Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Adblock Shakedown
German startup Eyeo’s Adblock Plus is among the Internet’s most widely used free Internet ad blockers, but the company allows some companies to circumvent its filters – for a price. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Taboola have all signed confidential deals with Eyeo to stop the software from blocking their ads, the Financial Times reports. According to Eyeo, its software has been downloaded 300 million times worldwide and hosts more than 50 million monthly active users, and data from PageFair and Adobe suggest ad-blocking software usage increased 70% in 2014. It’s unclear how much tech firms are paying to be “whitelisted,” but a digital media exec tells FT it could be as much as 30% of ad revenue generated from unblocked ads. Read on (subscription).
Publishers are struggling with viewability, but the statistics could be misleading, according to comScore Chairman Emeritus Gian Fulgoni. “When we look at the top 100 publisher sites or video properties … 90% or so of them have, on average, low levels of non-human traffic,” Fulgoni told Beet.TV. “But, when you start breaking those properties up in a granular sense and look at different sections of the site, you see that half of them have non-human traffic levels that are medium to high. So the average can be misleading.” More.
Video Kool-Aid
In a Q&A with Ad Age, Twitter product chief Kevin Weil talks up Twitter’s video ad biz. “It’s relatively common for us to see advertising videos that get retweeted so many times that their earned views are five to ten times their paid views,” he said. Weil added that Amplify, Twitter’s core video product, has increased Twitter’s ability to serve ad content in real time. On building separate ad products for Twitter and Vine, Weil said the creation process differs due to the format of each platform, and Vine ads post to Twitter either way. Read on.
Search Blips
TechCrunch reports that, excluding mobile queries, Google’s US search share dropped below 75% for the first time since 2008. Meanwhile, Yahoo search is gaining ground courtesy of its Firefox deal, with Bing searches accounting for 28% of total queries on the browser. “The stats point to a small but still interesting trend, particularly in light of Yahoo apparently gearing up to make a play for a lucrative deal with Apple to take on default search in the Safari browser,” writes TechCrunch reporter Ingrid Lunden. In the search world, even small changes in share can translate into millions in ad revenue, to say nothing of the intent data.
Rah Rah Rubicon
Rubicon Project gets some local media love in a piece for the LA Times. The piece cites Quantcast’s and Forbes’ favorable rankings of the “advertising automation cloud platform,” as Rubicon calls itself. CEO Frank Addante says the company will continue to leverage programmatic to compete. “Our vision is to automate all advertising, including television, digital billboards,” he said. “I’ve even seen an advertisement on a faucet.” IoT FTW!
You’re Hired!
- Altitude Digital Adds Former Groupon Exec Bradley Downes As CFO – press release
- BlackBerry Executive Alec Saunders Leaves For Role At Microsoft Ventures – Re/code
- Nativo Names Carlos Sapene VP Of Product Development – Ad Operations Online
But Wait! There’s More!
- MediaBrix Announces Emotional Targeting Advisory Board – press release
- Nexstar Broadcasting Acquires Yashi – press release
- Five Programmatic Predictions For 2015 – Fourth Source
- Inneractive Launches Native Video Ads Product – VentureBeat
- Google Goes In Search Of New Revenue Streams – The National
- Netflix To Raise $1B In Debt, In Part To Buy And Create New Content – VentureBeat
- How The Middle Layers Of Ad Tech Keep Fraud Alive – MediaPost
- Is Video Changing the Social Media Landscape? – SocialTimes
