Platforms

Scruff has a love/hate relationship with programmatic advertising. When the gay dating app, which now has more than 12 million users, first came on the scene in 2010, its monetization strategy could pretty much be summed up in one word: AdMob. But in January, the Grindr competitor decided to remove all its banner ad slots […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Let’s Stay Together A growing chorus of media industry leaders, privacy activists and even legislators have called for anti-monopoly cases against Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. And those calls have only gotten louder since the European Union hit Google with a record-breaking $5.1 billion […]

Google AMP was supposed to help publishers deal with slow-loading mobile web pages and boost consumption of articles on phones when it rolled out almost three years ago. But publishers such as The Daily Beast aren’t seeing that promised increase in traffic on AMP to justify the lagging monetization they experience on AMP. The Daily […]

Some apps don’t seem to be taking GDPR seriously – or maybe just don’t realize how much they’re leaving themselves exposed. Although mobile apps aren’t necessarily more at risk of GDPR violations, they do have specific and nuanced tasks they must complete in order to comply, and many are noticeably behind. Mobile apps that rely on […]

Advertisers that want to exclude people interested in “Passover,” “Native American culture” or “evangelism” from seeing a campaign on Facebook will soon be out of luck. On Tuesday, Facebook said it’s planning to remove more than 5,000 ad targeting parameters that could be used to discriminate against minority groups. The targeting options will be unavailable […]

Index Exchange has for more than a year been doing bid caching, where if its buyer loses a programmatic auction, it holds onto the bid to see if it can serve an ad on the next piece of content the consumer views. Bid caching has enabled Index Exchange to gain market share against rival exchanges […]

RevJet wants to be an operating system for the customer experience, and it’s using a $21 million Series A round to get there. Total funding for the four-year-old startup, which helps marketers manage, test and optimize their digital advertising across touchpoints, is now $30 million. The round, revealed Wednesday, was led by private equity firm […]

Tapping into international markets, particularly the US, is lucrative but far from easy for a mid-size game developer from Indonesia, especially one trying to replicate a viral hit. Jakarta-based game studio Alegrium saw immediate success with a series of trivia apps that have collectively racked up tens of millions of downloads since the first title, […]

Amazon has begun enabling guaranteed private marketplace buys between its DSP clients and publishers using its Transparent Ad Marketplace product. Test deals are just starting to flow from Amazon’s DSP to publishers, AdExchanger has learned. Direct deals work like a guaranteed private marketplace: Advertisers commit dollars and place ads with specific, brand-name publishers using Amazon’s […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Ad Tech Is Consolidating Ad tech shows the hallmarks of a maturing market. Financing for ad tech companies this year is on pace for $1.5 billion, about half what it reached in 2015, The New York Times reports, citing data from CB Insights. Meanwhile, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Right At Home, Out-Of-Home Google is working on deals for out-of-home advertising inventory in shopping centers and transportation stations in Germany, and may expand an OOH offering to the US and UK. The Android mobile operating system, which runs on 75% of smartphones in […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Back To The Bench The US Justice Department is appealing the decision by Senior US District Court Judge Richard Leon to allow AT&T to acquire Time Warner. “Most legal observers believe the government faces an uphill battle in overturning the ruling,” reports The Wall […]

Disney missed its earnings expectations on Tuesday by a smidgen, causing its stock to dip about 1% in after-hours trading. But you can’t keep a good mouse down. Analysts expected $1.95 per share on revenue of $15.4 billion in the fiscal third quarter. Instead, Disney posted $1.87 per share on $15.2 billion in revenue – not […]

Snap’s revenue grew 44% year over year to $262 million in the second quarter. Its average revenue per user – a critical metric where Snapchat lags behind Facebook and Instagram – increased 34% to $1.40 in Q2. Snapchat’s transition to self-serve programmatic has allowed the company to scale its ad business in ways that weren’t […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Money On My Mind Recent data scandals haven’t stopped Facebook from asking US banks for information about their customers, The Wall Street Journal reports. Over the past year, Facebook has approached Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and US Bancorp for data, including user credit […]

