Microsoft and AOL are both rumored to be looking at AppNexus, a New York City real-time bid (RTB) advertising startup, for a possible acquisition.

RTB — in which advertisers pay for ad impressions to particular consumers based on tracking data at the moment a new web page is loaded — is growing incredibly quickly right now.

As RTB appears set to take over a large portion of the display market over the next few years, major advertising players are building, acquiring, or partnering their way into the market. Most recently, Google paid a reported $70 million for Invite Media, a demand-side platform that helps advertisers trade in the RTB market.

AppNexus is run by a couple guys who sold Right Media to Yahoo, Brian O’Kelley and Mike Nolet, as well as ex-Googler Michael Rubenstein. Souces from the company dimiss all this gossip as just that – “rumors.”

Read More: BusinessInsider

Is Ad Blocking the Right Approach?

A couple of months ago I read an article by Tom Hespos called “Is our ad delivery infrastructure overtaxed?“ Besides doing a good job highlighting the growing issue of complexity and latency issues in our ad delivery infrastructure, it reminded me of a debate that we’ve had here at Adometry: is ad blocking the right approach?

A number of companies have sprung up to block ads that would appear next to objectionable content. From a brand protection point of view, we understand the appeal of ad blockers. If you could ensure that you could stop your brand appearing next to inappropriate content 100% of the time, why wouldn’t you adopt one of these services? But when you look more deeply at the reality of what these services deliver and the potential unwanted side effects, the value proposition becomes less clear.

Additional Latency

Ad blockers work by inserting themselves in the ad delivery chain.  Ad blockers need to make a decision whether to allow or reject an ad on a particular page without delaying unduly the delivery of the page.  Most of the time, they do this by matching a URL in their cache. For a new URL, they schedule the page for examination in an “offline” queue.

How much extra latency is acceptable? While opinion varies, 100-150 milliseconds would be an upper limit, and most publishers would prefer to see something in the 40-50 milliseconds range or less.

How much latency do ad blocking vendors introduce into the ad delivery path using today’s technology? Our measurement of one of the leading ad blocking vendors indicates that they add an average of almost 500 milliseconds to the ad call.  Perhaps we measured them during a bad month; I’m not claiming we have enough data to be accurate about someone else’s technology. I am saying that if you’re thinking of adopting ad-blocking technology, you should measure for yourself the delay to the ad call.

Read More: iMediaConnection

ShareThis Puts Value on Shared Content

ShareThis plans to release two analytics tools that allow advertisers and marketers to determine the value of content being shared across Web sites. Through both, Social Reach and Audience Index, brands have an opportunity to understand the value of social traffic.

Social Reach measures the true value of shared media across the Web by looking at inbound social traffic and outbound sharing, valuing the responder of a share as much as the sharer. The analysis aims to provide more data than buttons on Facebook, Twitter and Tweetmeme buttons that measure outbound sharing.

Audience Index measures and segments a publisher’s audience by influence, so it identifies who has shared, responded and viewed content from their site. It indexes the information by category and matches it against other sites across the Web.

Some early data shows that social traffic engages consumers more than search traffic, according to ShareThis CEO Tim Schigel. “It measures the social reach and allows publishers to measure it by article,” he says. “They also can index their reach from the articles on their site against the rest of the network.”

Read More: MediaPost

When marketers buy television spots, they can turn on the tube and watch them run. Magazines and newspapers? Marketers can flip to their ads. But when it comes to online inventory, the questions still linger: Are my ads truly running where and when I want them to? Am I wasting impressions and ad dollars serving ads in front of the wrong audience, or are they subject to impression fraud? Are they running next to content that might be offensive to my audience or on the same page as one of my major competitors? Most of us may have chuckled over humorous examples of the wrong ad in the wrong place, but it isn’t that funny if it’s happened to you.

Most advertisers are already sold on the value of good online marketing and understand how leveraging the digital world for their end goals is an important part of their marketing mix. So why are we seeing consumer media time online rise to almost 40 percent but online budgets still only represent a portion of that ratio?

When asked why the big dollars aren’t yet flowing like they could into the channel, most decision makers seem to have an issue with trust — whether it be in brand safety concerns, unproven measurement, etc. Ultimately, the currency of choice is trust, and for some marketers, especially ones rooted in deep, traditional advertising familiarity, the online world is still a bit of a mystery. In the same vein, can you imagine if you went to buy a thousand shares of Apple and instead were given a thousand shares of a worthless penny stock? Would you continue to patronize a restaurant where you weren’t guaranteed to get the meal you ordered? Even hardcore digital advocates admit that there are still questions — and a few bugs left to exterminate –within virtual inventory.

Read More: iMediaConnection

Pushing Boundaries: Exploring the Evolving World of Display Media 

Digital media agency, FRWD, hosted digital event Pushing Boundaries: Exploring the Evolving World of Display Media yesterday at the Fine Line Music Café in Minneapolis. Industry leading publishers, demand side platforms, data aggregators, verification and survey tool providers gathered to help each other prepare for, and profit from, the fast-changing world of online advertising.  MediaMath, Simpli.fi, BlueKai, DataXu, Lucid Media, ADSDAQ Exchange, [x+1], and Rocket Fuel; among others exchanged ideas on the direction of the industry during 4 panels and 2 keynote presentations.

The transfer of data integration into ad exchanges and DSPs coupled with technology and real-time bidding (RTB) capabilities are increasing at a rapid rate, almost as rapidly as the industry is changing. Joe Zawadzki of MediaMath predicted that the industry transformation from “Mad Men to Math Men” will occur by 2012 at which point “Don Draper will be replaced by your high school Dungeon Master.” 

Panel speakers throughout the afternoon explained the details of successful ad exchanges and DSPs, specifically the capabilities of combining data and audience research targeting with the need to assure brand protection, transparency, and the unique market dynamics of RTB.  

Read More: FRWDCO.com

Google and the Search for the Future

To some, Google has been looking a bit sallow lately. The stock is down. Where once everything seemed to go the company’s way, along came Apple’s iPhone, launching a new wave of Web growth on a platform that largely bypassed the browser and Google’s search box. The “app” revolution was going to spell an end to Google’s dominance of Web advertising.

