All Fun And Games
Live video threw sports broadcasts for a loop – and the losses are only just being tallied.
Last week, two brothers, one in New York City and the other in Bangladesh, were indicted for operating an illegal streaming service called 247TVStream, Fortune reports. The service subscribed to other streamers with live sports and simply rebroadcast those feeds.
They also broadcast on-demand shows from those streamers.
247TVStream didn’t collect live broadcast ad dollars, but viewers did have to pay for access.
The scheme, which ran for years, was a cruel self-own for streaming services and a major frustration for the leagues. They’re all trying to recover their former TV ratings, and yet it’s possible that hundreds of thousands if not millions of people watch live sports on some unofficial channel, like YouTube or Twitch.
Marketers, however, may not despise the trend.
TV ad rates increased consistently for years despite worsening ratings. Those prices finally plateaued and even declined in the past year or two. Marketers would probably rather pay for ads than concede any hard-won decrease to TV prices.
Broadcasters, meanwhile, would likely forego the ad revenue to reconcile their live TV ratings with pirated streaming viewers.
Slop-happy
Artificial intelligence is already revolutionizing the ad tech industry – but not how anybody hoped.
Adweek reports that media buyers are dealing with a surge of AI-generated, made-for-advertising websites – up from 20,000 at the beginning of the year to 50,000 now, according to fraud detection company DeepSee.io.
What’s more, this low-quality content (oh, let’s just call it slop, everyone else already does) appears to be a bigger problem when buying using AI-powered tools like Google’s Performance Max.
One agency executive even claims that between 30% and 40% of display and video ads in a recent Pmax campaign were served to cookie-cutter MFA sites with questionable and sometimes even dead domains.
Google does have a dynamic exclusion list that allows advertisers to block specific placements. However, it doesn’t specifically target MFA sites, meaning advertisers have to block each individual site manually, which is impossible to do at scale.
Another anonymous exec laid the problem square at Google’s feet as a “monopolistic organization.”
Google could obviously be doing a better job with quality assurance. But meanwhile, the AI slop bottle’s already been popped, and the cork’s not going back in anytime soon, if ever.
TTD TV
The Trade Desk launched a TV operating system on Wednesday called Ventura, Axios reports.
So what?
Despite TTD CEO Jeff Green’s assertions to the contrary (lol), the company was rumored to be working on a TV OS, and this news was expected. The Trade Desk’s inaugural launch partner is Sonos. It’s a creditable, well-known hardware brand with inventory of a sort. For example, Sonos has more audio opportunities than it does TV or CTV.
With only Sonos on the network, the Ventura OS lacks scale, and there’s not really an ad business there – not yet at least.
Credit where credit is due, though. In an ocean of pluses and maxes, The Trade Desk remains committed to weirdness.
Ventura is a nod to The Trade Desk’s headquarters in Los Angeles – and it’s actually rather tame compared with other TTD product names. There’s Kokai, TTD’s machine learning-based ad product; the new DSP user interface called Solimar; Megagon, a campaign planner tool; and Galileo, TTD’s first-party data portal announced last year.
But Wait, There’s More!
It’s official: Comcast is spinning off all of its NBCUniversal cable networks. [Variety]
The incoming Trump administration puts a potential breakup of Google’s Chrome in a new light. [Digiday]
The number of new mobile internet users is stalling out. [Rest of World]
You’re Hired!
OpenWeb appoints Steven Goldberg as SVP of partner success. [release]
