Real talk for a second: Whenever you hear me griping about the myriad things Facebook doesn’t do well, either for users or for its publisher partners, I’m probably subconsciously trying to convince myself of something. I’m a social media addict, and I suppose I have been ever since the Geocities…
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Back on Jan. 11, Facebook announced it was switching up its news feed algorithm to prioritize original posts from users, and to de-prioritize links to news stories. Following uproar and confusion from publishers and marketers about how much good or ill that will do to users, Facebook came back this…
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Not the CES update you want, but maybe the CES update you need. January brings with it cold weather, year-end reconciliations, lower post-Q4 CPMs, and CES. This year I had an audacious plan: I’d go to CES and actually go to CES. You know – the actual show, not just…
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We're all aware the digital ad marketplace is currently dominated by just a couple of massive companies--and you know exactly who they are. One evergreen issue for publishers is the question of how to navigate this dynamic: Working with Facebook and Google is practically a necessity, especially where distributing your…
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Facebook's Content Problem Is an Ad Problem, Too Couple fresh dispatches from the “You Can’t Automate Everything” beat: Facebook is catching heat over ads both weird and fraudulent on its platform. The Daily Beast’s Taylor Lorenz published a detailed exploration of the bizarre, impractical products (cat blindfolds? Plastic doodads of…
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I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but if you think it’s hard for publishers to bend to the whims of Google and Facebook to get their content out to a mass audience, just think for a few seconds about what it might be like playing ball with ISPs…
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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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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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Google Delivers Insights Engine to Pubs Google announced it’s releasing a suite of tools to give its DoubleClick publisher clients audience and performance insights. It’s called the Insights Engine Project, and it’s angled to give publishers a view of performance similar to what the company gives advertisers when they target…
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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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