Publishers

What’s up with The New York Times Co. and programmatic? We’ve pondered that question before, but the publishing giant declined to speak at the time. Since then, Times SVP of Ad Products and R&D Michael Zimbalist has revealed to AdExchanger that the company intends to release more inventory cautiously into the RTB space. It also is planning an […]

Comcast AdDelivery on Tuesday struck a deal with digital ad-distribution company Adstream to expand global video ad delivery efforts. The deal essentially fulfills each companies’ geographic delivery needs. While Comcast historically had a strong domestic delivery network, Adstream, an Australian-founded, $65 million-a-year business that’s headquartered in London, gives Comcast pertinent global reach. A trend in […]

Microsoft and Yahoo are loosening their stranglehold on their premium display inventory. MediaMath has set up a buying program that includes guaranteed direct buys in a programmatic environment. The program is enabled through partnerships with publishers Yahoo and Microsoft, along with technology partners Shiny Ads, iSocket and Yieldex. The partnership represents the latest industry attempt […]

“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jeremy Hlavacek, vice president for programmatic at The Weather Company. It looks like a good year to be a VC or investment banker. IPOs continue rolling out, and there is also a lot of healthy […]

Supply-side platform (SSP) AdsNative received Thursday a $2 million injection of funding led by Interwest Partners, raising about $750K in convertible debt prior to this series. The company also released a mechanism called Mediation/SSP, designed to maximize publisher fill rates for in-stream native ads. AdsNative will devote the majority of the funds to getting more publishers […]

Speculation about Alibaba’s upcoming IPO pegs Yahoo’s share at about $10 billion, giving Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer substantial firepower to acquire more companies and develop Yahoo’s businesses. But Mayer has an extremely thin margin of error to turn the Sunnyvale, CA company’s fortunes around. Despite its expected windfall, Yahoo is struggling. Its revenue for 2013 […]

The repercussions of cable heavyweight Comcast’s planned acquisitions of Time Warner Cable and video ad-serving platform FreeWheel are still unknown. One of the biggest questions for ad industry insiders is the extent to which the preexisting relationship between Amazon and FreeWheel, announced in early February, will continue. Although neither Amazon nor FreeWheel have confirmed whether […]

When The New York Times discontinued in February its director of programmatic advertising position, held by Matt Prohaska, partners and advertisers wondered how this would affect the publisher’s programmatic initiatives. Certainly the Times sought to alter its structure, saying in a statement it was “re-imagining and growing [its] programmatic organization and strategy with a focus […]

Comcast’s acquisition Thursday of video ad serving platform FreeWheel generated numerous questions, the most common being: What does this mean for the future of Pay TV and digital video ecosystem? Beyond anticipating the convergence of linear TV and digital video ad dollars, there’s still tremendous fragmentation between the worlds of the television operator and programmer, […]

“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Steve Goldberg, senior adviser at EmpiricalMedia. The industry has gone into full hand-wringing mode over fraudulent traffic, spurious clicks and low levels of viewable ads. That is good. After all, these are serious issues and […]

Comcast will acquire video ad-serving platform FreeWheel, the companies confirmed Thursday. The development comes just weeks after the cable giant made public its intent to acquire Time Warner Cable for $42.5 billion. TechCrunch first reported the news, and Re/code confirmed Thursday it’s a done deal and pegged its value at approximately $360 million. That’s roughly in line with […]

Visible World, which has been developing addressable TV technology since 2000, claims to cover nearly 90% of cable TV households in the US through its targeted ad products. The company has developed a video and TV campaign platform used by advertisers directly or by distributors to sell to advertisers. That same platform is now being […]

Google’s publisher business is on a tear. Last week it struck two private exchange deals with Time Inc. and the 42-member Local Media Consortium. Google will support programmatic direct sales for these sellers and provide wider access to their quality inventory for global media traders such as trading desks at Publicis Groupe’s Vivaki AOD or […]

Time Inc. has set up a private exchange with inventory from its global properties, supported by Google technology. The new, expanded marketplace – called Time Inc. Global Exchange – is built on Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange and spans some 116 million global unique users (per comScore). Advertisers and marketers can use it to reach audiences across […]

A deal between Google and a collective of 42 local media holding companies could enable private exchange deals spanning some 800 newspapers and 200 broadcasters. The agreement is the first in a series of projects that the so-called Local Media Consortium (LMC) – formerly known as the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium — will bid out to […]

