referral traffic

Guess there’s no pleasing investors. Despite Reddit delivering an objectively solid Q2, its stock cratered, in part because of search-related headwinds and low referral traffic.

Audiences that reach publisher sites but leave little to no trace in analytics are referred to as dark traffic. At Penske Media Corporation, shining a light on dark traffic is part of a broader recalibration of how the publisher thinks about audience growth.

The programmatic supply chain is “pretty flawed,” says Danny Spears, COO of publisher alliance Ozone, and value is leaking away from digital media brands. But that doesn’t mean they need to stand there and take it.

Local media companies have already seen traffic declines of 25% to 50%, and the Local Media Consortium is collaborating to fight the problem.

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

From headline to punchline, AdExchanger’s weekly comics distill ad tech industry news into something our readers can laugh about. These are our faves of the year.

Private equity firm Novacap acquires IAS; many large online retailers are seeing an uptick in referral traffic from ChatGPT; and the IAB downgraded its US ad spend projection for the rest of the year.

TTD turns its back on SSPs; scientists are finding a home on Bluesky; and a hacker used Anthropic’s Claude to plan a cybercriminal operation.

With no-click generative AI search gaining steam, here’s how publishers can thrive when search traffic disappears.

The Google PMax whisperer releases his latest annual report; publishers brace for more disruptions from Google search updates; and stolen content is the least of Wikipedia’s gen AI concerns.

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

BuzzFeed took another lap around its AI-related talking points as its advertising business took another lap around the drain.

Dotdash Meredith previewed plans for how its OpenAI partnership could provide incremental traffic and scale its contextual targeting capabilities across a wider network of sites and media types.