Technology

Google faces another antitrust investigation; Americans want free, ad-supported news; and the K-shaped economy dings mass-market manufacturers.

AppLovin’s profits and revenue are skyrocketing—but investors aren’t buying the story, sending shares tumbling 20%.

Programmatic’s biggest promise was never automation for its own sake. It was accountability. But today, the industry is moving from reporting performance to steering performance.

Amazon opened up its Prebid adapter for beta testing on January 21. Publishers are preparing to test, and we spoke with Raptive and Unwind Media to learn how.

For brands, this opens a new lever beyond impressions. For publishers, this is a business problem, as their first-party data and on-site inventory could become less valuable for targeting.

TikTok may be doubling down (again) on Shop; bots are scraping content they’re banned from; and Walmart is allegedly selling counterfeit products.

Criteo has an optimistic pitch for future growth, but Wall Street doesn’t see the money yet from LLMs, commerce agents and social shopping.

Evertune’s new feature allows advertisers to run programmatic ad campaigns directly on the sites and pages most often cited by AI chatbots.

Amazon teases an AI licensing marketplace for publishers; not every country is fine with targeted gambling ads; and YouTube’s ad revenue share isn’t enough for its entrepreneurial creators.

In a Q&A with Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, we examine where publishers can find real impact in 2026 amid growing pressure to deliver revenue now.

The OAAA’s new content taxonomy introduces new subcategories that OOH media owners can use to classify their inventory in OpenRTB bid requests.

ChatGPT users will start seeing ads this week; is our entire economy structured around bothering consumers?; and the FTC’s investigation into media credibility groups continues.

The IAB’s new framework aims to standardize when AI in ads should be disclosed, but a lot is still left up to interpretation.

Wall Street is falling out of love with SaaS; OpenAI has an “ads integrity” unit; and the Super Bowl is getting more personalized.

An emerging consensus among Wall Street investors, based on the earnings reports of companies like Meta and Alphabet, is that subscription software is on the way out. LiveRamp, which reported its Q4 earnings on Thursday, is staring straight down the barrel of this conventional wisdom.

It’s hard to break into the ad platform big leagues; AI platforms debate the value of ads; and vibe coding isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Describing Google’s revenue growth has become a problem, it so vastly outpaces the human capacity to understand large numbers and percentage growth rates. The company earned more than $113 billion in Q4 2025, and more than $400 billion in the past year.

People Inc. is offsetting a 50% decline in Google search traffic through off-platform growth and its highest digital revenue gains in five quarters.

Marketers claim they want control over creative production, but the moment a new AI tool hits the scene, they’re suddenly all about convenience. AI video ad platform Airpost, which launched last month, does its best to find that happy medium. Today, it announced $4.1 million in seed funding. If your company wants to give up […]

On stage at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting, IAB CEO David Cohen tore into AI companies, accusing them of “free riding” on publishers’ work – and calling it “stealing.”

The MRC’s auction transparency standards aren’t intended to force every programmatic platform to use the same auction playbook – but platforms do have to adopt some controversial OpenRTB specs to get certified.

Ripping out battle-tested infrastructure and starting from scratch – as some emerging agentic protocols propose – is the slowest and most painful path to advertising’s agentic future.

Q4 earnings reports are heating up; Private equity firms get squeamish; and AI data centers are harder to build than ever.

The IAB unveiled its Project Eidos on Monday, a new program uniting its numerous measurement initiatives under one banner.

ICE is going ad tech; Streaming television is more original than ever; and YouTube wants to keep all its data to itself.

Prebid is on a roll: It will take charge of a seller agent, part of AdCP, and Amazon’s integration with Prebid is in beta. But there’s one sticking point: Microsoft is not going to cache video ad creatives anymore that come through Prebid, leaving publishers scrambling for an alternative.

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

Supply-path optimization may not be the trendiest three-letter acronym in ad tech anymore, but the SPO trend is still playing out – especially in the CTV category.

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

Big TV’s shift to programmatic brings in the performance brands; Meta rolls out premium subscriptions for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp; and Yahoo enters the crowded AI search market.