"Starting around 2019, The Chernin Group, a private equity fund with stakes in Substack, smart-ring maker Oura and personalized video marketplace Cameo, bet big that niche publishers could earn more with a content-to-commerce business model. Which is to say, turning editorial businesses into direct shopping channels, often by adding a marketplace to a publishing business, although the same idea could also work in reverse by tacking editorial operations onto an ecommerce site."
"Chernin acted on this hypothesis by acquiring media companies and investing tens of millions of dollars into their operations. There was Hodinkee (fancy watches), Food52 (recipes and cookware), The Pro's Closet (preowned bikes) and Epic Gardening (which covers gardening, of course). To be fair, Chernin was a victim of crazy macro-effects. Shortly after beginning its multiyear media acquisition spree, quarantine hit, and ecommerce sales skyrocketed. Marketplaces for luxury used bikes and home cooking supplies were massive beneficiaries, encouraging further investment."
"Throughout most of this year, Salesforce has been hyping its Agentforce solution as helping businesses create agentic tools that automate multistep processes and reduce reliance on human employees. Agentforce's automation has been increasingly using old-school "if, then" computer programming, rather than newfangled AI "reasoning." And Salesforce's website now says Agentforce can help "eliminate the inherent randomness" associated with generative AI."
December 24 will be the last Daily News Roundup of 2025; publication resumes January 5, 2026, ahead of CES. Starting around 2019, The Chernin Group invested in converting niche editorial brands into commerce channels by acquiring media companies and funding marketplace integrations. Investments included Hodinkee, Food52, The Pro's Closet and Epic Gardening. The pandemic and a surge in ecommerce amplified demand for marketplaces, particularly for luxury used bikes and home cooking supplies. Salesforce positioned Agentforce as an agentic automation solution but has leaned on deterministic "if, then" programming to reduce generative AI randomness and to provide more hands-on customer support.
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