Street Fight Daily: AirBnB Raises $1 Billion in Series F, Facebook Tests New Measurement Tool

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

AirBnB Just Raised a Massive $1 Billion Round that Values It at $31 Billion (Business Insider)
The Series F round was oversubscribed, a source said. According to that source, Airbnb has “no plans to go public anytime soon,” but was profitable in the second half of 2016. The startup expects to continue to be profitable in 2017.

5 Platforms Connecting Local Customers to Their Online Footprints (Street Fight)
More than half of marketers expect cross-channel measurement and attribution to occupy most of their time, attention, and resources in the coming year. Many of these marketers will be exploring new technologies that close the loop on attribution and unlock the hidden connections between web viewing sessions and in-store purchases around the globe.

Facebook to Release Advanced Measurement Tool (MediaPost)
Advertisers will have the ability to use Advanced Measurement to determine the media and the platforms such as Google search and display or Facebook and Instagram that achieved the highest reach with their targeted audience or drove the most purchases in their online store. VentureBeat: Regulate Facebook and Google, British News Industry Demands

Raise Report: New Funding for Instacart, Kabbage, Drizly (Street Fight)
Every two weeks, we round up some of the biggest fundraises taking place in hyperlocal marketing, commerce, and tech. This week’s edition includes funding for Goldbely, Peerspace, Workfit, and Cordial.

Brands Cool on Chatbots (Digiday)
What goes up must come down. Just this week, Facebook said it was “refocusing” its use of AI after its bots hit a failure rate of 70 percent, meaning bots could only get to 30 percent of requests without some sort of human intervention.

Lingerie Brand Cosabella Replaced Its Agency with Artificial Intelligence (AdExchanger)
After years of double-digit growth, global lingerie brand Cosabella suddenly lost momentum in 2016 and cut ties with its agency. Cosabella had three options: hire another agency, hire more in-house marketers, or adopt an artificial intelligence platform that can handle marketing and media buying autonomously.

Millenials Buy Clothes on Amazon More Than Any Other Online Retailer (Recode)
Amazon registered the most apparel sales in 2016 of any online retailer in the U.S. for shoppers aged 18 to 34 — yes, millennials. The e-commerce giant accounted for nearly 17 percent of all online clothing sales to this demographic last year, more than doubling the market share of the No. 2 seller, Nordstrom.

Google Updates Drive with a Focus on its Business Users (TechCrunch)
Google on Thursday announced a number of major updates to Drive, its online file storage service, which all aim to make it more useful for the company’s business and enterprise users.

Instacart’s Huge New Funding Round Means Uber-for-X Isn’t Dead Yet (Quartz)
Alison Griswold: Uber-for-X isn’t dead yet. A startup in Los Angeles raised $10 million earlier this year to deliver rental cars to people. A new venture from a graduate student at Stanford is supplying “emergency” items like tissues and deodorant on college campuses. And on-demand groceries company Instacart just closed $400 million in Series D funding.

Uber’s Travis Kalanick Doesn’t Need a New Coo. He Needs a New CEO (Wired)
Davey Alba: Uber doesn’t suffer from an operations problem. To the contrary. The company excels at operations. Uber suffers from an image problem coupled with a culture problem. And that, as they say, starts at the top. To truly fix its problems, Uber shouldn’t hire a new COO. It should hire a new CEO.

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