But that’s all so six-months-ago. When a group of Journal editors sat down with Eric Schmidt on a recent Friday, Google’s CEO sounded nothing like a man whose company was facing a midlife crisis, let alone intimations of mortality.

For one thing, just a couple days earlier, Google had publicly estimated that 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily by cell carriers on behalf of customers. That’s a doubling in just three months. Since the beginning of the year, Android phones have been outselling iPhones by an increasing clip and seem destined soon to outstrip Apple in global market share.

True, Apple sells its phones for luscious margins, while Google gives away Android to handset makers for free. But not to worry, says Mr. Schmidt: “You get a billion people doing something, there’s lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We’ll get lots of money for it.”

“In general in technology,” he says, “if you own a platform that’s valuable, you can monetize it.” Example: Google is obliged to share with Apple search revenue generated by iPhone users. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. That difference alone, says Mr. Schmidt, is more than enough to foot the bill for Android’s continued development.

And coming soon is Chrome OS, which Google hopes will do in tablets and netbooks what Android is doing in smartphones, i.e., give Google a commanding share of the future and leave, in this case, Microsoft in the dust.

Can it all be so easy? Google’s stock price has fallen nearly $150 since the beginning of the year. Financial pundits have started to ask skeptical questions, wondering why it doesn’t give more of its ample cash back to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. Some suspect that all that temptation merely encourages Mr. Schmidt, along with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page—the triumvirate running the company—to splurge on gimmicky ideas that never pay off. Fortune magazine recently called Google a “cash cow” and suggested more attention be paid to milking it rather than running off in search of the next big thing.

But to hear Mr. Schmidt tell it, the real challenge is one not yet on most investors’ minds: how to preserve Google’s franchise in Web advertising, the source of almost all its profits, when “search” is outmoded.

The day is coming when the Google search box—and the activity known as Googling—no longer will be at the center of our online lives. Then what? “We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. “I mean that in a positive way. We’re still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.”

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn’t know you wanted to know. “The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically,” Mr. Schmidt says.

Mr. Schmidt obviously has an eye to his audience, which this day consists of folks with an abiding devotion to the newspaper business. He speaks in sorrowful tones about the “economic disaster that is the American newspaper.” He assures us that in the coming deluge trusted “brands” will be more important than ever. Just as quickly, though, he adds that whether the winners will be new brands or existing brands remains to be seen. On one thing, however, Google is willing to bet: “The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads. That’s our business.”

Mr. Schmidt is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he’s a believer in targeted everything: “The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

That’s a bit scary when you think about it. But for investors and executives the big question, of course, is which companies will control these opportunities. Google may see itself as friend and helper to the media business, but it also clearly sees itself in control of the targeting information. Says Mr. Schmidt: “As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that’s basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time.”

Between here and there, though, the company faces ever-growing legal, political and regulatory obstacles. The net neutrality debate, which Google has led, has taken a sudden turn that has many of its former allies in the “public interest” sector shouting “treason.”

What was most striking about the set of net neut “principles” Google produced this week with former antagonist Verizon was that they didn’t apply to wireless. “The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy,” Mr. Schmidt told one news site. “And that’s really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.”

Wait. Isn’t the future of the Internet wireless these days? Isn’t wireless the very basis of the new partnership between Google and Verizon, built on promoting Google’s Android software? But Google has now broken ranks with its allies and dared to speak about the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future.

If that weren’t about to become a sticky political wicket for the company, it also faces growing antitrust, privacy and patent scrutiny, fanned by a growing phalanx of Beltway opponents, the latest being Larry Ellison and Oracle. “There’s a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges resignedly. “The first opponent will be Microsoft.”

Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game—as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do—make sure its every move is “good for consumers” and “fair” to competitors.

Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find “creepy.”

Really? Some might be skeptical that a user with, say, a thousand photos on Picasa would find it so easy to walk away. Or a guy with 10 years of emails on Gmail. Or a small business owner who has come to rely on Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Isn’t stickiness—even slightly extortionate stickiness—what these Google services aim for?

Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

“I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,” he adds. “I’m not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things,” he says.

Not that Google is a doubter of the value of social media. Mr. Schmidt awards Facebook his highest accolade, calling it a “company of consequence.” And though “there is a lot of hot air, a lot of venture money” in the sector right now, he predicts that one or two more “companies of consequence” will be born among the horde of new players just coming to life now.

A skeptic might wonder whether, despite present glory, Google itself might yet prove a flash in the pan. The company has enormous technological confidence. Mr. Schmidt describes how YouTube, its video-serving site, almost “took down” the company in its early days, thanks to the swelling outflow of video dispatched from its servers to users around the globe. Salvation was the “proxy cache”—lots of local servers around the world holding the most popular videos. “The technology that Google invented allows us to put those things very close to you,” says Mr. Schmidt. “It was a tremendous technological achievement.”

But with YouTube, as with lots of Google projects, there remains the question of how to make money. Google captured the search wave and shows every sign of positioning itself successfully for the mobile wave. As for the waves after that, your guess may be as good as Mr. Schmidt’s.

Read More: WSJ.com (entire article here)

Video ad network BrightRoll has struck a deal with search data provider Magnetic to offer search retargeting as an option for targeting video ads. Search retargeting allows advertisers to run display ads based on a user’s search history. So if someone has been researching a car purchase, they might see a banner ad from an auto advertiser.  With the BrightRoll deal, Magnetic is now applying this approach to video ads as well. “By combining Magnetic’s targeting technology with our video advertising platform, we’re able to solve the needs of our advertisers by delivering targeted campaigns at scale with a high return on investment,” said BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti in a statement. The ad network already offers targeting according to demographic, behavioral, geographic and other criteria.  Magnetic has already struck partnerships earlier this year with display ad networks including interCLICK and Undertone Networks aimed at refining display ad targeting based on the 270 million anonymous profiles the company has created based on search data gleaned from mostly second-tier search engines, Web site toolbars, e-commerce sites and other sources.  The idea is to combine the high conversion rates of search advertising with the traditional brand-building role of display. “You have all the different creative options in display that you don’t have in search,” said Magnetic CEO Josh Shatkin-Margolis. “And for premium publishers the best form of online display ads are video ads.”

