Publishers

Comcast’s acquisition of French video supply-side platform StickyAds on Monday will give its video ad tech division a serious boost. Comcast’s video ad server FreeWheel will be able to streamline the way big TV broadcasters allocate inventory by embedding StickyAds’ private exchange tech into its own video ad server. The capability will let FreeWheel’s TV […]

Updated with comment from FreeWheel’s CEO. Comcast has acquired StickyAds.tv, a French video ad tech startup focused on publishers. Re/code first reported the news Sunday night, and Comcast confirmed it Monday morning. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Business Insider claimed the deal was an all-cash transaction and worth “at least $100 million.” […]

YouTube reaches more 18- to 49-year-olds on mobile alone than any cable network or broadcaster, said Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, during Google’s glitzy Brandcast event Thursday night in New York City. She cited MAGNA Global’s $250 million upfront commitment to Google Preferred as evidence of the shift of brand TV dollars to digital. YouTube […]

Time Inc. on Thursday reported its best quarter in two years: It grew revenue 1%. For a Facebook or Google, those results would be alarmingly bad, but for a traditional media company trying to grow digital revenue as its large print and subscription businesses decline slowly year after year – well, that isn’t so bad. […]

After completing his first full quarter as CEO of performance marketing company Criteo, Eric Eichmann seems confident. Criteo had “very strong top-line growth,” Eichmann told AdExchanger ahead of the company’s Q1 earnings call on Wednesday. Revenue was up 41% year-over-year to $162 million at constant currency minus traffic acquisition costs and that performance was consistent across […]

Conversational UI is hot right now, and Playbuzz is hopping aboard the trend with a static content format that’s designed to mimic the layout of an SMS text conversation, including emoji, images and GIFs. Dubbed Convo, the main purpose of the unit is to spice up editorial, improve engagement and generate more time spent. That’s […]

Snapchat’s 10 billion daily video views can’t be wrong. At least, that’s publishers’ logic as they push vertical video. Hearst, for instance, rolled out a vertical video unit last month that it sells via direct deals with advertisers, and on Monday, outstream video company Virool launched a vertical video format called Vertical Reveal, which exchange partner […]

Four years ago, Hollywood trade pub Variety Magazine was aging and under threat. A paywall pushed Variety.com’s traffic dip to fewer than 1 million uniques. A revamped Hollywood Reporter and industry blogs like The Wrap and Deadline.com created new competition for advertising dollars. Its then-parent company, Reed Business Information, had stopped investing in Variety and […]

Intuit has hired Mike Zeman, an architect of Netflix’s programmatic trading desk, to help grow its Mint personal finance brand. Zeman will serve as director of marketing and business development for Intuit’s Consumer Ecosystem Group, reporting to SVP Albert Ko. During his three years at Netflix, Zeman led digital marketing during a period of dramatic […]

Acorns is an app that allows users to invest spare change left over from daily purchases in the stock market. Now it’s making an investment of its own with the creation of a digital magazine called Grow aimed at millennials. “We’re looking to satisfy a hunger our users have for financial content,” said Jeff Cruttenden, […]

The wave of acquisitions in digital media is almost always driven by the need for scale. Access to millennial audiences often plays a role as well. Both of these challenges played a role in the marriage of humor sites Cheezburger and eBaum’s World, which are uniting under the umbrella of Literally Media. A private group […]

Yahoo reported earnings on Tuesday. Details are below – but that’s hardly what people care about now. The real question is: Who’s going to buy it? Verizon’s the clear frontrunner, but there also a few upstarts. One such is a joint investment group that includes big names like former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn and […]

Facebook invited three new third-party ad verification partners into its inner sanctum on Tuesday – further evidence that what the buy side demands, the buy side gets. Integral Ad Science, comScore and Nielsen will now be able to verify viewability and attention metrics for display and video ads on Facebook, including mobile web and in-app. […]

Apester, a self-described digital storytelling platform, rounded out its Series A on Tuesday with $12 million, bringing its total funding to $17 million. The fresh infusion, which came after an initial $5 million round in July, was led by Blumberg Capital, with participation from Mangrove Capital, Wellborn Ventures and several others. The cash is earmarked for […]

