Publishers

The bid has dropped. Comcast on Wednesday again attempted to outmaneuver Mickey and acquire most of 21st Century Fox’s assets with a $65 billion cash offer, putting Disney’s deal in jeopardy. Disney offered Fox a $52.4 billion all-stock deal in December. Comcast wants to disrupt the deal and follow in AT&T’s footsteps: a content distributor […]

Reddit is hoping advertisers upvote its latest ad offering: outstream video. The ad unit is being made available to managed partners on Tuesday, and all advertisers will get a crack through self-serve within the next few months – but programmatic is still a long way off. Although programmatic is on Reddit’s road map, “we’re still in […]

USA Today Sports Media Group acquired Golfweek 20 months ago because of its great content and readership of obsessive golf fans. After working with Golfweek on advertising and content partnerships, the Gannett-owned group saw how much more it could do with Golfweek if it owned the property. “We thought we could run it much more […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The House Always Wins As YouTube keeps dialing up brand safety protections, creators in marginal or disreputable categories are feeling the brunt. A relatively small but active group of creators who stream from inside casinos (because people like to watch others gambling) have found […]

Ads.txt is headed to the app ecosystem. What form will it take? That’s still shaking out. The IAB Tech Lab released guidance on Wednesday with several proposals for how to implement Ads.txt within an app environment. Ads.txt is the Tech Lab’s initiative to reduce inventory spoofing and help advertisers distinguish legit supply sources from the […]

Facebook is hopping into in-app header bidding. Starting Wednesday, publishers can include Audience Network inventory in their in-app unified auctions. All formats will be available, including display, native and video. Facebook joins a long list of other platforms that have gotten jiggy with in-app header bidding in recent months, including Google’s AdMob, Oath, MoPub and […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Yaser Bishr, executive vice president of digital at Al Jazeera Media Network. Facebook’s days as a major disseminator of hard news are coming to a close. And while that puts the traffic of many […]

Video delivered over the internet to a smart television or connected TV could have a brand safety problem. We’re talking specifically about user-generated digital video streaming to a big screen and the niche OTT channels and streaming services that seem be springing up on a near-weekly basis. That type of video shouldn’t be confused with […]

When the sports news startup Minute Media was founded seven years ago, Bleacher Report, Huffington Post and other publishers already had demonstrated user-generated content and social traffic growth strategies before ditching the model for more traditional newsrooms. Minute Media wants to prove a new media company can stick with its contributors and generate returns by […]

Concert, the ad marketplace run by Vox Media and NBCUniversal, added three more large publishers to its network Thursday, increasing Concert’s reach from 80% to 90% of all internet users. PopSugar, Rolling Stone and New York Media were selected to create a strong offering around entertainment and female-focused content, according to Ryan Pauley, head of […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jay Friedman, COO at Goodway Group. In the past two weeks, I’ve been to two supply-side platform (SSP) summits and spoken in depth to more than a dozen publishers. I’ve learned a lot. In short, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Cleaning The Nest Twitter debuted a set of political advertising policies it will have in place for the 2018 US midterm elections. Read the blog post. Political advertisers will have to verify their identities and that they are based in the US, either by […]

Header bidding-enabled ad spend is on the upswing thanks to mobile. And though it’s still early days for in-app header bidding adoption, that train’s just about ready to leave the station. The number of mobile impressions transacted through unified auction technology increased more than 110% year over year in the first quarter of 2018, according […]

After purchasing programmatic audio platform AdsWizz in March, Pandora has become a force in the market. In February, Pandora began beta testing a private marketplace for video and audio. It also offers display inventory on the open exchange. As it jumps into programmatic, it’s training and staffing its 300-plus sales employees to become experts across […]

Publishers like to pretend that consumers can’t live without content – but if 95% of media brands disappeared tomorrow, no one would care, said Rafat Ali, CEO and founder of travel publisher Skift, at LUMA’s Digital Media Summit in New York City on Tuesday. Despite the value media people ascribe to the importance of what they […]

