It arrived quietly and revealed it was allowing users to personalise their favourite news sources in Google.

Once done, publishers the readers had selected as their favourites would be prioritised in Google search results.

Wow! That’s a big deal.

Today’s mail is the tip of a giant story which first broke the surface in Johannesburg just before Christmas and reveals the direction of Google’s next ad monopoly.

It’s a big story, so this one’s on the house.

And my thanks to today’s sponsor Cerby. 🙏

⚽ World Cup 2026 is about to kick-off and thousands of publishers will be relying on social media. But are your brand accounts secure? Protect them with Cerby.

Protect your social accounts with Cerby

Let’s go…

If you’re a regular at Future Media you know that I live by a simple premise: The first rule of tracking Big Tech is to analyse anything it says in detail.

Google’s mail today says it’s changing its $294 billion search ad cash cow to give us all “more control” over search.

We can even tell it which news providers we want at the top of our search results.

But if you look closely, you’ll see Google prioritised search, maps, shopping, hotels, flights and even translations ahead of news.

And that betrays the real reason this is happening.

Alphabet’s banked $402.8 billion last year and 73 cents of every dollar came from the advertising that used to fund publishing and the open web.

And search ads are Google’s biggest earner.

So if Google’s reordering how Search works, it is performing open-heart surgery on the most profitable advertising business ever built.

So there has to be a very big reason.

Today’s Future Media Explains video shares what it is. And the trail leads back to a competition inquiry in Johannesburg in late 2023.

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The hidden hand

The Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry launched by South Africa’s Competition Commission was comprehensive.

It stretched over two years and included five rounds of information requests and public hearings where Google was forced to sit in a room and answer tough questions.

The architects of that inquiry joined me on the Future Media Podcast last December.

What made their inquiry different from every other attempt worldwide is that it wasn’t about money. It was about protecting the country’s Constitution.

South Africa has 12 official languages. They’re the architecture of the country’s identity and culture.

But when the inquiry looked under the hood, Google Search supported only three of them. Its constitutionally protected languages simply didn’t exist in search.

And that was a problem.

The regulators used that legal leverage to demand Google’s raw data including its impressions and click-through using the legal information powers it unlocked.

What they found was stark.

Almost half of all news queries from South Africans were redirected by Google to foreign outlets like CNN, Reuters and Bloomberg.

Google argued that was what its users wanted, but the data showed that was a convenient deception.

The data revealed that Google’s South African users were 60 per cent less likely to click foreign links than links to their own publishers.

Google was shown to be systematically serving people the news they didn’t want and burying the news they did.

The Commission did something genuinely clever.

Using Google’s own spreadsheets, it showed it was failing its own customers and covering it up with words.

Google was pressed into a remedy. It would roll out a controversial new solution it had been quietly testing in its labs. It was called Preferred Sources.

The mail in your inbox today is Google now releasing it to the rest of the world.

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Rapid reaction

Google’s reputation has been to be very slow and considered in launching major changes - and with good reason given the money involved.

But after criticism for being too ponderous with AI, it has been throwing caution to the wind.

AI Overviews was the fastest expansion in Google’s almost 30-year history and the preferences launch is not far behind.

Look at the timeline.

• Mid-2024: Google begins trialing it in Search Labs in US and India, and only in English.

• November 2025: South Africa’s final report lands in Google’s inbox demanding Preferred Sources

• December 2025: Google commits to releasing it in South Africa early.

• April 2026: It was live in every supported language and market.

• Two weeks ago: Google extended it into AI Overviews and AI Mode.

This morning’s email is the consumer-facing wrapper around all of that.

Google looked at South Africa’s numbers and learned something. People like personalised results.

More than 345,000 unique sources have already been selected by its users globally.

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Personalisation tax

But why is Google suddenly so keen to evangelise the feature?

There are two reasons.

First, it’s a terrific regulatory insurance.

It is in the most intense enforcement period it’s ever faced with antitrust convictions in the US, ad tech remedies pending and inquiries from Brussels to Canberra.

A personalisation dial showing its listening to consumers is the cheapest concession available, and photographs really well in a courtroom.

But there’s something else.

A happy user is an engaged user, and an engaged user is a better advertising target.

When users hand Google their source preferences, travel intentions and shopping tastes, they’re not just curating their experience. They’re completing Google’s profile.

News and niche content drive daily habits. Habits reveal profiles. Profiles drive targeted ad auctions.

And that’s what feeds Google’s monetised funnels of Search, Shopping, Hotels and Flights.

It’s dressing up the next era of targeting, as control. It’s quite clever really.

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The bigger picture

For 20 years, personalisation has meant a ranking algorithm that makes a best guess at the users’ preferences based on click data.

