It took 15 months and nearly $20 billion more than originally planned, but the Walt Disney Company has officially closed on its $71.3 billion purchase of 21st Century Fox, putting into motion one the industry’s most massive transformations ever.
Google ‘bad ads’ drop to 2.3 billion
Number of bad accounts removed using machine learning has doubled to more than a million.
Google took down 2.3 billion “bad ads” last year, which is significantly down on the 3.2 billion it removed the year before.
The internet’s dominant ad company has also provided more detail about the kinds of ads it removed last year for violating its policies.
These include: 207,000 ads for ticket resellers, more than 531,000 ads for bail bonds and about 58.8 million phishing ads, while it removed nearly 734,000 publishers and app developers from its ad network.
However, Google could not provide an estimate for how big of a proportion 2.3 billion is against its total ad inventory that was served in 2018, although it is understood to be a very small minority.
Nor would it comment on how much income it made from those ads.
Google has been at the centre of multiple brand safety scandals in recent years, such as ads appearing next to terror videos and extremist content.
However, last year Google was able to identify and remove almost one million bad advertiser accounts using machine learning, which is nearly the double amount it terminated.
Because of the sheer volume of new web pages that are created every day, as well as videos posted on Google’s video-sharing platform YouTube, the company has tried to develop artificial intelligence-led solutions to moderation instead of just relying on humans.
Scott Spencer, director of sustainable ads at Google, said: “Google has a crucial stake in a healthy and sustainable digital advertising ecosystem – something we’ve worked to enable for nearly 20 years.
“Every day, we invest significant team hours and technological resources in protecting the users, advertisers and publishers that make the internet so useful.”
Two years after going public, Snap’s problems are still all about growth
Snap investors, avert your eyes!
It’s been exactly two years since Snap completed its very successful IPO. Snap had figured out how to reach the young people that Facebook was no longer capturing; investors hoped Snapchat would give Facebook and its stable of apps like Instagram and Messenger some legitimate competition.
Unfortunately for Snap, that hasn’t happened. In two years, the stock is down about 60 percent from the $24.50 price it closed at on its first day of public trading. It’s not a pretty slide.
Timing Is Everything, Including for Publishers’ Videos on Twitter
Twitter global vice president and head of content partnerships Kay Madati said in late January that the social network was focusing on providing “reach, relevance and revenue” to publishers, and a feature introduced this week marks a step in that direction.
Infographic: Over Half of Consumers Delete Marketing Emails Without Ever Opening Them
Netflix may be losing $192M per month from piracy, cord cutting study claims
As many as 1 in 5 people today are mooching off of someone else’s account when streaming video from Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Video, according to a new study from CordCutting.com. Of these, Netflix tends to be pirated for the longest period — 26 months, compared with 16 months for Amazon Prime Video or 11 months for Hulu. That could be because Netflix freeloaders often mooch off their family instead of a friend — 48 percent use their parents’ login, while another 14 percent use their sister or brother’s credentials, the firm found.
At a base price of $7.99 per month (the study was performed before Netflix’s January 2019 price increase), freeloading users could save $207.74 over a 26-month period. At scale, these losses can add up, the study claims.
Digital advertising in the US is finally bigger than print and television
It was inevitable, but it’s finally here: Digital advertising businesses like Facebook and Google will be bigger in the US this year than traditional advertising businesses like TV, radio, and newspapers.
New estimates from eMarketer show that US advertisers will spend more than $129 billion on digital advertising in 2019 — more than the $109 billion they plan to spend on “traditional” advertising.
