Story updated to include a comment from Snap. Snapchat is on track to lose US users for the first time this year, according to eMarketer, thanks in part to continued aftershocks from its disastrous 2018 redesign. And Snap’s loss could be Instagram’s gain. Monthly users are set to decrease 2.8% year over year at Snapchat […]
Sens. Mark Warner, D-VA, and Deb Fischer, R-NE, introduced a bipartisan bill on Tuesday that would prohibit large internet companies like Google and Facebook from using deceptive design practices known as “dark patterns” that subtly manipulate users into sharing their personal data. Click here to read the bill in full. Dark patterns enable companies to […]
IBM is bowing out of mar tech and offloading its marketing cloud assets – for the second time. Competition from the other scaled marketing players was fierce and Big Blue’s heart hasn’t been in it for a while. Last week, IBM entered into a definitive agreement to sell its marketing platform and commerce software to private […]
Reddit’s advertising revenue is a speck on the duopoly’s windshield, but it’s growing fast, albeit from a small base. The company’s US net ad revenue is set to hit $119 million this year, up from $76.9 million in 2018, giving Reddit a 0.1% share of the US digital ad market, according to an eMarketer forecast […]
Pinterest filing its S-1 late last week makes it the last of the social media walled gardens to go public. The OG Facebook might still be in a class of its own, but Pinterest bears comparison to Snap, which filed its S-1 in 2017, and Twitter, which filed a lifetime ago in 2013. Notably, while […]
LinkedIn is rolling out lookalike audiences following a beta testing period that began late last year, the company said Wednesday. Advertisers could already create matched audiences – basically, LinkedIn’s answer to custom audiences – built from a list of target contacts or accounts. The addition of lookalike audiences is a good look for a platform […]
How much ad revenue does Facebook lose out on when its platforms go on the fritz? More than you probably make in a year … or 50. On Thursday and Friday, Facebook experienced what was reportedly the longest partial global outage in the company’s history. For around 14 hours, some users had trouble accessing or […]
Google’s move to create unified, first-price auctions for publishers using Google Ad Manager doesn’t just change the auction type. It impacts pricing, header bidding, publisher floors and how publishers see AdWords demand. Under the new rules, all exchanges will bid for an impression at the same time, and Google will lose the “last look” it […]
There are only around 2.5 million weddings in the United States every year – yet more than 30 million people are planning a wedding on Pinterest at any given time. “That means there’s a lot of planning being done long before a wedding ever happens,” said Jon Kaplan, who joined Pinterest in 2016 as global head […]
Big Tech can’t catch a break in DC … actually, scratch that. If Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, is elected to the White House in 2020, she’s got a plan to break up Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple. And her proposal specifically targets Google’s ad platform business. On Friday, the Democratic presidential candidate laid out how her […]
Branded content is a priority for Instagram in 2019 – but measurement is seriously lacking. “That’s one of the things I wish you guys would work on,” said Edlynne Laryea, director for global Neutrogena digital transformation and sustainability, speaking at an Instagram media event Tuesday. Although Instagram claims that 68% of its users choose to interact […]
On Monday, Pinterest introed a tool to help retailers automatically ingest their online product catalogs as pins, including up-to-date pricing and stock info. Advertisers can then take the additional step to promote their product pins as targeted shopping ads, which are now available via self-serve after a prolonged beta that started last year. Similar functionality […]
Video ad platform Ooyala is slowly being disassembled and sold piece by piece. On Thursday, Ooyala revealed it had sold its online video platform to Brightcove for $15 million. The deal is expected to close in mid-2019. Brightcove, founded in 2004, provides a similar cloud-based video distribution solution as Ooyala. Its clients include Acorn TV, […]
Facebook CFO David Wehner recently told investors that even if the economy falters, Facebook’s ability to measure advertising returns is its saving grace. Will the same hold true for small- to mid-sized marketers? AdExchanger called on several analysts and senior marketers to get their take. On the whole, they agreed SMBs will continue to buy […]
The amount of online media with audience data attached is shrinking, thanks to Apple, which now blocks third-party cookies in Safari, and GDPR, which requires user consent to show personalized ads. But when advertising cookies are missing, marketers have limited, costly alternatives. Some demand-side platforms (DSPs) don’t offer any contextual buying. Or buyers must pay […]