It’s been crude, passive and one-size-fits-most - but in the sunsetting era of the open web, Google made the best of it to create a $4.3 trillion mega-monopoly.

But AI is changing the game.

It doesn’t rank an experience, it manufactures one.

Every digital surface can now be assembled fresh, per person, in the moment.

AI Overviews has turned search results pages into publication with a circulation of one. You. 🫵

The South African inquiry found that only 12 per cent of users who saw AI Overviews clicked through to publishers.

It also found that South African news content was only 0.26 per cent of the data Google’s AIs were trained on.

My reporting has so far focused on how publishers are being bypassed by AI Overviews. South Africa’s data proved entire nations were being silenced.

Twelve languages and 60 million people just didn’t factor, until South Africa forced the issue.

What publishers should do

Any day now, the first Future Media Intelligence report will be released to 26,000 publishers by FIPP, part of the world’s largest publisher industry group WAN IFRA.

It contains insights from more than half a billion data points as well as hundreds of interviews over three years to chart a path forward in the AI era.

Preferred Sources uses AI to change the ranking signal of search from the backlink and algorithmic bias of PageRank to one that runs on reader loyalty.

That opens interesting doors for publishers who believe they can push back the tide of AI slop.

But really this is a story about the revival of premium journalism and use it to reduce their 20-year over-reliance on search and social to send clicks.

1. Show readers how to add you as a Preferred Source. Google has published the how-to. People who care enough to choose you in settings will be the most loyal and valuable - and a distribution signal too.

2. Change what you measure. Stop tracking page views and start tracking direct-relationship traffic. Readers who type your URL, click a bookmark, or open the newsletter are your real audience. Anonymous traffic never paid the bills.

3. Double down on the quality of your product. Referrals from Google Search and Meta are down 40-80 per cent since AI Overviews. It’s time to let the readers do the distribution for you.

As Paula Fray, who helped build the South African deal, told me in December: These remedies are a foundation, not a finish line. Let’s build on it.

“It’s still possible to build your own brand,” he told me, “even in the world of Google and Apple’s behemoths.”

He spent two decades at the frontier of AI as the first engineer at Siri, and his work so inspired Steve Jobs, he bought it as a start-up for $200 million.

Over a decade he integrated it into billions of iPhones, turning them from sexy bricks into AI conversational companions.

While most viewed ChatGPT’s rocketing success as a better chatbot, Vineet saw something else: The product-market fit his vision had waited 15 years to find.

But he didn’t join the conga-line of Silicon Valley stalwarts cashing in at the new AI wannabes. Nup…

He turned against the tide and walked into the Washington Post, because he recognised something AI boosters steadfastly ignore: Journalism is essential for reliable AI.

“News has had product market fit for 3,000 years,” he told me. “Ever since writing was invented, people have been writing and sharing it around.”

He’s now CTO helping the 147-year-old newspaper innovate in the age of AI, and today he’s sharing with me how his early hopes are becoming reality.

This is a long read, loaded with insights, learnings, landmines, product executions and change management tips, and quantifies how AI can transform journalism into knowledge.

“When people complain to me that there’s so much misinformation on AI chatbots, my response is to ask them what they did to stop it,” Vineet tells me.

“If we don’t build our products now to be ready for our audiences, we have no answer to that.”

If you care about adapting news to be relevant in the AI-led future, you can’t afford to miss this one. Let’s go…

The Big Story: From Siri to news sustainability

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My post was explaining why we haven’t had a decision on breaking up Google’s illegal ad tech monopoly.

Basically, the judge Leonie Brinkema has been super busy.

The Google break-up - and with it the fate of the open web - is just one of the many massive cases on her to-do list.

Judge Leonie Brinkema has been busy.

First, she ordered the release of a Venezuelan couple with temporary protected status whom the Trump administration had detained.

And days ago, she blocked Trump’s US$1.776 billion Anti-Weaponisation Fund - a slush fund critics said was rigged to reward political allies, potentially including January 6 rioters.

My post was to share the good news that now she’s free, and unravelling with Google’s illegal antitrust monopoly - and returning the ads that she called the “lifeblood" of the open web - is her top priority.

But back to the question the reader asked, because I had published this chart in the post.

It compared Google own revenue growth (in green) against the falling ad revenue flowing through to the open web, through what Google calls Network ads (in red).

The reader called Myles asked me: “Hey mate, can you explain this diagram to me? Google search I get, but Network?”

It felt like time for another episode of Future Media Explains, so here goes.

Chunky revenue

Google has a monopoly in search, and an illegal monopoly in ad tech.

We know this from the antitrust trials brought by the US Department of Justice over the past few years.