Telaria – the company formerly known as Tremor Video – has expanded its video supply-side platform (SSP) to a full stack with a decisioning engine, analytics and advanced-TV ad server, the company said Tuesday. The suite, called Video Management Platform (VMP), was made generally available Tuesday and has a handful of beta clients numbering in […]

Advertisers want everything at scale: a niche audience, a brand-safe environment, and beautiful, engaging ads. Atlantic-owned publication Quartz, Vox Media and NBCUniversal’s ad marketplace Concert are partnering to add scale to their respective ad offerings. With the partnership, advertisers can buy in a single deal across Quartz and business-minded publications at Vox Media and NBCUniversal: […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Erik Requidan, vice president of programmatic strategy at Intermarkets. In advertising, we just love the death watch. Publishers often hear rumors like “Desktops are dead!” How many times have we heard the bell toll […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Membership Has Its Privations A paywall and digital subscription craze has swept newspapers, magazines and new media companies in the past year, but many “will soon realize the size of their ‘real audience’ and will soon realize that they don’t pass the ‘value for […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.  Think of PicsArt as the love child of Instagram and Photoshop in app form. Advertising and in-app purchases make up the bulk of its revenue, but the photo-sharing and sticker creation app is branching out with an ad-free subscription […]

Data was center stage Thursday at Meredith’s first NewFront since the acquisition of Time Inc. closed at the end of January. “We’re a data-driven organization,” its chief marketing and data officer, Alysia Borsa, told AdExchanger, referring to “the new Meredith,” where data informs everything from product to advertising to editorial. The women-focused media company, which […]

Hulu told advertisers at its upfront on Wednesday that it’s reached the 20-million-subscriber mark. While 20 million subscribers is a lot smaller than rivals Netflix (125 million subs) and Amazon Prime (100 million subs), Hulu is ad-supported and only in the US. Ad-supported subscribers are up 40% this year to 40 million viewers, said Hulu’s […]

“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 independent audience strategy consultant.  In a world of “popcorn data,” quantity and reach are more important than quality and depth, and users are seen as “data cows” rather than customers. […]

The New York Times is eyeing inroads into TV and emerging channels such as voice search to confront the new realities of the news business. “Publishers who’ve relied too heavily on social platforms and display advertising are in flux, but we built a billion-dollar consumer business with 3.6 million subscribers across digital and print,” New […]

MoPub co-founder and former CEO Jim Payne is getting his next startup off the ground with MAX, a platform that helps mobile publishers sell programmatically. The company launched Thursday following around six months of beta-testing with a $3.5 million seed round led by Payne’s investment fund, Breakpoint Capital, and a handful of angels. They include […]

Although Tasty, BuzzFeed’s popular food property, commands a ton of reach, it wants advertisers to know that it’s also a performance play. BuzzFeed is making a concerted effort to prove the efficacy of its media, particularly on high-traffic properties like Tasty. “We didn’t set out to build a shopper marketing offering, but because of our […]

Oracle has acquired Grapeshot, a UK-based contextual targeting startup, the companies announced Tuesday. Grapeshot provides pre-bid insights based on the media being considered. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Grapeshot will join the Oracle Data Cloud, where it will be combined with Moat to strengthen the company’s brand safety service. The company initially focused […]

Viacom on Monday formed a multi-year agreement with Comcast’s advanced ads business, FreeWheel, to expand its use of the tech platform. Previously, Viacom used FreeWheel to power digital ad decisioning, but now, it will also use FreeWheel’s operating system to manage yield and grow revenue across live TV, set-top box and video-on-demand inventory. In addition, […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Rachel Parkin, senior vice president of strategy and sales at CafeMedia. Imagine if every impression could find its perfectly matched buyer. Demand-side platforms (DSPs) are the ultimate gatekeepers for screening inventory, but publishers only […]

NBCUniversal has joined the TV consortium OpenAP. Launched just over a year ago, OpenAP is a joint effort by broadcast networks Fox, Turner and Viacom to create a common data standard and provide a more accurate representation of advanced TV audiences across platforms. Through a multiyear agreement, NBCU will license its data platform Audience Studio […]