New data from mobile ad network Mojiva out this morning paints a picture of the state of mobile advertising, highlighting trends across its network from February to June of this year. Some high-level conclusions: rich media ads dominate, the mobile web shouldn’t be discounted, the majority of mobile ad requests came from Wi-Fi connections, and RIM is still a major player. (Well, in Europe, that… → Read More
When we wrote about Napkin Labs last year, the Boulder-based startup had created an online lab space that functioned as a collaborative community in which fans could help their favorite brands incubate new ideas and make their voices heard. However, the startup soon found that creating a new destination community is an uphill battle.
Shifting its strategy, Napkin Labs began building tools that… → Read More
MoPub, the Accel-backed mobile advertising startup founded by ex-AdMob and Google employees, is today announcing a $12 million round of Series B funding which the company says will be used for hiring and international expansion, including putting folks on the ground in Europe, Japan, Korea and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region. → Read More
Twitter has released numerous “user experience enhancements” this summer — including today’s update. But subtly embedded in each are the building blocks of a better business plan. Twitter is slowly and incrementally improving advertiser reach on the service, one change at a time. Twitter now shares two different perspectives on new feature announcements with the official blog and the advertising… → Read More
Back in 2009, Republic Project launched to give bands and labels a platform to sell pre-orders of new music direct to fans, while receiving 100 percent of the revenue. The platform essentially provided bands with a widget they could embed on their websites, blogs and social networks to share exclusive video from the road, the studio, and so on.
While the idea found a bit of traction with bands… → Read More
Twitter is moving the bus forward on monetizing itself and allowing brands to handle all of their advertising on the site. Today, the company announced two new self-service features that companies have been asking for. → Read More
GIF, a filetype that celebrated its 25th anniversary this past June (don’t you feel old now?), won’t die. And the animated GIF, in particular, has seen a notable resurgence recently, as a newer, younger group of netizens rediscover its capabilities, posting GIFs to social networks, blogs and in fashion editorials. “Cinemagraph“-making apps became trendy, and Tumblr posts filled with animated GIFs… → Read More
As Google Maps continues to face headwind from competitors like OpenStreetMap, Google has to find new ways to entice developers to continue to use its mapping solution. Today, the company is launching new ad units for Google Maps that bring Google’s standard AdSense link units to its maps on third-party sites. These new ad formats join Google’s long-established Maps Ad Unit, which the company… → Read More
Craigslist has been making a lot of moves to ensure that third party developers get off its lawn, but the listings giant is also, it seems, trying to make that lawn a little more attractive for residents. At some point not too long ago it seems, the site quietly introduced a feature that lets users view images inline, on the same page as category listings, and when you hover your cursor on the… → Read More
Mobile app monetization exchange inneractive has closed on $3.5 million in new financing, the company is announcing today. The round was led by Evergreen Ventures Partners, and saw participation from both existing private investors and new investors from the U.S. and Europe. The company, which integrates over 120 ad providers from 200-plus countries into a one-line SDK, now has thousands of… → Read More
Google’s tools for tracking the upcoming U.S. election later this year mostly focus on the presidential election. It’s no secret, though, that Google – thanks to its various advertising services – also makes a good amount of money from political campaigns that compete in smaller contests, including the 435 races for seats in the House of Representatives this year. This year, thanks to the recent … → Read More
Whenever you see the same ad for a shopping site you just visited pop up across the web, chances are that’s not a coincidence but a remarketing effort by that site. These sites often offer users who abandon their shopping carts a discount to lure them back, for example, but the only way to get a hold of them once they have left the site is to target ads to them on other properties around the web. → Read More
WPP today has announced a major development in its strategy to have 40 percent of its business coming from digital in the next five years: it is buying AKQA, one of the biggest — and independent — digital agencies around. WPP says that AKQA will continue to operate as an independent agency, and its current chairman will also head up a new investment arm, WPP Ventures, to back more digital… → Read More
Banner ads have been around for over a decade, and though they may have been effective back in the mid-’90s, today they just feel like relics. You probably can’t remember the last time you clicked on one. (I know I can’t.) Sure, display advertising is evolving, and marketers still spend billions on display, but as much as we try to spruce them up, they remain one of the weakest forms of digital… → Read More
Skype just announced that it will now begin to show some of its users ads during 1:1 audio calls. These so-called “conversation ads” will only appear for users who don’t have Skype credit or a subscription and, for the time being, these ads will only appear on Skype for Windows, though chances are the company, which is now owned by Microsoft, will also bring these ads to its OS X client in the… → Read More
According to online analytics company comScore, Americans watched 37 billion online videos on sites like YouTube, Yahoo and Facebook in April. In total, 181 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 1,307 minutes of online videos last month. Those numbers are virtually unchanged from last month, but one area that has seen pretty spectacular growth over the last few month is online video… → Read More
Appia, an app marketplace and white-label app platform, is broadening its support for Android with the introduction of Pay Per Install App Advertising for Google Play (formerly known as the Android Market). Up until now, all the downloads generated through PPD (pay per download) were done through an Appia-powered app store, but now developers can purchase a Pay Per Install campaign and drive… → Read More
BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, today announced an extension of its relationship with social, online TV site Viki. On the heels of a strategic investment it made last year — BBC Worldwide participated in a $20 million Series B round that also included SK Planet, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Neoteny Labs and others — and a content licensing deal… → Read More
In its first-ever earnings report as a publicly traded company, mobile advertising network Millennial Media said its net loss for the first quarter widened to $4 million on increased costs. Revenues were up 53 percent year-over-year to $32.9 million.
