Magnite

The group that turned header bidding software into an open standard is bringing the same approach to publisher-side AI agents.

Gamera, a media quality measurement startup for publishers, announced on Tuesday it raised $1.6 million to promote its service that combines data about a site’s ad experience with data about how its ads perform.

Ad industry experts call out trends to watch in 2026 and separate the real AI use cases having an impact today from the AI hype they heard at CES.

Enjoy this weekly comic from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem … and happy Thanksgiving!

Competitive tensions and ad tech drama have flared all year. And this drama has rippled out into the investor circle, as evident from a slew of recent ad tech company earnings reports.

We break down some of the most interesting financial trends coming out of Q3 earnings reports, and what rises to the level of being worth covering in the first place.

Magnite says it’s not mad at The Trade Desk for prioritizing OpenPath or labeling all supply-side platforms as “resellers.”

A DSP, an SSP, an agency and a publisher walk into a room. Believe it or not, that isn’t the lead-in to a bad joke. It’s the model used by Medialive, a new AI startup that brings media buyers, sellers and vendors together to collaborate directly in a shared (digital) space. Joe Prusz, former CRO […]

The fate of the open web will be decided on who controls the data that drives monetization and the AI that determines distribution. Google controls both, and proposed remedies to its ad tech monopoly do not address this imbalance.

From a $637 million PE acquisition of healthcare of a DSP to acquisitions of freshly minted startups, there’s been a flurry of ad tech deals this month. And they have one thing in common: AI.

On Tuesday, Magnite announced it had acquired Streamr.ai, which specializes in developing AI-generated assets for small businesses to use in their CTV campaigns.

GAM’s dinner with ad agencies sparked speculation that Google is preparing to spin off its bundled SSP and ad server as a remedy to its ad tech monopoly. But Google says it’s just part of the trend of SSPs going direct to buyers.

Google’s SSP tries to cut out its DSP ahead of a possible ad tech breakup; Perplexity’s head of ads skips town; and Amazon’s search ad pause flooded the market with big spenders.

Magnite is making a play for pause ads. On Tuesday, the advertising platform announced the introduction of pause ads into its SSP.

The Trade Desk has won the battle for supremacy on the open internet, says Needham & Company’s Laura Martin. But it might just be losing the war for the future of the web to walled gardens and AI search.

The SSP is betting on the DOJ’s antitrust remedies, plus closer relationships with agencies, DSPs and mid-sized advertisers, to help it eat some of Google’s lunch.

RE/MAX gets into the retail media game; Meta loses a class-action lawsuit over how it handled period-tracking data; and the IAB Tech Lab unveils its ad delivery playbook for live events.

CleanTap, an ad tech startup launched by the founder of Method Media Intelligence, wants to separate the wheat from the chaff in CTV by serving as a curation layer between DSPs and SSPs.

Pub tech SaaS startup Swivel wants to make ad ops much less manual and time-consuming with an AI-driven yield optimization tool designed by people who used to build ad servers.

AI app marketplace Dappier ensures that chatbot responses using Benzinga’s data link back to the original source, and it also shares revenue from ads placed in these responses.

Magnite’s SpringServe deal illustrates why SSPs need a video ad server; Google grapples with AI search’s impact on publisher traffic; and Anthropic’s AI assistant is a law enforcement snitch.

When it comes to third-party cookies on Chrome, Google’s plan to reverse course is neither here nor there, says Magnite CEO Michael Barrett. “Forget Privacy Sandbox,” Barrett said. “That thing was dead upon arrival.”

On Wednesday, Magnite announced plans to merge Magnite Streaming, its ad exchange and SSP, with SpringServe, its ad server and mediation platform, into a single unified product.

The curation debate is missing a critical piece: standardized reporting. Without it, curation risks leaving publishers in the dark about its actual value.

Magnite ended up with a scrappy 4% year-over-year growth rate in Q4 2024, after a sudden, unexpected drop in display and online video CPMs during November and December, which caused the company to miss its revenue guidance.

Streaming TV advertisers are still unsatisfied with the level of transparency from publishers in the ad buying process. So Rain the Growth Agency created its own way to get more transparency into CTV buys.

At CES on Tuesday, media and ad tech veteran Kris Johns unveiled AdGood, a nonprofit with a connected TV ad platform and a mission to help other nonprofits access streaming media.

Forrester released its first SSP wave since 2014 last week, and there’s a surprise. The research firm ranked Google – whose sell-side ad tech platform is facing federal antitrust charges – as a mere challenger.

CTV advertising continues to drive significant growth for Magnite. That’s all thanks to “increasing programmatic adoption by the industry’s largest players,” CEO Michael Barrett told investors on the company’s Q3 earnings call this Thursday.

While there are plenty of reasons for political ad buyers to be cautious about CTV, streaming media has one major selling point: programmatic targeting.