Google is required by law to report its revenue in quarterly updates to America’s Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC.

And it reports its earnings - which passed a record $402 billion last year - in chunks.

This is a screen from Google’s latest quarterly update showing its revenue (in billions) from Search, YouTube and the Google Network.

And it’s that Network line that I was posting about, and what led to the question.

Network is where Google reports all the other money it makes, and within this number, is how much advertising Google’s ad network shares with the rest of the open web.

Let me explain.

Google has an all encompassing planetary-scale monopoly on digital advertising through its ad tech. It controls how ads are sold, delivered and measured.

It has the world’s most dominant ad server called Google Ad Manager, known as GAM.

Almost all the world’s publishers and almost all ad-funded websites on the web use it to find and deliver ads on their websites.

Google then has an ad network called AdX. Think of it as a dam full of ads looking for a place to be served.

Almost every advertiser and advertising agency in the world relies on it to get their ads from their whiteboards to the people they are looking to sell products to.

And it’s massive.

Around half of all the world’s ad demand - that’s advertisers looking for audiences - is transacted through here.

And we know from evidence surfaced at the trial that its scale is almost impossible to the human mind to comprehend.

How it works

Let’s say Hyundai wants to sell its SUV to 25 to 35-year-old women who have recently had children and need trunk space who live on the East Coast of the United States.

Hyundai goes to Google’s ad tech, and drops its requirements.

Google’s AdX runs a super-fast auction in a fraction of a second to find websites that have the target customers, and GAM delivers the ad.

Google gets paid at least 35 cents on every dollar for doing that, and the website gets what’s left.

This is programmatic advertising at its most basic, and when it’s working right, then everyone wins.

🖥️ Google gets paid for the tech.

📝 The publisher gets paid for creating the content that attracted the reader.

🎯 Hyundai’s ad reaches the right potential buyer.

🚗 And the consumer gets the car they want.

Only, my chart - the one Myles was asking about - shows how this has been corrupted by the illegal ad tech monopoly that Judge Brinkema is now considering breaking up.

Now let’s explain what it shows.

We have already established that Google controls all the ads looking for customers through AdX, and it controls where they go through the taps and pipes of GAM.

But in 2026, Google wants all the ads for itself, because that’s how it sustains the double digit annual growth Wall Street demands.

Internal emails presented at the trials exposed Google executives “shaking the cushions” to increase prices to meet Wall Street goals.

But also because it needs cash to fund the colossal investments its making to stay ahead in the AI race.

That has led it to bend the rules, and this chart is the proof ☝️.

To keep as many of the ads for itself, Google launched AI Overviews to replace search.

You might remember that it was Future Media that revealed this back in 2023 when it was a secret Google patent.

Since then, Google has used AI Overviews to keep readers on its search pages by answering the questions.

Think what that does.

A person goes to search and asks what are the latest headlines in the Wall Street Journal today.

AI Overviews responds with the answers, and the reader does not need to go to the Wall Street Journal.

That means Google keeps the reader, and serves them ads, and does not need to send the reader to the WSJ, so it does not need to share its ad revenue with them.

This isn’t theoretical any more. It’s real. Here it is in action.

Self preferencing

When Google sends readers to a publisher, it’s known in the industry as referral traffic.

Since AI Overviews, referral traffic to publishers has fallen by as much as 80 per cent in the worst cases.

But Google’s not done, because it has also turned the taps and narrowed the pipes to send less of its AdX dam of ads with everyone else on the web too.

And the proof and the impact of both together is what the Network Ads chart I shared shows.

It shows Google keeping readers to itself and monetising them for growth, while simultaneously sharing less of the advertising it controls with the open web.

And the SEC filings show how it’s moving the ads that used to pay for every ad-funded website to platforms it owns, mainly search and YouTube.

The law has a term for this. It’s called self preferencing, and in Google’s court cases this was found to be anticompetitive and illegal.

For the layman though it’s a pincer movement. Google’s sending less readers and less ad revenue to everyone else and suffocating the open web, while using its monopoly to hoard it for itself.

And that is the problem that Judge Brinkema will soon offer her solution for.

Will she force Google to sell GAM and AdX. That’s what the US Department of Justice wants.

Or will she try to change Google’s behaviour so it plays nice and shares like it used to. The DoJ has bleakly called this “putting a BandAid on a severed limb”.

That’s what we are all waiting to hear. It will decide the fate of the $750 billion global digital advertising market

So it’s a great question, and thanks to Myles for sending it. Please keep them coming. There’s plenty to talk about. Stick any questions you have in the comments. 👇

This has been Future Media Explains.

