Google has severed its relationship with ComboTag, the Israeli startup that sourced buyers for Adblock Plus’ recently launched Acceptable Ads Platform. “We were just as surprised as you were and certainly don’t want to be in a business relationship that [supports this],” Google’s SVP of ads and commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy, told reporters at DMEXCO in […]
If AppNexus Chief Economist Gabriel Weintraub could go back in time to the beginning of real-time bidding (RTB), he would have designed a different type of auction. “Because you are targeting so finely, you are creating thin markets. So the question is, how do you create rules that alleviate that issue, especially from the publisher […]
French video supply-side platform Teads has raised 43 million euros in debt financing – about $48 million – to continue pushing its outstream video ad formats. The financing came from several sources, including French multinational bank BNPP, Bank of China and HSBC. The company has raised $70 million in combined VC and debt, according to […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Brandon Atkinson, chief people officer at AppNexus. Imagine driving to your office, dropping off your dog with a caretaker, leaving your laundry with a drycleaner and buckling up your cycling […]
Home decor ecommerce site Wayfair is turning to its digital ad buying partner AppNexus to expand its media business. AppNexus will sell advertising across Wayfair’s ecommerce sites, which include Wayfair.com as well as Joss & Main, AllModern and DwellStudio. Using the same platform will make it easier to share data segments across Wayfair’s retail and […]
For many in the native space, the always-on-the-horizon prospect of the Promised Land has been a hard sell to other digital stakeholders. And though the industry has grown at a rapid clip, there’s still deep confusion over questions as basic and crucial as “What is native?” Native is “a broad term that lacks definition,” said […]
It’s come to this: The hopes of an industry are pinned on two SEC filings. Both AppNexus and The Trade Desk are close to submitting S1 forms with the Securities and Exchange Commission, indicating plans to go public in the coming months and releasing key financial details. In the case of The Trade Desk, the […]
Microsoft and LinkedIn both have advertising businesses. But Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn wasn’t about advertising. At least, that’s not the main reason. “It’s less about ad tech and more about mar tech,” said William Furlong, a former Bizo executive and current adviser and consultant. Forrester VP and principal analyst Melissa Parrish agreed. While […]
AppNexus and Taboola have connected with each other to enable buyers to purchase Taboola’s native placements programmatically. Eighty-five AppNexus buyers have already used this connection to buy on Taboola. The integration represents a step forward for programmatic native just as another huge native pool of supply disappeared: FBX, which will shut down in November. Taboola CEO Adam Singolda […]
After a late start, AppNexus is continuing to double down on video. The company launched a closed beta for video viewability measurement and reporting across its platform on Tuesday. The plan is to move into open beta by the end of Q2. The announcement comes a little less than three months after AppNexus took the […]
Since Google opened up its ad server and brought exchange bidding to dynamic allocation a month ago, publisher ad tech and media companies have been asking many questions but receiving few answers. People in the industry want to know: How much will Google charge? Nobody seems to know. What kind of data will publishers be […]
The steady growth of AppNexus’ advertiser-facing business in recent years has led to a jump in employees. Out of AppNexus’s roughly 1,050 total headcount, about 318 now serve the buy side, developing and supporting the company’s demand-side platform product. Of those employees, about 97 are engineers, 19 are product managers, 74 are in sales and a […]
Getting agencies to buy enterprise software is hard, which is why AppNexus quietly killed off its two-year-old product Twixt in December – which included both workflow automation (aka RFP automation) and automated guaranteed functionalities. Ultimately, Twixt was too difficult and expensive to sell. “The level of investment that would have been required to drive penetration, […]
AppNexus has completed beta tests of a new supply-side platform and ad server designed solely for video and will release it widely in Q2. The company has already signed up 15 publisher clients in the US and Europe in the wake of a beta test that began in late 2015. The SSP is one piece […]
The Trade Desk has grown faster than probably any other DSP in recent years, as founder and CEO Jeff Green sought to capitalize on what he saw as strategic errors by rivals. “We saw that most of the DSPs had created channel conflicts for themselves,” said Green, a reference to some other DSPs’ media company […]
