This Week in M&A Issue #233
April 20, 2026
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Today’s trend of the week is “soccer”. ⚽
Move over baseball, soccer is now the third most popular sport in the U.S.
According to The Economist, 10% of Americans now say soccer is their favorite sport, making it the third most popular in the country behind American football and basketball.
A major driver of this growth is Major League Soccer, which has scaled rapidly from 10 teams in 1993 to 30 clubs across the U.S. and Canada.
Now, soccer mania is about to hit fever pitch. The 2026 FIFA World Cup begins on June 11 and will be hosted across venues in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. It is expected to be one of the largest sporting events in history, with around 6 billion viewers worldwide and roughly 6.5 million fans attending in person.
This whirlwind of attention creates a massive opportunity for businesses. Ecommerce brands can tap into demand with fan gear, themed merchandise, and country-specific products. Newsletter operators can build daily World Cup updates or player insights. App developers can launch match trackers, prediction games, or fan communities. Content creators can publish match previews, player breakdowns, and beginner guides for new fans entering the sport.
Soccer is kicking into a new gear, and businesses that move early have a chance to score while attention is still building.
Today we have for you:
- Amazon sellers stage boycott over rising fees
- OpenAI launches self-serve ads manager for ChatGPT
And:
- Google has banned back button hijacking
- Why major news sites are blocking the Wayback Machine
- Google ‘Skills’ turns Gemini Prompts into reusable workflows
Alright, let’s dive in.
Amazon
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Image Source: Giphy
Hundreds of Top Amazon Sellers Boycotted Ads for 24 Hours
Amazon is facing a new kind of pushback from its own sellers. On April 15, hundreds of high-revenue third-party sellers coordinated a 24-hour boycott of Amazon’s advertising platform to protest a series of recent policy changes that they say are putting pressure on cash flow and long-term business value.
The boycott was organized by Million Dollar Sellers, a private community of entrepreneurs generating significant revenue on the platform.
At the center of the issue are three changes. First, Amazon shifted payout timing so sellers now receive funds seven days after delivery instead of after shipment. For many sellers, that extends the cash conversion cycle by up to two weeks.
Second, Amazon began deducting ad spend directly from seller proceeds rather than allowing payment by credit card. Sellers say this removes access to credit and eliminates rewards they relied on.
Third, a new 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge adds another layer of cost on top of already rising fulfillment fees.
Each change on its own may be manageable. Together, sellers say they reduce liquidity at a time when advertising has become essential for visibility. Many report ad spend now accounts for 15% to 30% of revenue, making profitability more sensitive to small fee increases.
Amazon says the changes apply only to a subset of sellers and are consistent with broader industry practices. It also points to rising logistics costs as justification for the surcharge and has already delayed one advertising payment change after feedback.
The boycott itself is short-term, and Amazon’s scale makes sustained disruption unlikely. Still, tension is growing as sellers feel platform costs are rising faster than the value they receive.
OpenAI
OpenAI Lowers Ad Spend Barrier as ChatGPT Ads Expand
OpenAI is starting to open up its advertising business.
The company has launched a self-serve ads manager for ChatGPT, now available to a small group of advertisers in its pilot program. At the same time, it has lowered the minimum spend from as high as $200,000, down to $50,000. The pilot has already crossed $100 million in annualized revenue.
Until now, running ads in ChatGPT was not very flexible. Advertisers had to work through OpenAI directly or rely on agencies, with limited visibility into performance. The new dashboard changes that. Approved advertisers can now track impressions and clicks in real time and adjust campaigns on their own.
The interface will feel familiar to anyone who has used Google Ads. Campaigns are structured into Campaigns, Ad Groups, and Ads. Current ad formats are simple, with a headline, short description, and an optional square image. Video and other formats are not available yet.
Targeting is still basic. Advertisers use “context hints” to define when ads appear, with country-level geography as the only additional option.
There are three campaign objectives listed: reach, clicks, and conversions. For now, only reach is live and priced on a CPM basis at $60. Features like click optimization, conversion tracking, and daily budgets are expected to roll out later.
