Category: In the News

Curated Performance Marketing News – Consumer and Industry Trends-Affiliate Networks, Business Insights and more.

WTF are gray bots?

A new category of bots is quietly becoming one of the biggest forces reshaping the web: gray bots.

They’re not yet a household name like “generative AI” or “AI agents,” but gray bots are already far beyond niche. Experts see the growing wave as an urgent challenge for the digital economy. Recent cybersecurity reports show some websites are seeing millions of scraper bot requests each month largely tied to generative AI activity. Others are noticing AI crawlers are driving more general invalid traffic and GIVT-related ad request volumes.

Between December and February, cybersecurity firm Barracuda — which coined the term “gray bots” in an April report — tracked millions of generative AI bot requests, including one web app that saw nearly 10 million in a month and another that logged over 500,000 in a single day. The most active were Anthropic’s ClaudeBot and TikTok’s ByteSpider, according to researchers.

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Meta’s Threads ads arrive fast, but advertisers move at their own pace

After a mere three months of testing, Meta announced on Wednesday that ads on Threads are now available to all eligible advertisers globally.

While it might seem quick — testing periods can typically take anything from six months to a year prior to an official global launch — the anticipation of when this might drop has lingered since Threads first launched in July 2023.

So what’s on offer and how does it work?

Since Threads is a text-based app, the new image ad placement is in the Threads feed. And as predicted by most advertisers Digiday caught up with during the short testing window, Meta stated that advertisers can access it via the Advantage+ platform whereby advertisers leave it up to Meta’s algorithm to determine where their ads show up, or via manual placements, where marketers purposefully select which placements they want their campaigns to show up in. 

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