When Amazon debuted its Video Direct service on Tuesday, the media hailed it as a rival to YouTube. Video Direct lets content creators post and monetize video directly on Amazon’s Video and Prime platforms. Amazon isn’t commenting beyond the release, but there’s no standalone platform and the only launch partners are media publishers, film studios […]
Rubicon Project enjoyed a strong first quarter, growing overall advertising revenue by 26% year over year, while its cut of the revenue swelled even more. Non-GAAP net revenue reached $63.6 million, a 71% year-over-year increase. That’s largely because Rubicon Project acquired the DSP Chango a year ago to form its Buyer Cloud, causing take rates […]
Like every marketing cloud, Oracle’s was built through acquisition. The tech giant has devoted more than $3 billion to construct a suite that includes campaign management or marketing automation from Responsys and Eloqua, data management solutions from BlueKai and Datalogix, omnichannel commerce through Maxymiser and online ad targeting tools like AddThis – among many others. […]
The steady growth of AppNexus’ advertiser-facing business in recent years has led to a jump in employees. Out of AppNexus’s roughly 1,050 total headcount, about 318 now serve the buy side, developing and supporting the company’s demand-side platform product. Of those employees, about 97 are engineers, 19 are product managers, 74 are in sales and a […]
Facebook’s growth led to a strong first quarter and stock that shot upward post-earnings. Facebook’s Q1 2016 revenue grew 57% year over year to $5.4 billion, compared to $3.5 billion the same time last year. Advertising comprised $5.2 billion of that revenue. Of that ad revenue, 82% came from mobile, compared to 73% in Q1 2015. Meanwhile, monthly […]
There’s nothing investors want to see more from Twitter than monthly active user (MAU) growth. It’s been the recurring theme every quarter since former CEO Dick Costolo flew the coop in June. The needle moved minutely this past quarter. Twitter told investors on Tuesday that its monthly active user base increased from 305 million last […]
Dutch cross-device data vendor Screen6 has been flying under the radar and avoided the Nielsen verification route like its well-known competition. Last year, Tapad (recently acquired by Norwegian telco Telenor) and Drawbridge had the accuracy of their device graphs evaluated by Nielsen, coming in at 91.2% and 97.3%, respectively. Screen6 CEO and co-founder David de […]
While publishers combatting the rise of ad blocking can select from a growing number of vendors who address the issue, many of the available solutions are largely the same. One group of offerings is designed to change user behavior. There are generally four methods: asking users to turn off ad blockers, blocking content when ad […]
Publisher network and ad tech firm Sovrn bought UK-based viewability company OnScroll Wednesday for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock. Sovrn plans to deploy the technology across the 80,000 publishers in its network, according to CEO Walter Knapp. OnScroll creates highly viewable ad units for publishers by analyzing user behavior patterns. So if a […]
In a major change to its Double Click for Publishers ad server, Google will bring in the real-time bids of a publisher’s outside exchange partners to its dynamic allocation product. The feature addresses a key problem that led to the rise of header bidding, essentially doing away with Google’s previous policy where it only allowed […]
IBM’s hire of AOL’s former president Bob Lord as its chief digital officer naturally begs the question: What will it mean for IBM’s collection of marketing applications? After all, Lord helped architect AOL’s transition into an ad tech platform – which eventually led to its acquisition by Verizon. But while Lord’s duties at IBM will […]
The Awl is moving three of its four sites from WordPress to Medium, as part of the Medium for Publishers program, which was announced Tuesday. Migrating an entire site onto a platform is the latest example of the rise of platform publishing. The Awl’s publisher, Michael Macher, tells AdExchanger that “indie publishers need to streamline […]
Getting agencies to buy enterprise software is hard, which is why AppNexus quietly killed off its two-year-old product Twixt in December – which included both workflow automation (aka RFP automation) and automated guaranteed functionalities. Ultimately, Twixt was too difficult and expensive to sell. “The level of investment that would have been required to drive penetration, […]
Sizmek has rebuilt most of its ad tech stack into what it describes as a cloud-based modular suite. The rejiggered product is called MDX-NXT. Sizmek hopes the change will strengthen its position against the ad serving monster that is Google’s DoubleClick. (According to Alexa, Sizmek has the second most ad server market share – 9.8% […]
IBM has nabbed Bob Lord, who formerly served as president of AOL and global CEO at Publicis-owned Razorfish, as its chief digital officer. Lord is one of the few executives with experience running companies in both marketing services and advertising technology, a nexus where IBM has been making large bets lately. An IBM spokesperson said […]
