As Executive Editor, Sarah oversees AdExchanger’s news and feature coverage and event content. Sarah has written extensively about publishers, sell-side technology and Google. Understanding and explaining the business implications of technically complex topics is her forte. Over her years at AdExchanger, she’s documented the rise and maturity of programmatic tech, as data-driven advertising has spread far and wide in its marketing applications.
RockYou specializes in acquiring down-and-out digital properties and managing them through their decline. The San Francisco-based company adopted that business model because it nearly went out of business itself in 2009, when Facebook decided it was done with social gaming apps on its platform. At the time, RockYou was a top social gaming app developer […]
Six exchanges and a handful of top publishers who work with Index Exchange’s wrapper say they consistently notice anomalies indicating the exchange prioritizes itself. At least two of those exchanges are composing a letter to Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale threatening to withdraw from its wrapper unless it takes steps to ensure neutrality, AdExchanger has […]
California’s consumer privacy law, passed in late June, has spurred demand for federal regulations to avoid a patchwork of state-by-state rules. To discuss what federal privacy laws might look like, representatives from AT&T, Amazon, Google, Twitter, Apple and Charter Communications met with the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on Wednesday in Washington, DC. […]
Google added more ways for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns Wednesday, and it got the MRC’s approval in categories such as viewability and impression measurement on YouTube and its buying platform, Google Display & Video 360. “Advertisers need to trust the metrics and be able to compare across the different media […]
SiriusXM said Monday it has offered to acquire Pandora for $3.5 billion, a 13.8% premium on the current stock price. Read the release. If the deal goes through, SiriusXM would be able to distribute its content beyond vehicles and gain both a subscription radio business and an ad-supported streaming business. It would have the opportunity […]
Consumers’ mistrust of data-driven advertising has reached a crisis point, and they must be reminded of the value they’re getting in exchange, said Google SVP of ads and commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy at the Data Summit in Dublin Wednesday evening. “It’s up to all of us to confront the crisis in front of us,” Ramaswamy told […]
Ecommerce startup Material sells kitchen tools – including a chef’s knife, a wood spoon and one-handed kitchen tongs – meant to appeal to home chefs and people who like well-made, thoughtfully designed products. But the direct-to-consumer brand’s challenge has been connecting with consumers using customer insights, not just site analytics and sales data. “We take […]
A year and a half ago, Gary Vaynerchuk bought PureWow, bringing together an agency and publisher under one parent company called VaynerX. “We thought we were fast before the acquisition, but we are faster than ever before,” said Ryan Harwood, CEO of Gallery Media Group, which houses both PureWow and ONE37pm, a just-launched men’s lifestyle […]
When the founder of Diapers.com launched a media startup led by parenting brands Scary Mommy and The Dad, he brought his customer-focused metrics with him: customer acquisition cost (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV). When translated to media, Some Spider Studios CEO Vinit Bharara analyzes what content draws readers most efficiently (the media version of CAC) […]
Publishers who use a consent management platform (CMP) saw CPMs rise 9% and fill rates go up 5% post-GDPR, according to analysis of publishers using Mediavine, which manages ads for thousands of sites. Meanwhile, publishers who didn’t use a CMP for their European Union traffic saw CPMs dive precipitously. With no targeted ads, CPMs fell […]
Google AMP was supposed to help publishers deal with slow-loading mobile web pages and boost consumption of articles on phones when it rolled out almost three years ago. But publishers such as The Daily Beast aren’t seeing that promised increase in traffic on AMP to justify the lagging monetization they experience on AMP. The Daily […]
Some digital media startups aspire to reach every millennial with their content. VinePair just wants to reach the millennials who care about wine, beer and spirits. Focusing on a niche audience – and the advertisers and products that appeal to it – is why the site turned a profit this year for the first time, […]
If coffee drinkers receive personalized recommendations about which high-end coffee they’ll like best, will they start drinking more fancy java at home, and not just when they order their latte to go? Direct-to-consumer coffee business Trade launched in April backed by JAB Holdings, one of the biggest names in coffee and coffee chains. JAB’s massive […]
Following outcry over how it changed programmatic auction rules, Index Exchange has paused bid caching, said CEO Andrew Casale in a letter to clients Monday. The practice accounted for half of all impressions filled by Index Exchange, according to research conducted by Jounce Media and published Monday evening. The fallout from the buy side has been ferocious […]
