Business Insider Spots The Spoofers; Ad Execs Anxious Over Chrome Ad Blocker

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Pulling The Knockoffs

Business Insider’s service-focused programmatic strategy helped it uncover exchanges selling spoofed BI inventory, said programmatic VP Jana Meron at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference Thursday. Last year, a client planned to cut its BI private marketplace deal because it was able to spend $40,000 a day buying BI on the open exchange for a lower price. But BI found only $97 in open marketplace spend from the advertiser, leading to a long investigation. Meron tried to push exchanges, who sometimes ignored her, to pull spoofed inventory from their supply. Meron encouraged other publishers to adopt Ads.txt, which will address domain spoofing in a more automated fashion: “Put up your files, and tell the bad guys to go somewhere else.”

Chrome Horns

Some digital media companies are anxious about Google’s Chrome browser update, which beginning next year will block formats like autoplay video with sound, prestitial ads with countdown timers and full-screen ads users must manually discard. Google lifts its standards from the Coalition for Better Ads (CFBA), an industry coalition created last year to establish online ad standards. However, several ad execs believe “Google is the driving force behind the Coalition, and that it is funding and dictating the effort,” writes Business Insider’s Mike Shields. Others are concerned the CFBA won’t meet regularly or fear its standards won’t keep pace with innovation. Media companies trying an unusual ad format, for instance, couldn’t do so on Chrome if it’s not among the pre-approved formats. Shields has more from the ad tech startup Parsec, which is shuttering one unit due to the looming Chrome update. More.

Compressed Cable Subs

Comcast lost 125,000 video subscribers in Q3, its largest quarterly loss in three years. Although the cable provider had predicted subscriptions would suffer from a heavier-than-average hurricane season, Verizon and AT&T similarly saw compression in their video subscriber numbers as telcos increasingly compete with ad-free subscription video services like Netflix. Amid those subscriber losses, video revenue grew 4.2% to $5.8 billion in Q3. As for Comcast-owned NBCU, advertising revenue decreased 45.6% compared to the same period in 2016, when NBCU aired the Rio Olympics. Broadcast TV revenue was down 30.9% to $2.1 billion, reflecting softer ad revenue. Earnings.

Fake News Fever

Google will partner with Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network to train more employees in fact-checking news. Meanwhile, Twitter says it will ban advertising from RT and Sputnik, Russian news outlets that targeted Twitter ads to US voters last year. Snap has managed to keep above the fake news fray, largely because it uses humans to implement and maintain newsroom-style standards, curates the news sources available in its Discover section and deliberately slow-rolls viral content to keep fake or planted posts from picking up steam. “From the very beginning we’ve felt a responsibility to make sure our community knows where their news and information is coming from,” CSO Imran Khan told Bloomberg. More.

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