Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Gawker Overtaking Offline’s Online News
Except for one newspaper’s website, Gawker has a larger online readership than any offline newspaper with an online presence. Gawker Media‘s Nick Denton is quoted on The Awl about the momentum: “The network as a whole drew 17.8m domestic visitors for the month (July 2010). Let’s put that in context. How do we stack up, against the established names in online news. Last time we measured ourselves against the traditional newspapers’ online operations, we were fourth. But we’ve overtaken both the Washington Post and USA Today, according to Comscore. And, in this category, we’re behind only the New York Times.” Read more.
WSJ’s McLeod Resigns
PaidContent’s Staci Kramer has confirmed that Gordon McLeod is stepping down as the president of the Wall Street Journal Digital effective October 1. McLeod told PaidContent, “While I’m extremely proud of the growth in our digital business over that time, I’m now looking forward to exploring new opportunities.” Will it be a publisher-focused startup? Has the entrepreneurial bug bitten YET AGAIN?! Only McLeod knows. Read more.
Display Ads Getting Bigger
Undertone announced its new PageGrabber ad format as the company echoes efforts by the OPA to offer marketers biggers units with better performance. Undertone says in a release that “interaction rates are 88 percent higher and average interaction time is 83 percent higher than the industry standard. Average expanding time is 4X that of the industry standard based on campaign performance benchmarks from DoubleClick.” Read the release.
What They Know About Privacy Software
The Wall Street Journal continues its “What They Know” series as reporter Cari Tuna finds that in spite of solutions available to consumers which help them manage their privacy and delete cookies among other tasks, consumers aren’t that interested in adding the software. Tuna says its because of the cost involved. She also quotes Gartner analyst Carsten Casper who says, “‘People call for privacy, but they don’t act accordingly’ because downloading software and tweaking privacy settings is inconvenient.” Read more.
Visually Partnering
Lucid Media has partnered with visual ad targeting technology company Milabra according to a release. LucidMedia is not alone among demand-side platforms in its use of Milabra data. In its boilerplate, Milabra also echoes the ad vertification crowd in that its tech “understands the pages visual content environment before an ad is served, making safer, better controlled media environments (…)” Read more.
InterClick Refreshes Brand
InterClick has unleashed new branding and InterClick prez Michael Katz says in a release, “Since our goal is to connect marketers with their most ideal digital audiences at scale, our new brand identity highlights the complexity of the data that interclick deciphers in order to do so effectively.” In addition to a new website design, logo and messaging, the company plans a cross-media campaign through the end of the year. Read the release.
Google Display Future
Citibank analyst Mark Mahaney offered investors his take on Google’s presentation by Google’s Director of Product Management, Nick Fox, at this week’s Citi Technology conference. Display was front-and-center. Mahaney writes,: “Google’s Display Opportunity Appears To Be Substantial – Google sees an opportunity in reducing the friction from the buying and selling of display advertising, and estimates that per $1.00 spent on Display Ads, $0.28 is lost in the friction (faxing orders, etc.). Google’s goal is to help reduce the friction by automating as much of the process as possible, layering in performance, and leveraging its exchange for greater transparency. The company noted that display revenue has come from incremental budgets, and GOOG’s been successful in cross selling search and display to new and existing clients. We are increasingly confident that Display Advertising (including YouTube + Display Ad Network) will exit 2010 at a $1B net revenue run rate.”
The Age Of The Cookie
Dapper provides research gleaned from the use of its technology and services in a presentation called, “How Bidding Based on Cookie Age Drives Efficiency.” Among the insights are tips on best practices for retargeting: “The best retargeting strategy, especially with dynamic retargeting that shows a specific product personalized to each user, is to bid on a curve that reflects the effect of cookie age on consumers’ propensity to convert. Days when conversions are high should get a corresponding high bid while low converting days should get a lower bid, following a curve specific to each advertiser or campaign.” Read more.
YieldEx Presents
Yieldex announced that it will be producing a full-day event on September 29 at the Harvard Club in NYC. Agenda topics will address the challenges that large publishers are seeing every day as they look to maximize revenues across their properties. Panelists and presenters include Jason Kelly of Time Inc. Digital, Tim Messier of TWC Media Solutions, Peter Naylor, SVP Digital Media Sales, NBC Universal and Dan Reiners of The Wall Street Journal. See the agenda and request an invite.
The Bidding Battle For Bedbugs
An article on the battle over search ads related to bedbugs is featured in The New York Times. Here’s where the significantly larger bucket of top-of-funnel, biddable display impressions could be of help to the search marketer who must deal with the gated scale of search. Bill Carlson, who runs a site targeting bedbug B2C business, tells the NY Times, “Our costs have gone up to acquire the customers over the past few weeks with all this (bedbug) hysteria.’ Mr. Carlson says he spends 80 cents to a dollar for every click on one of his ads, regardless of whether a customer buys his product, and about $100,000 to $150,000 a month on search advertising on Google.” Read more.
ADTECH Goes Global With Video
Aol’s ad serving solution, ADTECH, announced the “global launch” of video ad serving solution.” Of note from the press release – Tremor Media is a customer: “Each month, ADTECH serves more than two billion video ads and current customer Tremor Media was cited by ComScore as the top video ad network with a potential reach of 102.8 million viewers.” Read more.