Index Exchange has for more than a year been doing bid caching, where if its buyer loses a programmatic auction, it holds onto the bid to see if it can serve an ad on the next piece of content the consumer views. Bid caching has enabled Index Exchange to gain market share against rival exchanges […]
Amazon has begun enabling guaranteed private marketplace buys between its DSP clients and publishers using its Transparent Ad Marketplace product. Test deals are just starting to flow from Amazon’s DSP to publishers, AdExchanger has learned. Direct deals work like a guaranteed private marketplace: Advertisers commit dollars and place ads with specific, brand-name publishers using Amazon’s […]
Meredith will offload its 60% equity interest in ad platform business Viant, the company confirmed on its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call on Friday. It expects the sale to be finalized early in its coming fiscal year. Time Inc. bought Viant in 2016 for $87 million, and the purchase gave an inorganic boost to the publisher’s […]
Tech and publishing are coming together. Uzabase completed its acquisition of Quartz on July 31 and will pay between $75 million and $110 million, depending on this year’s performance. But what does it mean for a Bloomberg-like intelligence platform to join forces with a global business publisher? The two companies concede that they’re still figuring […]
It’s not how many people you know. It’s how many you know well. Meredith prioritizes depth over breadth: The company posits that a limited number of deep relationships with core readers matter more than a larger number of shallow relationships. While advertisers prize scale, content that draws readers back again and again opens the door […]
Millennial females in search of a humor fix gravitate toward Betches. A trio of college friends started a blog in 2011 and have since grown Betches into a revenue-diversified media brand fueled by branded content, a thriving ecommerce site, a cable TV deal and three books. And it focused on multiple revenue streams long before […]
Future PLC has agreed to buy the consumer division of Purch for $132 million. The July acquisition brings together Purch properties Tom’s Guide, Tom’s Hardware and Top Ten Reviews with Future PLC’s tech vertical titles, including PC Gamer and TechRadar. Future PLC’s 100-plus brands also serve non-tech niches like music and photography. The two companies […]
Rubicon Project beat its Q2 revenue expectations, sending the stock up 15% in after-hours trading Wednesday. Rubicon Project is still in the middle of steering a huge ship out of danger: It’s burning cash faster than it can increase ad spend on its platform, the result of cutting buyer fees from the platform in November. […]
After years of sitting on the programmatic-video sidelines, ESPN is tagging in. The sports network started selling video programmatically for the first time this year. Travis Howe, SVP of platform ad sales strategy, is running the playbook. “When I looked at the media landscape, there were very few companies that were not only sitting at […]
Verizon revealed Tuesday that it is taking a $658 million writedown for “product realignment” that is “mainly related” to Go90, which it shut down in late July. Verizon also had $339 million in severance charges and $120 million in charges related to its Oath integration, the company said during an earnings call. Taken together, the […]
The revised OpenRTB 3.0 spec released Tuesday makes major changes to the programmatic standard to stamp out bad ads and fraud. The IAB Tech Lab’s new spec is now open for public comment for 60 days. The eight-year-old OpenRTB standard governs how demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) communicate with each other to buy […]
Boost Mobile’s recent campaign on Snapchat’s hit series “Phone Swap” went three levels deep to make its ads as seamless and relevant as possible – all the more important because they were among the app’s first unskippable ads. The ads ran on mobile phones while viewers watched the dating show where a potential couple trades […]
Ad tech is a buyer’s market right now, and MediaMath just got $180 million in cash to fund acquisitions. Could one of those targets be Rubicon Project? “That’s an interesting idea,” MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki told AdExchanger Thursday. “No, we are not buying them at this time.” The idea of a top-tier DSP and SSP […]
Trusted Media Brands is continuing its turnaround and building a revenue team to take advantage of its digital audience growth. Over the past year, the company, formerly known as the Reader’s Digest Association, grew readership on RD.com 76% to 8.3 million unique visitors. Taste of Home’s audience grew 39% to 12.7 million unique visitors. Overall […]
MediaMath is flush with cash and ready to ignite consolidation in ad tech. Thanks to a $225 million investment by private equity firm Searchlight on Tuesday, MediaMath will end up with a $180 million cash infusion to spend on acquisitions and building new products. MediaMath, whose flagship product is a DSP/DMP, used $45 million of […]
Inserting fresh ads into podcasts is challenging and time-consuming. An online article loads fresh ads every time a page loads. But in the podcasting world, readers download content and ads together, which means the two must be stitched together beforehand. Because of this challenge, many older podcasts run with no ads or stale ones, even […]
