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Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., left, arrives at federal court in San Jose, California, US, on Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2022. 

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

For Matthew Hassett’s smart alarm clock company Loftie, the 2022 holiday shopping rush was the busiest in its five-year history despite a lackluster U.S. economy and persistent concerns of a recession.

Hassett, who’s based in New York, attributes the boon to one key decision. He reallocated his marketing budget, decreasing spending on Facebook and, for the first time during a holiday season, committing ad dollars to Amazon.

“So many people start their shopping on Amazon,” Hassett said in an interview. “I do personally for most things. So, we have to be there.”

Loftie is representative of a larger trend taking place in retail that’s having major ripples on Madison Avenue and Wall Street. Amazon’s increased advertising offerings for the millions of brands that sell on the site coupled with Facebook’s diminished targeting capabilities that resulted from Apple’s privacy changes have produced a significant realignment in the digital ad market.

Until a year ago, Amazon didn’t even disclose the size of its advertising business, leaving analysts and investors to guess how much the company was making in allowing sellers and brands to promote their wares on the site and apps. Now, the company’s ad division is a $38 billion annual business, and last week reported 19% year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter to $11.6 billion.

Facebook-parent Meta, meanwhile reported a 4% annual decline in revenue for the quarter to $32.2 billion, shrinking for a third consecutive period. Google has been less impacted by Apple’s iOS update, but the ad business is still being hit by the economic slowdown. Parent company Alphabet posted growth of 1% to $76 billion.

Amazon has catapulted to third in the global digital ad market, with 7.3% share, according to Insider Intelligence. Even as it takes share from Google and Facebook, it’s still well behind the two market leaders, which control 28.8% and 20.5%, respectively, of the industry. The Facebook figure includes Instagram.

Loftie continues to spend more money on Facebook than Amazon, but the equation has changed dramatically. In the days surrounding Black Friday in November, he allocated 10% of his marketing budget to Amazon, up from zero the year before. Facebook and Instagram fell to 40% of his budget from 71%. The rest of the money he pulled out of Meta went to Google, as he increased spending there from 29% over the holidays in 2021 to 50% last year.

Hassett said Facebook ads simply don’t work as well anymore, after the iOS update in 2021 began forcing app developers to ask users if they wanted to be tracked. With more consumers opting out of app tracking, the pool of potential customers has been “hollowed out and so we can no longer reliably target people,” Hassett said.

“Facebook has to serve the audience to a bigger pool of people in order to find the same people you’re finding before, and that’s just more expensive,” he said. “You have to pay a lot more than you did a year ago, and a lot of that is due to Apple’s privacy changes.”

Meta finance chief Susan Li told analysts on last week’s earnings call that growth in the company’s biggest verticals, online commerce and consumer packaged goods, “remained negative” in the quarter. She said the pace of the year-to-year decline in “online commerce has slowed compared to last quarter,” but was uncertain if the sector will significantly rebound anytime soon.

People take selfies in front of the logo of Facebook parent company Meta on November 9, 2022 in Menlo Park, California. Meta will lay off more than 11,000 staff, the company said on Wednesday.

Liu Guanguan | China News Service | Getty Images

For Loftie, Amazon and Google provide better value because a shopper is showing intent by searching for a particular item. Hassett purchased keywords like “white noise” as well as “Loftie” to make sure that consumers who wanted to find his products weren’t misdirected.

“The work we do off of Amazon on advertising definitely pays dividends on Amazon because people are going there and typing in Loftie,” Hassett said, adding that his shift in ad spending helped Loftie generate a record $250,000 revenue over a four-day stretch during the holidays.

Investment bank Cowen noted in a recent survey of ad buyers that “Amazon was the most popular survey response when we asked respondents which ad platform outside of GOOG / FB properties could emerge or is emerging as a meaningful part of buyers’ Digital ad spend, ahead of TikTok.”

The survey indicated that there continues to be “broad interest among advertisers” to grow their Amazon budgets in 2023, with 54% of surveyed Amazon advertisers saying they are planning to spend more this year than last.