PS: I asked Google’s AI Gemini to fact check this article. It said: “The post is highly accurate regarding the specific news events it references (the Venezuelan couple and the Anti-Weaponisation Fund) and correctly explains the basic mechanics of programmatic ad tech.”

I have a confession. I have a complicated relationship with incentives.

I’ve always known they’re around, of course. Throughout my career, I’ve been given KPIs and targets to deliver.

But incentives are upstream of KPIs, and I didn’t need to understand them as a frontline newsroom executive.

That changed when I joined boards. My first was in financial services. I quickly learned the job was about satisfying shareholders.

My learning curve became steeper still with my own investors in my AI video start-up.

But my deepest understanding of incentives - and how they influence behaviours - has come from diving into the world’s largest tech companies - and Meta in particular.

It’s a horrible and addictive product used by 3.58 billion people every day.

It does terrible things to people and kills children but advertisers love it.

And is under attack everywhere in the world but it’s growing faster than ever.

How the f*ck does that happen?

People often ask me why’s Meta so bad? Why doesn’t it just sto…

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A month ago, a Silicon Valley insider reached out to me after 30 years inside California’s magic-money-making-bubble. He wanted to share.

That newsletter - Don’t Be Evil was always too low a bar - has become one of my most talked about guest posts.

He wrote about his 8,000-mile drive across America with his dog Paco meeting people and putting faces to the damage the addictive tech he helped create is causing.

Now is back after he and Paco had an unexpected encounter with a tech billionaire on a deserted beach...

Welcome to new subs over the past few days from the newsdesk at Bloomberg in New York, the data intel team at the UK’s Independent in London, broadcaster NPR in Washington, the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs in New Jersey, the CEO of Belgium’s news agency Belga, the tech, media and telco leadership team at Deloitte, internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare in San Francisco, information wellness platform Readocracy in Toronto, publisher growth and subscriber …

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One hundred and forty-four years ago, in a back room behind a soda shop on Wall Street, two journalists launched a newsletter that became a legend.

Charles Dow and Edward Jones were p*ssed. Wall Street had corrupted The Press, and they were going to fix it.

They quit their jobs, printed financial alerts on tissue paper, innovated new tech and paid kids to hand-deliver it. It grew into The Wall Street Journal.

Days ago, Dow Jones announced a $1 billion earnings target with newsletters and niche intelligence at the heart of the strategy.

Joining me to tell the story is guest writer , creator of Spread - a platform putting people back into journalism.

🎁 And this is a special free post. Enjoy.

Welcome to new subs from the board of Netflix, the leadership team at Apple, Bloomberg in Sydney, Deloitte Germany, Publicis in Paris, The Sunday Times in London, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, 20 Minuten in Zurich, Bauer Media in Ireland; ARN in Australia, Harvey AI New York, the News Media Alliance

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Update: A federal judge just cast serious doubt on the SEC’s $1.5 million settlement with Elon Musk over his 2022 Twitter share buildup.

US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan summoned both sides to her Washington courtroom on May 13 2026.

She called the deal’s “irregularities” red flags and refused to rubber stamp it.

The SEC removed Musk personally as defendant. It swapped him for a legal trust bearing his name. It dropped $150 million in alleged ill-gotten gains, and cut the total sought by 99 per cent.

Sooknanan has asked why the deal was structured “for the sole purpose of Mr Musk being able to say that no relief was entered”.

As I report below, SEC lawyers had previously appeared surprised to learn Musk’s team was even in settlement talks.

Musk closed his $44 billion Twitter purchase in October 2022. Trump’s SEC has scaled back corporate enforcement since, leading former enforcement chief Margaret Ryan to walk out after six months.

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The 2021 News Media Bargaining Code returned ~$250 million-a-year to publishers - but had gaps.

Now there’s a new law: The News Bargaining Incentive. It taxes platforms’ Australian revenue, with offsets if they do deals with publishers.

To unpack it, I’m joined by Paul Fletcher - Australia’s former Communications Minister and one of the main architects of the original law.

Welcome to paid subs from mag giant Burda in Munich, AFP in Paris, the News/Media Alliance in Virginia, and tech-justice non-profit Foxglove.

As well as new free subs from Netflix, the SEO team at The Times of London, the Sydney bureau at Bloomberg, Atex in Stockholm, El País in Spain, Pushly in Kansas, Dutch public broadcaster NPO in Hilversum, Nine Entertainment in Sydney, The Telegraph in London, and Sistrix in Bonn, among many others.

Before we dive in, did you know that Google has banked US$1.2 billion from the publishing industry since it was ruled a monopoly 383 days ago?

