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Sergino Dest of USA and Milad Mohammadi of Iran battle for the ball during the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Group B match between IR Iran and USA at Al Thumama Stadium on November 29, 2022 in Doha, Qatar.

Matteo Ciambelli | Defodi Images | Getty Images

There were Super Bowl ads, arena sponsorships and celebrity endorsements. TV commercials landed during the nightly news. Money flooded onto Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.

Crypto companies were spending anywhere and everywhere.

Through October of 2022, crypto-related brands shelled out $223 million on ads in the U.S., up 150% from $89 million for all of last year, according to MediaRadar. Few were as aggressive as Crypto.com, which said in late 2021 it was committing $100 million to an ad campaign that would feature Matt Damon and run across 20 countries. The company is an official sponsor of the 2022 World Cup taking place in Qatar.

What the crypto industry giveth, it can taketh away.

The stunning collapse this month of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s broader empire spells further trouble for ad-supported media businesses that had come to see crypto as a new growth engine with money to burn. And FTX is far from the only problem, as the contagion has been spreading for months.

Coinbase has lost over 80% of its value and the company cut 18% of its staff in June, when CEO Brian Armstrong admitted the business grew too quickly and stressed “the need to manage expenses.” Crypto.com has reportedly cut 40% of its workforce, eToro downsized by 10% and in July canceled a planned merger with a special purpose acquisition company, and BlockFi just declared bankruptcy.

“Crypto winter is a crypto advertising winter,” said Grant Harbin, CEO of performance marketing firm Headlight, which has worked with companies in the industry. “There’s probably very little consideration on scaling advertising budgets right now.”

In the third quarter of this year, the top crypto advertisers spent just $35 million on ads, according to MediaRadar, an 80% drop from the first quarter, which got a huge boost from the country’s single biggest sporting event — the Super Bowl.

The pullback in spending, which is expected to intensify given the industry’s deepening turmoil, is notable as ad-based companies face broader challenges from soaring inflation and fears of a recession. But while crypto represented a promising area for growth, it still makes up a tiny portion of the overall ad market.

Companies overall are expected to spend almost $89 billion on TV ads this year, across linear programming and connected devices, and close to $250 billion on digital ads, according to Insider Intelligence.

Blockchain holds a lot of promise, but most of it is speculative, says Fmr. FDIC Chair Sheila Bair

Facebook (including Instagram), Snap, Twitter and TikTok combined are expected to pull in $57.1 million in ads from crypto exchanges this year, according to SensorTower. That’s about even with 2021 figures, though almost all of the spending last year was on Facebook and Instagram.

In Alphabet‘s third-quarter earnings call last month, the company blamed a slowdown in revenue growth in part on reduced ad spending by cypto companies and other financial firms. Google’s sales growth was the slowest for any period since 2013, other than one quarter during the Covid pandemic.

The spending roller coaster

SensorTower data shows a big spike in crypto ad spending on digital media around October and November of last year, as prices were peaking, and a steep drop after the first quarter of this year. In April, the crypto sell-off began in earnest, with bitcoin and ether each losing well over half their value over the next three months.

The Super Bowl created a spending splurge that the industry may never see again. A 30-second spot during the NFL’s grand finale in February cost an average of $6.5 million, and crypto was a huge theme.

Coinbase, Crypto.com, eToro and FTX spent a combined $54 million on Super Bowl ads, according to MediaRadar. Coinbase aired a 60-second commercial showing a bouncing QR code that, once scanned, led to a promotion offering $15 worth of free bitcoin to new users. FTX signed up Larry David for an ad, urging viewers not to miss out on crypto and declaring NFTs “the next big thing.” A version of “Fly Me to the Moon” played during eToro’s commercial.

Promotional costs weren’t limited to airtime.

In 2021, Crypto.com paid $700 million to put its name on the home of the Los Angeles Lakers for the next 20 years. FTX signed a 19-year deal worth $135 million with the NBA’s Miami Heat for naming rights to the team’s arena, partnered with the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and had its logo placed on uniforms worn by Major League Baseball umpires.

Miami-Dade County is now trying to get the FTX named scrubbed from the arena. Miami has become a major hub for the crypto industry, and in September FTX moved its U.S. headquarters there from Chicago. The company spread its wings in the city, sponsoring a three-day crypto weekend in May on South Beach called “FTX Off the Grid.”

