Right here’s in the present day’s AdExchanger.com information round-up… Need it by electronic mail? Enroll right here.

The LUMA Escape

LUMA Companions – the funding financial institution of advert tech, primarily – is having a significant fracture. 

Brian Andersen, a co-founder and accomplice, together with companions Mark Greenbaum and Dick Filippini, are all exiting over a disagreement with co-founder and CEO Terry Kawaja, Insider reviews. LUMA will purchase them out of their present shares. 

The corporate is at an inflection – or not less than a mirrored image – level. Insider notes that LUMA closed 17 transactions in 2021, however haven’t introduced one deal this 12 months. 

LUMA’s three breakaway companions additionally needed a bigger share of fairness and commissions on gross sales. 

Kawaja is a vaudeville performer as CEO, identified for satirical comedy movies and edgy takes.

“What I need to stress is this isn’t an unsightly divorce or something like that. We’ve got spent 13 years rising an excellent franchise that was massively profitable for all of us,” Andersen tells Insider. 

You Can By no means Go Homepage Once more

You may say that if Web2 was the platform-ification of the web and Web3 is the decentralized blockchain no matter, then publishers had a homepage technique within the Web1 days. 

Folks got here on to the location, and as soon as there, the writer had nice management over the expertise and website loyalty. 

On the one hand, think about the web-great Homestar Runner, which had a homepage coated in loopy animated options and Easter eggs. 

Then there was the cynical enterprise benefit, and Drudge Report is definitely the prime case research for that. 

Drudge Report, a conservative information aggregation service, satisfied a lot of folks to make its website their browser homepage or pushed them to go to organically reasonably than through a search engine or social web. 

Then the homepage was swallowed by search and social. 

These days, the “interface” the place publishers domesticate their viewers is the e-mail inbox. Perhaps the subsequent up is a ChatGPT plugin.

The homepage alternative gained’t come once more, writes Brian Morrissey at The Rebooting.

“Efforts to construct consideration metrics as proxies for loyalty largely foundered,” he says. “The nostalgia for homepage methods is like all nostalgia: unrealistic.”

The New Advert Tech Tax

When entrepreneurs assume “advert tech tax,” it’s vendor take charges. However there might be precise state advert tech taxes.

Maryland is the primary US state to suggest an internet advert tax. Its Digital Promoting Companies Tax would accumulate between 2.5% and 10% of gross income above $100 million earned from digital advertisements served inside the state by corporations that make not less than $1 billion yearly. 

The thought is to focus on the largest corporations, like Meta, Google and Amazon, with out damaging small enterprise advertisers or publishers. 

The tax was handed by Maryland’s state legislature in 2021, however vetoed by then-governor Larry Hogan. The legislature overrode Hogan’s veto, however the tax was struck down by a Maryland circuit courtroom in 2022.

The state legislature is in search of to overturn that call within the Maryland Supreme Courtroom, which started listening to arguments on Friday, Bloomberg reviews. If Maryland’s on-line advert tax is permitted by the courtroom, and if it survives challenges on the federal degree, it may set a precedent for different states.

However Wait, There’s Extra!

Vevo pitches itself as a FAST powerhouse. [Adweek]

Seven explanation why media is a no-good, horrible, rotten enterprise that I like anyway. [Napkin Math]

Regardless of businesses’ investments in information tech, advertiser expectations nonetheless fall brief. [Digiday]

Warner Bros. Discovery reported a shock revenue in streaming TV. [Ad Age]