Adalytics

TV piracy of sports streams is siphoning away millions of viewers. Then: Vox Media and BuzzFeed found new owners this spring, punctuating the end of the pageview era.

Although tides of ad revenue flow based on the ratings of certain tentpole TV events, a new crop of scammers now operate illicit sports livestreaming rings, and there’s almost nothing broadcasters can do about it.

An upcoming paper from CIMM doesn’t just demonstrate that differences in media quality can be measured. It also argues that tying media value to short-term outcomes has perpetuated longstanding industry challenges.

Our industry has done a terrible job rewarding publishers for monetization choices that align their supply to quality and outcomes vs. short-term yield bumps. But is it overly optimistic to think The Trade Desk’s recent moves prove that’s changing?

CleanTap claims that 100% of the invalid traffic it spoofed was accepted into live auctions run by programmatic platforms and was successfully bid on by advertisers.

Former Meta employee files a complaint regarding the company’s illegal business practices; virtual AI salespeople are hosting 24/7 livestreams; and Google SPN advertisers will now receive a list of URLs where their ads appeared.

Protected by Mediaocean, Mediaocean’s ad verification division, is partnering with the Internet Watch Foundation to crack down on CSAM and ensure children’s online safety.

New social media content moderation policies will enable connections with audiences that reflect a broader range of perspectives, expand inventory, and provide opportunities for contextual alignment.

YouTube accounts are uploading recent Hollywood movies, racking up views while advertisers (and sometimes creators) remain in the dark. Plus: Could Cloudflare’s AI bot blockers provide a salve for digital media’s traffic declines?

For at least a year, Adalytics has observed creator accounts on YouTube eluding the platform’s IP and rights monitoring tech to distribute movies, shows and live sports that should be exclusive to streaming or cable subscriptions.

Programmatic promised clarity: automation, efficiency and measurable outcomes. What we got instead is complexity dressed up as optimization: a stack of acronyms performing trust theater.

AdExchanger spoke with DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski just a few days after the company sued Adalytics alleging defamation over the latter’s recent report on bot detection.

Proof keeps piling up that gen AI makes marketing creatives lazy; Google stops serving ads to parked domains, prompting questions as to why those domains were ever monetized; and a resurgent David’s Bridal thinks it can reach profitability this year.

What’s old is new. Time is a flat circle. Trends are cyclical. Choose your idiom, because this week’s episode grapples with two topics that are back in style (so to speak): bot traffic and the tantalizing dream of scaling programmatic in-game advertising.

Industry experts agree that the bot activity analyzed in the latest Adalytics report is among the easiest type of invalid traffic to spot.

An Adalytics report released Friday details numerous instances of brands serving ads to known bots that appear on the IAB Tech Lab’s International Spiders and Bots list and TAG’s Data Center IP List.

WPP shares dipped to a four-year low on after posting its 2024 earnings results. Plus: How brands are courting virality.

To solve ad tech’s intractable problems, there’s a solution that the advertising industry could borrow from the hacker world: bug bounties.

YouTube is adding a new tier with a “light” ad load. Plus, remember Facebook?

When an ad shows up next to illegal content, there is often not a single point of failure. Adalytics Krzysztof Franaszek walks us through why he found ads showing up next to the worst kind of criminal content — and the simple and complex solutions to this problem.

On Friday, Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn) sent co-written letters to Amazon, Google, Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, the MRC and TAG notifying the companies that they have been identified as “responsible for serving or certifying” ads on pages hosting child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Every week, we publish an original comic creation inspired by trends in the online advertising industry. These are the stories – and the highly specific double entendres – behind AdExchanger’s top 10 comics of 2024.

The programmatic open marketplace is designed to sustain the business models of ad tech, agencies and consultancies, rather than serving the interests of advertisers, audiences and media owners. It cannot be fixed. It must be rebuilt.

NCIS: Ad Tech takes off as Washington zeroes in on Adalytics reports; Kroger says attention has yet to prove correlation to performance; and inside California’s backroom deal with Google to fund journalism and AI.

In the crosshairs this time: media sellers with masses of user-generated content, including movie and video review forums with unmoderated comment and discussion sections.

How big of a deal is The Trade Desk’s top 100 list? AdExchanger spoke to industry experts for their reactions and bounced some of their hot takes off The Trade Desk.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Guinea Pig Farm Google rushed generative AI search responses before the product was ready for primetime. In a recent blog post, Google announced a series of hasty updates after the rollout resulted in some glaring errors. (Would you like some glue in your […]

Pivoting to a “premium internet” is like avoiding the parts of town that have been blighted by illicit activity. The only real solution to MFA is for the dollars to dry up.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Signaling Change Amazon has a new ad measurement product for publishers. Signal IQ, as it’s called, is designed to help sites measure the impact of alternative IDs on campaign performance, including for streaming media, Ad Age reports. The idea is to make it easier […]

Made-for-advertising (MFA) sites are roosting in reputable publishers’ subdomains. IDs are declared inconsistently. And the established third-party measurement companies are sitting on the sidelines.