pubmatic

Would the internet be a better place if it weren’t run by billionaires? Plus, more brands are cutting out the ad tech middlemen.

What is the future of curation in 2025? On the CES conference floor, PubMatic Chief Revenue Officer Kyle Dozeman talks about why curation is such a hot topic in ad tech.

Advertisers’ obsession with “following the audience” allowed low-quality sites and vanity metrics to thrive while brand integrity suffers. But a cultural shift back toward focusing on quality is underway.

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.

Remember last quarter when PubMatic projected a $5 million revenue dip from a large DSP buyer having switched to a first-price auction?

To court new programmatic buyers, SoundCloud is now selling its display and video ads via open auction and private marketplace deals that combine multiple types of inventory.

On Thursday, the US district court in Alexandria, Virginia boarded a time machine back to April 18, 2019 – the day of a tense meeting between Google and publishers.

PubMatic’s $5 million loss from DV360’s bidding algorithm fix earlier this year suggests second-price auctions aren’t completely a thing of the past.

The trajectory of digital advertising remains unchanged. There are plenty of signs that the investments advertisers have made in cookie alternatives are already paying off.

The SSP revised its full year outlook down by $10 million, due to a DSP partner adopting first-price auctions and weakness in key ad verticals. But it highlighted mobile in-app as a new key revenue stream.

IPG announced what it’s calling a Climate Action Marketplace built in partnership with SeenThis and PubMatic to make it easier for marketers to do the sustainable thing.

In today’s newsletter: SSPs lead the way on ad tech’s M&A resurgence; Disney rolls back CPMs to court more streaming ad demand; and why dating apps struggle to grow and monetize their audiences.

Since launch, 82% of advertisers that buy inventory through the Yahoo DSP have tried Backstage at least once. And buyers are seeing lower CPMs from cutting out SSPs.

The phaseout of third-party cookies kicked off the sell-side curation trend. But it’s also being driven by advertiser concerns about open web media quality and the need to enhance publisher contextual signals with audience data.

Curation’s shift to the sell side is giving DSPs less control over how advertisers curate audiences, which is creating new tensions in the programmatic ecosystem.

Roblox CEO David Baszucki said advertising “will not be material this year” during the company’s Q1 earnings call on Thursday.

PubMatic has its supply-path optimization initiative, its strategy to introduce direct deals for CTV and online video, to thank for its quarterly revenue growth.

There are other motivating factors for crossing the LUMAscape, besides increased efficiency and less ad fraud. These businesses are trying to position themselves to win in a transformative era that will make or break many ad tech companies.

Roblox’s head of immersive media Ashley McCollum explains how the online gaming giant built its ad platform with demand for programmatic video in mind. And she previews Roblox’s ambitions to grow an ecommerce platform for real-world purchases.

For companies testing the Chrome Privacy Sandbox, another delay was starting to feel inevitable, even before Google shifted its deprecation deadline.

Digital media agency Hotspex Media’s emotional contextual tool, Reticle AI, analyzes the emotions an ad is trying to evoke and the context of where the ad might show up to find congruent ad placements.

In today’s newsletter: Data broker Adstra sues IPG-owned Acxiom and Kinesso; Apple could strip the P address of its status as a useful identity signal; and Roblox will introduce video ads later this year, with SSP PubMatic as its programmatic vendor.

Industry experts weigh in on Forbes’s MFA subdomain and why ad verification tools still regularly fail to flag some instances of alleged SIVT.

New contextual targeting tools use generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) to analyze websites and and build contextual audience segments. The companies behind them believe that GPTs can address some of the problems that plague contextual targeting.

Despite the backlash against MFA websites, there is still no industry standard to define MFA. So the 4A’s is hosting monthly meetings between buyers and sellers to nail down more explicit criteria for what constitutes MFA.

In today’s newsletter: Big Tech may be best positioned to take advantage of generative AI’s ad tech uses; ad tech leaders waffle on investing in Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox; Google faces an innovator’s dilemma.

Advertisers are turning the spigot back on. And PubMatic’s investments are paying off. The SSP reported 14% year over year revenue growth in Q4, powered by 9% growth in display.

DoubleVerify added a feature to its platform on Tuesday that classifies MFA sites based on a tiered system.

In today’s newsletter: The Trade Desk opens up OpenPath to CTV inventory; subscriptions remain an important revenue source for news publishers; and a class-action lawsuit alleges PHE violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act.

Index Marketplaces activates the curation capabilities of DSPs, DMPs and RMNs – and the demand for their PMP deals – across Index Exchange’s network of publishers.