Frankly’s content management system (CMS) and its “managed programmatic” ad selling service help more than 200 local TV news stations with their digital presence. As consumption shifts from desktop to mobile, the company is positioning itself to help these local TV stations make the transition too. But Frankly itself was under transition a year ago, […]

Updated with statement from Amazon. Amazon’s forthcoming $8.99-a-month subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service offers strong new competition to Netflix and Hulu. Will it include advertising as well? Not at first, but there is an internal debate at Amazon around the proper role of ads in its video offering. According to one source with knowledge of Amazon’s […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Samantha Price, director of ad products at The Weather Company, an IBM Business. I was recently asked if a recovered impression honored the user’s choice not to see an ad. It’s an interesting question, […]

Why did Google “democratize” dynamic allocation within its ad server on Wednesday to include external demand? Google addressed its rapid response to the rise of header bidding for broader exchange and publisher partners Thursday – and other developments – at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC.IO in San Francisco. “I find it interesting that this is the fastest time-to-market […]

In a major change to its Double Click for Publishers ad server, Google will bring in the real-time bids of a publisher’s outside exchange partners to its dynamic allocation product. The feature addresses a key problem that led to the rise of header bidding, essentially doing away with Google’s previous policy where it only allowed […]

Egmont, which operates more than a dozen publications in Europe, only started investing in digital advertising a couple of years ago. As the print business continued to decline, its Swedish operation decided to focus on fast-moving digital. By extension, that meant going all-in with programmatic. To kick it off, Lars Näslund joined in August as […]

It’s possible to sync radio ads and digital billboards to reach drivers with cross-channel messaging – but scale, targeting options and measurement are roadblocks to adoption. For one, there’s just not that much inventory available programmatically yet. “It’s nascent,” admitted Mark van de Crommert, CEO of Mediasynced, an Amsterdam-based TV/online syncing company that recently released […]

VICE is prioritizing off-platform distribution to reach new, loyal consumers who want more than a casual fling with its content. But although VICE has a gut read on who its audience is, it’s less clear what content mix resonates best across YouTube, Snapchat Discover and other platforms. “We have to recognize that Facebook is required […]

“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. As header bidding takes off, the advantages of private marketplaces (PMPs) are multiplying. With a PMP-first approach, advertisers lean toward maximizing PMP volume […]

Celebrities typically make money from their digital presences through influencer marketing, though some have become digital publishers. Consider Kim Kardashian’s app, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, Lena Dunham’s Lenny, Derek Jeter’s The Player’s Tribune and LaurenConrad.com. While many of those sites are custom-built, new companies like DWNLD and Fanbread are cropping up and offering turnkey solutions to […]

A group of publishers is testing a header bidding solution from Rubicon Project that is compliant with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages program. Tribune Publishing is among those who have implemented header bidding for AMP. It’s the first time header bidding functionality has been leveraged in support of the “platform publishing” craze that has lately seen […]

Condé Nast is expanding its programmatic offerings, giving buyers more options to use its first-party data and adding header bidding to boost programmatic supply. The new offerings, unveiled in a pitch to buyers Wednesday evening as “premium programmatic at scale,” comes three months after the company hired Evan Adlman as its head of programmatic. Condé […]

Beyond the headlines, the drama and all the talk, there’s the daily reality of actually putting viewability into practice. “The questions around how to transact around viewability have been such a big issue for both publishers and advertisers that I think there has been a session in just about every major conference over the past […]

LinkedIn is no Facebook, but it is a growing source of referral traffic for publishers. And as it turns to sponsored updates for more of its revenue, LinkedIn is encouraging users to spend more time scrolling through the feed – a move that will only benefit publishers posting content in that feed. Forbes, Bloomberg and […]

Mobile viewability is going through its awkward adolescent phase. There’s no official standard yet – the Media Rating Council (MRC) is planning to circulate a document for public comment in the next few weeks – and vendors are still tinkering with their methods. Which can lead to confusion around implementation, measurement-induced headaches and wonky reporting. “Everyone is […]

Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) and Time Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a new measurement product for attributing offline sales to print magazine advertising. “It’s the culmination of years of work and of a lot of pieces coming together,” said Leslie Wood, NCS chief research officer. And the product relies on a dense web of partners and […]