The New York Times Invests In International Programmatic; Verizon Lowers Yahoo's Price

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Programmatic Times

The New York Times is doubling down on programmatic in international markets as part of its goal of doubling digital revenue by 2020. The Times hired programmatic chiefs in London and Singapore, Digiday reports. It’s also pitching European advertisers on video and data opportunities similar to the bespoke programmatic relationships it has with some US advertisers. While the Times has an ace up its sleeve in the form of well-lit inventory, it doesn’t have the same audience leverage. “Aside from the UK and Germany and possibly some of their smaller business hubs, the numbers will be small and with very specific audiences that align to only a few advertisers,” said Jason Jutla, senior activation director at GroupM’s Essence. “So scale will be their biggest challenge.” More.

Close Shave

Verizon is cutting about $300 million from the $4.8 billion Yahoo sticker price after major data breaches exposed compromising personal information on billions of the digital platform’s users. It’s not such a bad haircut for Yahoo if this reported deal is finalized, considering Verizon reportedly wanted a billion-dollar discount and could have called off the deal. “It looks like they’re going to get a price cut – but it’s not dramatic,” said Brett Harriss, an analyst at Gabelli & Co. It’s been a rickety rollercoaster ride for Yahoo since Verizon’s deal was announced last July. At least there’s “more certainty around there actually being a sale,” Harriss said. Bloomberg has more.

MDC’s Gold

Goldman Sachs invested $95 million into holding company MDC Partners, for a 15% stake and a seat on the board. Stakeholders expect the transaction to close end of Q1 2017, and MDC will use all that coin to pay down existing debt. As per Reuters, MDC hired an adviser in November to assess its capital structure strategy and a few months ago had $2.09 billion in liabilities and $1.6 billion in assets. More.

Dragon Scales

Instagram is signaling “a new stage of growth” with an engineering hiring spree in New York. Facebook is specifically looking for “recovering quants,” machine-learning experts from investment banks and hedge funds, reports The Wall Street Journal’s Deepa Seetharaman. Instagram hopes machine-learning software will help it scale personalized content for its Stories product (which would drive up inventory value). Twitter tried and failed on a similar idea with its short-lived “Moments” tab and Snapchat Stories are personalized by human curators. Handpicking content may be fun and user-friendly, but in Facebookworld the credo is “scale or bust.” More.

But Wait, There’s More!