Industry Roundup: March 2019

Technology

• This March, Google announced that through the course of 2019, Google Ad Manager auctions will be switching from a ‘second-price auction’ model, where a winning advertiser pays one cent higher above the second-highest bid, to a ‘first-price auction’ model. As the biggest global ad exchange, this change is expected to have far reaching influences which will be felt all through the programmatic advertising ecosystem. Read more >

Supply

• eMarketer forecasts reddit’s ad business’ US revenues to cross the $100 million bar in 2019, representing a growth of more than 50% compared to 2018, and to more than double by 2021. eMarketer attributes the expected rise in revenues to Reddit revamping of its advertising offerings.Read more >

• An AdAge piece uses the Atlantic’s tribulations with finding a lucrative online business model to discuss the dilemma encountered by medium-sized publisher when considering raising a paywall

• A study performed for Digiday, with the participation of 15 leading U.K publishers, revealed that the ads, editorial content, tracking pixels and cookie-synching redirects constitute an average of 10% of pages’ weight.  

Demand

• DRUM reports that according to a World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) poll on programmatic practices in the Asia Pacific region, nine out of ten marketers in APAC are currently buying media programmatically.

• A recent adExchanger op-ed addresses the trend of DSP consolidation and its influences on the industry as a whole

Markets

• The EU commission slapped Google with a whopping (relatively) fine of 1.49€ billion for violating EU competition law. The commission concluded that Google has abused its market dominance by restricting third-party websites it was working with, such that said websites were prevented from hosting ads of Google’s competitors. Read more >

• In a Medium post, Dem. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts laid out her plan to break up Amazon, Facebook and Google, if elected president in 2020.