Its daily take rate is US$3.1 million-a-day - and it’s accelerating - while we wait for judge Leonie Brinkema’s decision on how to punish with the 3x monopolist. Just sayin’

The Big Story: Inside Australia’s News Bargaining Incentive

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Publishers have been feeling the pain of AI Overviews for two years but today the financial impact hit the balance sheet. Google put a number on it.

Welcome to new subs overnight from Netflix, the News Media Alliance, Bay Area News in San Francisco, ad giant Publicis, Bauer Media in Dublin, Australia’s ARN and the British University in Cairo, among others.

Today I’m revealing how Google’s raising the stakes - and how every day judge Leonie Brinkema delays her decision is hurting the victims.

The answers are buried in Google’s latest financial update - and it shows systemic, deliberate, and accelerated profit taking since it lost its landmark antitrust trials.

Let’s go.

The Big Story: The pain v the gain

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Spotify… man, it was sounding sweet a year ago. It executed a US$1.8 billion turnaround with a glorious 14-point plan and everything was humming.

Today though, the music paused, so I’m breaking down why it’s paying artists less because of an ad flop that hit rewind on US$14 billion of its value.

And don’t miss a big earning day tomorrow when I’ll deep dive into Google and Meta’s latest results.

First, thank you to paying subs from independent DSP The Trade Desk, New Zealand’s biggest media company NZME and recommendation engine Taboola.

And welcome to new free subs from influential tech tracker Arete Research in London, the US lawyers running a US$218 billion action against Google Keller Postman, AI marketers Monks, public broadcaster 3Cat in Catalonia, Spain, and Opera Australia, among many others.

Let’s fire up the ghetto blaster, hit play, and learn what Spotify’s troubles tell us about a new phase in the future of media…

The Big Story: From a boom to a bum note

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Tens of thousands of advertisers have just filed a US$218 billion claim alleging Google overcharged them for search and display ads going back a decade.

And today, I’m revealing how a smart US lawyer has sidestepped a century of Fat Cat deck-stacking to put Google in the doo-doo - and how you can join in.

Welcome to new paid subs from MSN, the Financial Times in London, Taboola in Tokyo and Dentsu in Warsaw.

And hola! to new free joiners from Ecuador’s digital publisher Primicias, hey to the video team at The Washington Post, こんにちは to Tokyo’s news aggregator SmartNews, ahlan to a new face from Similarweb in Tel Aviv, and buckle in at the UC Irvine School of Law in California - you’ll enjoy this one.

Let’s dive in. It’s a corker.

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Sometimes you dive into what looks like a simple story only to find it has unexpected ups and downs and fascinating angles. This one on Snap’s rollercoaster is one of those.

The social platform that banks almost US$6 billion by hooking kids as young as 10 is in a whole bunch of trouble.

And now the Wall Street firm that tried to force Rupert Murdoch to split his Aussie real estate business and The Dow Jones from the newspapers has joined the fray.

And it’s done something never before seen on Wall Street.

Welcome to new subs over the weekend from Netflix, streaming to 300 million subs, Google’s policy team in Brussels, Meta in Italy, the Research Centre for Justice and Governance in Portugal, The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, racing publisher BloodHorse in Lexington, Kentucky, CRM giant HubSpot in Brazil, Gizmodo, the BBC and the actor who played Brian Fuller on TV show Gilmore Girls who now runs a fandom marketplace in Vegas. G’day there fella 👋

Let’s Snap to it…

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Welcome to a special guest post from a Silicon Valley insider who reached out after 30 years inside the machine, wanting to share what he’s learned.

He’s recently completed an 8,000-mile drive across America with his dog Paco in a Rivian R1T, trying to make sense of what he’d experienced.

If you’re feeling the same and would like to share your insights in Future Media, drop me a line.

Take it away…

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Netflix just launched a standalone gaming app called Netflix Playground, designed for children aged eight and under.

It features Peppa Pig, Sesame Street, and Dr Seuss. Kids can play innocent games. It has no ads, no in-app purchases, and it works offline.

It’s included in the normal subscription, and it barely got a mention, but it’s one of the most strategically important things Netflix has done this year.

And almost nobody in publishing and the ad industry is talking about it. And they should. This is why.

Welcome to new subs over the past 24 hours from the tech reporting team at The Washington Post, the marketing team at Meta in San Francisco, The Guardian ad team, marketing at The Observer, the partnerships crew at Paramount Pictures (hello Hollywood), as well as BBC Wildlife Magazine and B2B adtech PR team at Bluestripe Group and the London Air Ambulance all in the UK. Hi all, great to have you.

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The Big Story: Netflix’s expanding ad universe

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Breaking news: Europe has built its own age verification app to accelerate its drive to block kids’ social media access.

The 27-country bloc has taken a different path to Australia by putting the building of the app out to tender rather than placing the age proof requirement on the platforms.

