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 […]
Google is less than two weeks away from releasing its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) into the wild. The AMP program will move out of its test phase and begin displaying the mobile-optimized content pages in its search results before the end of the month, and possibly as early as next week, according to AdExchanger sources. […]
Yahoo’s bloodletting on Wednesday also included a number of advertising and sales-related roles, AdExchanger has learned. Yahoo is in the midst of executing a board-approved cost savings scheme that will see 15% of its workforce receive pink slips. The layoffs, the first round of which went down last week, continued Wednesday with the announcement of […]
To help publishers manage multiple header bidding partners, OpenX created a server-to-server wrapper dubbed OpenX Meta, which it unveiled Thursday. The advantage of OpenX Meta is that it moves all the action – long, slow bid requests – off a publisher’s page and onto its server. From there, it can quickly ping all the other […]
The one thing that investors really want from Twitter – for it to grow its monthly active users – is seemingly something that the platform can’t deliver. Twitter reported on Wednesday that revenue for Q4 2015 was up 48% year over year, hitting $710 million – with ad revenue comprising $641 million of that number […]
Twitter’s giving its reverse chronological timeline an algorithmic tweak. Rather than automatically seeing the most recent tweets first and then moving backward in time as they scroll, starting Wednesday users will see a curated lineup of roughly one dozen tweets at the top of their timeline culled from the accounts they follow. To determine which […]
If you take the headlines at face value, Google and Facebook are killing it – dwarfing all others in terms of revenue and scale – and there’s not much reason for other publishers to get out of bed in the morning. But there’s a more nuanced story going on. Certainly, Facebook and Google have become the […]
Is dynamic ad insertion finally coming to podcasting? New audience measurement guidelines released Thursday by a collection of public radio companies address one of the big concerns advertisers have with the medium – thereby paving the way for new methods of selling and placing ads. “Up until recently, whenever we put an ad into the […]
Wikia unveiled a new property called Fandom this week at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Desert, Calif. The slick-looking site features news articles contributed by readers, as well as bite-size stories designed for social sharing. CEO Craig Palmer described it as “a one-stop shop if you’re a fan of pop culture.” Behind the […]
OpenX unveiled a new product Tuesday, real-time guaranteed (RTG), with features that fall between private marketplaces and automated guaranteed. The aim is to solve drawbacks to each current buying method. One of the biggest complaints about private marketplaces is that they don’t deliver the scale both sides want. And one of the biggest complaints about […]
Revcontent is angling to usurp Taboola and Outbrain in the content recommendation space. The fast-growing network on Monday signed Newsweek to be its exclusive provider of content recommendations. The news follows the Jan. 8 announcement that it had acquired ContentClick, a European native advertising network, to gain a foothold in that continent. In tests, Revcontent […]
If Apple is indeed shifting its iAd platform to focus on direct deals, as BuzzFeed reported Wednesday, it means its experiment accepting programmatic demand has come to an end after little more than a year. Perhaps it was inevitable. While Rubicon Project, Accordant Media and MediaMath were among iAd’s programmatic partners, not much happened after […]
MSN.com has gone through a lot of changes recently, switching to a syndication-only content model a year and a half ago and having its ad sales move to AOL. To personalize MSN.com’s content and ad experience, Microsoft revealed Tuesday it had signed on with Taboola to bring native ads and personalization to the MSN site […]
Since its launch in 2014, Facebook’s ad network has limited itself to mobile app placements, choosing to avoid working with mobile web properties. Now that’s changing. AdExchanger has learned Facebook Audience Network is one month into a test involving about 10 publishers that would see the ad network’s placements run on mobile web pages. The […]
Chicago-based ad platform company Centro let go 29 of its 725 employees on Monday, or about 4% of total staff. Unlike other recent layoffs in the ad tech sector – including at Turn, Collective and PubMatic – the cuts were not motivated by a shrinking pool of cash, restless investors or slouching revenue growth. Instead, […]
Header bidding is coming to mobile apps, via a solution Rubicon Project is beta testing with 20 publishers. Early results for the product, FastLane, saw CPM increases of up to 300%. Rubicon will release the product more widely to publishers in Q1 of next year. Unlike the mobile web or desktop, mobile apps bring in […]
Twitter on Thursday made its first attempt to capitalize on its logged-out audience with the launch of a private beta test program with select advertisers in the US, UK, Japan and Australia to target promoted tweets and promoted videos at users who aren’t logged into Twitter. As of Q3 2015, Twitter had around 320 million […]
Sell-side platform PubMatic has dismissed more than 100 employees, AdExchanger has confirmed. The layoffs, affecting 20% of the company’s global staff, follow an 8% reduction in October. The combined cuts have reduced PubMatic’s workforce from 600 to about 450. Additionally the company lost two key leaders on the publisher and demand side: Evan Adlman, VP of publisher […]
Square may be a unicorn – but it’s got its eye on the little guy. “We’re leveling the playing field,” said Kevin Burke, former Visa CMO and now head of acquisition at Square, which completed its long-awaited IPO in mid-November. “We’re helping small businesses close the loop.” Integrating online and offline has long been the […]
Tim Armstrong is going to have to look for a new successor. The AOL CEO’s heir apparent, the highly visible Bob Lord, will soon step down from the company, which he joined two years ago to help spearhead an aggressive expansion of the company’s ad technology vision. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news […]
Eight months after former CEO George John stepped down and the company started a search for his replacement, Rocket Fuel has decided to give head of sales Randy Wootton the keys to the city. Wootton was first hired in March to oversee a reorganization that split the company’s sales efforts clearly into three channels: agencies, direct […]
AppNexus unveiled a publisher suite Wednesday designed to offer an alternative to DoubleClick for Publishers [DFP], the dominant solution in the market. The AppNexus Publisher Suite includes an ad server, completely rebuilt after its acquisition of OAS [Open AdStream] in September 2014, and supercharged with forecasting from its acquisition of Yieldex in March. Publishers can […]
It’s been about three years since Zipcar left its digital ad agency in the rearview mirror, and the brand hasn’t looked back. The car-sharing company shifted all of its online ad buying to programmatic channels, turning to Accordant Media, whose stack includes a demand-side platform, an audience-buying platform, analytics, cross-channel attribution and a dynamic creative […]
If a turnaround story is going to fly, it’s got to take off at some point. But Prashant Fuloria, Yahoo’s SVP of advertising products, is preaching patience. “The reality is that this is a multiyear transformation, and our long-term trajectory will not be defined by a single quarter,” Fuloria said. Speaking of quarters, the results […]
Content sequencing is going omnichannel. OneSpot, whose tech sequences content across paid media, unveiled an expansion of its Content Sequencing platform Wednesday that brings the capabilities to owned media as well. Launch partner Delta Faucet implemented OneSpot OnSite, designed for brands’ owned sites, last month on its “Inspired Living” section. Located beneath articles about home […]
Mobile now makes up more than a quarter of Rubicon Project’s revenue, according to the company’s Q3 earnings report Tuesday. Twenty-six percent of revenue comes from mobile, and 74% from desktop. That’s up from 22% last quarter and single digits in years past. President Greg Raifman called that channel growth the “tip of the iceberg.” […]
