Here’s more about adtech: Paris-based Weborama has purchased Adways, which shows video ads by overlaying them on or around editorial content, thus ensuring they cannot be skipped. It’s a new role for Weborama, whose current business is based on using semantic analysis to classify web content for contextual ad targeting.
Google and Facebook are still the kings of online ad revenue, with estimated 2021 revenues of $210 billion and $117 billion respectively. But Amazon last week revealed it had $31 billion in ad revenue in 2021, ending much speculation and confirming its Number Three position. It already sells more than YouTube and is growing very, very fast.
Connected TV is one of advertising’s main frontiers, although at this point it’s well past the trailblazer stage. But it’s still facing some challenges that more mature digital ad channels have largely addressed, such as applying frequency caps to limit how often the same person sees the same ad. Google just knocked a few more bushes out of the way with a feature to control frequency across multiple CTV apps, rather than separately for each app.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.