Reddit Could Rake In $350M In Ad Revenue; IDG Communications Acquires Kickfire

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

Reddit And Weep

Reddit could clear $350 million in ad revenue this year, double its earnings from 2020. But Reddit’s percent-growth rate is high because revenue is relatively low; Pinterest has a similar number of active users, but earned $1.1 billion in the first half of 2021 alone. Reddit needs to get its act together on the money-making front. The company raised $700 million a month ago at a $10 billion valuation, and plans to IPO. To justify that valuation, Reddit needs annual revenue in sight of a billion dollars. One growth opportunity is global expansion, Reddit COO Jennifer Wong tells The Information. Half of Reddit’s audience is outside the US, but 99% of revenue is domestic. Reddit is constrained by its own media, though. Many Reddit threads are ad-free due to brand safety concerns, and indecorous posts are found practically everywhere. Reddit removed programmatic ads earlier this summer. It can still onboard agencies and advertisers directly to a self-serve platform, but Reddit’s ad strategy needs to get out of the tinkering phase and into the mature growth stage.

B2B Kickstart

IDG Communications acquired the B2B advertising data company KickFire. IDG Comms is IDG’s media and mar tech segment. The other half of the business is a research data arm called International Data Corporation. KickFire’s common use case is connecting WiFi and IP addresses to business locations. That could tie in neatly with Triblio, the account-based marketing (ABM) business IDG Comms acquired last year. ABM campaigns target particular teams and individuals within businesses that make vendor or sales decisions. The KickFire and Triblio deal terms were not disclosed. In June, IDG was acquired for $1.3 billion by Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity investment firm. The company has a goal to be IPO-ready by the end of 2022, IDG CEO Mohamad Ali (I know, I know) told AdExchanger at the time. “The successful exit vision, from Blackstone’s perspective, is to own the ABM data layer, and with it you can buy and integrate other pieces that can be fueled by that data.”

Who’s Who

Comscore said it will soon count specific individuals within a household who actually view a piece of content, Adweek reports. Comscore will launch the new offering next month, with person-level data replacing the company’s household-level audience data across its linear and OTT video ratings. “What this will allow us to do is to be able to start to understand if it’s one person consuming that content or multiple people consuming that content at the same time,” said Chris Wilson, Comscore’s chief commercial officer. The company will no longer rely on person-level data sourced via Nielsen’s Portable People Meter. Comscore and other measurement companies argue panel-based ratings are skewed, since viewers consume content across more and more streaming services and devices. Comscore has been busy building its own methodology for several years, and will use a “proprietary blend of data sources.” For whatever that’s worth.

But Wait, There’s More!

App Annie agreed to a $10M settlement with the SEC over user data practices. [WSJ]

Constructor snags $55M for ecommerce search and discovery tech. [TechCrunch]

Adobe customers will have access to Yahoo’s ConnectID. [Adweek]

DoorDash is suing New York City over a customer data-sharing law. [CNBC]

Facebook touts its video ads to address brand safety. [Ad Age]

Marketers mull the fate of DMPs in a cookieless world. [Digiday]

Salesforce adds more tools for real-time personalization to Marketing Cloud. [ZDNet]

Anzu taps Human Security’s anti-fraud protection for in-game ads. [VentureBeat]

You’re Hired

Goodway hires Michael Hayes as chief growth officer. [release]

Huge brings on Toni Howard Lowe as GVP of DEI. [Campaign]