While Facebook remains a core piece of a brand’s budget, its influence is diminishing, and the company’s investment in its TikTok-like Reels product will take a few years to make a significant financial impact, the Cowen analysts said.

“In the near term, we expect Meta ad share to decline further in ’23 given macro headwinds and the pivot to Reels,” they wrote.

A Meta spokesperson declined to comment for this story but sent CNBC examples of brands that the company says increased their allocation to Facebook and Instagram and have seen improved performance from ads on the site.

Like Loftie, Robin Golf also had to move away from Facebook in promoting its catalog of golf clubs and related equipment. CEO Peter Marler said over the past year more of that money has gone to Amazon.

Between July 2021 and the same month a year later, Robin’s cost to acquire a customer jumped 260% to $180 from $50, Marler said. He attributed most of the surge in costs to Facebook’s reduced targeting abilities, and said Google also wasn’t performing as well.

“We started investing more heavily in Amazon,” Marler said. “We shifted budget away from Facebook, we shifted budget away from Google, and we shifted to Amazon, and our Amazon sales have shot up by about 600% in 2022.”

Overall, the value of the tracking cookie has withered because of a renewed emphasis on consumer privacy. There are very few major online ad platforms that don’t rely on targeting, Marler said.

“Changes in the efficacy of those platforms really have forced us to reexamine our reliance on them,” he said. “We are actively moving our budgets away and decreasing the amount of money that we are spending with Meta.”

‘Not our customer’

Reliance on Amazon has its own pitfalls. The company is a dominant force in online retail and can make or break a brand’s success based on its performance on the site. That’s particularly risky because Amazon has its own ballooning private label business, which regularly rolls out products that compete with sellers on the platform.

Vitamin company Manna Health has been increasing its presence on Amazon, committing more of its ad budget to the site since the iOS changes, with plans to possibly double its allocation in 2023 from less than 10% currently, said marketing chief Ryan Farmer.

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But he worries about brand loyalty, when so many transactions take place on Amazon.

“It’s not our customer, it’s Amazon’s customer,” Farmer said.

Farmer likens Amazon’s online ad system to Google’s in that companies run ads based on keywords that they think resonate with potential customers who may be searching for certain products. Manna also uses Amazon’s demand-side platform advertising tool, which is helpful for placement in banner ads that can be seen by people “searching for certain things,” Farmer said.

Manna, like Loftie and Robin Golf, maintains a customized Amazon home page that contains graphics, slogans, and a listing of the company’s various products that it’s selling on Amazon. However, the system is a “black box,” Famer said, because it doesn’t provide the kind of demographic data or other information to help Manna retain and nurture its customers.

Manna doesn’t even get contact information for the buyer. CEO Jeff Hill said he wished that Amazon offered “more insight into the customer, obviously, and sharing emails would be a bare minimum” so Manna could build a community and talk to clients.

“‘Hey, you bought this joint supplement, you know you might also be interested in our new bone supplement,” Hill said, describing a potential follow-up email. “It would help our company out and we would be able to buy more on Amazon and it would be mutually beneficial for us to make it to the customer and drive more traffic back to Amazon and the products.”

Amazon declined to provide a comment for this story.

Rachel Tipograph, CEO of marketing technology firm MikMak, said there are other unforeseen costs tied to Amazon advertising.

Unlike Meta, which just requires you to login to Facebook’s business manager to start buying ads, advertising on Amazon comes alongside listing products on the platform and a host of other services that brands are often buying, including warehouse space. Premium ad placement is the equivalent of slotting fees in retail stores, where brands pay for shelf visibility.

A Target customer looks at a display of board games while shopping at Target store on December 15, 2022 in San Francisco, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Tipograph expects these costs will “cause the pendulum to swing back” towards brand promotion, and companies will rely more on channels that direct traffic to their own website and give them more control over their expenses.

“What CFOs want is profitable advertising, profitable growth,” Tipograph said, “and they want to know that they are driving incremental growth.”

Ryan Flannagan, the CEO of e-commerce marketing firm Nuanced Media, said that as Amazon’s ad business has grown, so has the competition to run “premium copy and visuals.”

