As Editorial Director, 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.
Outbrain will allow publishers to sell native in-feed placements via their direct sales channels. In beta testing with four publishers, publishers can offer the units on a CPC or CPM basis. “Over the last six months, we’ve had more and more publishers dipping their toe into native ads,” said Matt Crenshaw, Outbrain’s VP of product […]
Datasift’s hookup with Facebook is gaining steam. It’s a good thing for the social media data provider, which got cut off from Twitter’s firehose in April, one month after announcing its non-exclusive Facebook partnership. On Wednesday, social analytics platform Pulsar became one of the first Datasift clients to benefit from this connection – it will […]
Publishers taking the role of an ad agency by creating content for marketers should make sure they’re not creating misleading native advertising: The Federal Trade Commission will hold publishers responsible. “For us, the concern is whether consumers recognize what they’re seeing is advertising or not,” Mary Engle, the FTC’s associate director of advertising practices, told […]
Publishers often talk about wanting to “help the buyer however it wants to buy,” embracing methods like private marketplaces, direct sales or automated guaranteed. But a big part of how buyers want to buy today is with data. Tribune Publishing wants to create more data-focused advertising opportunities throughout the organization – which includes the Los […]
How can consumers opt out of cross-device tracking if they don’t even know it exists? “When people are surprised, that can have negative consequences on trust, a brand and enforcement,” FTC commissioner Terrell McSweeney said to a crowd of 150 people in the advertising community – many of them lawyers – at the Digital Advertising […]
Cxense, a Norwegian provider of publisher-focused ad tech, on Monday acquired Maxifier, whose technology optimizes direct sold campaigns, for $3.56 million in stock. “Our ability to understand customer behavior and data will be injected into Maxifier’s extremely rich ability to forecast and optimize advertising campaigns, and vice versa,” said Geraldo Maroniene, Cxense’s EVP of corporate […]
When Google announced last month its ad networks would move to HTTPS by June 30, it marked another Internet giant adding security features that benefit the user – but that also inconvenience publishers and advertisers. HTTPS makes websites more secure by authenticating websites and web servers and by encrypting client-server communications. In the past, adapting […]
Since Denmark’s third-largest media house, Jysk Fynske Medier, started bringing in programmatic demand, CPMs for non-direct sold inventory have risen more than 300%. Its portfolio of sites, which includes everything from local news to classifieds to daily deals, attracts 3 million uniques and 500 million page views per month. Though small, Denmark has a highly […]
Professional food bloggers have long relied on ad networks to monetize their audience. A few million page views or more can be enough to earn a living. But these long-tail content creators are also feeling the effects of programmatic, viewability and the shift to mobile. One example: Food blog Pinch of Yum, run by a […]
Magnetic and MyBuys announced Wednesday they will merge, creating a company with a combined gross revenue of $100 million spanning ad tech and marketing tech. With their dual capabilities, they will be able to leverage first-party and third-party data to inform their 700 clients’ advertising spend and marketing efforts throughout the customer life cycle. At the same […]
The rise of private marketplaces has transferred power to publishers, who can communicate information about fill rates, win rates and floor prices to buyers. “What makes programmatic successful is having insights to communicate to the trading desk,” said Sean Holzman, chief digital revenue officer for Bonnier, publisher of Popular Science, Saveur and Field & Stream, […]
Female-oriented publisher SheKnows hired as its first CTO Carl Hixson, who’s built digital platforms for Getty Images, HBO, Pearson and McGraw-Hill. He’ll turn his experience toward Momentum, SheKnows’ data-driven content management system designed to help advertisers “create content [and] manage ad units around content in a single, seamless ecosystem,” Hixson said. Momentum is expected to […]
Pinterest revealed Tuesday that marketers this summer will be able to target audiences, buy inventory on a cost-per-engagement (CPE) or cost-per-action (CPA) basis and run video units called Cinematic Pins. “These solutions map to any marketing objective,” said Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s GM of monetization. He described Pinterest’s ad solution set as “comprehensive” – a trait […]
The salespeople at Business Insider had a problem. Some potential advertisers wanted to buy directly with the publication, but due to minimums implemented in mid-2014, their budgets were below the minimum spend and CPM required for a direct buy. That would make them candidates for programmatic sales, but these clients didn’t have DSPs. Some were […]
Taboola is paving the way to enter the Chinese market. On Monday, it revealed it had received a multimillion-dollar investment from Chinese search provider Baidu. Baidu does not name the level of investment unless SEC rules require it. “The goal behind the investment is to work together on launching native advertising in China,” Taboola CEO […]
