IDFA

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

This week, The Big Story records live at AdExchanger’s digital conference: Innovation Labs. While our April 20 one-day event will focus on Ecommerce, and our May 18 event will focus on CTV, our event on March 16 was all about Identity. And the big story around identity, no pun intended, is that it’s still a […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Breaking The Rules Some big tech companies in China are apparently taking that old adage “rules are meant to be broken” to heart. According to the Financial Times, ByteDance and Tencent are testing a tool to bypass Apple’s new privacy rules and continue tracking […]

This article is sponsored by the Post-IDFA Alliance including Chartboost, Fyber, InMobi, Liftoff, Singular, Adcolony and Vungle.  With the iOS 14.5 update rapidly approaching later this month, many advertisers are preparing for the worst. Who can blame them? At this point, they’ve heard the warnings about unmeasurable ad inventory and slow publisher adoption of the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Vive La Privacy Will the IDFA have its day in court? As developers scramble to prepare for Apple’s iOS 14 privacy changes, which could roll out any day now, a French lobbying group is taking a different tack. France Digitale, which represents startups in […]

App marketing platform AppLovin filed for its IPO on Tuesday after the market closed, and it wins for best ticker symbol ever: APP. Read the full S-1 filing here. AppLovin is taking advantage of a public market boom for advertising-related technology companies, but AppLovin was actually quite hot before the froth started frothing. The company […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Sweetheart Deals? Ah Google, if it’s not one thing it’s another. Now, it seems that the Big G has also sparked the ire of small ad tech firms who say the company has entered into a number of revenue-share arrangements with select ad tech […]

“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 Todd Wooten, founder and president at VRTCAL. Soon, Apple will remove the device ID from mobile app ad requests. Google’s Android platform will follow suit. For many in the mobile advertising […]

“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 Ben Isaacson, Principal at Lucid Privacy Group. By now, you should be well aware of Apple’s imminent changes to its App Store terms that will require consent for ‘Tracking’ iOS […]

AppLovin’s recent acquisition of mobile attribution provider Adjust for $1 billion is evidence that M&A doesn’t necessarily decline in times of uncertainty. The mobile advertising ecosystem may be in a holding pattern waiting for Apple to release its AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework, which should finally happen by March or early April. But the fact that Apple’s […]

Uncertainty related to iOS 14 caused Snap’s stock to slip in after hours-trading despite beating expectations for user growth and revenue in Q4 2020. Snap added 156 million daily active users in the quarter for a total of 265 million, a 22% increase year over year. Full-year 2020 revenue was $2.5 billion, up 46% YoY, […]

Facebook began testing a new in-app screen Monday that will appear before the opt-in prompt required in iOS 14 apps by Apple’s upcoming AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) policy. The test will roll out globally across both Instagram and the core Facebook app. The additional prompt is meant to provide more information about Facebook’s privacy controls and how […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Brand Safe? With brands and agencies calling on social media platforms to ensure ads aren’t adjacent to harmful content, Facebook announced that it’s building a tool for advertisers to keep their ad placements away from certain topics in its News Feed. Per CNBC, the […]

SKAdNetwork is entering its final form, though details are scant. Apple recently updated its page dedicated to user privacy and data use to reflect its plan to add support for view-through attribution for video, audio and interactive ads in apps by “early spring” 2021. Apple will tie these attribution capabilities to creative measurement, so developers […]

Google announced this week that its federated learning of cohorts sandbox proposal (FLoC) is nearly as effective as cookie-based advertising. And the rest of the ad industry collectively said, “Whaaaaaat?” Needless to say, there’s a lot to unpack behind all the hype. This week on The Big Story, the team welcomes Flashtalking CEO John Nardone […]

Developers, mark your calendars for, eh, “early spring.” That’s when Apple will start requiring apps and advertisers to get permission before they can use the IDFA for tracking and ad targeting. After leaving developers on tenterhooks for months, Apple finally shared its broad timeline for AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) implementation in a blog post on Thursday, which […]

