Firefox

Judge Leonie Brinkema is ready to be done with the DOJ v. Google saga; Amazon DSP comes out on top; and Mozilla brings programmatic ads to to the Firefox browser.

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.

Google’s search antitrust trial ends with a whimper; the pitfalls of agency-owned SSPs; Perplexity axes its ads business; and brands are still building big-ticket metaverse experiences.

While some Privacy Sandbox testers lamented their seemingly wasted effort, they remain committed to post-cookie targeting and measurement – even if Google eventually abandons the Sandbox entirely.

Rival browsers raise an objection to Google being forced to sell Chrome; ad agencies pivot to software and services; and people are turning to chatbots instead of search, with error-filled results.

A group of 20 web app developers sent a letter to the CMA claiming the regulator’s proposed remedies for increasing competition among mobile browsers do not address barriers to entry for mobile web extensions on iOS and Android.

Recent moves by major ad tech players prove the industry doesn’t actually need cookies. But Chrome’s cookie pivot doesn’t clarify what will happen to the 1% of its audience that’s already cookieless or what will become of plans to deprecate the Android Ad ID on mobile.

Two years after leaving Meta to launch their own privacy-focused ad measurement startup in 2022, Graham Mudd and Brad Smallwood have sold their company to Mozilla.

Bonbon gives users rewards – such as discounts or chances to win merchandise – for setting up email registrations with publishers. Now The Trade Desk’s OpenPass will include that same rewards functionality.

When Google finally stopped supporting third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users, the ad industry reacted as if the sky was falling. But it’s unlikely that Google’s cookie deprecation plans will ever be fully fulfilled.

Enjoy this weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem … 

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Share Tactics Another secret Google revenue-sharing deal was revealed during antitrust testimony. Google head of global partnerships Don Harrison disclosed during the Epic Games vs. Google trial that the standard 15% fee doesn’t apply to Spotify. Spotify only pays Google 4% of subscription […]

First-party data is bolstering Slickdeals’ direct sales efforts and offsetting an industry-wide decline in programmatic CPMs. That data is also making ad targeting more effective for its native retail media inventory as demand for retail ads ramps up.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Church And Stock News publishers have had some business model challenges lately. That’s not news to anyone.  But one startup hopes to avoid the news industry’s advertiser drop-off and subscription malaise.  The startup, called Hunterbrook, will commission news stories from journalists, while an […]

There’s a misguided desire to find a third-party cookie replacement with as little disruption as possible, and confusion reigns about data collaboration alternatives, their capabilities and the differences between them.

If CNAME access and third-party cookies go away, identity companies – and most of their clients and partners – are going to get hurt, and badly, writes Kevin Mullen, chief product officer at Roq.ad.

While Chrome dallies on the third-party cookie question, Firefox keeps releasing new anti-tracking features. Marshall Erwin, Mozilla’s chief security officer, dishes on everything from cracking down on fingerprinting to its unlikely collaboration with Meta on privacy-preserving attribution technology.

Google’s decision to kick the can on cookie deprecation even further down the road to 2024 did not come as a shock to many in the digital advertising industry. The longer runway will give advertisers and publishers more time to test post-third-party-cookie solutions. But despite the temptation to procrastinate, publishers and tech vendors told AdExchanger they don’t anticipate straying too far from the road maps they’d already established to meet the previous 2023 deadline.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Keep It Clean Clean room?  More like a mud room. It’s where people can leave their “dirty” (read: private first-party) data without ruining the rest of the house.  The marketer point of view often goes something like this: “‘Our data is going to […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Staff Cuts Magnite is laying off about 6% of its staff following its $1.17 billion acquisition deal with video supply-side platform SpotX, Adweek reports. Buying SpotX is part of Magnite’s CTV growth plan, after already taking on Telaria. Though the acquisition nearly doubled […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. SPAC Bandwagon Content recommendation engine Taboola became the latest tech company to exist via SPAC when it announced plans to go public on Monday by merging with special purpose acquisition company ION Acquisition Corp, per Business Insider. The deal, which will value Taboola at […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Absolute power Google has been steamrolling ahead with its privacy sandbox proposals, where progress is incremental – perhaps too incremental. And according to Adweek sources, Google’s ideas are too conceptual as well. Non-Googlers playing in the sandbox “want more concrete examples of how the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Restarting The Firefox It’s been 10 years since Google released Chrome and rocketed ahead of Firefox in the web browser market. But Mozilla could regain ground with a recent Firefox upgrade laser-focused on privacy or, more accurately, the lack thereof. “You give up your […]

Mozilla’s decision to bail on its brief romance with its advertising products caught many insiders by surprise. The company said Monday it would end its sponsored tile offering, which it had released November 2014. Adzerk CEO James Avery, who was involved in briefings earlier this year meant to set the stage for Mozilla’s foray into […]

Mozilla is in a tough spot. Building a big ad business is key to the nonprofit’s well-publicized revenue diversification strategy, but many targeting techniques that are considered table stakes in digital advertising – such as cookie matching, third-party ad serving and CRM onboarding – are off limits. The main issue is not that Firefox users value their […]

Mozilla is putting the pedal down on its foray into digital ads. In recent weeks, the provider of open-source software has met with a range of ad tech companies in a bid to do more with the audience data and ad space generated by its still popular Firefox browser. In February and March, Mozilla’s content […]

Update 4:00 ET: In a recently-released blog post, Mozilla VP of content services Darren Herman announced the kick-off of an experimental program called Directory Tiles. Normally, when Firefox users open a new tab, they see tiles featuring images from sites they’d visited in the past. New users with no Firefox surfing history will, upon opening the […]

The advertising industry continues to debate privacy issues, including when advertisers may collect information about consumers. Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, has added fuel to the controversy through its experiments with a cookie-blocking patch and a Cookie Clearinghouse—actions that the IAB’s Randall Rothenberg denounced as “arrogant.” Mozilla also announced in a blog post […]

Two weeks after unveiling the “Cookie Clearinghouse,” a joint project between Mozilla and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society that would determine which websites are allowed to set cookies, Mozilla execs and CIS director of privacy Aleecia McDonald shed more light on the project today at a public discussion. “This initiative is about creating […]