It requires users to upload their passport or ID card to confirm their age and works across mobile and desktop.

Many European nations are now advancing their controls of teen access to Meta and other social media apps.

Reuters reports a dozen European countries, including non-EU nations Britain and Norway, are setting age limits between ‌13 and ⁠16 on social usage.

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Happy birthday Instagram. Fourteen years ago today Mark Zuckerberg shook hands with Kevin Systrom and agreed to buy the fledgling app for $1 billion.

As the ink dried on the paperwork, Instagram’s internal analytics showed it had soared to 30 million users, with 13 employees, no revenue and no ads.

Today Insta boasts three billion monthly active users, Reels has a $50 billion run rate, and its parent Meta banks $200 billion in ads - roughly half of it from Insta.

Zuck’s $1 billion bet is now conservatively worth US$500 billion. It may be the most lopsided acquisition in corporate history.

But the deal has been dodgy since the start. Most people have forgotten that. This post is a reminder.

And explains why the Federal Trade Commission believes Zuck withheld critical documents and wants the deal unwound.

Many of the key documents remain under seal, but today I’m publishing internal mails that show how the deal was done - and why it may not survive another birthday.

The Big Story: The hunter and the hunted

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What were you doing on November 30, 2022?

The baguette was added to UNESCO’s cultural heritage list, and England football fans were nursing a hangover after beating Wales 3:0 to top their World Cup group.

Both made headlines, but (fun fact) it’s also the day ChatGPT launched. And it didn’t earn one word of coverage. Anywhere. AI’s momentous arrival passed the world by.

It’s since fuelled an economic super-cycle: Nvidia, Microsoft and Google have hit US$4 trillion valuations. Four in five dollars of market gains are now due to AI.

Boom or bubble? Feast or famine? We’re yet to see, but who’s winning - that’s a $13 trillion question on everyone’s lips.

Has OpenAI nailed product market fit? How’s Anthropic’s founder handling the pressure? Does Meta AI have a fatal flaw? Where’s Microsoft at? Is xAI going to kill us all? Or will Google f*ck our careers first?

To unpack the unknowns I asked , author of and former tech editor at The Washington Post, Vox and Ars Technica.

And today we are stack-ranking the six biggest AIs. Who’s your money on?

Welcome to new paid subs from TikTok in sunny San Fran, America’s Local Media Consortium, the Australian Society of Authors, and Proton - founded by CERN scientists to combat Google and Apple and has 100 million users and 500 staff in Geneva, Zurich, Paris, London and Barcelona.

And hi there new free joiners from Anthropic, The Korea Daily, CTV ad platform tvScientific (owned by Pinterest), youth news discovery start-up Newsreel, Aussie powerhouse Mamamia, Shutterstock in New York, UNICEF in Switzerland, the behavioural science team at Save The Children in Germany, Sweden’s most influential newspaper Dagens Nyheter, and one of Spain’s largest newspapers La Voz de Galicia. What’s that? You’d like me to come over? ✈️

Chocks away, let’s go.

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My inbox lit up over the weekend as parents, investors and Silicon Valley rushed to digest the implications of Meta’s crushing court losses last week.

Two juries in two days ruled Meta liable for its algorithm causing addiction and harm to kids, demolishing a legal shield that’s protected social media for 30 years.

It threatens the way Meta harvests data for its US$196 billion ad monopoly. As that sank in, its value slipped US$116 billion. The value of Sony was lost in a day.

Now, a community of seven million mums have mobilised to take control of Meta and other harmful mobile apps literally into their own hands.

They’ve built their own phone and it’s just gone on sale. Today, they reveal how it has safety built in by default to give parents control over what underage kids see.

The Big Story: Mums army launches safe smartphone

Before we dive in, welcome to paid subs from The Trade Desk in New York, Le Devoir in Montréal, and Aussie broadcaster SBS.

Paid subscribers get access to the full story, board-ready data and deep analysis. If you’re not in, what are you missing? Give an upgrade a go.

And hi to new free subs from Warner Bros, Sky New Zealand, Ad Age, the team at POLITICO in London, the Asia-Pacific leads at Agence France-Presse in Hong Kong, corporate affairs at News Corp Australia, as well as Nine Entertainment, Swedish AI newsroom automation outfit United Robots and a cluster of new subs from Naver, the South Korean search engine that dominates Korean digital life the way Google dominates the West, and many more… 👋

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Let’s get in there…

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Pugnacious lawyer Mark Lanier has spent three decades busting billionaires and corporations for making dangerous products while hiding what they know.

He broke Big Pharma, took down from Johnson & Johnson over defective hip implants and then dodgy talc, before busting chemists for flogging opioids.