Companies that aren’t investing in Amazon ads are “basically losing market share, because they’re not defending themselves,” Flanagan said.

Amazon has plenty of work ahead to keep its ad offerings attractive enough for brands to continue forking over bigger portions of their budget. But for now, companies like Loftie are happy with the returns they’re getting from Amazon, given the challenges with Facebook.

The way Hassett sees it, even with the rising expenses and associated risks, Amazon is providing enough value to justify the headaches.

“I think you have to be there,” he said.

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Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund closes $4.6 billion growth fund

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Peter Thiel's Founders Fund closes .6 billion growth fund

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, holds hundred dollar bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center on April 7, 2022 in Miami, Florida.

Marco Bello | Getty Images

Founders Fund, the venture capital firm run by billionaire Peter Thiel, has closed a $4.6 billion late-stage venture fund, according to a Friday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The fund, Founders Fund Growth III, includes capital from 270 investors, the filing said. Thiel, Napoleon Ta and Trae Stephens are the three people named as directors. A substantial amount of the capital was provided by the firm’s general partners, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Axios reported in December that Founders Fund was raising about $3 billion for the fund. The firm ended up raising more than that amount from outside investors as part of the total $4.6 billion pool, said the person, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.

A Founders Fund spokesperson declined to comment.

Thiel, best known for co-founding PayPal before putting the first outside money in Facebook and for funding defense software vendor Palantir, started Founders Fund in 2005. In addition to Palantir, the firm’s top investments include Airbnb, Stripe, Affirm and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Founders Fund is also a key investor in Anduril, the defense tech company started by Palmer Luckey. CNBC reported in February that Anduril is in talks to raise funding at a $28 billion valuation.

Hefty amounts of private capital are likely to be needed for the foreseeable future as the IPO market remains virtually dormant. It was also dealt a significant blow last week after President Donald Trump’s announcement of widespread tariffs roiled tech stocks. Companies including Klarna, StubHub and Chime delayed their plans to go public as the Nasdaq sank.

President Trump walked back some of the tariffs this week, announcing a 90-day pause for most new tariffs, excluding those imposed on China, while the administration negotiates with other countries. But the uncertainty of where levies will end up is a troubling recipe for risky bets like tech IPOs.

SpaceX, Stripe and Anduril are among the most high-profile venture-backed companies that are still private. Having access to a large pool of growth capital allows Founders Fund to continue investing in follow-on rounds that are off limits to many traditional venture firms.

Thiel was a major Trump supporter during the 2016 campaign, but later had a falling out with the president and was largely on the sidelines in 2024 even as many of his tech peers rallied behind the Republican leader.

In June, Thiel said that even though he wasn’t providing money to the campaign for Trump, who was the Republican presumptive nominee at the time, he’d vote for him over Joe Biden, who had yet to drop out of the race and endorse Kamala Harris.

“If you hold a gun to my head, I’ll vote for Trump,” Thiel said in an interview on stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “I’m not going to give any money to his super PAC.”

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Meta adds former Trump advisor to its board

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Meta adds former Trump advisor to its board

From left, U.S. President Donald Trump, Senator Dave McCormick, his wife Dina Powell McCormick and Elon Musk watch the men’s NCAA wrestling competition at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 22, 2025.

Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images

Meta on Friday announced that it was expanding its board of directors with two new members, including Dina Powell McCormick, a part of President Donald Trump’s first administration.

Powell McCormick served as a deputy national security advisor to Trump from 2017 to 2018. She is also married to Sen. Dave McCormick, a Republican from Pennsylvania who took office in January.

“He’s a good man,” Trump said of McCormick in an endorsement last year, according to the Associated Press. Powell McCormick and her husband were photographed in March beside Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a current advisor to the president, at a wrestling championship match in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Additionally, Powell McCormick was assistant Secretary of State under Condoleezza Rice in President George W. Bush’s administration.

Besides her political background, Powell McCormick is vice chair, president and head of global client services at BDT & MSD Partners. That company was founded in 2023 when the merchant bank BDT combined with Michael Dell’s investment firm MSD. Powell McCormick arrived at the firm after 16 years at Goldman Sachs, where she had been a partner.

