Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Redistribute The Wealth
The time is ripe for ad tech companies to feast on the scraps that remain of Oracle Advertising.
Contextual targeting platforms and ad verification companies that specialize in brand safety, viewability and fraud are all looking to poach Oracle’s soon-to-be-former customers, Adweek reports.
Problem is, many advertisers, agencies and publishers increasingly have trust issues with ad verification companies like IAS and DoubleVerify. Frustrations are boiling over about hyperactive brand safety blocking, the persistence of ad fraud and the ongoing scourge of made-for-advertising sites in auction-based bidding. (MFA sites have also been known to game viewability metrics, which has contributed to the rise of garbage content online.)
And so perhaps the biggest winners will be the contextual targeting companies, such as Peer39, Pixability and Zefr, which used to compete with Oracle’s Grapeshot. Zefr, for one, has been getting inbounds from brands and agency holding companies about migrating away from Oracle, says Zefr CCO Andrew Serby.
Audience platforms like Dstillery and Proximic by Comscore also hope to benefit from the fall of Oracle Advertising. Dstillery, for example, is pitching a “three-step transition” from Oracle to Dstillery.
Guess it never hurts to be opportunistic.
Reddit’s Credits
Reddit and Quora were standouts for Google Search AI Overviews. But citations of Reddit content are down by 85% since May, while Quora has 99% fewer citations, Search Engine Roundtable reports.
And overall, AI Overviews are now appearing in only 7% of all queries, down from 11%, according to SEO company BrightEdge. That’s more extreme than what’s been observed by other experts, which have seen a one- or two-point drop-off, with AI Overviews still appearing for more like 15% of queries.
Still, this trend is emblematic of a pullback in AI Overviews – and it’s about more than just a reaction to embarrassing blunders, like when Google’s search AI was fooled by a Reddit joke recipe into suggesting nontoxic glue as a pizza dough ingredient.
The real reason Google AI can’t obviously favor Reddit in particular comes down to antitrust concerns. Reddit recently committed hundreds of millions of dollars to Google Cloud and gave Google unique access to its data API. Google, meanwhile, has agreed to pay Reddit $60 million per year to license data for its AI model.
Yet Reddit dominates Google’s new organic search listings, with more than 15,000 of the most prominent Google Search product review listings. Quora boasts 3,455.
Everyone else totaled fewer than 200.
Hey, Kids
Disney’s decision to offer more than just family programming is a double-edged sword.
To expand its subscriber base, The Mouse House repositioned Disney+ as a content hub for live sports and shows with adult humor, which gives Disney a bigger addressable audience (because you can’t target ads to children). But by branching out to reach adults, Disney is missing out on kids, Business Insider reports. And YouTube is swooping in to capitalize on that market.
The proportion of kids between the ages of 2 and 11 who watch YouTube jumped from 19.4% to 23.3% YOY as of April, according to Nielsen data. For Disney, meanwhile, that number dropped from 7.9% to 7.6%.
“YouTube is their primary platform of choice,” says ex-Warner Bros. Discovery exec Alexia Raven, who co-founded a consultancy to study kids’ media consumption patterns. And the proportion of children watching YouTube only keeps growing, as Google aggressively pushes YouTube Shorts and more media companies include the format in their content distribution strategies.
Seems like kid-focused media is just the latest weapon YouTube is wielding in its quest to achieve streaming dominance.
But Wait, There’s More!
Google is reportedly in talks to acquire cybersecurity startup Wiz for roughly $23 billion. [WSJ]
Ad execs sound the alarm over Google’s risky Privacy Sandbox terms. [Digiday]
Why Instacart’s back-to-school ads don’t display any actual school supplies. [Ad Age]
An anonymous hacking group has leaked data about Disney ad campaigns and other projects supposedly obtained from internal Disney comms. [WSJ]
