Platforms

Representatives from nine governments gathered in London on Tuesday with pointed questions for Mark Zuckerberg about fake news, misinformation, hate speech, election interference, privacy and data collection. Thing is, Zuckerberg wasn’t there, having declined repeated invitations to testify before the UK’s Digital Culture, Media and Sports Committee. The parliamentarians from Britain, Canada, France, Ireland, Belgium, […]

One year ago, Rubicon Project removed buyer fees from its platform, halving its take rate to 12.8%. The gutsy move occurred during a battle over take rates: Competitor AppNexus said its take rate stood at 8.5%, and its CEO called for a price war. Drastically cutting take rates forced Rubicon to use cash reserves to […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Collective Sigh Visto, the company formerly known as Collective, filed for bankruptcy protection and has reached a “stalking horse” deal to sell its assets to largest investor Zeta in a $15 million all-stock deal. The court filing gives a glimpse of just how tough […]

Aside from dedicated fans, most people who show up to a concert never hear from the band again. That fleeting relationship poses a challenge for musicians. How can they get people to come to their next concert? Or buy merch? Hurdl is solving that problem with connected LED wristbands, which live event attendees activate using […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an audience and data strategy consultant. Today’s modeled data at scale is evolving rapidly, due to legal and technical limitations. It is frequently misrepresented and mis-sold, but there would be no […]

Instagram is shopping for its share of holiday dollars. On Thursday, Facebook’s much-cooler sibling added three new features designed to help people browse, discover and save items more easily. A lot must happen before someone buys, and while shopping can be a by-product of spending time on Instagram, people aren’t there to fill their cart […]

Google Ad Manager is the dominant SSP, according to Advertiser Perceptions’ 2018 Programmatic Intelligence Report. But, the 154 publishers surveyed also valued platforms in areas like proactively shared insights and reporting – categories where Google didn’t perform as well as its competitors. “Google is the clear leader,” said Kevin Mannion, chief strategy officer at Advertiser […]

It’s been a tough year for Snap, as its stock tanks and its executive team flees the ship. Despite growing revenue 43% in Q3 to a record $298 million, Snap’s stock hit an all-time low in September of $10 per share. Snapchat is also bleeding daily active users after rolling out an unpopular redesign and facing increasing competition from Instagram. “Snap is struggling to […]

Pandora is making the podcast listening experience better for people and more monetizable for advertisers. The streaming platform revealed the beta version of its Podcast Genome Project, a discovery algorithm that recommends podcast episodes to listeners, based on their habits and searches. The beta will roll out to 1% of Pandora’s user base Tuesday and […]

The news feed is still a money-printing machine for core Facebook. But people aren’t sharing like they used to – Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser used Nielsen data to detect that consumption on core Facebook, including Messenger, was down 13% in September – and now Facebook is putting its faith into what it hopes will […]

Between “fake news” and lawsuits, few tech companies have been busier than Facebook. As a result, the platform’s technological ethos is changing. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has hinted that the company might phase out its classic news feed to focus on its Stories and Messenger features. Among these new avenues for monetization is Facebook Watch, […]

The B2B martech space is heating up as titans spend billions to build their stacks – and now it’s makeover time at LinkedIn. On Monday, LinkedIn opened the public beta for a revamped version of Campaign Manager, the self-service tool advertisers use to manage and measure campaigns on its platform. The idea is “to make it […]

A dozen local news publishers participating in Facebook’s Local News Subscription Accelerator, including The Denver Post and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, flew to New York, Austin and San Francisco this spring for a 12-week program to learn the intricacies of running a digital subscription business. Facebook has had strained relationships with publishers, which hit a […]

The Big Story is a breezy podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts. When giants move, everyone takes notice. This week on “The Big Story,” the AdExchanger team looks at some small but significant shifts in Amazon’s and […]

On Thursday, Facebook alerted advertisers, agencies and its marketing partners that starting in November, they’ll need to confirm the nature of their relationships to each other before they’re allowed to share Facebook data amongst themselves. Some businesses are in the habit of sharing data from using Facebook’s ad products with their partners to help with […]

Pinterest is growing its ad inventory with a new promoted carousel format, which moved out of beta on Thursday. Carousels, which allow advertisers to include up to five images within a single format, can appear within the Pinterest main feed as a related pin recommendation or through search. Users tap the cover image and then […]

