Platforms

In-app fraud is turning into another expensive headache for advertisers. According to research released Thursday by fraud detection firm Forensiq, programmatic in-app ad fraud was responsible for roughly $776 million worth of wasted budget in 2014, a number Forensiq projects will crack the $1 billion mark this year. That might seem like a relative drop […]

AwesomenessTV, which was purchased by DreamWorks Animation in 2013 for $33 million, is racing to reach teen audiences and capture more brand dollars in the Gen-Z gold rush. Those born in the mid ’90s-early 2000s, that is. With more than 2 million followers and 1 billion video views per month, AwesomenessTV is generally regarded as […]

A year after Yahoo’s disastrous Q2, the company reported year over year revenue growth of 15%, or $159 million, its best in nearly nine years. Yahoo saw Q2 revenue of $1.24 billion. So-called “Mavens” revenue (mobile, video, native and social) grew 60% to $399 million from $249 million during the same time last year. Yahoo CEO Marissa […]

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), which is uniting industry players to root out criminal activity in digital advertising, has unveiled a pilot program to block fraudulent traffic coming from data centers. Google proposed the data center project and is leading the pilot program, which will see member companies sharing intelligence about fraudulent data centers. The companies […]

YouTube has sparked a brand fire, but can it ignite the same flame with content owners? “YouTube invented short-form video and took the category from zero to 4 billion views over a period of five years, but then it flat-lined and nothing happened,” said Hilary Perchard, head of US investments for European broadcaster and pay-TV operator […]

John Nardone, the newly minted CEO of UK-based ad serving platform Flashtalking, feels like he’s come full circle. After spending more than 10 years deep in the ad tech weeds, Nardone, whose resumé includes the chief exec role at [x+1] – which sold to Rocket Fuel in August 2014 for around $230 million – and the co-presidency at […]

Technorati on Monday released SmartWrapper, a SaaS-based product that helps publishers run multiple header bidding partners by bringing all demand partners into one place. For publishers juggling multiple partners, SmartWrapper helps manage implementation page latency and gives publishers more unified analytics. With the product release, Technorati enters a different market. “We see this continuing down […]

David Karnstedt, who headed performance-marketing engine Efficient Frontier during its $400 million sale to Adobe in 2011, is taking the reins yet again as CEO of a data startup called Quantifind. He will lead a 60-person team seeking to scale quickly. Quantifind, which has raised $12 million, is among a handful of startups that act […]

PowerInbox is bringing content recommendation engines to email via its RevenueStripe product. Think Outbrain meets LiveIntent. Beta-launched last summer and brought to the general market in January, RevenueStripe is gaining traction. It now appears in 1.5 billion emails a month. It’s attracted 60 publishers, like Ziff Davis, Prime Publishing and Hearst, which inserts RevenueStripe into […]

Google’s recent push to prioritize mobile-friendly sites in organic search results is straining the advertising ecosystem, according to Adobe Digital Index’s Q2 2015 Digital Advertising and Social Intelligence report, released Wednesday. The Adobe Digital Index for Q2 2015 noted a 10% decrease in organic traffic on Google among sites that weren’t optimized for mobile. The […]

Beyond the morass of fraud and viewability hides another tripwire for advertisers: government regulation. That’s why UK-based credit card issuer Barclaycard is getting proactive about compliance. As a company that’s smaller than the competition and still making inroads in the US market, Barclaycard is particularly risk averse when it comes to regulatory issues. To that […]

Despite the doom and gloom around declining linear TV viewerships, networks like Discovery Channel still score on popular annual programming events like Shark Week. The network claimed 2014’s Shark Week was its biggest ever, drawing 42 million viewers in the course of the week, which spurred its decision to expand the weeklong summer event, which […]

When Ellen Pao stepped down from her post as CEO of Reddit on Friday – ceding the spot to Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman – it left Reddit’s monetization situation murkier than ever. In a question and answer session on Reddit’s popular AMA (Ask Me Anything) section, Huffman wrote, “Reddit has a lot of cash. Monetization […]

AOL is giving its multitouch attribution system, Convertro, a little extra juice by adding contextual data that measures the impact of ZIP code-level weather data within marketing mix models. Other forthcoming additions to Convertro will include conditions around the local and national economy and gas prices. Convertro claimed, even before it was acquired, that it […]

YouTube multichannel networks (MCN) – and their influencers and fan bases – keep whetting investors’ appetites. Media research firm Ampere Analysis values the entire MCN business at approximately $20 billion in a study of three years’ worth of MCN investments released this week. German media giant ProSiebenSat.1 is the latest to jump in, acquiring on […]

