YouTube Allows Third-Party Viewability Measurement ; Ad Injection Is Still A Thing

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YouTube Welcomes Moat Et Al

Google has opened the door to third-party viewability measurement on YouTube. Moat, Integral Ad Science, comScore and DoubleVerify have all been approved to track campaigns on the video platform, beginning in early 2016. The move follows a similar concession by Facebook last month. Commenting for a DoubleClick blog post, Unilever CMO Keith Weed said, “This move will generate better industry-wide standards across viewability and third party verification practices and continues the momentum in the right direction.” Read more.

Ad Fraud’s Newest (Old) Needle

WhiteOps and Forensiq tell The Wall Street Journal they have seen a slight lift in ad injection schemes. Google has waged its own campaign against ad injection, saying the practice is more dangerous than industry observers give it credit for. WhiteOps CEO Michael Tiffany says, “I don’t think most publishers have caught on to the way they’re being victimized.” Ad injection was among the original ad tech bogeymen. The last time ad injection was in the news, in 2012, Sambreel was the big perpetrator via browser plugins that dropped ads on About.com, The New York Times and others. Read more.

Candy Crushing It

Activision Blizzard, one of the world’s largest video game companies, purchased the mobile game publisher King Digital (best known for Candy Crush) for $5.9 billion, reports Christopher Palmeri at Bloomberg. The acquisition comes as other gaming titans, including Nintendo, are pivoting into the mobile sphere. The big money is still in the hardware and traditional video game systems, but mobile is catching up as apps figure out how to monetize. More. Related: Re/code’s Peter Kafka on the stages of game app revenue.

Danger: Hard Hat Area

Amazon is set to open its first permanent retail location, a book shop in a Seattle mall where a Barnes & Nobles once stood. So it goes. Walmart has recently claimed its physical infrastructure is a differentiating advantage over Amazon, which the ecommerce powerhouse appears to have taken as a challenge. Richard Macauley writes for Quartz that Amazon’s in-store inventory will be “selected by a mixture of big data algorithms and human curators,” and is one part of a larger effort to build a real-world shopping, shipping and delivery chain. Google, on the other hand, just killed its first brick-and-mortar push. So it goes. More.

CJ Affiliate Automates Some Functions

Affiliate marketing company CJ Affiliate (owned by Conversant, owned by Epsilon, owned by Alliance Data Systems) has activated its Placements Marketplace, designed to automate some of the manual processes for buying and selling media in affiliate channels.The tool was developed to help buyers plan and measure their buys, allowing them to search for inventory based on format, publisher, seasonal events or KPIs. For sellers, the tool shows what inventory is available and automates parts of the workflow including the I/O and payment processing. Read the release.