News UK Targets Domain Spoofing; Holding Co Stocks Draw Short Sellers

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

Still Spoofing

British publisher News UK “did a test where we turned off all our programmatic supply and tried to buy our own inventory when it wasn’t available, and we found that we could,” said Ben Walmsley, commercial director at The Bridge, the company’s commercial arm. Speaking at a Campaign event in London, Walmsley said News UK’s test unearthed more than $1 million in spoofed inventory. Like other publishing execs, he is hopeful Ads.txt can help stamp out domain spoofing once and for all, but still sees massive scale for online fraudsters posing as legitimate news sites. More at Campaign. Related in AdExchanger: News UK’s test mirrored one Business Insider ran across programmatic exchanges.

Grin And Bear It

Major ad agency holding companies are beset by short sellers betting against the category (and winning big). About 13% of Omnicom’s total shares, equivalent to $2.2 billion, were held by short sellers this year, while WPP and Interpublic have also encountered new skepticism. France-based Publicis Groupe, which has kept up shares better than the other holding companies, is facing short-seller bets too as investors wait for that shoe to drop, reports the Financial Times. But, the FT hedges, “While selling short struggling advertisers has become a profitable trade for hedge funds, other investors have made large bets in the other direction that the concerns over the agency model will prove less severe than the market believes.” More (registration required).

Bushel Of Apple

Apple has acquired Texture, an online subscription service that provides access to many magazine companies. Read the blog post. Texture and its operating company Next Issue Media were sold to Apple by a group of media co-owners, including Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith and the Canadian publisher Rogers Media. The deal price was not disclosed and probably negligible, but Texture helps Apple play nice with legacy media companies and fits neatly into the iPhone maker’s long-term plan to profit from news and audio subscriptions.

But Wait, There’s More!