Read More: MediaPost

The Future of Free Media

Monday’s Wall Street Journal article on cookie tracking was a bit underwhelming. So although (a) we’ve been having the same conversation over and over again since 1996 without getting anywhere*, (b) the article was a bit misleading and maddeningly vague, and (c) industry rumor has it that the church/state divide at the Journal does not quite live up to the J-school ideal, I am siding with Jeff Jarvis in believing that News Corp is not well enough organized to stage a conspiracy: the article was just poorly done.  These arguments are nominally about privacy. And providing privacy is a worthy but complicated** goal. But given the general level of philosophical confusion about privacy, I believe much of the commentary (and the comments to the commentary) is motivated by a hostility to advertising in general.  If you hate advertising, you hate advertising. Arguing that not paying for music means a diminished supply of quality music does not sway the downloader. Not paying for media–in whatever sense of pay–means a diminished supply of quality media. This argument does not sway the hater of advertising, but I’m not trying to convince them. Advertising provides something important: free (as in beer) media. This may not mean much to Rupert Murdoch–who can afford to pay cash for his media–but it means something to society. And it should mean something to those of us who are trying to find a way to make quality ad-supported online media a viable proposition.  Paying cash for media is regressive. High cover prices exclude those with less disposable income. (This strategy is used purposefully by mixed-model high-end media outlets to produce a demographic appealling to better-paying advertisers.) Advertising democratizes media***. And media allows a democracy.

Read More: ReactionWheel.Blogspot.com

The Google-Verizon Net Neutrality Pact

Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg hosted a conference call Monday to discuss an open Internet just days after the Federal Communications Commission abandoned efforts to reach a compromise. The proposal aims to derail unlawful discriminatory practices and gives regulators the authority to stop offenders.  While the two companies published the terms of the Google-Verizon “A Joint Policy for an Open Internet” agreement in a blog post, the plan does not treat wireless and wireline network access equally.  Both Schmidt and Seidenberg emphasized that there is no formal agreement based on the proposal. It simply represents suggestions to “the public policy arena to see how we can move our industry forward,” says Seidenberg, emphasizing that the agreement stands for innovation.

Read More: MediaPost

IAB Ad Network Guidelines: Providing Greater Brand Safety

We have all witnessed the ad network space and the overall non-reserved inventory landscape become increasingly complex. During the past 18 months, changes to our industry have come from the continued proliferation of ad networks, growth in data usage, the emergence of exchange models, as well as increased technology offerings including demand-side and supply-side solutions.  While these innovations are designed to benefit the end client, it has led to confusion – particularly during a time when advertisers and agencies are seeking transparency, brand safety, quality, and control.  As a result, clients have had growing concerns when it comes to buying inventory through networks and exchanges. They often wonder: “How will my brand be protected? Where will my campaign really run? How do I make sense of the various targeting capabilities and data sources?”  In light of these concerns, the IAB has released the “Networks & Exchanges Quality Assurance Guidelines.” The guidelines are intended to provide increased simplicity, transparency, and control for the buying community (i.e., marketers, agencies, and publishers). Based on feedback from members of this community, I’m confident that the implementation of these guidelines will result in providing confidence and clarity that buyers seek and an overall stronger marketplace for all parties alike.

Read More: ClickZ

Online advertising network InterCLICK announced its second quarter 2010 earnings on Wednesday. According to the release, “Revenue was $21.7 million in Q2 2010, a 103% year-over-year increase. (…) Gross profit was $9.6 million in Q2 2010, up 102% year-over-year.” Read more.

AdExchanger.com: Looking at InterCLICK’s 100% year-over-year Q2 growth and projected 2010 revenues of $90 million + , are there any observations you can share about how clients are spending?

MK: Delivering the most effective audience-centric campaigns is dependent on our ability to properly value targeting data and solving the operational challenges associated with running data enabled campaigns. We won a record amount of new business this past quarter and client retention reached a new high watermark. This is a hyper competitive space and I believe that our investment in our technology and our team has paid off tremendously, as evident in our results.

What about data? Has using data exchanges and other third-party providers been a key part of your offering? How do you see this playing out for InterCLICK?

The challenges in display advertising require effective supply chain management. The goal is to find the optimal alignment among data, inventory, and creative. Quality inventory has been accessible for quite some time, and through data exchanges like BlueKai, rich targeting data has been made quite accessible. So data exchanges allow for easy access and implementation. The real challenge is in the execution, which is what we have invested significant capital and resources in addressing.

Read More: AdExchanger.com

Inside the Numbers: How Demand Media Will Pitch a Billion Dollar IPO

Demand Media is a money-losing company. How will it convince Wall Street to value it at a billion dollars or more?   By directing investors’ attention to a set of numbers which say it’s a very profitable company.  The official term for these numbers are “non-GAAP financial measures”. In English, that translates into “accounting you can’t try at home, but which shows off our company in the best possible light.”  And it does! Depending on which set of numbers you want to look at, Demand lost either $4.3 million or $22.3 million on revenues of $114 million in the first half of this year. But Demand’s “Adjusted OIBDA” numbers show a company that made $25.6 million on revenue of $108 million. Much better!  Some investors may balk at these non-GAAP numbers, but Demand, Goldman Sachs (GS) and its other underwriters clearly think there’s a market for them. And there’s certainly a hunger in the tech world for a big, brand name IPO to break the dry spell. You can feel people willing this thing to work.  If Demand did, say, $55 million in OIBDA this year, it would need a multiple of 18 times trailing 12 months earnings to get to a $1 billion valuation. It would need 27x to get the $1.5 billion number that people are whispering to reporters.  Another way to get to $1.5 billion: Project OIBDA of $100 million for 2011, and ask for 15 x on that number. Reminder: $1.5 billion would make Demand worth more than the New York Times (NYT).

