- Accenture Song acquires Superdigital as marketing shifts social-first: The deal responds to the increasingly central role for social media and influencers in CMO strategies, as well as the impact of AI on marketing.
- Fiverr showcases AI-produced videos for tapping into viral trends: Garry, an AI-generated character, shows how brands can use the buzzy tech to quickly respond to viral moments.
- Streaming continues ad revenue gain on linear TV, study says: Advertisers continued to shift their dollars from linear TV to streaming during this year’s upfront ad-buying season, per a new report from Media Dynamics.
- YouTube Launches Effects Maker for Shorts, New Comment Controls: Effects Maker will allow creators to manage Shorts effects.
- TikTok Enables Livestreamers To Perform Specific Actions for Donations: Livestreamers can set up “Viewer Wishes” that they’ll respond to on livestreams.
- TikTok Announces New Content Partnership With the ATP: The partnership will bring exclusive tennis content to the app.
- Meta Rolls Out AI-Powered Audio Translations for Video: A new way to communicate with a different audience.
- TikTok Announces Finale of ‘Music on Stage’ Competition: TikTok continues to reinforce its connection to the music industry.
- TikTok Adds Campus Verification To Help College Students Connect: A new way for students to find friends on campus.
- Google unifies Local Services Ads under new Verified badge: Google is consolidating LSA trust programs into a single Verified badge to streamline credibility checks for advertisers and consumers.
- Google Ads pushes richer conversion imports: Google says richer conversion imports give Google’s AI the signals it needs to improve attribution and drive stronger campaign results.
- New Google Ads diagnostics tool for cart data tracking is here: Google’s new tool flags mismatched or incomplete cart data that could distort sales reporting and weaken campaign optimization.
- Affiliate cloaking is behind 45% of fraud: Affiliate cloaking fakes results and drains your ad spend without a trace.
- News site traffic is shrinking, but Google and AI aren’t solely to blame: Nearly every top U.S. news site lost traffic in July. From paywalls to shifting habits, publishers saw single or double-digit declines.
- Meta Freezes AI Hiring After Blockbuster Spending Spree: Meta has stopped hiring for its artificial-intelligence division. The hiring freeze, which went into effect last week, also prohibits current employees from moving across teams inside the division. It is aimed at creating a solid structure for the company’s new superintelligence efforts. It is unknown how long the freeze will last.
- Coinbase Bets on The Rise of AI Payments Fueled By Digital Dollars: Coinbase recently held a Crypto x AI hackathon where about 100 engineers spent the weekend building payment infrastructure with real-world purpose. Developers at the hackathon were encouraged to integrate Coinbase’s x402 open-source payment protocol, which is designed to let apps, bots, or machines charge and settle instantly in stablecoins, into their projects. Coinbase wants to build the back-end infrastructure of the AI economy. The US Congress recently passed the first US law regulating stablecoins, giving them a clear legal framework, allowing developers to take them more seriously.
- Building a better database to detect designer drugs: Designer drugs replicate the effects of known, illicit drugs, but evade law enforcement. The variations in chemical structures help them avoid detection, but they also make them unpredictable in the body, which could pose serious health consequences. A research team has used computer modeling to create a database of predicted chemical structures for the improved detection of designer drugs. The database could someday be a publicly available supplement to the current illicit drug mass-spectral databases.
- AWS in 2025: AWS is almost twenty years old, and many things have changed over the years. Even experienced veterans may find it hard to track all of the changes, and it’s very easy to stumble upon outdated blog posts that talk about how things used to be.
- Economics and AI take off: Many people believe that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), and fully general humanoid robotics are just around the corner. We are at the cusp of a revolution poised to increase GDP by many times over. While nearly everyone will benefit substantially from the widespread use of AGI, a tiny minority will increase their productivity by a factor of hundreds or thousands. This creates the potential for out-of-equilibrium economic shifts.
- ChatGPT is sending less traffic to websites – down 52% in a month: Referral traffic from ChatGPT to websites is down 52% since July 2021. Wikipedia, Reddit, and Tech Radar account for 22% of all citations. Branded websites are losing visibility and millions of potential referable clicks as ChatGPT now seems to favor a handful of ‘answer-first’ sources. Brands that don’t provide real answers could be squeezed out of ChatGPT answers.
- Code Review Can Be Better: One of the primary issues with the GitHub code review process is poor support for stacked pull requests and interdiff reviews.
- OSS Under Attack: Four Lessons in How Trust Gets Exploited – The convenience of open source software comes with the hidden cost of supply chain security risks.
- OpenAI CFO Sees Firm Selling AI Infrastructure Service in Future: Allowing other businesses to tap into its data centers and physical infrastructure could potentially create a new revenue line that could offset some of OpenAI’s immense costs.
- Apple is reportedly making more of its new iPhones in India instead of China: iPhone sub-assemblies are still mostly produced in China and then shipped to India for final assembly.
- More clicks don’t necessarily translate into more customers. Often, the chase for vanity metrics can distract us from what actually drives growth: the right audience.
- Google enables full placement reporting for Search Partner Network.
- Ahrefs just launched a monthly tracker comparing referral traffic from Google Search and ChatGPT.
TLDR: Social Media Headlines – 21 August 2025
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Darkside Hooker
Boerewors — spicy South African sausage [boor-uh-vors] Meaning ‘farmer’s sausage’, this term describes a savory sausage that was developed by the Afrikaners approximately 200 years ago. Boerewors is usually ‘braaied’ and eaten on a hot dog roll with tomato sauce and mustard. Make sure you roll the ‘r’ when pronouncing this word.
Thumb Candy
Italy: You have two cows. The northern one produces all the milk. The southern one sleeps all day.