If mobile and video are the twin engines driving ad tech, then AOL’s rumored $300 million to $350 million acquisition of Millennial Media would put the pedal to the metal. The potential deal, first reported by AOL-owned TechCrunch on Thursday, comes just a few weeks after the official close of Verizon’s $4.4 billion purchase of […]

Remember StumbleUpon? The content discovery and social bookmarking site born in 2001 wants to go beyond its bread and butter, driving social shares and referrals to publisher sites. That means StumbleUpon is expanding into new channels – and with good reason. StumbleUpon had 30 million monthly active users in 2014, but that number pales in […]

Pinterest is proving to be a nice fit for secondhand online clothier Twice. The company, which acts as a sort of hybrid Amazon/eBay-like marketplace for gently used duds, had seen success with all the usual marketing mix suspects – display, search ads, Facebook, Twitter – but it was on the hunt for a fresh channel to reach […]

A year after embracing programmatic technology, Live Nation is planning another major expansion of its ad tech capabilities, this time by connecting its many online and offline properties into a holistic marketing platform. With its “Fan Connect programmatic platform,” the entertainment company is continuing its evolution into a “digital publisher” – not in the sense […]

Microsoft isn’t the advertising behemoth it once aspired to be when it purchased aQuantive for $6 billion in 2007. Since then, Microsoft has mostly been a publisher, selling inventory both directly and programmatically across its Microsoft Network (MSN) family of sites, its Outlook email portal, Skype and Xbox. Following the Microsoft-AOL search and display deal, […]

Microsoft and AOL observers have a lot of questions in the wake of the companies’ landmark search and display ad deal, announced Monday. Here’s a big one: How will AOL, a company of some 4,500 employees, possibly absorb 1,200 new sales, marketing, biz dev and engineering people? Once the partnership is consummated, AOL will have […]

Autoplay is here to stay, especially in light of Facebook’s and Twitter’s latest video launches. Two weeks after Twitter offered marketers a 100% in-view guarantee on autoplay video ads for three seconds, Facebook came out swinging with a cost-per-view model and a revenue-sharing agreement for ads sold against Suggested Videos. With unique pricing models emerging for […]

While AOL’s absorption of Microsoft’s display, search and video ads business is indicative of Verizon’s digital media interests, industry insiders aren’t quite convinced the flagship publications it inherited through the AOL acquisition will stick around for the long haul. An early Huffington Post exec said Verizon will need to treat the media group like “a […]

The music streaming space got a bit more crowded on Tuesday with the launch of Apple Music, rivaling streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and Google Play. But as the war to win audiences escalates, questions about Apple’s model linger. After a three-month free trial, Apple Music will become a subscription-based platform for a monthly fee […]

Some bots are good, but most bots are not – and Distil Networks, which announced $21 million in Series B on Tuesday, has its eye on the latter. The round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with pinch hitting from Foundry, TechStars, ff Venture Capital, Idea Fund and Correlation Ventures, brings Distil’s total funding to $38 million. […]

In a new 10-year search-and-advertising alliance, Microsoft will transfer the lion’s share of its display ad business to Verizon-owned AOL. Under the deal, approximately 1,200 Microsoft employees will get offer letters from AOL, most of them in ad sales. Additionally, AOL will end its search distribution relationship with Google in order to accept Bing search and ads on […]

B2B vendors have a wealth of white papers and other content marketing materials, but often struggle to find the right readers. Distributing B2B content usually requires direct deals with individual publishers, which can limit scale for advertisers when those publishers have small footprints. To address this issue, B2B content marketing company NetLine created a marketplace […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Dave Smith, vice president of monetization and yield at Pandora. There has been a lot of talk about programmatic audio lately. But where’s the beef? What is the publisher value proposition that’s going to […]

7UP is giving the thumbs up to live-streamed video. For the second year in a row, the carbonated beverage brand is sponsoring Yahoo’s live stream of the Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), an annual electronic dance music mecca sponsored by entertainment company Insomniac in Las Vegas this month. Music has been on Yahoo’s mind since the […]

IPG’s MAGNA GLOBAL and Publicis Groupe’s ZenithOptimedia released global advertising forecasts Monday, both noting that, in very distinct ways, mobile propels the world’s advertising industry. MAGNA predicted mobile will go from 30% of all digital advertising to 55% by 2019, with a 53% increase this year – crossing the symbolic $50 billion mark. ZenithOptimedia similarly […]