The TV ad buying ecosystem is getting even messier, according to GroupM’s second-annual “State of Video” report, released Thursday. Some of the report’s revelations are familiar: Linear TV ratings are still dropping and, as eMarketer predicted in September, Amazon is a “likely third force” in the struggle for ad spend between Facebook and Google. GroupM […]

Even the mighty miss on revenue – but Facebook is still raking it in per user and Stories monetization across platforms is just getting started. Facebook reported $13.73 billion in revenue for the third quarter on Tuesday, $40 million less than what analysts expected. It’s Facebook’s second earnings miss in a row. But Facebook now […]

Starting Oct. 30, Google will make parallel tracking the default way to run third-party tracking for Google search and shopping ads. It’ll become mandatory for display and video ads by March 2019. For now, only Chrome traffic will use parallel tracking, with other operating systems and browsers to be added throughout the rest of the […]

Snap may have invented the Stories format, but Instagram Stories are attracting most of the ad spend. The two main reasons why sits at the heart of an existential dilemma for Snap: its audience and its scale. Snap’s youthful users are one of the platform’s primary selling points at the same time they’re a potential […]

Snapchat saw promising gains for its advertising platform in earnings reported Thursday. The company reported a record-high $298 million in revenue, with 43% year-over-year growth, and quarterly jumps in average revenue per user (ARPU) from $2.21 to $2.62 in North America and $0.66 to $0.85 in Europe. But Snapchat is still bleeding daily active users […]

Although Alphabet’s revenue grew 21% to $33.7 billion in Q3, that fell short of its target, sending its stock sliding 4.5% in after-hours trading Thursday. “We feel good about the underlying strength in the ads business,” said Google CFO Ruth Porat, noting that Google is investing in machine learning to further improve its ads business […]

Last quarter, Twitter’s stock got hammered after user growth stagnated, despite its solid financial results. But analysts appear ready to stop punishing Twitter for its user numbers. Although Twitter shed 4 million users in the third quarter year over year – monthly actives now total 326 million – the company’s stock grew nearly 3% in premarket trading […]

Online spending records have shattered across the country during this year’s midterm election cycle, but no campaign has brought more attention to digital media than that of Democrat Beto O’Rourke, a Texas congressman running for Republican Ted Cruz’s Senate seat. No candidate this year has raised more money online or spent more on Google, Facebook […]

 Putting together a sponsored content program is a time-consuming headache for buyers and publishers. BrandVerge, a marketplace where buyers can browse publishers’ sponsored content options, aims to make it faster and easier to create sponsored content deals. The platform claims to shorten the deal-making process by an average of 67%. Smaller agencies and direct-to-consumer brands […]

What kind of stories do people in market for a luxury SUV read? Forbes is answering that question using data, not a gut feeling, so brands can buy sponsorships and branded content based on what resonates with an audience. That question was once impossible to answer. Publishers would know, for instance, if readers indexed highly […]

AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. This episode of AdExchanger Talks is supported by StackAdapt. For this, our 100th episode of “AdExchanger Talks,” we bring you a wide-ranging conversation with Facebook’s top ad engineer, Mark Rabkin. This is Facebook’s first time on the podcast, so there was plenty of ground to cover. Rabkin, […]

If Amazon-owned Twitch reaches its goal this year of – according to Bloomberg – doubling its ad sales revenue to $1 billion, it has quite a lot to offer but a lot it must still do. On the plus side, Twitch, the popular video streaming platform that boasts more than 15 million daily active users, […]

Oracle kicked off its OpenWorld conference Monday by introducing a customer data platform (CDP) to connect disparate data sources and a subscription management product to capitalize on the blossoming subscription economy. The CDP, CX Unity, is now pre-integrated with the Oracle Customer Experience (UX) Cloud and is designed to tie marketers’ first-party data to anonymous third-party offline […]

Sovrn closed a $25 million Series E round Thursday to help it acquire companies outside of ad tech. Sovrn’s original investors, led by Foundry Group, all participated in the round. “Our business is 100% focused on tools and technologies that help publishers – of which advertising is an important one,” said Sovrn CEO Walter Knapp. […]