Customer Data Platform vendor BlueVenn announced a strategic partnership with Throtle, which helps companies connect online to offline identities. What’s interesting is such integrations have usually been done as clients request them; this makes the integration more part of BlueVenn’s standard offering.
It’s not your imagination: the online audience aggregators (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) really are coming under unprecedented pressure. It’s not just lagging indicators like the New York Times finally noticing there’s a problem, Verto Analytics, which gathers behavior from measurement apps on consumer devices, found that Facebook time fell 32.7 hours per month in 2016 to 18.5 hours in 2017. Other social media services showed growth. Let’s face it: attention spans are short and people are not as obsessed with Facebook as they used to be.
One of the problems with taking humans out of the media buying process is that ad fraud and brand safety problems can go undetected. Programmatic ad platform RhythmOne reports it blocked just over one-third of all potential inventory due to fraud or performance concerns last June – September. Rates are similar with previous periods but better options are emerging: fraud is lower on mobile app inventory than desktops; private marketplaces offer higher quality options; and ads.txt is helping to prevent unauthorized selling by fraudsters.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.