Her appointment represents another sign of Meta’s alignment with Republicans following Trump’s return to the White House.

In January, the company announced a shift away from fact-checking and said it was bringing Trump’s friend Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, onto the board. The changes follow Trump dubbing the company behind Facebook and Instagram “the enemy of the people” on CNBC last year.

Also on Friday, Meta said Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of payments startup Stripe, was also elected to the board. Stripe was valued at $65 billion in a tender offer last year.

“Patrick and Dina bring a lot of experience supporting businesses and entrepreneurs to our board,” Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Zuckerberg visited the White House last week, after attending Trump’s inauguration in Washington in January. Politico last week reported that the Meto CEO paid $23 million in cash for a mansion in the nation’s capital.

Powell McCormick and Collison officially become directors on April 15, Meta said.

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UnitedHealth is making struggling doctors repay loans issued after last year’s cyberattack

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UnitedHealth is making struggling doctors repay loans issued after last year's cyberattack

UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty testifies before the Senate Finance Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 1, 2024.

Kent Nishimura | Getty Images

Following the massive cyberattack on UnitedHealth Group’s Change Healthcare unit last year, the company launched a temporary funding assistance program to help medical practices with their short-term cash flow needs, offering no-interest loans with no added fees.

A little over a year later, UnitedHealth is aggressively going after borrowers, demanding they “immediately repay” their outstanding balances, according to documents viewed by CNBC and providers who received funding. Some groups have been asked to repay hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of days. 

Optum, UnitedHealth’s financial, pharmacy and care services arm, is telling borrowers that it reserves the right to “begin offsetting claims payable” to the practices, meaning the company will withhold separate funds until it recoups the loan.

It’s a significant change in posture for the company, which suffered a cyberattack in February 2024 that compromised data from around 190 million Americans, the largest reported health-care breach in U.S. history. The ensuing disruption caused severe fallout across the health-care system, leaving many providers temporarily unable to get paid for their services. Some dipped into their personal savings to keep their practices afloat.

During a Senate hearing about the attack in May, UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty said providers would only be required to repay the loans when “they, not me, but they confirm that their cash flow is normalized.”

Several doctors who took advantage of the financing told CNBC that they can’t meet the company’s new demands. Dr. Christine Meyer, an internist who started a practice in Exton, Pennsylvania, received a letter from Optum earlier this month telling her to immediately submit her organization’s payment. 

“We are not in any position to start repaying this loan,” Meyer, who started her practice about 20 years ago, told CNBC. She has been a vocal critic of UnitedHealth following the breach.

“I’m just looking at all my legal options at this point,” Meyer said. “But repaying them $750,000 in five days is obviously not going to happen.”

UnitedHealth tumbles on report the DOJ is investigating Medicare billing practices

UnitedHealth didn’t comment on specific cases, but a spokesperson for Change Healthcare confirmed that the company has started recouping the loans.

“Now, more than one year post the event and with services restored, we have begun the process of recouping the interest-free funding we provided to providers,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

The company said the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services took the same approach last year “under its own cyber-attack lending program.” HHS launched a separate funding assistance program through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services last March. CMS said it would automatically recoup payments from Medicare claims, and providers could accrue interest, according to a release.

We continue to work with providers on repayment and other options, and continue to reach out to those providers that have not been responsive to previous calls or email requests for more information,” the Change Healthcare spokesperson said.

Providers were told that UnitedHealth reserved the right to withhold future payments when they signed up for the funding assistance program, the company added. CNBC independently reviewed a copy of a loan agreement for the program and confirmed this statement.

Change Healthcare, which offers payment and revenue cycle management tools, was acquired by Optum in 2022.

After discovering the breach last year, UnitedHealth said it isolated and disconnected the impacted systems. The company paid out more than $9 billion to providers in 2024, and more than $4.5 billion has already been repaid, according to the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report in January. UnitedHealth said providers would receive an invoice once standard payment operations resumed, and that they would be subject to a repayment period of 45 business days. 

“Change Healthcare will notify the recipient that the funding amount is due after claims processing or payment processing services have resumed and payments impacted during the service disruption period are processed,” the website says. 

