Facebook reported first-quarter earnings Wednesday, exceeding analyst estimates with ad revenue growth of 82% to $2.3 billion. In contrast, Google’s Q1 revenues were seven times larger at $15.4 billion, but its growth was only 19%. Read the earnings release. Mobile was the star of the show, from both an audience and revenue standpoint. The number […]
Four months after first introducing support for native advertising, Twitter’s mobile exchange MoPub is pitching the solution to all publishers. Consisting of an native ads SDK, a publisher-side ad server, and an RTB extension, the MoPub native product is a “a complete solution for direct sold and exchange traded native ads, delivering the same control […]
Twitter, as rumored, is developing an ad product specifically designed for app installs. On Thursday, Twitter acknowledged the existence of the mobile app promotion suite, the first product that connects Twitter with the mobile ad exchange it inherited when it acquired MoPub last September. Advertisers shouldn’t try to jump on board quite yet, however: The […]
Online video, especially online video embedded in social networks, is essentially a free-for-all. There are few rules or best practices and brands and vendors are still figuring out what works best for consumers. SnappyTV is figuring its one-tap native video playback on Facebook and Twitter, a feature the video content platform is releasing Tuesday, will […]
Call 2011 and 2012 the first wave of social CRM, when companies like Salesforce.com and Oracle snapped up social media analytics and marketing companies. Little more than one year later, all signs point toward paid media becoming a part of the enterprise social stack with more M&A and partnerships likely to come. Although CRM, in […]
Mobile app install ads have proven to be lucrative for Facebook, and sources say Twitter is close to releasing its own version of such ads along with a new mobile app install partner program. “Given the prevalence of Twitter app usage in mobile, which has an even higher percentage of mobile vs. desktop than Facebook, […]
Marking up cheap Facebook inventory has been a lucrative business for a range of companies in its Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) ecosystem. And Facebook is fine with that practice, just so long as it’s clear to advertisers just how big of a cut their partners are taking. But do advertisers know, and do they care? […]
Twitter’s average cost per ad engagement decreased steadily over the past seven quarters, culminating in an 18% decrease in the quarter ended Dec. 21. While ad revenue, by contrast, increased during those same quarters, this chiastic trend isn’t sustainable, as Twitter itself conceded in the 10-K it filed Thursday. The company noted its ad revenue […]
Facebook will acquire mobile messaging service WhatsApp in a deal worth $16 billion – $4 billion in cash and approximately $12 billion in Facebook shares. Factoring in an additional $3 billion employee stock grant that will vest over four years, the deal value is more than 10% of Facebook’s approximately $173 billion market cap, and makes the $1 billion […]
Enterprise social media management company Sprinklr has acquired social data analytics and services firm Dachis Group for an undisclosed sum, the latest venture from Razorfish’s cofounder and former CEO Jeff Dachis. As a combined entity, Sprinklr, founded in 2009, and Dachis Group will employ 300 with offices in New York, London, and Austin, and serve […]
Professional social platform LinkedIn is cooking up a number of paid product extensions, at the base of which is its nearly 300 million-member-strong social graph and a quickly growing content operation. At LinkedIn’s FinanceConnect in New York Thursday, an event that drew roughly 200 marketers, financial professionals, customers and partners to the Time Warner Center […]
Location-based marketing technology company MomentFeed is betting big on the hyper-local search and marketing movement. Founded in 2010, the Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) company has raised $3 million in seed funding and recently closed a $6 million Series A round. According to its chairman and CEO Robert Blatt, MomentFeed is “the first company to […]
Twitter’s first quarter as a public company was hot and cold. Ad performance was the hot part. Q4 2013 ad revenue on the Twitter platform grew 121% to $220 million, of which mobile advertising accounted for more than 75%. The MoPub mobile ad exchange, acquired during the quarter, delivered $8 million in revenue. Audience trends […]
In Q4 2013, Facebook for the first time derived more than half of its ad revenue from impressions served to mobile devices. Mobile ad revenues were $1.2 billion, 53 percent of the overall $2.3 billion in ad revenue it garnered for the period, the company reported Wednesday. It’s a significant milestone for the company, which has long […]
If you’ve ever seen an online meme or a viral image (and these days who hasn’t?), chances are you either viewed it through the photo-sharing service Imgur (pronounced “imager”), or it was uploaded there first. Founded in 2009 by then-Ohio University computer science student Alan Schaaf, Imgur has seen its financial support structure evolve from […]
