News Corp.'s Programmatic Party; Mobclix For Sale

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News Corp.’s Programmatic Party

News Corp. is taking programmatic into its own hands and launching a programmatic ad exchange. News Corp. Chief Executive Robert Thomson said, “Content aggregators would like to commodify our content, while data scrapers would like to aggregate our audience — the only way to reach the world’s greatest content and the most prestigious and lucrative audiences is directly through our digital properties. Third parties are no longer invited to the party.” News Corp. will work with The Rubicon Project as its sell-side platform. Read more.

Mobclix For Sale

Struggling mobile ad company Velti’s Q2 earnings are in and things aren’t looking great. The company reported a 47% decrease in revenue since last year. “While we understood there would be challenges to improving Velti’s financial position and driving long-term growth, the second quarter proved to be more difficult than expected,” said CEO Alex Moukas. And now Mobclix is for sale. Read the earnings release. Mobclix was acquired in 2010 by Velti.

Blip Gets Bought

Google’s YouTube is becoming a birthplace for Web-wide content networks — yet another threat to the TV monolith. Case in point: Maker Studios has been searching for a way to monetize its content outside of YouTube, and yesterday it acquired Blip in an attempt to do so, according to AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka. No specifics were given on the deal, although it’s reported that it was a stock and cash deal. Read more. See this 2009 AdExchanger interview with Blip.tv co-founder Dina Kaplan. The original vision apparently did not pan out for Blip.

Ad Blocking Abundance

In an article on Forbes, the number of people using ad-blocking technology is on the rise, with ad-block sniffer PageFair estimating that 22.7% of people are using an ad blocker. Of course, PageFair has its axe to grind. Nevertheless, Google Trends backs up that claim to a degree with a report showing that the amount of people searching for “adblock” has doubled in the last year. Another analytics site, ClarityRay, had a more conservative estimate at 9.7% of Web users having an ad blocker. Read more.

SAP’s Social Retargeting

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How The Markets Are Made; Why So Many Solo Consultancies?

After missing its second-quarter earnings, SAP unveiled a new social insights app that will match customer data from social networks with first-party data. The new system will be called the Social Contact Intelligence application and runs on SAP’s HANA in-memory database system, according to ZDNet. This is the fourth integrated analytics application SAP has developed for its HANA system. Read more. Sounds like another flavor of retargeting from here.

Privacy Glass

The FTC is adding Google’s Glass product to its watch list for potential privacy violations, The Hill is reporting. As more companies begin working on wearable technology (such as Apple and Samsung, who are developing smartphone watches), privacy concerns are going to crop up. Google’s response is that it’s blocking apps for things like facial recognition. Read more.

Budding Audience

Microsoft wants to introduce children to its products as early as possible, competing with Google for the lucrative spot of schools’ chosen search engine, says GigaOm. Among the incentives for schools to use Bing is an ad-free product that has robust privacy and search-filter abilities. Microsoft also has Surface tablets to give away, claiming that each month 60 Bing Rewards users will win a free tablet. Read more. Microsoft has never been shy with incentives.

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