Crimson Hexagon is back in business on Facebook and Instagram – mostly. The social analytics platform, which uses AI to analyze public data across social networks, said Friday that most of its customers have had their access restored to both Facebook and Instagram data since the end of last week. The process was far swifter for […]

Google is going full-court press on universal app campaigns (UAC) through a partnership with Unity Technologies, a company that makes development tools for game creators. Starting Thursday, Unity’s more than 10 million developers have access to advertiser demand from AdMob via a direct integration. It’s the first partnership of this nature between Google and a […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Good While It Lasted Facebook’s data partner program will shut down on Aug. 15, a result of policy changes following the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, and some marketers dread the impending loss. The program included data brokers like Acxiom, Oracle Data Cloud, Epsilon […]

Rubicon Project beat its Q2 revenue expectations, sending the stock up 15% in after-hours trading Wednesday. Rubicon Project is still in the middle of steering a huge ship out of danger: It’s burning cash faster than it can increase ad spend on its platform, the result of cutting buyer fees from the platform in November. […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Media Diet On average, US adults spend 11 hours per day consuming media, with six of those hours spent watching video, according to Nielsen’s Q1 Total Audience Report. Read it. Total video consumption grew 11 minutes over the previous quarter, with six of […]

Spotify has terminated its relationship with AdsWizz since Pandora acquired the programmatic audio platform for $145 million in March. Spotify confirmed the news Tuesday, shortly after Pandora’s second quarter earnings call. “We did sunset our partnership with AdsWizz,” said Spotify in an emailed statement to AdExchanger. “That being said, we remain dedicated to offering advertisers […]

Facebook’s stock took an unprecedented beating last week after the company raised concerns about its future growth – but the show must go on, and it’s gotta be measured. On Tuesday, Facebook said it’s making a bunch of modifications to the way it measures video in the news feed, with the goal of giving advertisers a […]

By Sarah Sluis, Ryan Joe, Allison Schiff, Alison Weissbrot and Rae Paoletta Programmatic is expanding, becoming a glossier way to transact and add value to both the buy and sell sides. “We are moving rapidly into a programmatic-first world,” said Sal Candela, president of enterprise partnerships at Omnicom. “There is a surge of quality inventory […]

Another day, another Facebook blunder, mishap or scandal – or so it’s felt since the Cambridge Analytica storyline started to unfurl in mid-March. But the nonstop headlines and incremental news hits make it easy to lose historical perspective. (As a colleague recently noted with surprise, “Wait, the Cambridge Analytica news only came out five months […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Opera, The Other Operator The Norwegian software company Opera, maker of eponymous web browsers and mobile apps, IPO’d on the Nasdaq stock exchange last Friday, raising about $115 million. Opera has a 2% sliver of the global browser market but hopes to grow along […]

That moment when you realize Wall Street will never give you a break, even if you beat on revenue and report profits. #MAUproblems. Twitter’s stock tanked more than 16% in pre-market trading Friday morning based on lackluster user growth in Q2, despite reporting a 24% overall revenue uptick and a third sequential quarter of profitability. […]

Even Facebook isn’t impervious to the downstream effects of repeated scandals, macro privacy trends and the law of large numbers. With Cambridge Analytica, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and flatlining use in North America, which is Facebook’s most lucrative market, the buck had to stop, or at least stall, sometime. It did so on Wednesday […]

This is a new podcast from AdExchanger. It will be available wherever you subscribe to podcasts.  In the wake of Facebook’s suspension of social listening tool Crimson Hexagon from its platform late last week, it’s easy to trace the reason for the crackdown to residual squeamishness from its Cambridge Analytica nightmare. In the latest episode […]

While most of Spotify’s ad-supported revenue comes from direct-sold inventory, its programmatic self-serve platform is growing fast – and now brings in 20% of total ad revenue. In Q1, Spotify reported that its programmatic revenue grew 94% in 2017 but did not break out a figure. Spotify launched its self-serve platform, Ad Studio, in the […]

Facebook’s monster growth narrative is set to stall in the coming quarters, due in part to its recent privacy and data policy changes. Shares plunged more than 20 percentage points in after-hours trading Wednesday when Facebook reported a $120 million whiff on its revenue goals – the company’s first miss since 2015 – and warned investors that […]