Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
It’s Just A Little “3”
Forbes and Media.net are in hot water after an Adalytics investigation revealed a shady MFA subdomain (www3.Forbes.com) being sold programmatically as the normal Forbes URL, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The subdomain was shut down in late March, after the Journal raised the matter with Forbes while fact-checking the story.
But the Forbes subdomain has persisted for years, according to Adalytics Founder and CEO Krzysztof Franaszek. And it’s snuck by that long because the Media.net prebid server was misrepresenting the inventory as the Forbes site. Even The Trade Desk, which is known for effectively filtering MFA, bought ads on the MFA subdomain.
Media.net tells the Journal the misrepresentation was an error.
Most of the traffic to the www3 subdomain – 70%, according to Adalytics – came from content recommendation platforms (Outbrain and Taboola, primarily).
The subdomain was also well hidden because it wasn’t accessible via search engines or the public site – only through paid portals like content chumboxes.
Advertisers and agency execs who’ve made buys with Forbes are poised to review their logs and demand refunds for impressions served to the MFA subdomain.
Paying Attention
Could attention metrics validate the “premium” price tag for top publisher inventory? The New York Times thinks so.
The Gray Lady is the first to announce adopting attention measurement vendor Adelaide’s new publisher platform, Marketing Brew reports.
In addition to measuring how likely users are to actually engage with an ad, Adelaide also offers attention benchmarking against industry averages.
The NYT plans to benchmark both its direct-sold and programmatic ad inventory in an attempt to prove its premium status in the digital ad marketplace.
That’s because existing metrics like viewability aren’t effective for distinguishing “premium” publishers from everyone else, according to NYT executive director of audience strategy Gabriel Dorosz. So the news pub is looking for a better metric to prove its status (and justify higher CPMs).
The NYT also wants to tie attention scoring to campaign performance.
And if there’s a correlation, you can bet that high-performing, high-attention placements will carry a heftier price tag.
A major publisher like the NYT using attention for campaign pricing could speed along adoption of attention as a currency.
Looks like viewability better watch its back.
New Hub In The Wheel?
Alphabet is in talks about possibly acquiring HubSpot, a $35 billion mar tech and CRM company, Reuters reports.
Though whether it would pass antitrust muster is an interesting hypothetical.
On the one hand, it’s such a blockbuster deal that it’s hard to imagine it goes unchallenged by the FTC or other antitrust regulators. Big Tech companies are so constrained in dealmaking at this point, how could a $35 billion acquisition (plus a premium) get by?
On the other hand, as Reuters notes, Google would be entering a new vertical – the CRM market – which would bolster competition against category incumbent Salesforce. HubSpot also generated a net loss of $176 million last year, so it’s in a tough spot despite being a popular stock.
There would be many implications for advertisers. Salesforce and Google have been common partners and would now become direct competitors. Google would also bring into its first-party portfolio one of the major registries of business conversions – the sales and metrics that show up in their CRM. Alphabet also has an $111 billion cash stockpile, as of the beginning of this year.
But Wait, There’s More!
Marketers are leaning more on metadata, as they shift their reliance on third-party cookies. [Adweek]
Ad tech’s movers and shakers are readying a resurgence of M&A activity. [Digiday]
The AWS Clean Rooms product adds machine learning capabilities. [release]
Using cohort ages for product optimization. [Mobile Dev Memo]
Google considers charging for AI-powered search – a big potential change to its business model. [FT]