Read More: AllThingsD.com

Adapt.ly to Manage Ads Across Multiple Social Networks

As advertisers begin to run ads across an increasing number of social networks and sites, startup firm Adapt.ly has developed technology to help manage those campaigns from a single platform, and to help digest and evaluate the resulting performance data more easily.  As Adapt.ly co-founder Nikhil Sethi points out, most social networks offer self-service ad platforms, which exist in complete isolation of their competitors’. As a result, advertisers are forced to manually construct individual campaigns on each, despite the fact they’re attempting to reach essentially the same audience. “Managing all these campaigns by hand is a pain in the ass, and analyzing the data from all the different platforms becomes a nightmare,” Sethi said.  It’s that heavy lifting that Adapt.ly is attempting to relieve, providing a service that will handle campaign creation, targeting, and optimization automatically, and from a single point of entry. “We’ve built a system that allows us to take creative and to normalize it across a range of networks. We ask advertisers two simple questions: What are you advertising, and who are you trying to reach? The system will then optimize targeting across the networks,” said Sethi, adding that users are given the option to specify creative for individual platforms if they wish, or to simply let Adapt.ly take care of it.

Read More: ClickZ

Are Marketers Really Spying On You Online?

The ongoing “What They Know” series in The Wall Street Journal is drawing needed attention to some of the ways web analysts and marketers gather and track information about people online. As part of the series, they visualized the types of cookies and tracking files used by 50 top websites, including their own. However, the WSJ failed to fully explain what type of information is being collected about visitors and what marketers do with the data. Rather, they left the public to wonder if online marketers are actually spies.   I don’t deny that I use cookies and tracking pixels to gather a variety of details about you if you visit my site. However, most of the data I have is anonymous and the details exist across multiple systems, not aggregated in one tidy personal profile. Rarely do I feel like I have pieced together enough details to be considered a spy. But with all that data, what do I really know about you?

Read More: AdAge

The banner ad is the Web’s original advertising format, but many have viewed it as a disappointment. Prices for display ads quickly tumbled, and marketers fell in love with targeted search options.  That’s not to say display units are on their way out. On the contrary, tens of millions of dollars in venture capital is flowing into ad technology. Investors are betting that a market the Interactive Advertising Bureau pegged at $8 billion in 2009 can quickly grow five times or more with the help of better machinery. (See also: “Display Ads Aim for a Banner Year.”)   “If you take the logic behind targeting to the extreme, it’s all about discovering hidden tier-one inventory,” said Terence Kawaja, managing director of GCA Savvian Advisors. “There’s a lot of inefficiency in inventory pricing.”  Inventory aggregator AdMeld is the latest company to benefit from this belief, closing a $15 million Series C round of funding that brings its backing to $30 million. Norwest Venture Partners led the round, which included AdMeld’s previous VCs as well as a strategic backing from Time Warner Investments.  AdMeld operates a tech platform that publishers use to maximize the amount of money they make from display ads. Publishers like Discovery, Fox News, Reuters and Pandora use its yield-optimization software to determine how best to package display ad inventory for audience-based buys.

Read More: AdWeek

Simplifying The Narrative

Josh Chasin of comScore can definitely count me among his fans.  He wrote a great article late last year on the limitations of CTR as a metric.  A couple weeks back he wrote another great one that I have been looking for a moment to comment on.  Between the upcoming product launch and the 1 year old I finally found a little time, somewhat belatedly.  As I read it, the main theme of Josh’s most recent article was that as an industry we have inhibited the migration of brand-focused budgets online with complex and conflicting narratives, which cause advertisers essentially to throw up their hands and look for reasons not to spend.  I couldn’t agree more.  In fact, I don’t think Josh would object to framing this as a different angle on the same idea I discussed in a post last year (Josh – feel free to comment if I am taking your name in vain).  Regardless of the angle we each take on the story, we’re clearly in violent agreement that the narrative needs to be simpler.  Josh is also quite correct that the 30-spot is an extremely compelling creative format, next to which a hastily-assembled static banner can look, well, flat.  However, as I have previously noted, within 5 years about 80% of households will have the capability to fast forward through that compelling creative.  Online creative formats get more compelling every year – it’s not hard to imagine a well-made pre-roll, rich media or even animated flash creative execution comparing favorably to a TV ad that is watched at 10X normal speed with no sound.  Even before DVRs reach their inevitable tipping point, the research shows that online advertising drives sales at least as well as TV.

Read More: Brand.net

The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets

Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty’s computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny.  The file consists of a single code— 4c812db292272995e5416a323e79bd37—that secretly identifies her as a 26-year-old female in Nashville, Tenn.   The code knows that her favorite movies include “The Princess Bride,” “50 First Dates” and “10 Things I Hate About You.” It knows she enjoys the “Sex and the City” series. It knows she browses entertainment news and likes to take quizzes.  “Well, I like to think I have some mystery left to me, but apparently not!” Ms. Hayes-Beaty said when told what that snippet of code reveals about her. “The profile is eerily correct.”  Ms. Hayes-Beaty is being monitored by Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company that uses sophisticated software called a “beacon” to capture what people are typing on a website—their comments on movies, say, or their interest in parenting and pregnancy. Lotame packages that data into profiles about individuals, without determining a person’s name, and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers. Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s tastes can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is $1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of “50 First Dates”).  “We can segment it all the way down to one person,” says Eric Porres, Lotame’s chief marketing officer.

One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business of spying on Internet users.  The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry. 

• The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.

• Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.

• These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.

The new technologies are transforming the Internet economy. Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages.  In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.  The data on Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s film-watching habits, for instance, is being offered to advertisers on BlueKai Inc., one of the new data exchanges.  “It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”  The Journal examined the 50 most popular U.S. websites, which account for about 40% of the Web pages viewed by Americans. (The Journal also tested its own site, WSJ.com.) It then analyzed the tracking files and programs these sites downloaded onto a test computer.  As a group, the top 50 sites placed 3,180 tracking files in total on the Journal’s test computer. Nearly a third of these were innocuous, deployed to remember the password to a favorite site or tally most-popular articles.

