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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For years, we’ve joked that brands don’t care how the digital advertising sausage is made. Their modus operandi seemed along the lines of: Let the agencies and publishers deal with the frustrating minutiae involved in making digital media transactions work.Funny how quickly things change. As increased spend hits digital channels…
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Read Part I of this two-parter here.If you recall from Part I of this series, we'd been talking about how arbitraged video impressions are bad. There are a number of reasons why arbitraged video impressions suck from the buy-side perspective:1. Most obviously, they make the same ads cost more than…
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If you’re a marketer looking to send the right ad to the right person in the right place, programmatically buying online video ads on the open exchange is a monumentally stupid move. If you’re a brand trying to advertise that way, you’re wasting much, if not most, of your ad…
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Page speed is never too far from the main stage of the ongoing show that is ad ops, and it’s enjoying another spotlight moment right now. On one side, publishers have Google and Facebook calling for compliance with their platform publishing guidelines--and with massive mobile traffic coming to them through…
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If you're in digital, you're more or less destined to be on Facebook and Google. The major platforms have unparalleled scale. But they're certainly not the be-all and end-all to digital--and publishers would love for advertisers to agree on this point. Publishers are sitting on valuable audience insights of their…
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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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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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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…
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The fact that publisher revenues are under siege from a number of sources isn’t exactly news. Users are abandoning desktop in droves, continuing the progression from print dollars to digital dimes to mobile pennies. Remaining desktop users are blocking ads with increasing regularity. Companies like Facebook, the dominant source of publisher…
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