Tag: publishers

California, USA – Programmatic digital advertising company PubMatic has announced a series of major enhancements in OpenWrap, the company’s unified auction solution for publishers. These recent enhancements aim to give publishers, including app developers, increased flexibility and improved performance with omnichannel and platform-specific enterprise-grade developer customisation. 

OpenWrap gives publishers more control over their programmatic advertising business. It is built on the open-source Prebid codebase, which provides publishers greater control, transparency, and innovation. With its new features, sellers can now clearly examine and activate the levers that contribute to delivering incremental performance.

PubMatic said that it has released a suite of enhanced capabilities to create value across the web, CTV/OTT, and mobile app. All publishers and developers leveraging OpenWrap will now gain yield improvements, such as floors designed to increase revenue, ad refresh at no cost, and levers that lift CPMs while maintaining fill. They will also have an upgraded management API, where they can customise OpenWrap to better fit the tech stack, and gain access to new automation and API options that add flexibility. And lastly, they will also gain enhanced analytics, which provides a holistic, data-visualised, and real-time view of their ad business. 

Additionally, OpenWrap has released new capabilities that deliver platform-specific benefits, including allowing web publishers to utilise more than 40 Prebid modules to leverage multiple, third-party-developed technology with efficient and unbiased integration, and enabling mobile app developers to seamlessly integrate with the top mobile mediation providers, leveraging OpenWrap’s SDK to gain access to PubMatic’s global brand demand, as well as giving OTT publishers the benefit from in-line bidding, capturing the full power of a unified auction that connects with third-party ad servers.

John Martin, director of OpenWrap at PubMatic, shared that OpenWrap is first and foremost a performance solution built for publishers and app developers, and they know every publisher’s business is different.

“We believe in open, flexible technology that enables total control and interoperability for every publisher, regardless of their inventory mix or monetisation strategy. Our recent enhancements build on this foundation, delivering higher performance, more nuanced capabilities and richer insights to ensure publishers maximise the value of their inventory and audiences,” said Martin.

Singapore – Global video and CTV programmatic advertising platform, Unruly, has launched its new content-level targeting solution that standardizes attributes across genre and rating segments, enabling scaled buying on premium video content, as spend moves from linear to digital. The new solution will serve publishers who are increasingly looking to meet buyers’ needs for contextual targeting opportunities.

At launch, 26 segments will be supported based on content attributes, such as content genre and rating. With this, Unruly’s proprietary methodology will be evaluating the direct publisher partner data and simplifying the content-level attributes into scalable deals for buyers.

Moreover, the publishers can leverage Unruly’s Private Marketplace (PMP) platform, CTRL, to package inventory to more effectively meet growing buyer demand for privacy-conscious, publisher first-party targeting solutions across CTV and video. In turn, buyers gain scaled access to deals leveraging TV-like content attributes passed through the bidstream. They can activate through Unruly’s direct DSP integrations and via Tremor Video, the demand side of Tremor International’s end-to-end platform.

Karim Rayes, Tremor International’s chief product officer, shared that interest in OTT ad opportunities grows year-over-year, which leads publishers to meet buyer needs for contextual targeting opportunities on OTT supply but lack the framework to pass this content data in standardized ways.

“Content-level targeting gives publishers control over the segmentation and packaging of their inventory, but it ultimately brings benefits to both sides of Tremor’s end-to-end platform. Standardizing content in this way maximizes publishers’ inventory value, while buyers can broaden CTV campaigns across their desired categories,” said Rayes.

Unruly has also announced its plan to further expand support for content attributes in the coming months to include language and IAB content category, in addition to providing self-service forecasting, reporting, and insights tools in support of these new attributes.

New Delhi, India – As India grapples with the virus, now having a record-high rate of daily cases in the world, Google has come to give support to its news ecosystem, with the launch of Google News Showcase.  

First launched in 2020, Google News Showcase helps participating publishers share their expertise and editorial voice through an enhanced storytelling experience. In addition, the experience lets readers dive deeper into more complex stories. It helps them stay informed on the issues and events that local, national, and global newsrooms highlight through their Google News Showcase panels.

Google News Showcase incentivizes and supports news publishers to curate high quality content on Google’s News and Discover platforms, connecting readers with the news they need.

Google News Showcase will rollout across 30 news publishers including The Hindu Group, HT Digital Streams Ltd, Indian Express Group, ABP LIVE, India TV, NDTV, Zee News, Amar Ujala, Deccan Herald, Punjab Kesari, The Telegraph India, IANS (Indo Asian News Service) and ANI.

In addition, English and Hindi news from the aforementioned publishers will show on the dedicated News Showcase panels in Google News and on Discover.

