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Facebook has a 100-person engineering team that helps advertisers build tools and infrastructure
Facebook says that one of its success stories in recent years involves a relatively small group of engineers. Originally it was just one engineer, Vastal Mehta, who serves as Facebook’s director of solutions engineering and now leads a team of more than 100 people that works with advertisers to build the technology and infrastructure needed to run more effective campaigns on Facebook. Read More
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TrendKite raises another $11M for its PR analytics platform
TrendKite is closing out 2017 with the announcement that it’s raised an additional $11 million in funding. The Austin-based startup says it’s currently analyzing 4.2 million articles every day, and using that analysis to help both brands and agencies to measure the impact of their PR efforts. Read More
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Thousands of major sites are taking silent anti-ad-blocking measures
It’s no secret that ad blockers are putting a dent in advertising-based business models on the web. This has produced a range of reactions, from relatively polite whitelisting asks to dynamic redeployment of ads to avoid blocking. A new study finds that nearly a third of the top 10,000 sites on the web are taking ad blocking countermeasures, many silent and highly sophisticated. Read More
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Tech in 2017: Crazy, troubled and out of control?
Questions are being asked about platform power. Regulatory rules and knives are being sharpened. Politicians are eager to point the finger of blame. And with so much tech-fueled ammunition, who can blame them? Read More
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Digital ad spend grew 23 percent in the first six months of 2017, according to IAB
Digital ad spending continued to grow during the first six months of 2017, according to the latest Internet Advertising Revenue Report. The report was prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group of online advertisers and publishers. It shows that digital ad revenue in the United States reached $40.1 billion in the first half of this year. Read More
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Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15
Google is going to start blocking certain ads in Chrome, the company announced earlier this year. But now we know exactly when: February 15, 2018 (via VentureBeat) is the go-live date provided by the company for introduction of its built-in enforcement of the standards established by the Coalition for Better Ads, of which it is a member. This won’t block all ads on all websites… Read More
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EyeEm’s new products aim to understand brand aesthetics
EyeEm is unveiling new tools to help the brands and marketers using the site to source their images. Underlying these tools is a technology called EyeEm Vision, which we described in-depth earlier this year. The goal is to expand image recognition so that it’s not just identifying the objects in the photo, but also its aesthetic qualities. EyeEm’s co-founder and chief product… Read More
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Facebook pushes pre-roll ads on Watch as it stops subsidizing Live
Everyone’s least favorite ads are coming to Facebook, but six-second pre-rolls will only appear on original Watch tab videos you purposefully view and not in the News Feed. Facebook is embracing pre-rolls after years of shunning them as it tries to make payouts to video creators sustainable. Read More
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Twitter says Russians spent ~$1k on six Brexit-related ads
Twitter has disclosed that Russian-backed accounts spent $1,031.99 to buy six Brexit-related ads on its platform during last year’s European Union referendum vote. Read More
Latest Crunch Report
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Click-to-WhatsApp messaging buttons are now rolling out in Facebook ads
WhatsApp has always said that it has no plans to put ads into its own app, but this is not stopping Facebook, which now owns WhatsApp, from figuring out other ways of monetizing the hugely popular messaging service, which has around 1 billion daily users. Today, Facebook is launching a new ad unit that will let businesses create a link between the two platforms: advertisers can now include… Read More
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PhoneWagon raises $1.2M to track when marketing campaigns lead to phone calls
When it comes to tracking the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns, PhoneWagon CEO Ryan Shank said there’s been a big piece missing for most businesses — namely, how often those campaigns lead to phone calls. Shank has plenty of experience in local marketing, having worked in sales at Yext, then serving as COO Mhelpdesk, which was sold to IAC’s HomeAdvisor. And… Read More
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Yext sees 39% revenue growth in latest quarter
Yext, the company that powers search results for retail locations, reported third-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday. The New York-based company said it brought in $44.3 million in revenue for the third quarter. This is 39% growth from the same period last year. Analysts had been expecting $43.85 million in revenue. Losses came in at an adjusted 12 cents per share, better than the… Read More
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Facebook will temporarily disable a tool that lets advertisers exclude people of color
Facebook has been under fire for its practices and policies that enable advertisers to exclude “multicultural affinity” groups from the audiences they reach via the social network. Now, in light of a ProPublica investigation and pressure from the Congressional Black Caucus, Facebook says it’s committed to taking a closer look at its advertising policies. Read More
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There are now 25M active business profiles on Instagram
Instagram announced this morning that it now has 25 million active business profiles, up from 15 million in July. The company throws out a lot of different statistics (back in September it said it had 800 million monthly active users, 500 million daily active users and 2 million advertisers), but this one’s significant as a measure of how many businesses see Instagram as an important way… Read More
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Innovid acquires Taykey to provide more data to video advertisers
Video advertising company Innovid has acquired another advertising startup, Taykey. We’ve written about Taykey as a tool that companies can use to target their ads based on the topics that their desired audience is interested in. Innovid says that by combining Taykey’s analysis with its own data about video engagement, it can show advertisers how targeting relevant content affects… Read More
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Facebook prototypes Messenger Broadcast for businesses
Facebook may soon be ready to squeeze more money out of its 1.3 billion-user chat app. The company has internally developed “Messenger Broadcast,” a self-serve mass-messaging interface that lets businesses send marketing messages to users. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s testing the feature internally, but hadn’t trialed it to the public or with businesses as… Read More
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YouTube faces brand freeze over ads and obscene comments on videos of kids
YouTube is firefighting another child safety content moderation scandal which has led several major brands to suspend advertising on its platform. Read More
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Meredith to buy Time with help from the Koch brothers, but says they won’t have any influence
It’s official—Meredith Corporation will buy Time Inc. in an all-cash transaction valued at $2.8 billion. Meredith said today it agreed to pay $18.50 per share for all outstanding shares of Time Inc. As reported earlier this month by the New York Times, the deal, which is slated to close in the first quarter of next year, includes equity financing from the billionaire Koch brothers… Read More
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Makers or breakers?
The weight of problems being demonstrably attached to heavily used tech services has acquired such a gravitational and political pull that it’s becoming harder and harder for these businesses to sidestep wider societal responsibilities. Read More
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Snapchat seeks salvation in long-form and “hands-on” AR ads
Snap Inc’s stock tanked after missing revenue expectations by $30 million last quarter, so Snapchat is looking to win over businesses with immersive new ads formats. This week it introduced two new forms of ads: Promoted Stories which string together multiple Snaps into a longer-form slideshows openable from a tile on the Stories page that’s shown to everyone in a given country… Read More
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