Amazon Or IPO For PubMatic?; VC Dollars Flowing Into BrightRoll; Conde Nast Adds Private Exchange

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Amazon Or IPO

The Business Insider drank from the rumor cauldron (or something like that) yesterday and said that Amazon may want to acquire sell-side platform PubMatic. TBI’s Nicholas Carlson quotes a source and writes, “This source said a Pubmatic executive and another plugged-in industry executive told him that Pubmatic recently fielded a $300 million takeout offer from Amazon, but turned it down in favor of going for an IPO.” Read it.

More VC Dollars For Video

Video ad network BrightRoll, owners of the BrightRoll video ad exchange, announced that it has taken a new round of funding to the tune of $30 million and led by Trident Capital. The company reports that it has continued to double revenue year-over-year and “currently manages 2.25 billion video ads per month, or nearly 1 out of every 3 U.S. video ads served, according to data from comScore and BrightRoll internal reporting.” Read it.

Conde Nast Goes Exchanging

AdMeld may be temporarily caught behind a Department of Justice curtain as it awaits approval for Google buying the sell-side tech company, but that hasn’t stopped it from closing more private exchange deals including Conde Nast. Conde Nast tells Ad Age that if you want to buy on its Ad Meld-supplied private exchange, “The minimum requirement for advertisers to get access to the exchange was that their fourth-quarter ad spend with Conde Nast this year had to be higher than last year’s.” Read more. And, read the release.

Acquiring For Mobile

Mobile marketing ad tech company Velti remains acquisitive as the owner of Mobclix has now bought Mobile Interactive Group (“MIG”) for $25 million with various incentives and earn outs thereafter. From the release, the company claims, “This acquisition makes Velti the world’s largest mobile marketing company based on revenue, customers, and technology holdings.” To back it up, the company offers only that MIG had “$100 million in gross billings, more than $20 million in net revenues in 2010…” Read it.

The Scarcity Of Scale

David Pakman, venture capital partner at Venrock, says with his investor “eye” that it’s time to look beyond certain success metrics tied to scale (i.e. millions of unique users) for growing web properties. He writes, “With it becoming easier to reach such scale, there is no longer a scarcity of scale. This means the value of achieving scale is declining. As investors, if we bet on properties that have simply ‘become big,’ that bet may no longer be enough to establish value.” Read more.

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The Pivot To Ecommerce Hits A Wall; Salesforce Walks Back Its Agentic AI Pitch

It’s The Algo

Google just announced “ten recent alogrithm” changes to its search algo. Among the changes according to Google’s Inside Search blog, “Fresher, more recent results: (…) we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.” Make mine “real-time”! Read more.

Driving Yield For Publishers

In the first of what he promises is a multi-part post on his personal blog, Ian Thomas attempts to fill the gap around what he says are written resources for sell-side yield optimization for display advertising. He begins, “I’ll unpack the key data components that you will need to pull together to create a dashboard that will give you meaningful, actionable information about how your site is generating money – or monetizing, to use the jargon.” Read more.

Leveraging The Airline Data

Leveraging its close relationships with major airlines, Sojern announced the launch of the Sojern Media Platform which it tells Biz Report that it allows for: “Access to anonymous audience data; Display ad targeting based on its proprietary data segments; Premium inventory sources; exclusive media channels.” Meanwhile, will Sojern break off Read it.

Infographic Wednesday

A new infographic informed by data collected from 890 executives by Bizo and Vizu reveals that when it comes to the politics of audience and business, small business owners are decidedly more independent that large owners. See it now!

But Wait. There’s More!