Twitter’s got a new metric for Wall Street to chew on – monetizable daily active users (MDAU) – and something to hide: the fact that monthly active user growth is on the decline. Starting this quarter, Twitter will report the number of logged-in users it’s actually able to make money on rather than what CFO Ned Segal […]
Supply-path optimization (SPO) lets buyers find the best way to access the inventory they want. But the next stage of SPO is emerging, where buyers will negotiate with exchanges to create their own low-fee paths to supply. In that spirit, the agency Goodway Group and the exchange PubMatic inked a deal Wednesday where PubMatic will […]
Snap is no longer losing users. For the third consecutive quarter, Snap managed to stave user decline. Its Q4 daily active users clocked in at 186 million, which was flat sequentially but a slight year-over-year dip from 187 million. And advertisers are still spending on the platform. Q4 revenue grew 36% to $390 million, while […]
Facebook is getting beaten up by a punishing news cycle – but, for its part, it’s beating the street. The stock surged more than 17% in after-hours trading on Wednesday. Revenue for the fourth quarter clocked in at $16.91 billion, a 30.4% year-over-year (YoY) increase. Nearly all of that – $16.64 billion – was thanks […]
Apple actually mentioned the word “advertising” on its earnings call. Although hardware isn’t going anywhere, Apple’s services business, which includes search ads in the App Store, is becoming increasingly meaningful to the company’s bottom line. “Services are scaling quickly,” Apple CFO Luca Maestri told investors on Tuesday. Although iPhone sales were weak during the holiday […]
Facebook’s plan to integrate the backend infrastructure of its messaging platforms isn’t sitting well with privacy advocates, security experts, European regulators or US lawmakers. Alarm bells are ringing all over the place. The Irish Data Protection Authority says it’s going to be “very closely scrutinizing” the situation, particularly where it might involve the sharing and […]
Adobe Marketing Cloud’s top executive, Brad Rencher, is leaving the company after nearly a decade. Rencher, who as EVP and GM Digital Experience set the vision and strategy for the software giant’s digital marketing platform initiatives, first joined Adobe in 2009 through the acquisition of Omniture, which later became Adobe Analytics, a key component of […]
OpenX signed a five-year deal with Google Cloud Platform worth more than $110 million that will move its infrastructure completely to the cloud. OpenX is transitioning to the cloud within six months, and it expects the transition to be completed by Q2 of 2019. Once complete, OpenX expects its publishers and buyers will see several […]
LinkedIn launched interest-based targeting through its self-serve ad platform on Wednesday after more than three months in beta. B2C marketers are accustomed to targeting prospects based on their interests – “fast food lovers,” “coffee drinkers,” “gym goers” – but there is less interest data available for B2B marketers, said Abhishek Shrivastava, LinkedIn’s director of product. “A […]
Beeswax raised $15 million in Series B funding which it will use to support connected TV and win marketer clients. As it expands to achieve these initiatives, Beeswax will double its current headcount of 65 by the end of this year. The software-as-a-service DSP last raised funds in 2016. The new round brings total funding […]
After 14 years at Google and DoubleClick, ads vet Jonathan Bellack has joined Alphabet-owned Jigsaw as its first-ever director of product. Google created Jigsaw as a technology incubator with the mission of using technology to make the internet safer. Jigsaw’s projects have protected news organizations from toxic comments, gave readers uncensored access to sites and […]
Overcoming the banality of a standard banner ad in favor of a custom unit requires a lot of work. Buyers need to work with creative tech companies to build the units, and publishers need to adjust their ad setup to support the unusual formats. When header bidding became the norm, it cut off these companies’ […]
Facebook will distribute $300 million across multiple news projects over the next three years to support local newsrooms and help publishers create new business models, the platform announced Tuesday. Donations include a $5 million endowment gift to the Pulitzer Center, $6 million for the UK-based Community News Project and a $20 million expansion of Facebook’s […]
Amazon’s release Thursday at CES of a free, ad-supported streaming video channel called IMDB Freedive could provide an opportunity for the digital giant to exhibit its targeting capabilities and pose a real threat to the Facebook-Google duopoly. Freedive is currently available on Amazon Fire devices and through Amazon’s desktop site. With about 50 million Fire […]
Piano, whose tech and services gives digital publishers a way to supplement their ad revenue, raised $22 million in Series B funding Thursday to expand its offering and help it buy other companies in the space. “There’s all this ad tech out there, but nothing exists to help publishers treat their traffic as readers and […]