Average CPMs on the AppNexus platform rose sharply during the second half of 2015, from below 20 cents last summer to $1.60 by early fall, as invalid traffic was rejected under the company’s anti-fraud efforts. Meanwhile, volume fell off a cliff, with impression transactions plummeting more than 90% from December to September. The company released the data Wednesday […]
Best practices and policies to deal with fraud and botnets are emerging, but ad tech companies aren’t sharing them with each other – partially because they don’t want their secrets to slip out to fraudsters, and partially because ad fraud detection is a competitive differentiator. As a result, companies are developing their own policies and […]
AppNexus is hitting the market with its own version of mobile header bidding. Announced Monday, the tool – dubbed PriceCheck – aims to help app developers and publishers maximize their yield by accessing as many sources of demand as possible and revealing what each impression is worth. Then the impressions are routed to the advertisers willing […]
AppNexus’ management and investors have spent the better part of a year preparing to take the company public. But the harsh (and getting harsher) IPO climate means they might not get to realize that ambition any time soon. As a result, even while AppNexus remains poised for a public offering – and could in fact […]
In campaign speeches, TV appearances and public statements, Donald Trump frequently boasts about his campaign’s low ad spending. “I’ve spent no money and I’m No. 1,” he said recently on the “Today” show. “Other people have spent tens of millions of dollars and they’re floundering and doing poorly.” Unfortunately for his opponents, this statement – […]
Judging from last week’s news, it’s tempting to say GroupM has got the programmatic religion. But that might be selling the holding company short. WPP Group’s media-buying arm, which controls $106 billion in global ad spending, last week promoted Xaxis CEO Brian Lesser to a big new job running its North America business. His elevation […]
Pubs and brands have complained about programmatic inventory on open exchanges for years, but a renewed focus on inventory quality is gaining traction. AppNexus has long positioned itself as the platform for ad networks, but it reversed its policy in recent weeks by removing ad networks that don’t provide direct publisher or seller relationships. Shortly […]
AppNexus unveiled a publisher suite Wednesday designed to offer an alternative to DoubleClick for Publishers [DFP], the dominant solution in the market. The AppNexus Publisher Suite includes an ad server, completely rebuilt after its acquisition of OAS [Open AdStream] in September 2014, and supercharged with forecasting from its acquisition of Yieldex in March. Publishers can […]
In the four months since Verizon’s acquisition of AOL closed, AOL absorbed Microsoft’s advertising business, dropped $238 million on Millennial Media and Verizon revised its privacy policy in anticipation of its data flowing into the AOL stack. Since AOL launched a unified platform called ONE, it has preached the gospel of “openness.” But will that standard hold once Verizon’s […]
AppNexus has long been the grand poobah of indie programmatic media platforms. But lately it has begun to look like a company under siege. There’s the fraud issue, which became an albatross after competitors Rubicon Project and OpenX cleaned up two years ago while AppNexus continued to allow blind impression resale. It has since fixed […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Jonathan Hsu, chief operation officer and chief financial officer at AppNexus. Does it seem that every week we learn about the latest “unicorn” private company raising hundreds of millions of […]
Last week’s stock market dip and subsequent recovery could have particularly troublesome consequence for ad tech firms looking to play on public markets. Though market volatility is a constant, last week’s flux put a spotlight on a handful of ad tech firms often mentioned as IPO candidates, among them AppNexus, Quantcast, Collective, Dstillery, PubMatic, Integral Ad Science, […]
Publishers seeking to create more competition and access for programmatic buyers have embraced header bidding over the past year. AppNexus first brought header bidding technology to market in 2009, back when RTB first started, but not many of its customers used it. Now it’s seeing increased demand from publishers adding its header bidding (or pre-bid) […]
Ari Paparo is a longtime builder, explainer and sometimes lampooner of ad tech. And now he’s a CEO. The former product executive with Google, Nielsen and AppNexus has taken the wraps off his new company, Beeswax, which provides a licensed “Bidder-as-a-Service” technology geared to two primary constituents: (1) ad tech firms, such as ad networks […]
Microsoft and AOL observers have a lot of questions in the wake of the companies’ landmark search and display ad deal, announced Monday. Here’s a big one: How will AOL, a company of some 4,500 employees, possibly absorb 1,200 new sales, marketing, biz dev and engineering people? Once the partnership is consummated, AOL will have […]