Jordan Levy, a Miami-based venture capitalist, said that while other crypto companies have advertised in the city, FTX was on another level.

“None of them have as significant of a presence in Miami as Bankman-Fried and FTX,” said the managing partner of SBNY, formerly SoftBank New York. “They’ve tried to do some guerrilla marketing stuff that put them on the top of the food chain from perception perspective.”

The money FTX was spending now presumably goes to zero. According to SensorTower, the company’s online ad spending quadrupled this year to $13.3 million, with roughly half of that coming in the first quarter.

Crypto.com’s online ad spending plummeted from about $16.2 million in the first quarter to $1.6 million in the third, SensorTower said. And Gemini, the exchange owned by the Winklevoss twins, cut spending from $8.5 million the first quarter to $2,500 in the third.

Coinbase, the only major exchange that’s publicly traded in the U.S., said in its earnings report this month that its sales and marketing expense dropped 46% in the third quarter from the prior period to $76 million. The company attributed the decline to “our decision to reduce performance marketing, due to lower efficiency in this spend associated with softer crypto market conditions as well as savings associated with our headcount reduction.”

Coinbase didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A Crypto.com spokesperson said via email that the company’s $100 million campaign ran from October 2021 through February 2022. Since then, “we ran additional advertising as part of our marketing strategy, and we continue to focus on our global brand and sports partnerships,” the spokesperson said. That includes sponsorship of the World Cup.

Brad Michelson, eToro’s U.S. head of marketing, said the Israel-based investment platform will “actively adjust spend based on performance,” and plans to continue building its brand in the U.S.

“It’s no secret that the markets are in a pull-back phase, and our budgets are being reallocated accordingly,” Michelson told CNBC in a statement.

The crypto market has suffered downturns in the past, only to bounce back and attract even greater sums of cash and new entrants.

Joseph Panzarella, director of digital media and marketing at the Yeshiva University’s Katz School of Science and Health, said that even if the market starts recovering, the high-profile scandals of 2022 will force companies to take a more serious approach when promoting their offerings.

“What they came out with was like, ‘Hey, we’re going to stick it to the Fed,'” Panzarella said, referring to the industry’s focus on decentralization and its ability to function without the heavy hand of government. “I guess they have to eat a little crow and say something like, ‘Hey, we are now we’re now [open to] being regulated.'”

WATCH: FTX’s bankruptcy puts increased pressure on the ad market

FTX's bankruptcy puts increased pressure on the ad market

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Cybersecurity firm Netskope files to go public on the Nasdaq

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Cybersecurity firm Netskope files to go public on the Nasdaq

Sanjay Beri, chief executive officer and founder of Netskope Inc., listens during a Bloomberg West television interview in San Francisco, California.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Cloud security platform Netskope will go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NTSK,” the company said in an initial public offering filing Friday.

The Santa Clara, California-based company said annual recurring revenue grew 33% to $707 million, while revenues jumped 31% to about $328 million in the first half of the year.

But Netskope isn’t profitable yet. The company recorded a $170 million net loss during the first half of the year. That narrowed from a $207 million loss a year ago.

Netskope joins an increasing number of technology companies adding momentum to the surge in IPO activity after high inflation and interest rates effectively killed the market.

So far this year, design software firm Figma more than tripled in its New York Stock Exchange debut, while crypto firm Circle soared 168% in its first trading day. CoreWeave has also popped since its IPO, while trading app eToro surged 29% in its May debut.

Read more CNBC tech news

Netskope’s offering also coincides with a busy period for cybersecurity deals.

The year’s two biggest technology deals include Alphabet’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz and Palo Alto Networksambitious plan to buy Israeli identity security company CyberArk for $25 billion.

Founded in 2012, Netskope made a name for itself in its early years in the cloud access security broker space. The company lists Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Zscaler, Broadcom and Fortinet as its major competitors.

Netskope’s biggest backers include Accel, Lightspeed Ventures and Iconiq, which recently benefited from Figma’s stellar debut.

Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are leading the offering. Netskope listed 13 other Wall Street banks as underwriters.

