Rebooting Ad Units to Meet Better Ads Standards Google wants (and intends, starting in 2018) to block intrusive ads from the Chrome browser, and it wants to tell you what counts as “intrusive.” Ever since Google made the announcement about which types of ad experiences should expect to be blocked,…
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Last week a lot of my industry connections passed around the Buzzfeed story, “Attack of the Zombie Websites,” about a programmatic, bot-driven web of lies that may have shorted advertisers tens of millions of dollars. Although it was meticulously reported, I had a hard time reading the full article not…
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Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has been catching heat from all over the internet since this past Thursday, when she told Axios editor Mike Allen that Facebook was not a media company. Her rationale was that Facebook doesn’t produce original news content, doesn’t hire journalists (which it actually has done), and…
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Ads.txt is an initiative the IAB Tech Lab launched earlier this year to ensure greater transparency in the programmatic marketplace by creating a record of who is authorized to sell or re-sell ad inventory. The top aim of Ads.txt is to crack down on domain spoofing, a widespread, wily and…
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I returned from an excellent Publisher Forum in Montreal to hear that Mic was laying off part of its editorial staff and re-focusing on creating video content—mainly to grab the sweet CPMs the come with monetizing video. I feel like I’ve heard this story many times in the last few…
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The web has always been a more visual place than the print world that preceded it, but the rise in video consumption over the last few years has really driven that point home. Mobile, desktop, whatever device you have--if there’s a screen and a wifi connection, you’ll find people watching…
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A few months back, Google announced it would be equipping an ad blocker—or something like an ad blocker, maybe more like an ad filter—into newer versions of Chrome. The new Chrome feature would filter out ads deemed overly intrusive to the user experience. At the time, Google suggested it would…
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This morning, Adobe announced it would cease development of Flash Player by the end of 2020, along with its roadmap for killing it off with minimal disruptions to user experience. It’s almost surprising to finally hear it from Adobe—much of the digital world has been bracing for a Flashless world…
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Digital media types have been buzzing for a while about a shift in the marketing tech world: Marketing tech is being drawn closer to advertising tech, and this is going to change the way advertisers and publishers do business. The messaging in advertising will become more personal, and in order…
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I can’t say I was surprised by findings from research firm L2 Marketing that Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa is more likely to push Amazon Prime products on users seeking a variety of wares. There’s nothing scandalous in that—if I had an Alexa, I’d probably want it to look for Prime…
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