Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Armstrong On AOL’s Bebo Acquisition
Caroline McCarthy reports from the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in NYC that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong shared his thoughts on AOL’s historically over-priced ($850 mil) acquisition of social network Bebo saying, “I don’t know whether or not I would have bought Bebo. Looking backward, the answer’s no, but in that time period with what was going on, maybe..” Read the coverage of Armstrong’s appearance.
Ad.ly Survives Twitter Scythe
A day after Twitter announced changes to its policies regarding ad networks, Ad.ly CEO Arnie Gullov-Singh said on the company’s blog, “Since inception, Ad.ly has, and still is operating under Twitter’s approved guidelines and terms of service for advertising on its platform, so it’s business as usual for us.” Read more.
UK Looking At Cookies
Is more regulation on the way in the UK? The UK Office of Fair Trade issued a study that said “More could be done to provide consumers with information about how personal information is collected and used online,” according to Tommy Stubbington of Dow Jones Newswires. Read more. Data nugget from the OFT’s press release: “The revenue from online behavioural advertising is between £64m and £95m. At present, this represents just a fraction of the wider online advertising industry market which was worth £3.35bn in 2008.” Read the OFT’s release. And, download the OFT’s study (PDF).
Google Gains In Display
MediaPost’s Mark Walsh covers new data from market research firm IDC that shows Google gaining display market share. Quoting IDC analyst Karsten Wiede, Walsh writes, “Thanks to rapidly growing display ad sales on YouTube, Google has managed to steadily grow its net display ad revenue market share (excluding traffic acquisition costs) from not even 1% in 1Q 07 to 7% in 1Q 10, and more growth is in the cards.” Read more.
Corp And Biz Dev Buzz At Yahoo!
Yahoo! has been busy the past week or so. Not only did they buy Associated Content last week, but they announced integration on Nokia phones with maps and more (more from Tech Republic); handed their personal section to Match.com (Biz Journals); and bought Koprol – called by TechCrunch “The Asian Foursquare.” Read more.
The Data Aggregators
Matt Shanahan of Scout Analytics writes on the company blog about data aggregators who “aggregate audience members from publishers and then repackage and resell them. Their goal is to build a big enough audience (i.e., pool of cookies annotated with rich information) for sale to advertisers and agencies for targeting.” Nice overview from Shanahan here with more posts on the way.
Do Digital Leads Give Good Phone?
eBureau said in a release that it has introduced “eVerify Phone Contact Score.” Bridging the offline with the online, the “standard predictive score assesses whether an online lead is likely to be contactable on the phone.” Read more.
The New Yorker’s Cross-Digital Pricing
Venerable literary and news magazine, The New Yorker, has rolled out its plans on pricing for digital access to its content according to Ad Age’s Nat Ives who writes, “The idea likely to reach fruition “‘fairly soon,’ [New Yorker editor David] Remnick said, will offer the print edition for one fee and the magazine plus everything else for another fee.” That means iPad, iPhone, Kindle – all for one price. Read more.
Forbes Acquires True/Slant
Forbes Media has acquired True/Slant, which CEO and Founder Lewis Dvorkin describes as “a unique news platform company. In a social media setting, more than 300 talented contributors provide their expertise across 18 topic areas…” Read more. All Things D’s Peter Kafka reports on sources who say Dvorkin will start running editorial for the magazine as well as work on a redesign of the website. Read it.
More Transparency Positioning From Google
Well, whaddya know? MORE transparency positioning from Google. Coming a day after revealing the “top line” on AdSense revenue share, Google said that it was offering greater choice and transparency through its popular Google Analytics product. It’s offering a plug-in to opt-out of Google Analytics counting you whenever you visit an Analytics-enabled site. And, they’re providing “an additional level of privacy for visitors to their sites by offering an option to anonymize IP address information sent to Google.” Read more on the Google Analytics blog.
iPad Video Ads
ScanScout says that it’s the first to bring pre-roll video ads to Steve-Jobs-devices-near-you saying in a release that it’s “a video ad solution that enables video advertising on HTML5-compatible devices such as Apple’s iPad and iPhone.” Read the release.
More Pre-Roll
Speaking of pre-roll, Undertone Networks said, “The amount of revenue the company received from pre-roll grew by more than 200 percent in the first four months of the year.” Read the release.
iCrossing And AdSafe Media
Digital agency iCrossing announced that it is implementing AdSafe Media’s brand safety technology for its clients. Read the release. Dax Hamman, vp of display media at iCrossing, said that his agency is looking to add “preventative protection for display advertising.”
Rocket Fuel And Nielsen
Rocket Fuel announced that it “will use aggregated consumer purchase data from The Nielsen Company” in order help with understanding online ad effectiveness for its clients. Read the release.
