Weather Moves To The Exchange; Search Update

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Weather Moves To The Exchange

IPONWEB and The Weather Company say they are partnering on a weather-based advertising platform. The release states that this isn’t just about targeting through Weather Channel owned-and-operated websites: “Weather can now leverage this targeting for extension campaigns purchased on a real-time buying basis across multiple exchanges and supply sources beyond Weather’s own properties. Weather will also utilize IPONWEB’s recently launched BidSwitch to access this inventory.” Read more.

Search (Retargeting) Update

Google has updated the “guts” of its search engine, as The New York Times’ Nick Bilton reports. Users can use more complex queries to get answers — rather than the old way of keyword matching. Bilton adds, “Yet Google revealed few details about how the new search algorithm works or what it changed. And it said it made the change a month ago, though consumers may not have noticed a significant difference to search results during that time.” Changes were evidently implemented a month ago. Read more. And, read the Google Inside Search blog. It will be interesting to see how this plays out for Google search retargeting across digital channels when Google eventually, inevitably, unveils the tactic. It would seem targetable “audience” becomes more nuanced.

Amazon Disrupting CPG

A new report from Sanford C. Bernstein shows that ecommerce is shaking up the CPG industry by making pricing and demand more unpredictable for brands. As Ad Age points out, the brands who are popular on sites like Amazon are different from those that dominate physical stores. From the report: “Given that lower prices, specialized niche selections and delivery convenience seem to be the key drivers for consumers to purchase online, the outcomes for large incumbents may not be entirely positive.” Read more.

Going Direct

While image-sharing site Imgur has not taken a single dollar of investor money, it’s profitable and its traffic numbers put it in the top 30 websites. The company also has no long-term business development plans and relies solely on an ad network and subscriptions for revenue, finds VentureBeat. The company’s founder and CEO Alan Schaaf tells VentureBeat that eventually the company would like to handle its own advertising and work directly with brands to strategically place ads on the site. Read more.

Organic Search vs. Paid Search

A study from Kenshoo and Resolution Media analyzes paid and organic search marketing to uncover the effectiveness of each. Findings include: Consumers still click on paid ads even when organic ads are in the first spot and organic search drives higher brand-term metrics. Download the report.

News Publisher Ad Growth

FT.com reports that publisher MailOnline’s ad revenues have grown 45% this year as its newspaper parent struggles on the print side. FT.com’s Robert Brudden offers a few reasons, including: “Earlier this year MailOnline began rolling out an affiliate marketing initiative that links editorial content on its site to online vendors in a pioneering trial that could be mirrored by other online publishers. Last month, unique monthly browsers to MailOnline hit a record 138m, a 30 per cent increase on the same period last year.” Read more (subscription).

Paywall Future

USA Today doesn’t have plans for a paywall, although president and publisher Larry Kramer told Poynter they’re studying it. The company is also raising the price of its daily paper from $1 to $2, which will also lead to the removal of some of its white boxes. Also, The Nation is planning to implement a paywall, according to Folio. Read more.

But Wait, There’s More!