The pilot began on February 9 in the United States and has since expanded to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Google Adds “Back Button Hijacking” to Its List of Malicious SEO Practices
Ever hit the browser back button and ended up somewhere you never chose? Google is moving to penalize that behavior in search.
On April 13, Google’s Search Quality team announced an update to its spam policies that explicitly bans “back button hijacking.” Enforcement begins June 15, giving site owners about two months to remove the behavior before it can affect rankings.
Google defines back button hijacking as interfering with browser navigation by manipulating history or other functions so users can’t immediately return to the page they came from. In practice, users may be redirected to pages they never visited, shown unsolicited recommendations or ads, or blocked from going back. Google says the issue creates a mismatch between user expectations and outcomes, leaving people feeling manipulated and less willing to visit unfamiliar sites.
The tactic is now listed under Google’s “malicious practices” spam category, alongside issues like malware and unwanted software. Google says it can take action through manual spam actions or automated demotions. Manual actions are visible in Google Search Console and can be addressed via a reconsideration request after fixes. Automated demotions are applied by algorithmic systems and lift over time as compliance is re-evaluated.
The change also has advertising implications. Google previously linked manual search penalties to Google Ads eligibility in December 2024, so a manual action tied to back button hijacking could also restrict advertising.
Google noted that violations may come from third-party libraries or advertising platforms, placing responsibility on site owners to audit and remove or disable offending code, including scripts that manipulate the browser’s history stack.
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AI
The Wayback Machine Is Losing Access to Major News Sites Over AI Concerns
Big news organizations are starting to block the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine is one of the internet’s most important public archives. It saves snapshots of web pages over time, letting anyone see how stories, data, or pages looked in the past. It is widely used by journalists, researchers, and lawyers when original pages are changed or deleted.
Now, that access is being restricted.
At least 23 major news organizations, including outlets like USA Today and The New York Times, have started blocking the Wayback Machine from saving their pages. In total, hundreds of sites have added similar restrictions.
The main reason is not the archive itself. Publishers are worried that AI companies might scrape archived pages at scale and use them to train models. In their view, that could bypass licensing deals and copyright rules, since the content would still be publicly accessible in archived form.
This has created a three-way tension:
- Keeping a public record of what was published online
- Protecting media business models
- Controlling how content gets used in AI training
The Internet Archive says it already has protections in place to stop large-scale scraping and abuse. It also argues that blocking access weakens accountability. If articles change after publication, the archive is often the only way to see what was originally said.
Not all journalists are on board with the restrictions. More than 100 media professionals have signed a letter supporting continued access, saying that blocking archives makes it harder to track changes, corrections, and edits over time.
One side wants a permanent, searchable record of what gets published. The other is trying to limit how that information can be reused in the age of AI.
Which side are you on? Should the internet stay fully archivable, or should parts of it stop being recorded to protect licensing deals and copyright rules?
Chrome’s New Gemini Skills Let You Save and Reuse AI Workflows
Google is turning one of the biggest pain points with AI into something more practical. Instead of rewriting the same prompt over and over, Chrome’s “Skills” for Gemini now lets you save it and reuse it as a workflow.
After you run a prompt in Gemini’s Chrome side panel, you can save it as a Skill from your chat history. When you need it again, you can trigger it by typing a forward slash or clicking the plus sign, selecting the Skill, and running it on the page you’re viewing.
Google is also launching a library of prebuilt Skills aimed at common tasks. Examples include breaking down product ingredients, comparing specs across tabs, and cross-referencing a gift budget with a recipient’s interests. Users can add these to their own collection and edit the underlying prompt to customize the workflow.
An exciting feature is that Skills can run across multiple open tabs. Users can select additional tabs when running a Skill, allowing one saved prompt to pull information from several pages at once.
For SEO and marketing teams, the multi-tab approach could support repeatable checks such as comparing competitor pages, extracting structured data from product pages, or reviewing title tags, meta descriptions, and headings across sites.
In practice, this moves AI from a one-off interaction to something closer to lightweight automation. A saved prompt can read a page, compare it with others, and output a formatted result without starting from scratch each time.
Skills rolled out on April 14 on desktop Chrome with English (US) settings and syncs across devices when users are signed in.
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