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Meta set to unveil first consumer-ready smart glasses with a display, wristband next month

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Meta set to unveil first consumer-ready smart glasses with a display, wristband next month

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., on Sept. 25, 2024.

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Meta is planning to use its annual Connect conference next month to announce a deeper push into smart glasses, including the launch of the company’s first consumer-ready glasses with a display, CNBC has learned.

That’s one of the two new devices Meta is planning to unveil at the event, according to people familiar with the matter. The company will also launch its first wristband that will allow users to control the glasses with hand gestures, the people said.

Connect is a two-day conference for developers focused on virtual reality, AR and the metaverse. It was originally called Oculus Connect and obtained its current moniker after Facebook changed its parent company name to Meta in 2021.

The glasses are internally codenamed Hypernova and will include a small digital display in the right lens of the device, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.

The device is expected to cost about $800 and will be sold in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the people said. CNBC reported in October that Meta was working with Luxottica on consumer glasses with a display.

Meta declined to comment. Luxottica, which is based in France and Italy, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Meta began selling smart glasses with Luxottica in 2021 when the two companies released the first-generation Ray-Ban Stories, which allowed users to take photos or videos using simple voice commands. The partnership has since expanded, and last year included the addition of advanced AI features that made the second generation of the product an unexpected hit with early adopters. 

Luxottica owns a number of glasses brands, including Ray-Ban, and licenses many others like Prada. It’s unclear what brand Luxottica will use for the glasses with AR, but a Meta job listing posted this week said the company is looking for a technical program manager for its “Wearables organization,” which “is responsible for the Ray-Ban AR glasses and other wearable hardware.”

In June, CNBC reported that Meta and Luxottica plan to release Prada-branded smart glasses. Prada glasses are known for having thick frames and arms, which could make them a suitable option for the Hypernova device, one of the people said. 

Meta Connect 2024 kicks off

Last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg used Connect to showcase the company’s experimental Orion AR glasses.

The Orion features AR capabilities on both lenses, capable of blending 3D digital visuals into the physical world, but the device served only as a prototype to show the public what could be possible with AR glasses. Still, Orion built some positive momentum for Meta, which since late 2020 has endured nearly $70 billion in losses from its Reality Labs unit that’s in charge of building hardware devices.

With Hypernova, Meta will finally be offering glasses with a display to consumers, but the company is setting low expectations for sales, some of the sources said. That’s because the device requires more components than its voice-only predecessors, and will be slightly heavier and thicker, the people said.

Meta and Ray-Ban have sold 2 million pairs of their second-generation glasses since 2023, Luxottica CEO Francesco Milleri said in February. In July, Luxottica said that revenue from sales of the smart glasses had more than tripled year over year.

As part of an extension agreement between Meta and Luxottica announced in September, Meta obtained a stake of about 3% in the glasses company according to Bloomberg. Meta also gets exclusive rights to Luxottica’s brands for its smart glasses technology for a number of years, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC in June.

Although Hypernova will feature a display, those visual features are expected to be limited, people familiar with the matter said. They said the color display will offer about a 20 degree field of view — meaning it will appear in a small window in a fixed position — and will be used primarily to relay simple bits of information, such as incoming text messages. 

Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s technology chief, said earlier this month that there are advantages to having just one display rather than two, including a lower price.

“Monocular displays have a lot going for them,” Bosworth said in an Instagram video. “They’re affordable, they’re lighter, and you don’t have disparity correction, so they’re structurally quite a bit easier.”

‘Interact with an AI assistant’

Other details of Meta’s forthcoming glasses were disclosed in a July letter from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol to a lawyer representing Meta. While the letter redacted the name of the company and the product, a person with knowledge of the matter confirmed that it was in reference to Meta’s Hypernova glasses.

“This model will enable the user to take and share photos and videos, make phone calls and video calls, send and receive messages, listen to audio playback and interact with an AI assistant in different forms and methods, including voice, display, and manual interactions,” according to the letter, dated July 23.

The letter from CBP was part of routine communication between companies and the U.S. government when determining the country of origin for a consumer product. It refers to the product as “New Smart Glasses,” and says the device will feature “a lens display function that allows the user to interface with visual content arising from the Smart Features, and components providing image data retrieval, processing, and rendering capabilities.”