But over two-thirds—2,224—were installed by 131 companies, many of which are in the business of tracking Web users to create rich databases of consumer profiles that can be sold.  The top venue for such technology, the Journal found, was IAC/InterActive Corp.’s Dictionary.com. A visit to the online dictionary site resulted in 234 files or programs being downloaded onto the Journal’s test computer, 223 of which were from companies that track Web users.  The information that companies gather is anonymous, in the sense that Internet users are identified by a number assigned to their computer, not by a specific person’s name. Lotame, for instance, says it doesn’t know the name of users such as Ms. Hayes-Beaty—only their behavior and attributes, identified by code number. People who don’t want to be tracked can remove themselves from Lotame’s system.  And the industry says the data are used harmlessly. David Moore, chairman of 24/7 RealMedia Inc., an ad network owned by WPP PLC, says tracking gives Internet users better advertising.  “When an ad is targeted properly, it ceases to be an ad, it becomes important information,” he says.  Tracking isn’t new. But the technology is growing so powerful and ubiquitous that even some of America’s biggest sites say they were unaware, until informed by the Journal, that they were installing intrusive files on visitors’ computers.

The Journal found that Microsoft Corp.’s popular Web portal, MSN.com, planted a tracking file packed with data: It had a prediction of a surfer’s age, ZIP Code and gender, plus a code containing estimates of income, marital status, presence of children and home ownership, according to the tracking company that created the file, Targus Information Corp.  Both Targus and Microsoft said they didn’t know how the file got onto MSN.com, and added that the tool didn’t contain “personally identifiable” information.  Tracking is done by tiny files and programs known as “cookies,” “Flash cookies” and “beacons.” They are placed on a computer when a user visits a website. U.S. courts have ruled that it is legal to deploy the simplest type, cookies, just as someone using a telephone might allow a friend to listen in on a conversation. Courts haven’t ruled on the more complex trackers.  The most intrusive monitoring comes from what are known in the business as “third party” tracking files. They work like this: The first time a site is visited, it installs a tracking file, which assigns the computer a unique ID number. Later, when the user visits another site affiliated with the same tracking company, it can take note of where that user was before, and where he is now. This way, over time the company can build a robust profile.

One such ecosystem is Yahoo Inc.’s ad network, which collects fees by placing targeted advertisements on websites. Yahoo’s network knows many things about recent high-school graduate Cate Reid. One is that she is a 13- to 18-year-old female interested in weight loss. Ms. Reid was able to determine this when a reporter showed her a little-known feature on Yahoo’s website, the Ad Interest Manager, that displays some of the information Yahoo had collected about her.  Yahoo’s take on Ms. Reid, who was 17 years old at the time, hit the mark: She was, in fact, worried that she may be 15 pounds too heavy for her 5-foot, 6-inch frame. She says she often does online research about weight loss.  “Every time I go on the Internet,” she says, she sees weight-loss ads. “I’m self-conscious about my weight,” says Ms. Reid, whose father asked that her hometown not be given. “I try not to think about it…. Then [the ads] make me start thinking about it.”  Yahoo spokeswoman Amber Allman says Yahoo doesn’t knowingly target weight-loss ads at people under 18, though it does target adults.  “It’s likely this user received an untargeted ad,” Ms. Allman says. It’s also possible Ms. Reid saw ads targeted at her by other tracking companies.  Information about people’s moment-to-moment thoughts and actions, as revealed by their online activity, can change hands quickly. Within seconds of visiting eBay.com or Expedia.com, information detailing a Web surfer’s activity there is likely to be auctioned on the data exchange run by BlueKai, the Seattle startup.

Each day, BlueKai sells 50 million pieces of information like this about specific individuals’ browsing habits, for as little as a tenth of a cent apiece. The auctions can happen instantly, as a website is visited.   Spokespeople for eBay Inc. and Expedia Inc. both say the profiles BlueKai sells are anonymous and the people aren’t identified as visitors of their sites. BlueKai says its own website gives consumers an easy way to see what it monitors about them.  Tracking files get onto websites, and downloaded to a computer, in several ways. Often, companies simply pay sites to distribute their tracking files.  But tracking companies sometimes hide their files within free software offered to websites, or hide them within other tracking files or ads. When this happens, websites aren’t always aware that they’re installing the files on visitors’ computers.  Often staffed by “quants,” or math gurus with expertise in quantitative analysis, some tracking companies use probability algorithms to try to pair what they know about a person’s online behavior with data from offline sources about household income, geography and education, among other things.  The goal is to make sophisticated assumptions in real time—plans for a summer vacation, the likelihood of repaying a loan—and sell those conclusions.  Some financial companies are starting to use this formula to show entirely different pages to visitors, based on assumptions about their income and education levels.  Life-insurance site AccuquoteLife.com, a unit of Byron Udell & Associates Inc., last month tested a system showing visitors it determined to be suburban, college-educated baby-boomers a default policy of $2 million to $3 million, says Accuquote executive Sean Cheyney. A rural, working-class senior citizen might see a default policy for $250,000, he says.  “We’re driving people down different lanes of the highway,” Mr. Cheyney says.  Consumer tracking is the foundation of an online advertising economy that racked up $23 billion in ad spending last year. Tracking activity is exploding. Researchers at AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute last fall found tracking technology on 80% of 1,000 popular sites, up from 40% of those sites in 2005.

The Journal found tracking files that collect sensitive health and financial data. On Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.’s dictionary website Merriam-Webster.com, one tracking file from Healthline Networks Inc., an ad network, scans the page a user is viewing and targets ads related to what it sees there. So, for example, a person looking up depression-related words could see Healthline ads for depression treatments on that page—and on subsequent pages viewed on other sites.  Healthline says it doesn’t let advertisers track users around the Internet who have viewed sensitive topics such as HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, eating disorders and impotence. The company does let advertisers track people with bipolar disorder, overactive bladder and anxiety, according to its marketing materials.  Targeted ads can get personal. Last year, Julia Preston, a 32-year-old education-software designer in Austin, Texas, researched uterine disorders online. Soon after, she started noticing fertility ads on sites she visited. She now knows she doesn’t have a disorder, but still gets the ads.  It’s “unnerving,” she says.

