Platforms

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 […]

Pinterest’s advertising business took its next step toward scale with the official launch of its ads API on Thursday. The ads API, which Pinterest introduced in beta in April, comes on the heels of a flurry of brand-focused products from the social platform, including an imminent buy button, a content API for businesses to manage […]

Ben Barokas – whose company AdMeld was purchased by Google in 2011 – unveiled his latest venture Thursday: Sourcepoint. The company, through which publishers can ask their audience to support the content either through general advertising, interest-based advertising or subscription, also raised a $10 Million Series A round Thursday, led by Spark Capital and Foundry […]

Email advertising and marketing platform LiveIntent unveiled a $32.5 million growth equity investment on Wednesday, led by FTV Capital. Other investors include Battery Ventures, First Round Capital and Shasta Ventures. It will use the funds primarily to build out its platform and APIs for wider integration with other marketing tech companies like Salesforce, an effort […]

As of Tuesday, Pandora has made all its smartphone and tablet display inventory available for programmatic buying. The announcement expands on its programmatic display business, which has been generally available since January, and formally takes Pandora’s mobile programmatic solution out of beta. The solution first surfaced in March and has since been trialed by a […]

Steve Jobs’ notorious open letter “Thoughts on Flash,” published in 2010, was considered the final nail in the coffin for its status as the go-to software for web and mobile development. But like the Internet’s most powerful zombie, Flash has continued to play a prominent role for developers and ad builders. HTML5, the solution listed […]

As audiences increasingly find and engage with content on Facebook, publishers face two choices: Keep trying to monetize that audience off of Facebook, or find a way to sell their Facebook audiences to advertisers. Deseret Digital Media is going the latter route, using posts in its FamilyShare Facebook feed as part of the native advertising […]

By Allison Schiff and Zach Rodgers. Wall Street never really seemed to get soon-to-be-former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. Costolo will step down as chief exec of Twitter on July 1, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. [Read the SEC filing.] Founder and board chairman Jack Dorsey will take the […]

Twitter has a DM for brands: We care about DR. “We highly prize the ability to drive ROI,” said Richard Alfonsi, Twitter’s VP of global online sales. So do most of Twitter’s competitors, with Pinterest, Instagram, Google and Facebook all at various stages of buy button rollout. It makes sense. Social platforms are starting to […]

Mobile native isn’t just about look, it’s also about feel – and there’s nothing more native to the mobile experience than a tap. “Brands and users are looking for an alternative to web banners squished into mobile,” said James Cooper, head of creative at New York City-based digital ads startup Betaworks, which announced Tuesday that it […]

Visa wants merchants and consumers to know it’s everywhere they want to be. And, increasingly, everywhere means mobile. The brand is committing more than 50% of its US media budget to digital, including social and mobile, said the company’s SVP and head of North America marketing, Lara Balazs. Last year, it invested 30-40% or more […]

Apple’s stance on data collection: “We honestly just don’t want to know,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering, to roughly 5,000 app developers at the tech giant’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday. “We don’t mine your email, your photos or your contacts in the cloud to learn things,” Federighi said. “All of this is done […]

Agencies and publishers alike have jumped into private marketplaces. Rocket Fuel, known for its performance-driven campaigns in open marketplaces, has lately begun pitching an offering of its own. For the past six months, it’s partnered with agencies and publishers to enable performance-driven campaigns in premium environments, building on technology put in place by [x+1], which […]

Datasift’s hookup with Facebook is gaining steam. It’s a good thing for the social media data provider, which got cut off from Twitter’s firehose in April, one month after announcing its non-exclusive Facebook partnership. On Wednesday, social analytics platform Pulsar became one of the first Datasift clients to benefit from this connection – it will […]

When Reddit revealed it would produce original video, code for “more premium content,” it was right in line with its pitch to brand advertisers – as well as more tools for publishers – through features like embeddable comment threads. That said, the last thing it will compromise is a solid user experience in its community […]

The fox can’t guard the chicken run. GroupM is not down with Facebook and Google’s reticence around third-party verification tags. “You can’t measure yourself,” said John Montgomery, COO of GroupM Interaction, North America, speaking at AdExchanger’s Clean Ads I/O conference in New York City on Wednesday. The fact that Facebook is working closely with the […]

Brands need to feel confident that their ads are being seen – and “because we said so” is not an acceptable answer. That’s why Yahoo is bringing third-party verification tags from comScore, DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, Moat and several others onto its owned-and-operated properties and onto third-party sites within the Yahoo network. Yahoo is slated to […]