Apparently IDFA can move stock prices. Although Facebook had a damned good Q4, with ad revenue up more than 30% year-over-year to $28.1 billion – its fastest growth rate in more than two years – the stock fell nearly 4% in after-hours trading. Why? Because the ad targeting-related headwinds that Facebook CFO Dave Wehner has been referring […]

Google shared a glimpse of its AppTrackingTransparency plan on Wednesday, but offered few details about exactly how it’s readying itself for Apple’s IDFA changes. Google did acknowledge that publishers “may see” (ahem, will likely see) a palpable impact on their Google ad revenue on iOS once Apple’s policies take effect due to reduced visibility into […]

So few publishers and advertisers are ready for Apple’s forthcoming IDFA changes that mobile DSP Jampp had to develop its own app just to run live tests of SKAdNetwork. SKAdNetwork is Apple’s privacy preserving attribution API for iOS 14. Once Apple implements its AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework, which will require advertisers and publishers to get an […]

Here’s something for an investor to bring up on Facebook’s next earnings call on Wednesday: Apple’s upcoming IDFA changes could have a significant impact on Facebook’s revenue – as much as 7% of total revenue in Q2. That’s according to Eric Seufert, a mobile consultant and investor and editor of Mobile Dev Memo. Doing a little back-of-the-napkin […]

Unity Technologies raised more than $1.3 billion during its IPO in September at a $13.6 billion valuation, proof positive that the gaming industry isn’t playing around. Roughly 750,000 creators, mainly game developers, use the Unity platform to build their apps, and Unity’s game engine powers game titles played on billions of devices around the world, […]

2020 brought an identity crisis to the online advertising industry. The year started with Google answering the until-then theoretical question of what might happen to third-party cookies at some unknown point in the distant future. In July, Apple made a similar move with the announcement that its proprietary mobile device ID, the IDFA, would soon […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Jedi Mind Trick? More details are coming out about Google and Facebook’s alleged sweetheart deal to rig Google’s ad auction. The tech giants agreed to “cooperate and assist one another” if they ever faced an investigation into their pact, according to an unredacted version […]

For a company generating tens of billions of dollars in advertising revenue, Facebook’s attribution offerings are highly reliant on cookies and pixels. This can lead to inaccurate reports that sometimes underreport conversions. Thinkster, for example, an AI-based math tutoring app, typically spends between 90% and 95% of its ad budget on Facebook. But Facebook’s attribution […]

Facebook’s got its claws out, calling Apple’s move to require an opt-in for the IDFA “an attack on personalized advertising” that will harm small businesses, creators and kittens. Well, not kittens, necessarily. It’s just that it’s a little hard not to be facetious when a multibillion-dollar company that just got hit with twin antitrust lawsuits […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Apple Strikes Back “Dramatic,” “outlandish” and “false” – that’s how Apple SVP Craig Federighi described claims being made by the ad tech industry about Apple’s forthcoming IDFA changes in iOS 14. During a recorded speech at the European Data Protection & Privacy Conference on Tuesday, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. All About Antitrust Facebook and Google’s legal woes are expected to get worse as federal and state antitrust authorities prepare to file new lawsuits against the tech giants. The Wall Street Journal reports that authorities are readying as many as four more cases targeting […]

The more the merrier. App attribution company AppsFlyer has a late breaking addition to its $210 million investment round, which closed in January: Salesforce Ventures. Although Salesforce is only taking a small percentage of AppsFlyer as part of the round extension – less than 1% of the company, according to AppsFlyer CEO and co-founder Oren […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Apple Vs. Facebook Although maybe not as exciting as the upcoming Mike Tyson fight against Roy Jones Jr., Apple and Facebook have been trading blows this week over which one of them exploits their users more. Business Insider reports that Apple landed the first […]

This SSP is going IPO. PubMatic is gearing up for a proposed $75 million initial public offering after filing an S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. The company, founded in 2006, is one of the ad tech old guard and planning to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global […]