Tracking became possible in 1994 when the tiny text files called cookies were introduced in an early browser, Netscape Navigator. Their purpose was user convenience: remembering contents of Web shopping carts.  Back then, online advertising barely existed. The first banner ad appeared the same year. When online ads got rolling during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, advertisers were buying ads based on proximity to content—shoe ads on fashion sites.  The dot-com bust triggered a power shift in online advertising, away from websites and toward advertisers. Advertisers began paying for ads only if someone clicked on them. Sites and ad networks began using cookies aggressively in hopes of showing ads to people most likely to click on them, thus getting paid.  Targeted ads command a premium. Last year, the average cost of a targeted ad was $4.12 per thousand viewers, compared with $1.98 per thousand viewers for an untargeted ad, according to an ad-industry-sponsored study in March.  The Journal examined three kinds of tracking technology—basic cookies as well as more powerful “Flash cookies” and bits of software code called “beacons.” 

More than half of the sites examined by the Journal installed 23 or more “third party” cookies. Dictionary.com installed the most, placing 159 third-party cookies.  Cookies are typically used by tracking companies to build lists of pages visited from a specific computer. A newer type of technology, beacons, can watch even more activity.  Beacons, also known as “Web bugs” and “pixels,” are small pieces of software that run on a Web page. They can track what a user is doing on the page, including what is being typed or where the mouse is moving.  The majority of sites examined by the Journal placed at least seven beacons from outside companies. Dictionary.com had the most, 41, including several from companies that track health conditions and one that says it can target consumers by dozens of factors, including zip code and race.  Dictionary.com President Shravan Goli attributed the presence of so many tracking tools to the fact that the site was working with a large number of ad networks, each of which places its own cookies and beacons. After the Journal contacted the company, it cut the number of networks it uses and beefed up its privacy policy to more fully disclose its practices.  The widespread use of Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash software to play videos online offers another opportunity to track people. Flash cookies originally were meant to remember users’ preferences, such as volume settings for online videos.

But Flash cookies can also be used by data collectors to re-install regular cookies that a user has deleted. This can circumvent a user’s attempt to avoid being tracked online. Adobe condemns the practice.  Most sites examined by the Journal installed no Flash cookies. Comcast.net installed 55.  That finding surprised the company, which said it was unaware of them. Comcast Corp. subsequently determined that it had used a piece of free software from a company called Clearspring Technologies Inc. to display a slideshow of celebrity photos on Comcast.net. The Flash cookies were installed on Comcast’s site by that slideshow, according to Comcast.  Clearspring, based in McLean, Va., says the 55 Flash cookies were a mistake. The company says it no longer uses Flash cookies for tracking.

CEO Hooman Radfar says Clearspring provides software and services to websites at no charge. In exchange, Clearspring collects data on consumers. It plans eventually to sell the data it collects to advertisers, he says, so that site users can be shown “ads that don’t suck.” Comcast’s data won’t be used, Clearspring says.  Wittingly or not, people pay a price in reduced privacy for the information and services they receive online. Dictionary.com, the site with the most tracking files, is a case study.  The site’s annual revenue, about $9 million in 2009 according to an SEC filing, means the site is too small to support an extensive ad-sales team. So it needs to rely on the national ad-placing networks, whose business model is built on tracking.   Dictionary.com executives say the trade-off is fair for their users, who get free access to its dictionary and thesaurus service.  “Whether it’s one or 10 cookies, it doesn’t have any impact on the customer experience, and we disclose we do it,” says Dictionary.com spokesman Nicholas Graham. “So what’s the beef?”

The problem, say some industry veterans, is that so much consumer data is now up for sale, and there are no legal limits on how that data can be used.  Until recently, targeting consumers by health or financial status was considered off-limits by many large Internet ad companies. Now, some aim to take targeting to a new level by tapping online social networks.  Media6Degrees Inc., whose technology was found on three sites by the Journal, is pitching banks to use its data to size up consumers based on their social connections. The idea is that the creditworthy tend to hang out with the creditworthy, and deadbeats with deadbeats.  “There are applications of this technology that can be very powerful,” says Tom Phillips, CEO of Media6Degrees. “Who knows how far we’d take it?”

Read More: WSJ.com (Entire Article Here)

Rocket Fuel has developed a formula to lower cost per action (CPA) and engagement metrics by an average of 43.75% compared with other targeting methods. It built custom campaigns combining BlueKai data based on specific audience models using key metrics to serve up ads in real-time with its own suite of targeting algorithms, analytics, expert analysis and real-time impression-level bidding.  The campaign, designed for an unnamed consumer packaged goods company, focused on indentifying in-market audiences that could scale as needed. Rocket Fuel simplified the problem through rapid testing and automation of multiple kinds of data to target the correct audience.  Tapping into this model to combine technology with data brought success to automakers, retailers, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and those in the travel industry. “It’s not just about one sector or one kind of metric,” says Richard Frankel, president of Rocket Fuel. “Direct-response marketers have one type of metrics, and brand and packaged good marketers have another.”

Read More: MediaPost

Cars May Not Be Flying Off Lots, But Auto Ad Volume Is Higher Than Ever

The recent hard times in the automotive industry have not dented the industry’s display ad volume, according to a new report from campaign management firm MediaMind (until recently known as Eyeblaster).  On the contrary, even as automakers were experiencing declining sales, there has been a significant increase in automotive ad impressions served by MediaMind, and specifically in the average impressions served per advertiser.  Data on online display advertising impressions served by MediaMind from 2007 to 2009 suggest that the global slowdown in automotive sales has actually done well for automotive Display Advertising.  In 2008, the number of total impressions increased and there has been no decline in the average impressions per advertiser. Furthermore, from February 2009, impressions increased significantly, potentially reflecting tighter competition for every customer and plans by governments in Europe and North America to launch new car rebate programs to stimulate the economy.  Last year — one of the worst years in recent memory for automakers — online display impressions per advertiser served by MediaMind shot up even further.  This shows that when ad budgets are becoming tight, advertisers are trading offline budgets for more targeted and efficient online campaigns, the report suggests. “For automakers, online display advertising represents a cost-effective way to interact with prospective customers.”