Google hopes in the near future to add more Indic languages to their News Showcase, as well as additional languages globally.

The launch is part of a global initiative by Google to support publishers that report on local or community news. To date, Google has signed in 700 news publications in more than a dozen countries, including Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, the U.K. Australia, Czechia, Italy and Argentina.

In a joint statement, Brad Bender, VP for product management at Google News and Sanjay Gupta, vice president at Google India, stated that this initiative will help people find quality journalism, contribute to the sustainability of news organizations, and expand their programs under the Google News Initiative — enabling newsrooms to engage their readers in new and compelling ways through the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

In addition to the News Showcase rollout, Google is also training 50,000 journalists and journalism students in the country for its News Lab initiative, where they will focus on digital tools to aid verification and combat misinformation online, as well as expanding their programs to connect Indian journalists and fact-checkers.

They will be also introducing several new programs to help small and mid-sized publications achieve financial sustainability – all part of the GNI Digital Growth Program, which has already trained executives at 100 Indian news organizations since launching last year. The new programs include: 

  • New business training workshops, delivered virtually, to help news organizations address the needs of their audiences, grow their readership and deepen reader engagement. These workshops will be available for free to Indian publishers, alongside Google’s existing workshops to support business success for news organizations. 
  • The GNI Advertising Lab, which includes training sessions and implementation support to help more than 800 small-sized Indian news organizations grow their digital ad revenue. 
  • The GNI Transformation Lab, a more comprehensive program for 20 local small and mid-sized Indian news organizations to help them succeed online.

Google has ramped up its news support in India back in 2018 when they first launched the GNI India Training Network, in partnership with BoomLive, DataLeads and Internews. The program has trained over 25,000 Indian journalists in-person or via virtual live workshops in 10 languages, touching 1,000+ news organizations and 700+ universities.

“The Indian news industry and its journalists have embraced technology to engage with readers and make data-driven decisions to improve their business and reporting efforts. We believe it’s important that digital platforms contribute to a sustainable, independent and diverse news ecosystem, working with journalists, news outlets and news associations. We’re proud to be strengthening our commitment at this critical time,” Google said in a press statement.

Australia – In a statement Wednesday, Facebook has announced that it has decided to restrict publishers and users in Australia from sharing and viewing Australian and international news content on its platform. This is in response to the country’s proposed media bargaining law.

What this means is, aside from limited viewing, people and news organizations in Australia are now restricted from posting news links and sharing Australian and international news content on Facebook. Globally, posting and sharing news links from Australian publishers is also restricted.

The media bargaining law which was announced in December last year by Australia, requires both Google and Facebook to share a portion of their revenues with news publishers through a mandatory code of agreement.

Facebook said that the proposed law “fundamentally misunderstands” the relationship between the platform and publishers who use it to share news content. 

“It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia, ” wrote Managing Director of Facebook’s Australia and New Zealand William Easton in a blog post 

Facebook has chosen the latter, which he said the platform had done it with a “heavy heart.” 

The platform further shared that it has made clear to the Australian government for many months, that the value exchange between Facebook and publishers runs in favor of the publisher. Last year, Facebook said it generated approximately 5.1 billion free referrals to Australian publishers worth an estimated A$407M.

Facebook News was ready to be launched in Australia with the platform having significantly increased its investments with local publishers, however, it resulted in a suspension, with Facebook saying it was only prepared to do it with the “right rules in place.” 

“We’ve long worked toward rules that would encourage innovation and collaboration between digital platforms and news organizations. Unfortunately, this legislation does not do that. Instead, it seeks to penalize Facebook for content it didn’t take or ask for,” Easton further wrote. 

In the announcement, Facebook gave an itemized list of the features of the restriction:

For Australian publishers:
• Restriction from sharing or posting any content on Facebook Pages
• Admins will still be able to access other features from their Facebook Page, including Page insights and Creator Studio
• Facebook will continue to provide access to all other standard Facebook services, including data tools and CrowdTangle

For international publishers:
• Publishers can continue to publish news content on Facebook, but links and posts can’t be viewed or shared by Australian audiences

For our Australian community:
• Australians cannot view or share local or international news content on Facebook or content from local and international news Pages

For our international community:
• Viewing or sharing of Australian news content on Facebook or content from Australian News Pages is prohibited

Amid the restriction, Facebook reassured that the changes affecting news content will not halt its products and services in Australia, as it will continue to assist users to connect with friends and family, grow their businesses, and join groups to help support their local communities. Also, Facebook will remain committed to its third-party fact-checking program, Agence France-Presse, and will continue to invest and support the important work of the Australian Associated Press.