Revenue Will Fall For Yahoo; Snapchat Makes Key Hires

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Revving Down

“While digital ad revenues continue to grow for Facebook and Google, they will fall considerably for Yahoo this year,” according to eMarketer’s new spending forecast. Yahoo is expected to see double-digit percentage drops for both social and display revenues. Mobile, the company’s only growing category, will surge almost 25% to $1.3 billion in revenue this year. However, Yahoo is still losing mobile market share to the competition, even underperformers like Twitter.

Stocking The Pantry

Social media’s youngest titan hasn’t said much on the record about its ad plans, but its hiring activity speak volumes. In February, Snapchat snapped up Sriram Krishnan, the guy behind this little thing called Facebook Audience Network. Now, The Wall Street Journal’s Mike Shields reports that Ali Rana, who spent the past 17 years at Millward-Brown, has joined as head of audience and brand solutions, and Google’s Gunnard Johnson has come on as head of quantitative ads research. More.

Fast-Moving Talent

Instability at packaged-food giants like Kraft-Heinz and Mondelez has created a flight of talent to adjacent industries, including tech. Ad Age reports on the trend, which has delivered CPG recruits to new players like Amazon to “help them establish a foothold in consumer products,” according to Tierney Remick of recruiting firm Korn Ferry. Technology firms, she says, “need to get the consumer conscience into the equation so they can understand – how do they service that customer.” Read it. In the ad tech space, execs from Kellogg’s and other firms have flown to Google, Krux and other companies.

Penny For Your Journalism

The Dutch startup Blendle, a publisher vendor that enables small micropayments on articles instead of subscription packages and paywalls, is crossing the Atlantic. Blendle has had US attention (its investor roster includes The New York Times, Bloomberg and Time Inc.), but this is a new market to crack. As Re/code’s Peter Kafka notes, “[M]icrotransactions – things you pay for a la carte, a couple cents at a time – are only really working in (mobile app) games.” Plus, in order to use Blendle, you have to use Blendle: accessing content through its site, and eventually through its app. It’s a far leap (many free reading apps have gone down the River Styx), but Blendle does come with a strong portfolio of publishers. More.

TV Audience Pools

“We are witnessing TV’s golden age,” says Lotame CEO Andy Monfried about the company’s newest product, which aims to extend smart TV audiences across digital channels. The product will aggregate US household viewing data such as shows, genres and networks watched. SpotX VP of programmatic Randy Cooke adds, “Lotame’s TV segments give us an ability to scale TV audience segments beyond TV, into connected TV, mobile, desktop or various iterations of VOD.”

But Wait, There’s More!