Since Russ Fradin initiated Dynamic Signal following the $300 million acquisition of his previous startup, Adify by Cox Enterprises (which Cox has since shuttered), he has transitioned away from paid media and helps brands tap customers’ social media influence. The idea behind Dynamic Signal is to simplify the process by which passionate customers can advocate brands […]
The marketing strategists at Callaway Golf hope to tee up more transparency and authenticity for the brand in 2014. A big first step in that is giving consumers more of a direct voice into brand messaging through a leap of faith. As part of a newly designed site launched last month, Callaway integrated streaming social […]
Twitter has rolled out two new prongs to its “Tailored Audiences” targeting regime, which debuted last month as a vehicle strictly for website retargeting. Among the new segmenting features are CRM matching and Twitter ID targeting. The latter allows the serving of ads based on a user’s public characteristics, such as keywords appearing in a […]
Twitter’s Wednesday release of conversion tracking is the company’s latest direct-response push. Beta advertisers, including retailer Alex and Ani, food-delivery and takeout service GrubHub Seamless and political agency Targeted Victory, used the tool to measure ROI on Twitter ad campaigns. Targeted Victory initiated CPA campaigns to meet a target number of “sign-ups” for a National […]
Facebook’s acquisition Tuesday of sports-centric social analytics and real-time trending platform SportStream signifies it’s not letting up in its tête-à-tête with Twitter. “Twitter has natural advantages in the social TV space,” commented Martin Kihn, a research director at Gartner. “It’s the go-to platform for real-time event-driven conversation, facilitated by hashtags. … On the other hand, […]
It took the better part of a year, but Facebook has overcome its internal angst about “motion” in the News Feed with the debut of cross-channel, auto-play video ads. The offering (officially in beta) instantly creates the largest digital video buy ever, with potential daily reach covering nearly half the U.S. population. Mindshare purchased the […]
Last January, T-Mobile declared itself the “Uncarrier.” It was part of a massive brand revamp, one that involved a new network, new devices (including iPhones) and new phone plans (and the carrier might be in line for yet another overhaul, if rumors about a possible acquisition by rival carrier Sprint bear fruit). T-Mobile’s “Uncarrier” messaging […]
When Pinterest debuted “Place Pins” in late November to a select group of beta brands, luxury hotel company Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts was among the first businesses on board. The program, which gives consumers a way to geo-pin their interests to make their pins “more actionable in real life,” is a feature Pinterest provides, […]
Both agencies and ad partners draw comparisons between Twitter’s launch on Thursday of retargeting product Tailored Audiences and Facebook Exchange (FBX). Just how technically similar they are remains to be seen, but the industry is buzzing about the ad product’s cross-channel targeting potential. We asked some Tailored Audience partners, media agencies and a beta tester to […]
After beta-testing retargeting capabilities back in July, Twitter rolled out Tailored Audiences globally Thursday. The offering includes website retargeting along with third-party audience segments, supported by an eclectic crew of ad partners. Advertisers can now “reach users on Twitter who have shown interest in your brand or category even away from Twitter,” wrote Twitter product manager Abhishek […]
According to Merkle, Facebook’s Custom Audiences program and its related lookalike modeling tools lead the pack when it comes to customer prospecting. Merkle bills itself as a CRM agency, so the company knows a thing or two about database matching online. Paul Steketee, head of paid social and emerging media, said match rates on Facebook […]
As brand marketers demand increasingly sophisticated tools to quantify the value of social media campaigns and improve performance, social analytics provider Socialbakers finds itself reaping the benefits. Headquartered in Prague with offices in New York, London and other cities, Socialbakers’s client roster includes Samsung, LVMH, Discovery and Disney. It acquired two thousand clients within a […]
A new report from Neustar’s Aggregate Knowledge notes the strong performance of advertising in social channels in terms of reach (58% better than exchanges) and the ability to deliver more high-quality buyers than ad portals, networks and exchanges. According to Aggregate Knowledge President Rob Gatto, this portends a shift in the role of social advertising […]
LinkedIn delved deeper into marketing with its launch Tuesday of Showcase Pages, through which companies can feature specific products within their branded pages. Designed as an extension of LinkedIn’s Company Pages, users that follow Showcase Pages will receive updates on products, events or other content. “We tell marketers, ‘Yes, we’re a professional network, but people […]
There’s still money to be made in Facebook’s vendor ecosystem. Ampush, a preferred marketing developer that supports data-driven advertising focused on Facebook’s News Feed, says its 2013 media revenue will grow to $70 million, up from $15 million last year. Headcount has more than doubled since December 2012, to 90. Ampush is an example of […]