Dangerous drugs. Defective devices. Addictive painkillers.

Now he’s notched up the most consequential win of his career as a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google’s YouTube negligent for designing harmful social media apps.

There’s been a lot of coverage about the trial, but not enough about the how. And I love the How.

So today I’m telling the glorious story of a part-time pastor with a love for courtroom theatrics, who dragged Big Tech into court - then nailed them with a jar of M&Ms.

The Big Story: Big Tech’s not too sweet moment

Let’s go…

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If you’re English like me it means we’re headed into five weeks of anxiety, warm beer, short-lived glory, and then an inevitable loss to Germany on penalties.

It’s now nearly 60 years since Bobby Moore and his glorious red-shirted heroes brought it home at Wembley, and it’s all about to kick-off again.

The numbers are staggering. Here’s the breakdown:

Six billion people will watch, attend, stream and social around what will be the most-engaged event in history.

• Kick-off is June 11

• 48-teams field

• 104 matches, and

• The US, Canada and Mexico as co-hosts.

It will be the largest advertising moment in history, and social media will go off the charts. It’s going to be absolute chaos.

Today, I’m joined by a mate, Matt Chiodi, who’s chief strategy officer at Cerby to talk about how to avoid the big moment going badly wrong.

Start the 30 day clock

Matt: Good to see you again Ricky.

Ricky: What are the risks and what are people at media companies and brands missing?

Matt: It’s a great question. Social media has dramatically grown over the past decade but the controls brands and enterprises have over it have not evolved.

There are no robust controls over who has access to these social accounts, so when there’s a massive event, with billions of viewers, that’s a serious problem.

I really wish this was a conversation that more teams were having because time is closing fast.

Ricky: In my experience at media companies, there’s an army of enthusiastic staff who want to report everything in real time - and social’s awesome for that.

Fans at the game, fast-reactions to events, the passion…

But publishers and brands might have 20 or 30 social accounts, or be using their staffer’s own social account, and there might be old accounts everyone’s forgotten.

That’s a risk, isn’t it?

Matt: That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You just nailed it on the head.

I’m talking about account sprawl and who has access to those accounts and who shouldn’t.

Most organisations, both small and large, really don’t know who has publish access to their social accounts.

Cerby has customers spending hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spend through these channels, but they have no good protection around it.

In many cases, they’ve no idea who has access. That’s a big problem for almost every brand we speak with.

Ricky: That seems odd. We invest fortunes and put huge effort into protecting our brands, but this is an open door to anyone to cause mischief. What do you do?

Matt: There’s a couple of priorities.

Number one is to understand what accounts you actually have? This sounds basic, but you’d be surprised how often it’s overlooked.

Maybe your big brand accounts are obvious, but what about the ones that were campaign specific, or for one member of staff? That’s where the risk is.

The best place to start is coming up with an inventory of those. To be honest, most companies are less organised here than you’d think.

Step two is finding out who has access; not who should have access, but who actually has access.

By now you might have a big list of accounts. Don’t panic. Don’t try to boil the ocean

Step three is to pick the ones that have the highest value, and consider which accounts you could least afford to lose during a major moment.

What would it mean if your biggest campaign went sideways tomorrow? Do you know who has access? If something happened, how fast could you regain control?

Those are the real questions that unfortunately most brands don’t think about until an account takeover happens.

Be safe with Cerby

Ricky: What you’re describing is that someone you don’t control is posting in your socials under your brand to the largest audience in a decade.

It could be a disgruntled employee, or someone who’s hacked in, because you’ve left the back door open.

Matt: We’ve had many examples of people have come to us with this.

Picture this: A social campaign goes live and an hour later is posting something offensive.

It’s confusing customers, and you’re burning through ad dollars that you didn’t approve. That turns into a brand crisis very quickly.

One massive brand customer who spends hundreds of millions of dollars on social media had an employee leave.

She had then used her social sign in at her new company and mistakenly redirected a couple million dollars of the old company’s ad spend.

It was an accident, but the money was gone. You can’t get that back. Many don’t realise that when this goes awry, it’s gone.

Ricky: Yeah, good luck getting Meta on the phone! But it impacts on content and ads, and it can be a mistake as much as deliberate, but the outcome is always bad.

Hundreds listening to this are at media companies whose staff have the logins to post on their brand’s behalf but have no failsafes.

Matt: Someone told me last week they were signed into their social and still had access to a company they left five years before but could still post.

Another story, Ricky, that we hear a lot is that employees leave and are the only ones with access. One employer was locked out for two years until they could find the ex-employee and get the 2FA code?

