纽约时报洽谈收购影评社区 Letterboxd，Fox 完成 220 亿美元收购 Roku

Monday, November 9th, 2026 – 12:03 am

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A Box Of Tricks

The New York Times is in exclusive talks to acquire Letterboxd, the film fan and review site, valuing the publisher at about $330 million. That’s per a recent report from The New York Times, although rumors have swirled all year of a Letterboxd acquisition.

The deal would put Letterboxd’s advertising under the NYT, which should improve its earnings. Letterboxd is reportedly on pace to earn only $15 million this year. It’s not a huge business, but the Times has deliberately pushed into new verticals, often through acquisition: product reviews (Wirecutter), cooking, games (Wordle) and sports (The Athletic). 

Letterboxd has a paid subscription tier, too, so the acquisition would be a quick shot in the arm of new subscribers, as the NYT notes.

But one thing that’s often missed in Letterboxd deal discussions – in particular, why it’s sought a high valuation (20x annual earnings) at an absolute nadir for web publisher earnings – is its AI data licensing value. 

Letterboxd is an authenticated forum with a massive library of unique human writing that is rich with banter, recommendations, drama, culture, etc. It is, in other words, a rich repository for LLMs. 

The New York Times will be more effective at monetizing that asset as well. 

A Roku Coup

Surprise! Fox Corporation announced the completion of its $22 billion Roku acquisition on Friday. 

The timing might be unexpected, but the result is not, given that CEO Lachlan Murdoch told investors during last Monday’s earnings call that he expected the deal to close “as soon as possible.” Semafor also reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) was about to clear the deal under a consent decree, even though it had just recently asked for additional information from both companies in September. 

Fox declined to comment to AdExchanger about the deal, but the DOJ’s Antitrust Division released a statement on Friday, saying that the merged company “would suffer monetary and reputational harm if it attempted to use the Roku platform to harm Fox’s content rivals,” and that consumers could easily switch to other connected TV platforms if they were dissatisfied with the product. 

Regardless of what happened behind the scenes, Fox now officially owns the top two most popular free streaming services in the US: The Roku Channel (a FAST service) and Tubi (an AVOD streamer). It also has access to all of Roku’s ad tech capabilities and first-party data, allowing the company to massively scale up its connected TV advertising business. 

In particular, being able to integrate Roku’s household graph with Tubi’s ad sales would be a real benefit to Fox, which is already seeing more success than it expected from the latter business.   

The Surprise Prize

Apple takes the cake with surprise rug-pulling changes. But Google’s no slouch. 

Setting aside the obvious cases of the Privacy Sandbox and third-party cookies in Chrome, Google can still send the whole industry reeling, even by accident with relatively minor updates.

For instance, the past few changes have been tough on open web video inventory. CPMs, fill rates and proxies for demand have dropped since about October 26, as Alan Ronis writes at Medium. The Rube Goldberg cascade of events started on October 1, when DV360 removed brand safety controls and thus some advertisers who relied on its finer-grain controls. On October 22, AdSense began restricting more web video inventory based on the accompanying content. And the big whammy was October 26, when Google retired the video line item for mCPV (maximum cost-per-view) campaigns. 

The deadline was communicated, but publishers and ad tech didn’t upgrade, and many campaigns that had been preset just failed to serve. 

Prebid, by the way, had a similar problem this year because publishers simply couldn’t be made to update their video ad delivery setup when Microsoft reached its deadline for paying to cache all Prebid video ads. 

But Wait! There’s More! 

OpenAI is building a new tool that will show brands how often they’re mentioned in ChatGPT conversations. [post]  

Online publication consortium Valnet agrees to a $2 million settlement in a class action lawsuit alleging the company of misclassifying and exploiting its freelance writers. [TheWrap] 

Meta won’t require business account holders to allow AI training on its linked websites after all. [Ars Technica] 

Instagram’s new push into long-form content hasn’t quite convinced creators to get on board yet. [Digiday]

You’re Hired!

Liam Parker is appointed US CEO of The Ogilvy Group. [release]