Beliefnet attracts a niche audience (about 5 million to 7 million uniques per month) of all faiths who come to read content about religion. But while its readers believe in a greater power, Beliefnet wasn’t always sure they had the same faith in ads. Even though advertisers began to prioritize viewability, the publication, which fielded […]
In its first earnings call since going public in March, MaxPoint reported revenue growth of 87% to $28.7 million. Its revenue ex-TAC, which excludes the cost of programmatically buying impressions through real-time bidding, rose 90% to $16.8 million. [Read the earnings release.] The total number of enterprise customers rose 62% to 529. In the first quarter of […]
Facebook has confirmed it will begin displaying publishers’ articles natively in the Facebook mobile app, naming nine initial media partners for the program. (Read the blog post.) Participating publishers are The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild. “We’ve been comfortable with experimenting with a variety of storytelling platforms over the past […]
While activist investors like Starboard Ventures LLC had advocated for an AOL-Yahoo merger, Verizon’s intent to purchase the former seems to have dampened that plan. So where does that leave Yahoo? “No different than they were before,” said Pivotal Group analyst Brian Wieser. “In a bad position.” Not everyone has such dire predictions. Cantor & […]
ZenithOptimedia Chief Investment Officer John Nitti will be a speaker at AdExchanger’s CleanAds I/O conference on June 3, an event examining issues and solutions around fraudulent inventory in the online advertising ecosystem. Clients hold their agencies accountable when they run campaigns heavy on fraudulent traffic or misrepresented inventory. While ZenithOptimedia, part of Publicis, understands that […]
The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), a group created by the IAB, ANA and 4As late last year, have announced the creation of a Fraud Threat List through which members will share URLs they consider fraudulent to create a master blacklist. “We are developing a registration program to create a safe zone for the digital advertising […]
Publishers like PureWow seeking audience development have a few usual suspects to drive traffic to sites. There’s Outbrain and Taboola, social amplification and syndication or traffic exchange. And now, to help make social amplification more efficient, they have KeyWee. “At the most basic level, they find the right audience for the content,” said Anna Lee, […]
AOL reported revenue growth of 7% YoY in the first quarter, for a total of $625 million. Global advertising revenue, which includes AOL’s own properties, search and third-party platforms, climbed 12% YoY to $483 million. Read the earnings release. CEO Tim Armstrong said the company continues to make updates “placing AOL at the center of […]
Digital advertising revenue at Time Inc. rose 20% to $73 million in the first quarter. But overall advertising revenue declined 9% to $353 million, and total revenue declined 9% to $680 million. Those declines were still slightly better than Wall Street’s expectations. “We’re in a turnaround, and turnarounds are bumpy,” said CEO and Chairman Joe Ripp. […]
The NewFront presentations, which started April 27 and continued through Thursday, showcased the convergence between digital video and linear TV. As the latter embraces targeting, digital video chases after “premium” in the eyes of buyers. The deal that epitomizes this merging isn’t yet official: Vice Media’s plans to take over a channel of one of […]
The joke is that France’s socialist roots made it easy for publisher coalitions to spring up in the country. La Place Media led the way, three years ago, followed by Audience Square in December 2012. But now the idea of cooperation among former competitors is spreading. In recent weeks, AdExchanger profiled coalitions in the UK […]
Nielsen unveiled a multitouch attribution (MTA) system Wednesday designed to help marketers optimize spend across all channels, from digital to television, using both Nielsen and marketer data. Nielsen selected Krux as its data-management platform (DMP) partner to house and combine disparate data sources, according to Nielsen global President Steve Hasker. Krux can combine Nielsen data […]
Rubicon Project’s Q1 revenue grew 62% year over year to $37.2 million, thanks to increases in its mobile and orders business, as well as international expansion. As CEO Frank Addante stated in previous quarters, Rubicon will benefit from the network effect, as an influx of buyers and sellers on the platform will cause growth to snowball. […]
PureWow, a women’s lifestyle website, raised $2.5 million in Series Seed Preferred funding Tuesday. It’s the second pre-Series A round of funding for the profitable property, which raised seed funding when it launched in 2010. PureWow’s audience tripled in the past 12 months. Advertiser RFPs have increased 200%. “The demand is there,” CEO Ryan Harwood […]
Viralnova has been hated and admired for the path it took to find an audience. It rose to the top of the Facebook news feed in 2013 with I-can’t-not-click articles like “If You Own A Microwave, Then You Absolutely Must See This Video.” And its success showed mainstream publishers the importance of social content discovery. […]
