NYT Nears $330M Letterboxd Deal; Fox Closes $22B Roku Purchase

The New York Times is in exclusive talks to buy Letterboxd for roughly $330 million — about 20 times the film-review platform's expected $15 million in earnings this year. The Times itself reported the figure, though acquisition rumors have circulated all year. Official confirmation stops at "exclusive talks"; everything else, including final terms, remains speculation.

The deal would move Letterboxd's advertising under the Times, which should lift its earnings. Letterboxd also runs a paid subscription tier, so the acquisition would deliver a quick infusion of new subscribers, as the NYT notes. That fits a deliberate pattern: the Times has pushed into new verticals through acquisition before — Wirecutter for product reviews, cooking, Wordle for games, and The Athletic for sports.

What's the asset nobody's pricing in?

Here's the part often missed in Letterboxd deal talk. Why would a publisher command a 20x multiple at the absolute nadir of web publisher earnings? The likely answer, per the source analysis: AI data licensing value.

Letterboxd is an authenticated forum holding a massive library of unique human writing — banter, recommendations, drama, culture. In plain terms, it's a rich repository for training large language models. The Times, given its existing licensing posture, would be well positioned to monetize that asset. Caveat: that's an analytical argument, not something either company has said on the record.

Fox closes its $22B Roku deal

Fox Corporation announced the completion of its $22 billion Roku acquisition on Friday. The timing surprised watchers, but the result didn't — CEO Lachlan Murdoch told investors on last Monday's earnings call he expected the deal to close "as soon as possible." Semafor reported the DOJ was set to clear the deal under a consent decree, even though it had requested additional information from both companies as recently as September.

Fox declined to comment to AdExchanger. But the DOJ's Antitrust Division released a statement Friday saying the merged company "would suffer monetary and reputational harm if it attempted to use the Roku platform to harm Fox's content rivals," and that consumers could easily switch to other connected TV platforms if dissatisfied.

What does this change for practitioners? Fox now owns the top two most popular free streaming services in the US — The Roku Channel (a FAST service) and Tubi (an AVOD streamer) — plus all of Roku's ad tech and first-party data. Integrating Roku's household graph with Tubi's ad sales would be a genuine benefit, and Tubi is already outperforming Fox's expectations. Expect a major scaling-up of Fox's connected TV advertising business.

Google's quiet October gutted open web video

Set aside Privacy Sandbox and third-party cookies — Google can still send the industry reeling with relatively minor updates. Per Alan Ronis writing at Medium, video CPMs, fill rates and demand proxies have dropped since roughly October 26. The chain of events:

• October 1: DV360 removed brand safety controls, pushing out advertisers who relied on finer-grain settings.
• October 22: AdSense began restricting more web video inventory based on accompanying content.
• October 26: Google retired the video line item for mCPV (maximum cost-per-view) campaigns — the big whammy.

Google communicated the deadline, but publishers and ad tech didn't upgrade, and many preset campaigns simply failed to serve. Prebid hit a similar wall this year when publishers wouldn't update video ad delivery ahead of Microsoft's deadline for paying to cache all Prebid video ads. Blame spreads around here.

Quick hits

• OpenAI is building a tool that will show brands how often they're mentioned in ChatGPT conversations.
• Online publication consortium Valnet agreed to a $2 million settlement in a class action alleging misclassification and exploitation of freelance writers, per TheWrap.
• Meta reversed course and won't require business account holders to allow AI training on linked websites, per Ars Technica.
• Instagram's long-form content push hasn't yet convinced creators to get on board, Digiday reports.
• Liam Parker was appointed US CEO of The Ogilvy Group.

If the Letterboxd talks hold, watch whether the Times discloses subscriber gains or data licensing terms — the real price tag may hide in the second line of the announcement.