Millennial’s shares fell by 7.7 percent in after-hours trading, as the company’s annual forecast missed estimates. For the year, Millennial is… → Read More
Tumblr, the immensely popular but profitless blogging platform, just turned on its first set of paid “sponsor products” (Tumblr doesn’t like to call them “ads”). Even though the company resisted running ads on its network for a long time, it announced that it would launch this platform about two weeks ago at Ad Age’s Digital Conference in New York. For the most part, the new ads don’t intrude on… → Read More
Vungle, a new company that wants to help mobile developers market their apps through video “trailers,” has just raised an enormous $2 million seed round from the who’s who of Silicon Valley. The round includes Google Ventures, AOL Ventures [Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL], Crosslink Capital, SV Angel, 500 Startups, SoftTech VC, as well as several notable angels like Maynard Webb, Scott… → Read More
Local advertising startup, and recent Google Offers partner, Signpost is announcing its Series A funding round this morning to the tune of $3.75 million, led by Spark Capital. Other angels also participated in the round, but the company isn’t disclosing names. This new round is in addition to previous funding of $1.25 million, which included an investment from Google Ventures.
The company is… → Read More
Bee Media, the makers of a mobile shopping platform that serves location-specific offers and info to mobile devices, today announced that it has acquired Adcentricity, a similarly location-focued digital media startup. Under the terms of the acquisition, Bee Media secures rights to the Adcentricity name and will operate as Adcentricity going forward. Doug Woolridge, the current CEO of Bee Media… → Read More
The heat is on to migrate more digital marketing activities into the cloud, and while we have seen a lot of movements from smaller, fleet-0f-foot startups in this area, the big players don’t want to be left out in the cold, either. Enter WPP, which today announced a partnership with the Bangalore-based outsourcing and IT specialist Infosys for a new cloud-based digital marketing… → Read More
Ad-tech may not be the most obvious face of digital advertising, but in a world in which the role of big data is getting ever more essential to how things work, it is taking up an increasingly important role. One sign of that comes from the funding that ad-tech players are getting in this space: today, ad-tech startup Moat announced that it has picked up a $12 million investment led by the … → Read More
The mobile app industry is in a state of confusion in the wake of Apple’s recent measures to wean developers from the UDID (Unique Device Identifier), a function broadly used for determining the effectiveness of mobile advertising.
In the short term, it seems that notions of an imminent Apple ban on use of UDIDs are premature. However, most in the market have concluded that they need to move… → Read More
This morning, at the Ad Age Digital Conference in NYC, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar announced a significant change in how the media company will charge its advertisers. Going forward, advertisers will only be charged based on a 100% completion rate. In other words, if viewers don’t watch the whole ad, it doesn’t count.
The change will be effective in both the free level of service and the… → Read More
A B2B company trying to change the way that marketers procure services for ad campaigns says it has just closed one of Europe’s largest-ever angel financing rounds.
blur Group, which runs a platform called the Creative Services Exchange, says that it has raised $2 million. Bypassing the VC route, the company instead opted for a group of about 20 business names and angel investors including… → Read More
There is hardly a program or ad on TV these days that doesn’t ask its viewers to like its Facebook page or tweet about it. According to a new survey by global consulting firm Accenture, there’s a simple reason for this: those social media symbols actually work. Accenture found that, in the U.S, about a third of TV viewers have liked a show’s or brand’s Facebook page or tweeted about what they saw… → Read More
It’s no secret that most of us put more stock in the recommendations we get from friends than traditional forms of advertising. What’s interesting, though, is that while most consumers also increasingly trust online reviews and ads, trust in paid advertising on television, magazines and newspapers has been declining pretty rapidly. The latest data from Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising Survey… → Read More
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