Dwindling deposits, lost revenue

While the vast majority of Change Healthcare’s services have been restored over the course of the last year, three products are still listed as “partial service available,” according to UnitedHealth’s cyberattack response website.

And doctors are still reeling. 

Meyer said that when the breach took place, she watched her practice’s daily deposits shrivel from the range of $60,000 to $80,000 to about $150 “overnight.” She applied for Optum’s temporary funding assistance program, and after some difficulty and back and forth with the company, she ultimately received a total of $756,900 in financial assistance.

Former Senator Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., shared Meyer’s story during the congressional hearing in May. He asked Witty about the company’s approach to the repayment process. 

“I’d like to absolutely confirm to you and Dr. Meyer that we have no intention of asking for loan repayment until after she determines that her business is back to normal,” Witty told lawmakers. “Even then, we would not look for repayment until 45 business days – 60 calendar days – after that and there would be no interest and no fee associated with that loan.”

“So it would be a determination she makes?” Casey asked.

“That’s absolutely right,” Witty said. 

Meyer said that’s not what happened. 

UnitedHealth Group Inc. headquarters stands in Minnetonka, Minnesota, U.S.

Mike Bradley | Bloomberg | Getty Images

She received a notice from Optum on Jan. 24, which was viewed by CNBC, that requested repayment since “the service disruption has ended for most clients.” Meyer said she called and told the company she was “not in any position to pay.” 

Meyer claims that her practice lost more than $1 million in revenue due to the Change Healthcare cyberattack. She told CNBC the figure was based on a forensic financial analysis her practice carried out by comparing its charges against payments over recent years. The $1.2 million figure accounts for losses across all its insurers, not just UnitedHealthcare, Meyer said.

On April 1, Meyer received another notice requesting immediate repayment within five business days. The letter was addressed to Meyer. But the name of the practice on the letter, Insight Counseling, as well as the total amount due, $925,200, were incorrect. 

Meyer said she called Optum again and was told the company made a mistake, but that she had five days to repay her actual total of $750,000. At that point, the company would start withholding her UnitedHealthcare payments, which she described as a “shakedown.”

Meyer said her practice typically receives annual claims payments of about $150,000 to $200,000 from UnitedHealthcare.

“I guess I’ll just let them take those payments back for the next three years until they get their money back,” she told CNBC.

In a post on LinkedIn on Thursday, Meyer wrote that she and her team “made a plan to leave the least amount of money in the account set up to receive payments from UnitedHealthcare. If it isn’t there, they can’t get it.”

‘Very frustrating experience’

Dr. Purvi Parikh, an allergist and immunologist with a private practice in New York, shared a similar story.

Parikh’s practice received about $440,000 in funding assistance after the breach. She said she started getting repayment notices late last year, and that Optum was threatening to offset claims payable to the practice.

“We were already hit very hard by the Change Healthcare hack,” Parikh said in an interview. “Now on top of that, they’re asking for all of this money back or they’re going to hold future payments ransom. It’s just been a very frustrating experience dealing with Optum.”

Parikh’s practice requested a one-month extension on its final payment of $101,650 in January to try and keep UnitedHealth from withholding other payments. In the email request, Parikh’s colleague wrote that “it has been quite difficult to recover financially.”

Optum granted Parikh’s practice the extension.

“People don’t just have that amount of money just sitting around,” Parikh said. “We’ve paid everything back, but it wasn’t without hardship.” 

A physician who runs a pediatric practice in New Jersey said UnitedHealth has already started withholding payments from the organization. The practice received more than $500,000 in funding assistance following the Change Healthcare breach. 

The doctor, who asked not to be named due to the sensitive nature of the situation, said the practice began receiving phone calls and emails from Optum requesting repayment beginning late last year. The group indicated that it didn’t have the money, but would set up a payment plan and had begun the process.

But the doctor said its billing department noticed that UnitedHealth had already started holding back claims payments. In its explanation of benefits, which details what an insurer will cover, the doctor said the company has a line that reads, “UnitedHealthcare is withholding payment for Optum.”

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