Eric Hochberger

SSPs are looking pretty ripe for acquisition; agencies want real man-on-the-street content from actual human men; and AI slop is taking over the internet.

2024’s most popular guest columns offer a snapshot of an industry in flux – and one that’s grown cynical due to repeated promises of unrealized change.

Even if the industry finds a way to replace the cookie, it won’t matter if publishers no longer have traffic to monetize.

Buyers will soon have far more transparency into video ad inventory sold through Google’s platform. But some publishers and video platforms have concerns.

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

On the mobile web, outstream is in, and instream is out. With its latest guidelines, the IAB Tech Lab has effectively ended instream, declaring outstream the primary path for web video inventory. This shift will mean incredible things for the advertising ecosystem, writes Eric Hochberger, CEO of Mediavine – namely, a transparent buying and selling experience for video inventory that should help supply and demand.

Earlier this month, ESP, not to be confused with PPIDs, entered open beta in GAM, so feel free to rev up your UID2s. In English: Google is moving forward with its solution, called encrypted signals from publishers (ESP), that allows publishers to share encrypted first-party signals, including Unified ID 2.0 identifiers, with buy-side platforms of their choosing via Ad Manager. Here’s the DL on all things ESP.