paid-ads

Pop-art collage of an iPhone with a removed Freecash app icon, a TechCrunch email envelope, and a falling No. 2 App Store chart ranking.

Apple Pulled the No. 2 US App After One TechCrunch Inquiry

Apple removed Freecash, the rewards app that hit No. 2 on the US App Store, on April 13, 2026, after TechCrunch sent the company a press inquiry. Google Play followed two days later. The app had ranked publicly for over six months while collecting race, religion, sexual orientation, health, and

Pop-art split panel: long calendar marked 11 YEARS on the left, short calendar marked 37 MONTHS on the right, Google Ads dashboard and BigQuery arrow between

Google Ads Cut Granular Data to 37 Months (17 Months After Promising 11 Years)

Google Ads will cut granular reporting retention from 11 years to 37 months on June 1, 2026, roughly 17 months after announcing the longer window. Daily, hourly, and weekly data older than 37 months will be unreachable through the Google Ads API and scripts; queries that ignore the cap return

Pop-art illustration of a stalled Roku direct-sales rate card overrun by climbing 40% growth chart and DV360, Trade Desk, and Amazon DSP demand bidding for the same CTV inventory.

Roku's DSP Spend Grew 40% YoY. The IO Premium Just Got Negotiable.

Roku reported $613M in Q1 2026 advertising revenue on April 30, with ad spend through third-party DSPs jumping more than 40% year-over-year. Programmatic now drives the majority of Roku video ad delivery, including expanded integrations with DV360, The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, Yahoo, and FreeWheel. CTV buyers can match Roku&

Pop-art illustration of a Walmart shopping cart pushed across a TV remote with VIZIO and Paramount logos as channels and a blank price tag where the CTV spend floor should be

Walmart Connect Select Opens Self-Serve CTV and Leaves the Spend Floor Blank

Walmart Connect launched Connect Select on April 27, 2026, a curated CTV marketplace inside Walmart DSP that lets advertisers activate VIZIO, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery inventory through self-serve Inventory Controls and a Deal Desk. The previous Walmart DSP minimums sat at roughly $1,000 per month for self-serve and

Microsoft Advertising publisher URL report dashboard with conversion and spend columns lit up next to a muted Google Performance Max placeholder, pop-art editorial style

Microsoft Ads Tied PMax Conversions to Each Publisher URL Google Still Hides

Microsoft Advertising added conversion and spend metrics to its Performance Max Website Publisher URL report in late April 2026, exposing spend tied to specific publisher domains for the first time. Google Performance Max only added Search Partner placement visibility in February 2026, and its channel-level data remains read-only. The practical

Pop art style calendar page with June 10 marked in bold red, a Google Ads API v20 version label, and faded CRT bid manager dashboards behind it

Google Ads API v20 Sunsets June 10 and Your Bid Manager Probably Hasn't Migrated

Google Ads API v20 sunsets on June 10, 2026, after which every request hitting that version returns a hard failure. That gives agencies roughly 40 days to identify which third-party bid managers, ad servers, attribution platforms, and reporting scripts still call v20, and to confirm vendor migrations to v21 or

Google Ads Budget Allocation: A Spreadsheet You Can Steal (and the 70/20/10 Reason It Works)

Google Ads budget allocation in 2026 looks roughly like 70% to Performance Max, 20% to brand search, 10% to standard testing campaigns, with a daily cap set at 10x to 20x target CPA. The reason that split holds is not the percentages. It is that PMax controls the channel mix