Today (May 17), the IAB Tech Lab rolled out a new method for combating ad fraud, specifically of the domain-spoofing variety. It’s called Ads.txt, which stands for Authorized Digital Sellers, or at least it is if you really need to turn the word “ads” into an acronym in this industry.On…
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Since programmatic sales entered the video space a little over nine years ago, the market has continuously evolved. Originally, “programmatic” was all about the open marketplace, with scale and price efficiency the core focus.A few years later, we saw the introduction of private marketplaces—invite-only marketplaces where premium publishers offered their…
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I found it bizarre that the same day that the IAB released digital advertising revenue numbers for 2016 that point to Google and Facebook—the Duopoly!—vacuuming up about half of ad spend and almost all of growth, ESPN conducted layoffs of 100 mainly editorial employees. As several sites noted, most of those…
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With Oracle’s recent purchase of Moat, one of the more widely-integrated third-party measurement companies out there, the term "Intersection Observer" has been thrown around a lot lately. To some, the Intersection Observer has been put forward as the possible driver of the next generation of viewability measurement, and as the…
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Call it a browser cookie, a web cookie, an HTTP cookie—it’s all the same thing, just a small text file, not even executable code. A cookie takes the form of a name-value pair (e.g. name=value). Originally designed to recall information like logins, form data and shopping cart contents, they’ve been…
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“I hate the term header bidding,” a friend and industry resource told me over a cold beer. “It’s too catchy—it sounds like another piece of ad-tech buzzword BS.”I’d argue “tagless tech”—the first name I heard in reference to header-based executions—was far worse (and horribly untrue). But my friend’s dislike really…
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You may hear a lot these days (particularly on a header-cheerleading site like this one) about the ad-server waterfall being vanquished like some fairy-tale villain. Well, it’s not entirely gone, and similar to many foes in children’s stories, it wasn’t always such a bad thing—it was simply exploited. In the…
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Late last year, tales of Methbot illegitimately gobbling up $3 million to $5 million in ad spend daily horrified the industry. While advertisers are the obvious victims of fraud based on bot traffic, the spectre still haunts premium publishers—not only is that spend that should have been relegated to their…
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Regulation--it’s the bane of ops’ existence. Keeping abreast of various regulations impacting the digital advertising environment is not easy: COPPA, HIPPA, VPPA, cookie laws, and so on. Do you even know what those letters represent let alone mean? Maybe the bigger question is: Where does regulation come from, and how…
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There’s a report from DCN (Digital Content Next) that’s been making the rounds in recent weeks, breaking down what the whole process of moving content into distribution platforms has meant for publisher revenue so far. Pulling data and commentary from 17 of DCN’s publisher members during the first half of…
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