Publishers’ ad revenue rebounded in the first half, but H2 is looking even brighter

The crisp autumn breeze is not the only breath of fresh air washing over the media industry this season. 

According to the latest Media Ad Sales Trend Flash Report from publisher ad management provider Boostr, focused on the first half of 2024, there are many positive ad sales trend lines showing that the doldrums of 2023 might be over — at least for now. 

Deal size of direct-sold advertising campaigns (ranging from custom content to programmatic guaranteed) and RFP volume were both up in Q1 and Q2 this year. Meanwhile, positive rebounds are happening with revenue retention and overall average ad revenue growth rates, among the more than 100 U.S.-based digital publishers surveyed for this report that use Boostr’s platform. 

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DOJ accuses Google of knowingly taking power from publishers as government enters emails and audio as evidence

On Thursday in federal court, the U.S. Justice Department introduced internal Google documents — including emails, chat logs and audio recordings — that showed Google execs’ plans around the introduction of new publisher tools to compete with header bidding.

Evidence submitted by the DOJ suggests Google knew about industry unease over the evolution of DoubleClick — Google’s publisher platform in question as part of the antitrust trial — but continued on its path to monetization anyway and even took measures to allegedly thwart efforts to side-step its control. Documents also gave a behind-the-scenes look at how Google execs understood why publishers wanted to diversify revenue away from the Google-controlled advertising waterfall and employ rival monetization technology header bidding instead.

One of the DOJ’s witnesses for Day 4 was former Googler Rahul Srinivasan — who at the time was product manager for Google Ad Manager between 2016 and 2019 — about the rollout of various features within Google Ad Manager, such as First Look, Last Look, Jedi Blue, and Unified Pricing Rules (UPR).

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