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…
Read More
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…
Read More
Publishers that deal with a lot of video content will likely be able to tell you a little about the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). Particularly, they’ll be able to tell you about the numerous hoops it causes video-heavy ops teams to jump through. VPPA holds that a user’s viewing…
Read More
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…
Read More
Back in August of 2016, the Google Webmaster Blog announced that come Jan. 10, 2017, “pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.” A little cryptic, no? Google was really taking aim at a variety…
Read More
The other day, a publisher friend of mine tapped my shoulder about a release the Electronic Frontier Foundation put out fairly recently. This was a release calling for a radical tightening of security around user data.The sense of urgency, as EFF’s argument goes, is that we’re in an increasingly charged…
Read More
Last June, a major revenue guy from Medium spoke at AdMonsters’ Ops conference, laying out a fascinating native advertising model transacted on a time-spent basis. It was a bold plan that sparked a great deal of conversation throughout the event.So you can imagine I was disheartened when reading Ev Williams’…
Read More
The rendered ad future just got a bit more nuanced following proposals for new measurement standards from the IAB and MRC.During the Austin Publisher Forum in August 2016, a swath of ops professionals gathered for a breakout on an issue that was only beginning to breach the surface. Discrepancies were…
Read More
Read Part I here and Part II here.So you want to set up a PMP. The conversation typically goes like this:1. The Advertiser reaches out to a supply partner and says it wants to set up a PMP. Advertisers find supply partners in a variety of different ways—some use comScore,…
Read More
Read Part I of this series here.There's an old saying: If you take someone's money, you have to do what they say.The big five agency holding companies control a significant portion of the world's media spend, and if someone on the sell side wants to make money in the ad…
Read More