While content recommendation engines used to be a commodity business, that’s no longer the case, said Camilla Cho, executive director of business development and strategy at New York Media. New York Media – owner of the NYMag.com, Vulture, The Cut and Grub Street sites – is looking for partners that share its focus on using […]
Playbuzz, a creation platform for quizzes, polls, trivia, slideshows and videos, raised a $15 million strategic investment Thursday. Saban Ventures, an existing investor in Playbuzz, led the investment, which included participation from Walt Disney Co. Playbuzz’s CEO and co-founder, Shaul Olmert, said the company was looking for “potential partners as well as investors,” but would […]
A group of publishers is testing a header bidding solution from Rubicon Project that is compliant with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages program. Tribune Publishing is among those who have implemented header bidding for AMP. It’s the first time header bidding functionality has been leveraged in support of the “platform publishing” craze that has lately seen […]
Mom-and-pop shops can now buy and target their Facebook ads through Square as part of a deeper integration between the two partners. The move, announced Wednesday, makes a heck of a lot of sense. Small business owners that use Square can already automatically share their promotions on Facebook. Now they’ll be able to combine their […]
Michael Zimbalist – who spent the past 10 years at The New York Times, most recently as SVP of advertising products – is hopping to ad tech, taking a post as Simulmedia’s CMO. “I’m a change agent by career and inclination,” Zimbalist said. “TV is in the early stages of volcanic eruption of change, and […]
Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart finds himself in the middle of the industry’s rocky transition from transacting on ad impressions served to running campaigns with tags to track bots and viewability. He says the first step in this transition is to ditch the served impressions in favor of a standard that’s based on how many impressions […]
LinkedIn is no Facebook, but it is a growing source of referral traffic for publishers. And as it turns to sponsored updates for more of its revenue, LinkedIn is encouraging users to spend more time scrolling through the feed – a move that will only benefit publishers posting content in that feed. Forbes, Bloomberg and […]
Targeted advertising on Pinterest has taken a big step forward with the introduction new interest segments as well as first-party data matching. Pinterest hopes to “massively expand the categories for interest targeting” from 30 to 420, said product manager Nipoon Malhotra, who leads the company’s monetization team. And with its CRM data matching capability, Pinterest is following Google […]
Marketers on LinkedIn have long been able to target titles like “VP of engineering” for sponsored updates and inMails. On Tuesday, LinkedIn rolled out account targeting, allowing marketers to target actual companies in their campaigns, up to 30,000 of them at a time. Wait, LinkedIn couldn’t target by company before? “This has been one of the […]
Back in 2008, before the likes of “Serial,” award-winning public radio producer Nate DiMeo was sharing little-known pearls of American history in his podcast, “The Memory Palace.” The show, in which DiMeo narrates forgotten moments to a curated selection of music, has maintained a loyal, mid-sized audience for the past eight years. But despite donations […]
Facebook’s Atlas ad server promises to deliver marketers a superior way to measure campaigns compared to DoubleClick, which commands the lion’s share of the market. But measurement is just one part of ad serving. And in the one and a half years since Atlas was rushed to market, marketers and agencies that have tested Atlas […]
In a bid to enhance its header bidding wrapper and improve yield for publishers, Index Exchange has tapped Drew Bradstock as its new SVP of product. Bradstock spent the past five years as group product manager of Google’s Ad Exchange. The move brings Bradstock back to focusing on a fast-growing exchange, he said, that looks more […]
Rubicon Project’s full-year financials paint a picture of a growing exchange. The company’s managed revenue hit $1 billion in 2015. With a growing take rate, 22.6% for the year, that tallied up to $227.3 million, an 81% annual increase. The amount Rubicon takes from transactions on its exchange increased from 19.3% in Q4 of 2014 […]
The wave of ad tech consolidation continues with Tuesday’s announcement that Synacor will purchase publisher tech vendor Technorati. The purchase price won’t be revealed until Synacor, a publicly traded company, files its 8-K to the SEC. [Update: Synacor paid $3 million cash.] Technorati posted $7 million in revenue last year, mostly from its aging ad […]
Last September, BrightRoll COO Bruce Falck became CEO of the troubled ad tech company Turn. It’s an interesting time for Turn. The company is not a spring chicken in the ad tech world – an industry often rocked by the mercurial whims of investors, agencies and brands. So how can Turn be a stabilizing force […]
