Month: September 2024

Despite how it looks, X claims to be a community safe zone — and a prime advertising playground — according to its latest transparency report.

No surprises there. The platform has been beating this drum ever since Elon Musk’s controversial takeover nearly two years ago. But what stands out this time is the medium through which the information was delivered: X’s first real transparency report since 2021.

Much like before, the new report outlines how X enforces its policies on illegal, hateful or fraudulent content. In the first half of the year, users reported 224,129,805 incidents where they believed those rules were violated.

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In the first half of 2024, the report says, X received nearly 67 million reports of hateful conduct, and took action on more than 2,000 accounts.

He’s deep in the defense-startup world as a Founders Fund partner and Anduril cofounder. His bunker, though, isn’t fully prepped for the end times.

One of the hottest trends in advertising effectiveness measurement, especially with privacy concerns killing user-level online tracking, is geographic incrementality experiments. These experiments are cost-effective, straightforward and reliable, if done right. Geo media experiments typically use large marketing areas, such as Nielsen’s Designated Market Areas (DMAs). Unlike traditional matched market testing, this modern approach involves […]

The post ZIP Codes: The Simple Fix For Advertising ROI Measurement appeared first on AdExchanger.

Welcome to Week Three of the US vs. Google ad tech antitrust trial. Plus, ews publishers are turning to WhatsApp for traffic.

The post Google Begins Its Defense; WhatsApp Is The New Publisher Traffic Source appeared first on AdExchanger.

As competitive gaming emerges from an industry-wide winter, the esports organization Sentinels believes it will become profitable in 2025, thanks in part to Riot Games’ updated revenue share strategy.

Sentinels, a privately held esports team based in Los Angeles, is projecting confidence after undergoing an equity crowdfund last year. After generating just under $3 million in revenue in 2023, the company managed to exceed that figure in the first six months of 2024, per data shared by the org. If trends continue in this direction, Sentinels leadership believes the company will break even by next year.

At the moment, Sentinels is one of the most prominent teams participating in Riot Games’ popular game “Valorant,” having competed in the first-person shooter title since 2020. Much of Sentinels’ branding and esports strategy is built around “Valorant,” though the company also fields a roster of competitive “Halo” players, as well as a team of influencers and creators. 

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how Overtime and Vox Media are adapting their podcasts into long-form videos.

• ‘A modern talk show’
• Olympics wins watch time gold for NBCUniversal
• Lionsgate’s AI deal, YouTube’s AI tools, Amazon’s AI ads and more

‘A modern talk show’

Honestly, I thought video podcasts were just a fad. And obviously, I was wrong. Way wrong. More than 170 million people have watched a video podcast on Spotify, per the company, and YouTube has become the “most used” platform for consuming podcasts, according to a study by Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights.

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Artificial intelligence is showing up in nearly all areas of the media business, from advertising sales to editorial. And now it’s being put to the test in publishers’ subscription strategies, with the hope that the technology is better at identifying the articles that are most likely to convert audiences into paid readers.

This is the thesis that Business Insider’s chief subscriptions officer Katie Friedman had when she joined the company last year: A smart paywall that uses machine learning can increase conversion rates and, ultimately, boost the total revenue yielded from online audiences. During her on-stage session at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida, this week, Friedman shared how her team worked with a vendor to build a smart paywall and talked about the tests they conducted that led them to the decision to roll it out to 100% of their audience in May.

Personalizing the paywall experience

Business Insider’s previous paywall strategy was an editorially-driven free/premium, or “freemium,” model in which only the articles written by a specific subset of journalists on the edit team (those tasked with writing solely subscriber content) were paywalled. This left a significant amount of other content on the publisher’s site that would never prompt readers to pay to access it.

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In July, when Google announced its decision not to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome by default, publishers were faced with reevaluating their post-cookie plans in light of a post-cookie landscape not necessarily being guaranteed. Hearst Magazines was among those publishers, having introduced its first-party targeting tool Aura a month prior.

“We paused for about five minutes [after Google’s announcement], and we just said, ‘Oh.’ But the plans were in place, and we were already on the path of a first-party targeting tool. I mean, we all believe this is the right thing for us,” said Jen Dorre, svp of ad products and data at Hearst Magazines, on stage during the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida, on Sept. 24.

Rather than reverse course as Google has done, Hearst Magazines has pressed on with its post-cookie plans – and now with the benefit of those plans not needing to be entirely post-cookie.

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According to most media spend prognosticators, the out-of-home media business continues to enjoy a resurgence of ad dollars following a serious dip in the immediate wake of the pandemic. At the same time, opportunities to grow media revenue has companies looking to less mature markets, including the Asia Pacific region.

Billups, an out-of-home specialist managed services media agency, is busy doing both, as it expands on the acquisition of a Malaysian company, and taps a former Dentsu executive to oversee its growing APAC business potential, Digiday has learned. Billups has also hired a new COO with holding company bona-fides to guide the overall operation. 

Ben Milne, an OOH exec for his entire career, has left his post as head of Dentsu OOH to become CEO of Billups APAC, and will move from London to Singapore. Milne has considerable experience working in the region — which observers agree should not be looked at as one region given the differences between India, China, Korea and Japan. 

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