Google has notified some customers of its DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) suite that they will no longer have access to DFP phone support or dedicated account reps. The tweak appears to be the result of a decision to raise the ad serving threshold at which publishers qualify to get managed services. A Google rep said […]

The New York Times, which last May made a move – albeit reluctantly – toward programmatic media selling with the hire of the company’s first director of programmatic advertising, Matt Prohaska, seems to have backtracked. Prohaska’s position, AdExchanger has learned, has been discontinued as of Tuesday afternoon. Prohaska was not available for comment. It is unclear […]

By Ryan Joe and Judith Aquino Media and cable conglomerate Comcast Corporation’s $45 billion deal to acquire its peer, Time Warner Cable, could be a boon for the advertising and marketing industry, combining Comcast’s superior digital platforms with Time Warner Cable’s audience reach across major metropolitan markets. “[This will provide] a level of scale and […]

The distinction between an ad exchange and a supply-side platform (SSP) has become muddled as the once disparate but complementary technologies have merged. Rubicon Project’s description of its offering as an “Advertising Automation Cloud” in its S-1 filed Tuesday underscored that shift and showed how companies originating as SSPs have attempted to shed the label. […]

“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view.  Today’s column is by Mike Zeman, director of North American digital marketing at Netflix. Numerous studies have outlined the importance of impactful creative in successful advertising campaigns. Many have shown that creative variables, such as messaging, formats and aesthetics, account for […]

2014 will be a “critical year in the story of advertising” at The New York Times Co., CEO Mark Thompson said during the company’s Q4 2013 earnings call today. It’s a story that will play out in ad tech, native ads, mobile formats and video. “In 2014, we will apply greater focus to mobile monetization, […]

At long last, sell-side platform (or do you say “ad exchange” or “marketplace”?) Rubicon Project has filed it’s S-1 Registration Statement with the U.S. Securities And Exchange Commission in preparation for an Initial Public Offering (IPO). The company is looking to raise $100 million. It has yet to reveal pricing for its offering so no […]

The 96-year-old Forbes Media has made an aggressive push into digital media. It’s invested in programmatic buying as well as native advertising through its BrandVoice platform. In October, it boasted that for the first time more than half (53%) of its total ad revenue came from digital advertising. The media company’s future has remained murky, […]

BuzzFeed, the ultrapopular purveyor of listicles and viral content, began with a question: “What does it take for something to spread on traditional media without the cost structure associated with traditional media?” The publisher’s CEO and founder, Jonah Peretti, recalled onstage at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview last week the way the company originated as “almost a […]

As the publishing industry attempts to find a way to bring the brand-friendly values of native advertising together with the scalability and speed associated with programmatic, blog network Federated Media Publishing (FMP) has decided those two functions would be best handled under separate roofs. FMP whose network includes heavily trafficked sites like Boing Boing and […]

Hearst Magazines Digital Media has continued expanding its programmatic focus by hiring former New York Times ad ops director Heather Keltz to fill its newly created position of VP for ad operations. Keltz reports to Mike Smith, the erstwhile Forbes chief digital officer who joined Hearst Magazines Digital as VP of revenue platforms and operations […]

If you’ve ever seen an online meme or a viral image (and these days who hasn’t?), chances are you either viewed it through the photo-sharing service Imgur (pronounced “imager”), or it was uploaded there first. Founded in 2009 by then-Ohio University computer science student Alan Schaaf, Imgur has seen its financial support structure evolve from […]

As publishers have become more comfortable with the idea of programmatic direct for their online sales, sell-side-focused analytics provider Umbel is trying to get sellers to expand that comfort zone to include audience targeting around offline media and live events. The 2-year-old Austin, Texas, startup’s pitch to publishers has rested on the idea that they […]

“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view.  Today’s column is by Mike Zeman, director of North American digital marketing at Netflix. It comes as a surprise to most publishers, ad-tech firms and other marketers I speak to that Netflix operates its own internal programmatic trading desk. In other […]

UK-based news outlet The Guardian is accelerating its programmatic ad offerings with the creation of a private video marketplace powered by Adap.tv. For the most part, The Guardian plans to aim the video marketplace to best capture incremental value around content such as tent-pole events like the World Cup and the upcoming Olympics. “When experiencing […]