Aditude

Remedies in the federal search antitrust case against Google landed with a thud earlier this week. Most publishers and ad industry pundits were sorely disappointed.

The past two decades have left publishers struggling to effectively compete with “easy buttons” from tech giants and UGC behemoths. The ad tech industry must proactively support publishers with solutions tailored to their needs.

The wave of ad tech headlines in recent weeks represents a long overdue moment of reckoning for companies who (still) hold disproportionate control over publishers’ website traffic and revenue potential.

For publishers, digital advertising is a lot like playing craps, says Aditude’s Justin Wohl. It’s all about tuning out the noise while placing safe bets that work for your monetization strategy.

A new storyline is emerging around curation, one in which publishers feel they’ve lost out to middlemen on yet another opportunity to monetize their audiences.

If Chrome imitates Apple, there may be a de facto deprecation of the third-party cookies, since potentially only a slim percentage of users would consent to tracking. In that case, advertisers would still have to primarily rely on cookie alternatives, including the Privacy Sandbox.

Publishers and online video platforms that rely on accompanying content video ads could see their revenue drop after Google AdX’s April 1 update.

The acquisition should help Aditude expand its footprint in the gaming vertical. But the main rationale, from Aditude’s perspective, was CPMStar’s already-established direct sales business.

Here are the pros and cons of client-side and server-side header bidding, and some typical use cases for each.

Aditude plans to spend the money doubling its headcount and enhancing its cloud-based prebid wrapper and other publisher tools.