Why Parker Thatch transformed its strip-mall storefront into a livestreaming studio

This article was first published by Digiday sibling Modern Retail.

Livestreaming is more than just a social media strategy for the husband-and-wife team behind the eight-figure luxury handbag and accessories brand Parker Thatch.

It’s also a weekly Friday ritual, where they set up a camera and tripod in their Orinda, California strip-mall storefront and log online. The QVC-style streams reach an audience of 179,000 Instagram followers and 101,000 YouTube subscribers, who tune in to hear about specific features of new products, such as the materials they’re made of and the kinds of pockets and straps they have. Co-founder Irene Chen explains her design process or the products’ functions, like what works best for carrying containers or fits over a luggage handle. Chen’s husband and co-founder, Matt Grenby, who is behind the camera, gives shoutouts to commenters and reads questions as they come in.

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Cloudflare’s compliant crawler highlights tension – and opportunity – in the emerging AI content market 

Cloudflare is pushing to create a market for licensed AI content, offering a compliant crawler aimed at giving publishers more control and reducing inefficient site crawls — even as some question the irony of the company that once blocked scrapers now building one itself.

Last week, the company released a crawl API (its crawl endpoint within Cloudflare’s browser rendering API) that can scrape an entire website with one request. (You give it a URL, it crawls the whole site and returns the content in HTML, Markdown, or structured JSON). The announcement raised eyebrows and left some publishers confused and unsettled by the move to provide its own version of what it has so far protected publishers from. 

That sentiment was exacerbated by some publishers noticing how they couldn’t block Cloudflare’s own scraper when they tried to adjust their settings. One independent publisher Thomas Baekdal was particularly vocal, posting on LinkedIn that Cloudflare had “betrayed every single publisher” with this tool.   

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