CBP didn’t provide a comment for this story.

The Hypernova glasses will also come paired with a wristband that will use technology built by Meta’s CTRL Labs, said people familiar with the matter. CTRL Labs, which Meta acquired in 2019, specializes in building neural technology that could allow users to control computing devices using gestures in their arms. 

The wristband is expected to be a key input component for the company’s future release of full AR glasses, so getting data now with Hypernova could improve future versions of the wristband, the people said. Instead of using camera sensors to track body movements, as with Apple’s Vision Pro headset, Meta’s wristband uses so-called sEMG sensor technology, which reads and interprets the electrical signals from hand movements.

One of the challenges Meta has faced with the wristband involves how people choose to wear it, a person familiar with the product’s development said. If the device is too loose, it won’t be able to read the user’s electrical signals as intended, which could impact its performance, the person said. Also, the wristband has run into issues in testing related to which arm it’s worn on, how it works on men versus women and how it functions on people who wear long sleeves.

The CTRL Labs team published a paper in Nature in July about its wristband, and Meta wrote about it in a blog post. In the paper, the Meta team detailed its use of machine learning technology to make the wristband work with as many people as possible. The additional data collected by the upcoming device should improve those capabilities for future Meta smart glasses.

“We successfully prototyped an sEMG wristband with Orion, our first pair of true augmented reality (AR) glasses, but that was just the beginning,” Meta wrote in the post. “Our teams have developed advanced machine learning models that are able to transform neural signals controlling muscles at the wrist into commands that drive people’s interactions with the glasses, eliminating the need for traditional—and more cumbersome—forms of input.”

Bloomberg reported the wristband component in January.

Meta has recently started reaching out to developers to begin testing both Hypernova and the accompanying wristband, people familiar with the matter said. The company wants to court third-party developers, particularly those who specialize in generative AI, to build experimental apps that Meta can showcase to drum up excitement for the smart glasses, the people said.

In addition to Hypernova and the wristband, Meta will also announce a third-generation of its voice-only smart glasses with Luxottica at Connect, one person said.

That device was also referenced by CBP in its July letter, referring to it as “The Next Generation Smart Glasses.” The glasses will include “components that provide capacitive touch functionality, allowing users to interact with the Smart Glasses through touch gestures,” the letter said.

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Google shares rise on report of Apple using Gemini for Siri

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Google shares rise on report of Apple using Gemini for Siri

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.

Camille Cohen | Afp | Getty Images

Alphabet shares rose on a Friday report that Apple is in early discussions to use Google’s Gemini AI models for an updated version of the iPhone-maker’s Siri assistant.

The company’s shares rose more than 3% on the Bloomberg report, which said Apple recently inquired of Google about the potential for the search giant to build a custom AI model that would power a new Siri that could launch next year. Google’s flagship AI models Gemini have consistently been atop key benchmarks for artificial intelligence advancements while Apple has struggled to define its own AI strategy.

The reported talks come as Google faces potential risk to its lucrative search deals with Apple. This month, a U.S. judge is expected to rule on the penalties for Google’s alleged search monopoly, in which the Department of Justice recommending eliminating exclusionary agreements with third parties. For Google, that refers to its search position on Apple’s iPhone and Samsung devices — deals that cost the company billions of dollars a year in payouts.

The Android maker has said its Gemini models will become the default assistant on Android phones. Google this year has showed Gemini doing capabilities that go beyond Siri’s capabilities, such as summarizing videos. 

Craig Federighi, who oversees Apple’s operating systems, said at last year’s developer conference that the iPhone maker would like to add other AI models for specific purposes into its Apple Intelligence framework. Federighi specifically mentioned Google, whose Gemini can now hold conversations with users and handle input that comes from photos, videos, voice or text. Apple is also exploring partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI as it tried to renew its AI roadmap, according to a June Bloomberg report.

Documents revealed during Google’s remedy trial showed executives from Apple were involved in the negotiations over using Google’s Gemini for a potential search option.

Google declined to comment. 

WATCH: Apple explores using Google Gemini AI to power revamped Siri, reports say

Apple explores using Google Gemini AI to power revamped Siri, reports say

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