Read More: MediaPost

Apple Inc., with a storehouse of billions of music, movie and software downloads, is studying the buying habits of many of its 150 million iTunes users to show more appealing mobile ads and fuel competition with Google Inc.  Through the iAd program that began last week, Apple started placing ads in iPhone applications for the first time. Early iAd clients include Nissan Motor Co., Unilever NV, JC Penney Co., Best Buy Co. and AT&T Inc.  At stake is leadership in mobile ads, forecast by EMarketer Inc. to almost triple to $1.56 billion in 2013. Google, which gained the biggest share of online advertising by placing ads based on PC-Web surfing habits, may use that tack to widen a lead on handheld devices. Examining consumers’ entertainment and software purchases may give Apple an advantage, says Rachel Pasqua, director of mobile at marketing firm ICrossing.  “Apple knows what you’ve downloaded, how much time you spend interacting with applications and knows even what you’ve downloaded, don’t like and deleted,” said Pasqua, whose clients include Toyota Motor Corp. and Mazda Motor Corp. She isn’t currently working with Apple on iAd campaigns.

Read More: Bloomberg.com

Display Advertising Acting More Like Search

While online display advertising has grown tremendously in the last decade, its growth rate and ultimate size have been outstripped by the growth and size of search.  And during a downturn search tends to hold or grow its relative position even more.  As a result, many players in the display world are looking to search to see what aspects of search can be better leveraged in display.  I think there are three key areas where display is working to become more like search.  First, in the area of data.  A tremendous amount of the power of search comes from the fact that the consumer’s intent is largely declared by their act of searching.  Clearly that is of great value to an advertiser.  By gathering data that better approximates current intent – for example, by incorporating an anonymous user’s recent queries from an e-commerce site – display advertisers can come closer to search in this respect.  The rise of data exchanges like BlueKai and Exelate is intended to help address this need.  The second area of historical “search advantage” is creative.  Search “creative” has historically been text, which is easy for even the smallest advertiser to create and change.  This means a broader number of potential advertisers.  Companies like AdReady and Tumri make the real-time assembly of display creative much easier and lower cost.  If companies can generate display creative on the fly inexpensively, the ability to better target display ads is significantly enhanced.  Finally, display advertisers are becoming more like search in the area of real-time bidding.  Search has allowed advertisers to bid for keywords and calculate their return on investment relatively easily.  With the rise of Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) such as MediaMath and Invite to help advertisers interface with ad exchanges, the display advertising world is similarly helping advertisers efficiently access quality inventory at a competitive price.  

Read More: Blog.Searchandise.com

For Online Advertising, Media Consolidation Is a Good Thing

Much has been written about the “long-tail” concept since Wired’s Chris Anderson popularized the idea in 2004. But for all the discussion about how effective long-tail strategies are for search-engine optimization, viral marketing, web retailing and social-media marketing, it seems that many online advertisers — especially display advertisers — are missing the boat.  Media continues to consolidate, and increasingly the vast majority of online ad dollars go to just a handful of web publishers. By ignoring the rest of the web publishing world, online advertisers are avoiding a perfect opportunity to reach much larger audiences at a reduced cost. From an advertiser’s perspective, the universe of websites can be divided into four groups.

Read More: AdAge

The online video ad network space has earned something of a reputation for murkiness, which has helped fuel interest in a string of ad verification companies that aim to ensure brands’ ads run where they are supposed to.  ScanScout, one of the growing players in online video, already claims that it’s technology can prevent an advertiser’s ads from running alongside questionable content. But to take things a step further, the company says it will now be fully transparent upfront with its advertisers about what sites their campaigns will appear on.  Buyers can now peruse ScanScout’s lists of hundreds partner sites — which include MLB.com, NBC and Fox sites, as well as Gannett and Warner Bros. Web properties — picking ahead of time where they’d like their clients’ ads to run.  That, says ScanScout evp Jason Krebs should take a lot of the uncertainty out of buying online video — and help risk-averse traditional brands embrace the medium. “Brand dollars have stayed away from the space,” he said. “We want to help brands figure out upfront what they are buying.”

Read More: AdWeek

How Paypal Can Help Save Media—And Itself

Earlier this month, John Donahoe, CEO of eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) and its subsidiary Paypal, was interviewed at the D8 conference. It was a flashback to see him speak:  I had worked under him 15 years ago when I was a freshly minted undergrad just hired into the San Francisco office he ran for Bain & Company. A strapping and charismatic up-and-comer, John was known for his bold visionary talks and his strident walk.  But at D8, I didn’t see that confidence. He spoke of eBay’s connections between buyers and sellers as though he hoped we’d believe it was a new trend; meanwhile far from his Santa Clara headquarters, Gilt Groupe and Groupon are reinventing e-commerce. On Paypal, he looked backwards to the innovation of getting financial services online, rather than forward to the app revolution. Overall he looked staid, the way eBay and Paypal now look to me – entangled by their legacy, unable to cut the cords to freely enjoy the new boom around them.  With that in mind, I’d like to offer Paypal the chance to get ahead in an area that still has room for wild success. Media desperately needs help to become financially viable – and consumers will need to foot part of the bill to make it so. It’s clear that others see the opportunity here: Facebook surely wants to spread its Facebook Credits currency to take over the world the way ‘Like’ has; and now word comes that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is readying Newspass in its bid to capture consumer payments for media. But more than these other companies, Paypal, with its huge footprint of consumer accounts and years of web experience, is in the catbird seat to be media’s savior. 

Read More: PaidContent.org

Guaranteeing Data And Audience Validation Reporting

Known as the “Quality Data Guarantee program,” AudienceScience has announced that it will start verifying its own data as well as those of other vendors in order to guarantee for clients that they’re really getting the audience they wanted. New audience verification reports will also be offered. Read the release.  AudienceScience CEO Jeff Hirsch discussed the new program and reporting as well as its implications.

AdExchanger.com: What has pushed AudienceScience to offer the Quality Data Guarantee?

JH: There are several reasons. First, we are strong believers in the notion that the creator of data has the right to determine how that data gets used. The industry needs standards to support this. AudienceScience has spent years developing relationships with thousands of data sources that specifically and contractually, spell out our right to utilize data to power campaigns for our advertiser and publisher partners. We think it is important for marketers to know, with absolute certainty, that they have the right to utilize the data powering their campaigns. Secondly, we are concerned that data collection does not always adhere to privacy guidelines. It is absolutely essential that we get this right as an industry. We have invested in a significant way to protect consumer rights and we want marketers to ask the tough questions of any company utilizing data – are consumer rights protected? Lastly, we want our partners to know that their own data is protected and that they have complete control over its collection and utilization.

