AdTech News And Editorial
Medium lures The Awl and other publishers to go all-in on its platform - Digiday
Eight small independent sites will fully migrate to Medium Tuesday, including The Awl and The Hairpin, sibling sites of The Billfold, which already migrated over last December; plus Pacific Standard, The Black List and Femsplain. Four others are in the pipeline, including Monday Note and NewCo Shift, a new business media brand from John Battelle’s NewCo. Medium also named several sites that will start putting original content there, including Time Inc.’s Money and Fortune and Atlantic Media’s National Journal.
Video Ads Are Coming to Facebook Instant Articles
Facebook is making further changes to the advertising policies for its Instant Articles product and will now enable publishers to place video ads into content they post on the platform.
NBCU and Vox Will Start Selling Ads on Each Other’s Sites
Starting this week, NBCU will run Vox’s custom ad products on its digital properties, and both companies’ sales teams will start selling packages to marketers that include these ads.
AppNexus Killed Off Twixt Because Agencies Weren’t Into It
Andrew Eifler, AppNexus’ VP of buy-side product and one of the execs who conceived of Twixt, said the product faced an additional challenge because it didn’t gel with agency cost structuring. Marketers prefer to pay for time spent, so a product that saves time could potentially impact how much agencies can bill.
Ad Blocking
Adblock Plus wins another legal battle with German publishers
A Munich court has ruled against one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, Süddeutsche Zeitung, saying Adblock Plus and its “acceptable ads” programme were legal.
Programmatic
AppNexus Tries to Bite at Google’s Heels (Pay Wall)
More broadly, Mr. O'Kelley’s hoping that as more publishers start selling ads programmatically—through systems such as those run by AppNexus— they will look for alternatives to Google. The portion of digital advertising sold programmatically is projected to reach 37% in 2018 from 27% last year, according to research by Cowen.
Header Bidding
Header Bidding: Don’t Believe the Hype
If you’re a publisher selling via direct campaigns at a fixed volume, or preferred deals with first-look access for the buyer, the benefits are less apparent. In these cases, choosing the best buyer is not based solely on the price they’re willing to pay for an impression.
Header Bidding: Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater?
Depending on how well header bidding has been implemented, publishers may see real impact on page load times; the scramble from third parties to bring forward ‘open’ header bidding APIs means the design and quality of solutions varies greatly. The decisioning can be taxing on the user’s browser due to high data volumes being transmitted – a problem exacerbated by the sheer number of potentially high-spending buyers out there. Whether decisioning is synchronous or asynchronous is also a factor.
Paywalls
Paid Or Ad-Supported: Pick One Model, And Stick With It
Since last August, I pay a posted price of $39 a month ($32 after promotional discounts) for The Information, an exclusive tech/business web site based in San Francisco. It is my most expensive subscription – I have many others. Every now and then, I nearly cancel that subscription but, so far, I have postponed the decision. Why? Because The Information publishes content that I will not find anywhere else: in-depth stories about tech companies, their failed strategies, murky finances, weird execs, etc. Quite frankly, a one person operation like Ben Thomson’s Stratechery — to which I subscribe as well — carries a much better value (it costs $9 a month), but I expect The Information to cover more topics and countries over time.
The New Yorker Tests Readers’ Willingness to Pay Up
Instead of deterring readers, the number of unique visitors rose to 9.7 million in October 2015 from 5.5 million a year earlier, the month before the paywall was implemented, according to measurement tracking firm comScore Inc. In February 2016, the website attracted 12.9 million unique visitors.