Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Looking At Ad Serving
On Friday, content monitor Attributor released its most recent report on ad serving across the web. Among the data points, “Google and DoubleClick overwhelmingly dominate the market. Combined they account for more than 65% of the market share, which, compared to the December 2008 report, is an increase of about 9%. Yahoo’s share has decreased by more than 5%, or half of its previous share from the December 2008 report. AudienceScience is strong on news sites like CNN.com, USAToday.com, WashingtonPost.com, etc. In fact, on these news sites, AudienceScience is ahead of both Google and DoubleClick taken separately.” Read the Attributor blog post. And, download the study (PDF). (source: PaidContent)
More Facebook Privacy Fun
Ethan Beard, director of Facebook’s developer network, talks to Computerworld in regards to Facebook’s privacy policies and the recent rancor surrounding the social network’s privacy/sharing initiatives. Beard says, “There’s been a lot of interest from the media, from organizations and officials. But to be honest, the user response has been overwhelmingly positive.” Read more.
Trick Of The RTB Trade
MediaMath CTO Roland Cozzolino has started a new blog called AdByte and offers to readers his take on “Demystifying Real Time Bidding.” Cozzolino says that the “tricky” parts of RTB include: “You have (give or take) 30 to 120 milliseconds to answer [a real-time bid request]. This is really easy if you always bid $1.00 for the same ad over and over again, but lets be realistic, that sort of spits in the face of RTB.” Read more.
Greg Coleman, CRO of Huffington Post, is looking to double his site’s revenue this year from an estimated $15 million in 2009 according to a Mediaweek feature story by Mike Shields. HuffPo’s CEO Eric Hippeau attributes the company’s success, which includes 22 million uniques in April, to social media’s effect on news. Read more.
MDC Closing In On 50% Digital
“One thousand of our people are digital and 40.5% of our business is digital. We have the most integrated and media-agnostic capabilities — we didn’t buy digital as a bolt-on, we wove it into the fabric of our agencies,” says MDC Partners CEO Miles Nadal in an Ad Age interview with Rupal Parekh. Read more on MDC plans.
Agencies Need To Think DR
Brian Tomasette is looking for “The Next Big Ad Market Compression” on his personal blog, Mobtown Labs. He suggests that brand dollars are going to be folded into DR “mechanisms” and for agencies this will present a huge challenge. Tomasette writes, “I think it’s time for disruption at the big agencies and starting to use some of the tools that we (editor’s note: Tomasette works at AOL) have with ad servers, scoring, data warehouses, and call tracking to connect the brand dollars with the call centers, sales channels, and ecommerce carts.” Read more.
Software Patent Debate
From his blog, Venture capitalist Brad Feld rekindles his ardent opposition to software patents on grounds that they’re “(a) invalid constructs, (b) totally unnecessary, and (c) a massive tax on and retardant of innovation.” Unfortnately, he notes, there is a statistic floating around that 76% of his VC brethren don’t agree. But, this stat may be a fabrication according to VC Jason Mendelson. Jill Hubbard Bowman on the IP Startup Law blog doesn’t entirely agree and takes a middle-of-the-road approach to the debate saying that there are definitely abusers, but patents can help small companies negotiate deals with bigger companies. Ultimately, “Some patents can add tremendous value and some aren’t worth the cost of drafting and filing them.” Read it.
On Innovation And Big Three
Google, Apple and Facebook may be running out of creating their own original business ideas. Or, so says angel investor Jerry Neumann on his Reaction Wheel blog: “Their actions say that they think the time for growth through innovation is past, the time for controlling as much of their market’s profitable opportunities has come.” Read more.
On Data-Driven Media Platforms
Forrester analyst Shar Van Boskirk identifies the launch of Efficient Frontier’s recent display/search platform and says that these and other platforms are just version one of the evolution in data-driven media buying. “I do expect that all of these tools will refine over the next two years. I think they will continue to add data sources, more inventory, additional and easier to use functionality, better metrics, and better reporting. But v.2 will develop only after advertisers begin testing dynamic media buying and can show technology players what additional depth and breadth they need.” Read more.
Why Harvard Kids Go To Wall Street
James Kwak reviews how Wall Street often gets first crack at Harvard grads by identifying and enticing them to enjoy the cush lifestyle of Wall Street as opposed to other areas of endeavor. Kwak sees three selling points: the idea that Wall Street jobs look good on the resume; the firms make it easy to find a job by recruiting early in the collegiate life cycle; and then there’s the money. Read more.
Outages Are Inevitable
The Pontiflex blog takes note of the rollercoaster ride of the stock market last Thursday around 2:45 p.m. and being ready for human-caused outages in business. In order to prepare for these outages, the writer suggests a few ideas: “Recognize that [outages] will happen. Emphasize recovery from failures rather than failure-avoidance…” Read the rest here.
Location-Based Mickey D’s
Facebook is about to target the Geo-audience as Foursquare-like location-based updates are coming to a Facebook profile near you according to Ad Age. What’s more, McDonalds will be a launch partner and local McDonald’s “check-ins” will yield product messaging and a customized app. Ad Age says McDonald’s app integration is part of larger media buy. Read more.
CDN Gets $12 Mil
Content delivery network Cotendo has raised $12 million in a Series C round. According to VentureLoop, “Tenaya Capital joined top names like Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital in [Cotendo’s] funding that will be used for expansion in domestic and international markets as well as product development. Read more here.
