the impact of emerging AI technologies, with the aim of establishing “guardrails” around their development.

The CMA probe will focus on foundation models that power chatbots, which have been the source of equal amounts of excitement and concern in recent months. The regulator will explore how the competitive market for this technology could develop, with the aim of creating “guiding principles” for the space. The potential risks and opportunities that programs like ChatGPT pose to consumers will also be reviewed.