Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has been catching heat from all over the internet since this past Thursday, when she told Axios editor Mike Allen that Facebook was not a media company. Her rationale was that Facebook doesn’t produce original news content, doesn’t hire journalists (which it actually has done), and…
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The ever-changing digital advertising ecosystem has one constant: Malware. Vigilance is the onus of every publisher. Securing the digital advertising ecosystem is easier said than done. The malware emergency du jour differs—this year’s phishing scams and scroll jacking could have been last year’s mobile redirects and app auto-installs. Meanwhile, users…
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While video advertising is still a growing revenue center for most digital publishers, much has changed over the last six years. Intriguing new formats such as outstream have allowed online publishers to additional inventory and new video distribution channels have provided content creators methods to inhabit new platforms and thus…
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Earlier in 2017, savvy publishers and platforms started noticing a gnarly new breed of mobile redirects, one that’s particularly evasive to common-practice malware prevention methods. It’s a new page in the standard playbook malvertisers long ago developed to skirt around the watchdogs in the ad ecosystem, one that allows them…
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The prominence of revenue operations as a critical function within the digital media world has had its ups and downs. While programmatic and other indirect channels have proven ops as a serious revenue center, it’s also forced the department into highly unfamiliar territory such as creative development and user experience.…
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Malware is a blanket term that applies to any software planted on the user’s device with malicious intent. It’s come a long way from that old bogeyman of the rogue hacker launching “gotcha!” viruses, which captured the public imagination in the ‘90s. Now it’s a very different bogeyman, and malware…
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It's becoming more common to hear industry folks suggest that blockchain holds certain keys for tightening up security in the ad ecosystem--providing verification and reducing fraudulent bot activity. Regardless, it's still common for other media types to respond, with at least a whiff of doubt, "What's blockchain gotta do with…
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For years, we’ve joked that brands don’t care how the digital advertising sausage is made. Their modus operandi seemed along the lines of: Let the agencies and publishers deal with the frustrating minutiae involved in making digital media transactions work.Funny how quickly things change. As increased spend hits digital channels…
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Blockchain is commonly referred to as a ledger—a shared, decentralized database, made up of so-called “blocks,” which are just hashed records of transactions. In each block, which is permanent and can’t be altered after it’s logged, you have a timestamp and a link to an earlier block. That gives participants…
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When the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) released its best practices for malware scanning in October, anyone seeking a more secure advertising supply chain would have been eager to read through the first-of-its kind, 16-page document. In a quest to outline basic malware scanning processes,TAG delivered plenty of suggestions about when…
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