Ricky: That’s two factor authentication. When the platform wants to email you or send a code to your phone as a back-up that it’s really you.

Matt: This is just really common in large organisations that have a massive social presence, but the risk management just hasn’t kept up.

Ricky: That would keep me up at 4am if I was the boss, so what do you do?

Matt: The boss’ first call needs to go to the Chief Marketing Officer, or whoever runs social for the company to ask how social access is being managed.

Often, it can also sit with the cyber security team, but the executive team needs to know what rules and controls are in place today.

Often what they’ll find is that access and passwords are being handled manually. This is often a spreadsheet - a Google Sheet or Microsoft Excel somewhere.

Maybe Jane has access, so does Ricky, and Matt, but as this scales, people leave, and it can’t be managed and anyone can access it.

Most of the time, those people are well meaning, but as it grows, it gets forgotten.

The executive needs to have a good handle on this. Often, it’s assumed to be the job of IT, but when we ask them, they say it’s marketing’s job - meaning nobody owns it. That’s when you end up with account takeovers happening.

And the damage can be severe. When companies experience a breach, 66 per cent of consumers say they’ll stop doing business with them. It creates a loss of trust.

Be safe with Cerby

Ricky: OK, so let me be the CEO. I’ve just found out my firm has 68 social accounts sitting in a shared Google doc anyone can see. What do I do?

Matt: Our customer success team has handled this for large brands hundreds of times.

Cerby will take the company’s account inventory and work with them on prioritising which team or individuals should have access.

Then we will get those accounts brought into Cerby’s platform. And here’s the key - we will then connect them all to a single enterprise identity.

Ricky: Explain that.

Matt: When you login to your work account with a username and password, Cerby will connect the right employees to those social accounts automatically.

Now, here’s the thing most people don’t think about. Managing access for your own employees is one thing.

But when you’re dealing with brands with multiple agencies, contractors, regional teams, campaign-specific accounts, that’s when things can get sticky.

Cerby solves that. We give seamless access to people who aren’t your employees and you can automatically shut their access off when the job’s over.

Ricky: Right. So now as CEO I know my team can control all the accesses from one account, and they are all locked up safely in one place.

Matt: That’s right. A single safe place.

Most social media experts, CMOs, marketers, are used to working in social media management tools from a content perspective.

It’s very efficient for scheduling content, managing what goes out, a central place to see how it’s all performing across multiple channels.

Cerby does the same for managing access. Everything in one place.

Ricky: Right. So imagine something goes wrong and an unwelcome post appears. Maybe one of the team has celebrated a little too enthusiastically and posted unwisely.

You’re telling me you now have an off switch that can stop it.

Matt: That’s absolutely right. You have that central control point for all of your social accounts.

A lot of people think social is X or Instagram, but there’s also YouTube, and maybe 50 other apps. Cerby puts them all under one control with an audit trail.

Ricky: Run me through some of the others to worry about.

Matt: There’s a massive universe of apps that organisations don’t worry about when it comes to security.

What about Pinterest and WhatsApp? They need to be in Cerby because a lot of marketing happens there. What about Flickr, Discord, Snapchat, Spotify?

Managing access to all of these different apps is typically managed in that open spreadsheet, or a piece of paper people pass around.

What about TikTok, Twitch, Tumblr, Reddit?

Ricky: As an England fan and former newspaper editor, I appreciate dark humour. Share a horror story with me where someone really cocked this up.

Matt: There are many, but one company had all their social accounts in a Google Doc that someone internally had published to the open web, and had no idea.

They got lucky for a while until they all showed up in a Google search and they realised that they had a big problem.

That’s a more egregious example, but it does happen more frequently than you might imagine.

Ricky: So this feels urgent given the eyes of the world are quite literally going to be on all these brand and publishing socials over the coming months.

Matt: The number of eyeballs going to social has changed dramatically over the last decade, and often cybersecurity professionals miss the big risk.

There’s no healthcare data that’s in there, right, so what’s the big deal?

What gets missed by those on the IT or the security side is that millions in ad revenue and billions in brand are being shared through these platforms.

There is real business risk. The CEO gets it. The CMO usually gets it, but they aren’t the ones thinking about how the company manages the access.

Ricky: Frightening and amazing. Let’s fix this, and then fix England winning the World Cup for the first time in 60 years.

Matt: It’s been a while between drinks, but I empathise as a Philadelphia fan. I hope it’s the year for you.

Ricky: Fingers crossed.

Thank you for tuning in.

Find out more about Cerby.

The world’s biggest event World Cup 2026 is just weeks away and it will run on social media. Are your brand accounts secure?

Five weeks of peak social media activity - on accounts your IT team can’t see. Lock down your social channels with Cerby before the opening match.

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