Facebook Expands Ad Measurement; Amazon To Sell Ads Against Thursday Night Football

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

Baby Steps

Facebook is exposing some new data for ad measurement. ”For example, it will let marketers track the order in which users see their ads and how many ads were viewed in a campaign,” writes Cory Weinberg at The Information. Then new data points are more like air holes than windows, but Facebook is trying to find ways to juice reporting without exposing proprietary data. Read it (sub required).

Amazon TV
Amazon’s rights to stream NFL Thursday Night Football this year will allow it to experiment with addressable TV, Mike Shields writes for The Wall Street Journal. Amazon will sell two minutes of advertising during every game, to which it can apply its troves of shopper and viewership data to send personalized commercials to logged-in Prime subscribers. “It could be a whole new level of addressability,” said Michael Bologna, president of recently launched advanced TV startup One2One Media. “They’d know I am an NFL fan, that I drink Pepsi and eat Doritos.” Amazon can also drive business back to its own platform and products by, for example, promoting its original programming and prompting users to place orders using its Echo smart home device. More.

New Dog, Old Tricks

Digital media startup Mic landed a $21 million Series C last week, adding Time Warner as a new investor and keeping lead investor Lightspeed Ventures from its Series B. The plan is to boost Mic’s presence on connected TVs, including tech resources and “short-form news and lifestyle features,” according to Variety. The market to be the “Today Show” or “Good Morning America” for a new generation is heating up. The video media startup Cheddar, which picked up $10 million from Comcast and Lightspeed Ventures late last year, sees big money in people who don’t have or care about the morning shows but “will still want something to watch while they get the kids ready for school.”

Shorter Long Tail

YouTube will no longer allow creators to make money off of ads unless their videos hit 10,000 views. That’s a big change to its Partner Program, which launched five years ago to allow anyone posting on YouTube to monetize their videos. In addition to reaching the view threshold, creators will have to apply to the program and be vetted against the platform’s brand safety criteria. “Together these new thresholds will help ensure revenue only flows to creators who are playing by the rules,” writes Ariel Bardin, YouTube’s VP of product management, in a blog post. More at The Verge.

But Wait, There’s More!