Read More: AdExchanger

Six months into 2010 and things are looking downright sunny, unless you’re BP, or want to swim in the ocean anytime in the next five years. So far the economic outlook is good and recent reports suggest that the digital world is poised for growth. Agencies are hiring again, staffing up new roles, and expanding teams. Clients are cautiously coming back to the digital world. Life is good in the kingdom…or so it seems.  A small storm is brewing. It’s not a client or budget problem; it’s an integration problem. Every agency is facing the problem of matching their user engagement strategy with their data-driven search efforts. How we approach this problem is key to organizing our agency resources to work with emerging trends and avoid the pending storm.  Search has always fallen into the category of algorithm-driven strategy, but with the rise of ad exchanges, demand-side platforms, and trading desks – the water has gotten murkier. With this “new” way to buy, agencies aren’t only educating clients on this new format, but also aligning an organization to deliver against it.

Read More: ClickZ

Apple’s Next Disruption: Advertising

If anything is clear from the punches being thrown by Google at Apple over mobile advertising, it is that the search giant understands what is at stake.  As mobile advertising comes into its own, Google should be well-positioned to grab a big piece of it. Prospects for other large media companies, online or traditional, are less sure.  It is easy to underestimate the importance of mobile Internet and advertising. ComScore estimates 48 million people had smartphones in the U.S. in the three months to April, of whom only 5.4 million searched the Web on the devices on a near-daily basis. In contrast, the firm counted 214 million people searching the Web generally in April.  Estimates from eMarketer put mobile advertising at $593 million this year, compared with about $25 billion for total online advertising.  But eMarketer’s numbers were issued last September, before the release of the iPad. The Apple tablet’s strong sales so far confirm consumer demand for tablet computers and suggest consumers’ online behavior is likely to become a lot more mobile. That is likely already the case for owners of smartphones with robust Web browsers like iPhones or Android-powered devices.  Android and iPhone devices commanded 37% of the smartphone market in the first quarter between them, according to Nielsen, against 35% for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry. Nielsen’s data also show that close to 90% of iPhone and Android owners used the mobile Internet in the previous 30 days, compared with 73% for all smartphones. Browsing the Web on a BlackBerry can be a frustrating experience. So as RIM’s market share declines and iPhone, iPad and Android devices become more common, mobile Web use will take off.  Data are scarce on how mobile browsing affects online behavior at a PC. But the ability to do Web searches anywhere likely reduces those done at a desk. Searching could become less important as people rely on apps for certain functions.  All this should spark an ad shift to mobile, particularly to apps. Admittedly, advertisers can take years to respond to changes in consumer behavior. But Apple’s plunge into the ad market with iAds, which serves advertising inside apps, is likely to accelerate the change. That it drew $60 million in second-half 2010 commitments from such marketers as General Electric, Unilever and Nissan Motor indicates mobile-ad estimates are too low.  Who will suffer from the advance of mobile advertising? TV networks, potentially, if the caliber of big-brand advertisers snagged by Apple continues. As the mobile audience is likely to fragment among applications, big Internet portals also may be at risk. Regardless, mobile likely will cause a bigger, faster disruption to the ad world than is generally appreciated.

Read More: WSJ

eXelate, which manages a large online targeting data exchange, is rolling out a new tool that will allow Web publishers to better manage the sale and use of their own user data.  The new product is called teXi:PM, which stands for “private marketplace.” According to eXelate executives, publishers can use teXi:PM to control how ad networks, agencies, demand-side platforms or other clients access their data. Publishers can also control how that information is sold. In addition, sites can employ teXi:PM to set price controls and initiate data transactions.  Publishers that elect to create their own data marketplaces using teXi:PM will not be precluded from also selling their data via eXelate’s exchange, which the company claims represents sites and networks that in aggregate reach 150 million unique users each month.  eXelate has signed on WhitePages as one of the first Web publishers to use teXi:PM to create a private data exchange.  “[This] partnership will allow us to extend the value of our users’ business search behaviors to marketers using a single technology platform, while still protecting consumer privacy,” said Ingrid Michelsen, WhitePages senior director, ad sales, strategy and development.

Read More: AdWeek

Former TiVo President to Lead Joint “Hulu for Magazines” Effort

The movement to create a “Hulu for magazines” hasn’t gotten much traction lately, but it has gotten a new CEO: Morgan Guenther, who is best known as the president of TiVo from 2001-2003.  Guenther will take the reigns of Next Issue Media, a joint venture of Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corporation and Time Inc. to create a digital hub where consumers can access magazine articles the way they access TV clips on Hulu.  “Next Issue Media is well positioned to create and deliver incremental business opportunities to the magazine and newspaper publishing world,” said Guenther in a written statement. “The potential for value creation across the entire industry ecosystem… is massive. Our task now is to execute on that potential.”  The project, originally announced in December of 2009, has taken on an air of urgency since the successful launch of the iPad. One of Next Issue’s primary goals is to make magazines as accessible to e-readers like the iPad and Kindle as books and some newspapers are now. With more than 2 million iPads sold since launch of the device in April, the stakes are considerably higher for anyone looking to create a successful magazine app.

Read More: ClickZ

How Yahoo Bought Associated Content

Last month, Yahoo bought Associated Content, a Web publishing startup with thousands of semi-pro freelance writers, for around $100 million.  $100 million isn’t much for a company like Yahoo (YHOO), and a big content deal helped Yahoo define itself, so the acquisition seems like a smart move. Here’s the story of how it happened. (Click here for the picture-book version.)  Before there was Yahoo, there was AOL.  Back in August 2009, everybody assumed AOL (AOL) was going to buy Associated Content. And, for a while, everybody was right. AOL began looking at Associated Content almost as soon as Tim Armstrong became AOL CEO in March 2009. The acquisition fit into Tim’s plan to turn AOL into a lean, mean Time Inc. for the 21st Century.

Read More: BusinessInsider