Amazon disappointed investors with a $3.8 billion net loss in Q1 this year, its first quarterly loss in the past six years, plus online sales ticked down 1%. Amazon Advertising, however, did not disappoint. “Advertising revenue was up 25% year over year, and that’s a strong run rate compared to the revenue growth rate,” CFO Brian Olsavsky told investors.
Subscribe to AdExchanger Talks on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts. Amazon’s search algorithm uses a bunch of different signals to rank products on its landing pages, including depth of product inventory, product page richness and paid media effectiveness. It’s not unlike Google, except that all those signals result […]
Amazon’s “other” segment, which houses its advertising business, grew 73% YoY to $6.9 billion in Q1. “The advertising team has done a great job turning clicks into productive sales, and the advertising that results is valuable to us as well,” said Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky. While Amazon’s ads business grew due to traffic increases, its […]
This week on The Big Story, the team broadcasts LIVE from AdExchanger’s Innovation Labs: Commerce Day event. And here’s your main takeaway if you weren’t able to attend: the fragmentation in the world of commerce-related media is … insane. An emerging cluster of media networks from retailers such as Walmart, Target, Kroger and numerous others […]
Over the past two years, NBCU has made inroads in the commerce arena, building capabilities that drive transactions directly and measuring those conversion events. The strategy makes sense: If you know your ad inventory drives purchases, you might as well go full Amazon and own the whole funnel. And NBCU has executed on that vision […]
“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 Mike Farrell, senior director of integrated digital strategy at Sidecar. Advertising on Amazon requires you to balance both offensive and defensive tactics. The overall goal is to appear alongside competitors and […]
Facebook on Tuesday launched a new commerce toolkit, called Shops, with a revamped model for how the company fits into the online shopping landscape. Shops will give every SMB, merchant and product company the ability to set up a virtual storefront across Facebook’s app properties. Unlike previous Facebook and Instagram commerce products, Shops will also […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Buzzing After racking up more than $50 million in losses last year, BuzzFeed is working its way toward profitability. The digital media company laid off 250 staffers and is benefiting from new revenue streams. Sponsored content, once BuzzFeed’s crown jewel, now makes up just […]
Walmart claims its programmatic advertising platform and ads API are ready for primetime. On Friday, Walmart Media Group (WMG), the retail giant’s advertising arm, released a self-serve portal so advertisers can directly buy on-site search and sponsored product ads on walmart.com. It also launched an API to make that inventory available through Teikametrics, Flywheel Digital, […]
Pinterest really wants people to shop on its platform. The newly public company revamped its marketing partner program on Monday and added a new partner category for third-party tech providers that facilitate shopping experiences. But the rebrand of Pinterest’s Marketing Developer Partners program to a global Pinterest Partners program is more than a cosmetic change. […]
Instagram has a lot going for it right now: Millions of active advertisers, an opportunity to capitalize on commerce, impression growth, a love affair with DTC brands, the continued breakneck growth of Stories … and the fact that a lot of people still don’t necessarily associate it with Facebook. The Facebook connection has been both […]
Adobe launched a cloud product suite for retail and ecommerce technology services on Monday. The Adobe Commerce Cloud is the fourth Adobe cloud offering, joining the Experience, Advertising and Analytics clouds. The core of the new commerce package is the Magento ecommerce platform Adobe acquired a year ago for $1.68 billion, that’s now been integrated […]
The shopping app Ibotta, which gives users cash back for purchases, has streamlined app-to-app buying. Tech from deep-linking vendor Button now allows Ibotta users to make purchases from apps in Button’s network, which includes Hotels.com, Groupon, Jet and Spring. Ibotta hopes to connect commerce apps into an easy-to-use marketplace. While it’s easy to link and […]
Deep-linking vendor Button announced the Button Marketplace on Thursday in an attempt to sustain the mobile app world without the need for digital ad dollars. “It’s an entirely different paradigm for apps,” said Michael Jaconi, Button’s co-founder and CEO. “You can’t capitalize on search and intent in this world like you did for the web.” […]
Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba has replaced CEO Jonathan Lu, effective May 10. Announced Thursday during its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call, the company revealed incumbent COO Daniel Zhang would be promoted to CEO while Lu will continue on as vice chairman of the board of directors. Zhang, an eight-year Alibaba vet and original founding member, has held […]
Answers.com, a knowledge resource site, has evolved from a basic wiki to a publisher and marketing tech provider. “We’ve made a lot of positive changes to the site,” said David Karandish, CEO of Answers.com, “have added support for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter for [gated] logins (Answers.com now has over 180 million registered users) and turned […]
Facebook and Twitter are keen to build more commerce functionality into the social stream. Earlier this summer Facebook began working with select commerce brands to support direct transactions on its platform, and Twitter has been expected to produce something similar after sharp-eyed users spotted a semi-functional “buy” button on the site in July. Well, now that other […]
Google and Amazon are going after each other. Google has ramped up commercial search and fulfillment, and Amazon is building a Google-like ecosystem around ads – a project involving an ad-buying platform to rival AdWords, according to The Wall Street Journal. And of course, both are investing heavily in video content and advertising. What is Amazon’s […]
Ever more companies on the buy side want to partner directly with publishers. Sell-side platforms (SSPs), ad networks, agencies, demand-side platforms (DSPs), retargeting networks and others have over the last year increased their efforts to gain visibility and direct inventory access. In a recent telling example, WPP Group’s Xaxis programmatic platform absorbed 24/7 Media to […]
Emmett Shine’s Bowery-based agency Gin Lane Media is not your everyday 25-person creative shop. The agency had early roots in women’s apparel; its founder and CEO began T-shirt company LOLA New York in 2005 while circumnavigating the downtown New York design and art scene. After securing a number of small projects that landed SeamlessWeb and […]
To Qubit, a London-based company founded by four former Googlers, proper optimization of Web technology deployments plays a critical role in the effectiveness of commerce experiences and online advertising. A range of publishers like the BBC and retail brands like Pandora rely on Qubit’s enterprise tag management product Opentag for digital marketing and other forms […]
Akin to an infant reaching its “Terrible Two’s,” designer flash sale site Fab.com has changed a lot in the period following its second year. The good? The ecommerce company, founded in 2011, inked $150 million in Series-D financing from Atomico, Andreessen Horowitz, Tencent, ITOCHU and others, bringing its running tally to $310 million in less […]
As a number of large technology vendors race to create full-spectrum digital marketing suites and omnichannel customer experiences, one player is here to remind them that it knows a thing or two about commerce. And, when it comes to its advertising and paid media play, eBay’s launch of eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions today has much […]
