D/Cipher

Traffic-starved publishers are hopeful that their long-undervalued audience data will fuel advertising’s automated future – if only they can finally wrest control of the industry narrative away from ad tech middlemen.

The layoffs reflect a strategic decision on People Inc.’s part to free up money to invest in growth areas, according to CEO Neil Vogel’s memo to employees.

People Inc. – the former Dotdash Meredith – is fighting on multiple fronts to keep its business growing as Google Search declines precipitously as a source of referral traffic.

DDM reported 1% Q1 revenue growth, citing traffic downturns Google’s AI search results and soft advertising demand due to tariff-induced uncertainty.

DDM is expanding its performance-focused contextual targeting solution, D/Cipher, to third-party inventory.

Dotdash Meredith’s Lindsay Van Kirk says the cookie-based buying tools she helped develop in her early career at AppNexus placed too much value on unreliable third-party audiences. But contextual tools like DDM’s D/Cipher, which she now oversees, can build a better ad ecosystem for buyers and sellers.

Ad revenue was helped along by 9% growth in unique visitors to the top sites in DDM’s portfolio. Programmatic ad rates were up roughly 36% in Q2, spurred by adoption of DDM’s D/Chipher contextual targeting solution.

Dotdash Meredith previewed plans for how its OpenAI partnership could provide incremental traffic and scale its contextual targeting capabilities across a wider network of sites and media types.

Here’s some good news about a digital publisher (no, seriously). IAC-owned Dotdash Meredith returned to digital ad revenue growth in Q4, with a 9% uptick to $284 million.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Uncapped Streaming TV viewers know what it’s like to be hounded by an ad for days or weeks at a time. Shira Ovide of The Washington Post explores how to avoid this unfortunate phenomenon – although it’s not an encouraging report. People can jump […]