ZTE kick-starts global race to 5G with advanced equipment geared for deployment from 2018

“Pre5G” solutions enable operators to emulate the performance of 5G networks on existing 4G infrastructure, and are easily upgradable to 5G in future when the universal standards for the mobile system are completed, according to ZTE.

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 The new mmWave and sub-6Ghz mobile base stations launched by ZTE in Barcelona use so-called beam tracking, beam forming, massive multiple input, multiple output and other key technologies behind future 5G networks.

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The International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations agency, expects to reach agreement for a single global 5G standard between 2019 and 2020.

http://www.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/2074791/zte-kick-starts-global-race-5g-advanced-equipment-geared-deployment 

 

comScore adds YouTube mobile metrics

ComScore, the oft-cited data company that measures digital traffic and ad campaigns, can now measure mobile consumption on YouTube.

This is important because nearly 70% of all YouTube videos are watched on mobile devices. Some examples of measured metrics include monthly minutes per viewer, average minutes per video view and monthly videos watched per viewer, among others.

http://www.businessinsider.com/comscore-adds-youtube-mobile-metrics-2017-2?r=US&IR=T&IR=T 

India’s $600 billion market is not big enough for it to top global retail rankings

American retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores, Costco Wholesale, and The Kroger top Deloitte’s “Global Powers of Retailing 2017” ranking by turnover, followed by Japanese and German companies. In all, revenue for the top 250 retailers studied by Deloitte totaled over $4.3 trillion in financial year 2015.
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But organised retailers, who form only 10% of India’s $600 billion retail industry, are still only catching up.

https://qz.com/916568/indias-600-billion-market-is-not-big-enough-for-it-to-top-global-retail-rankings
https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/consumer-industrial-products/articles/global-powers-of-retailing-2017.html#

Mobile ad blocking firm Shine is rebranding to 'Rainbow' and will stop selling ad blocking to carriers

On Friday, Shine announced it had stopped selling ad blocking solutions to mobile carriers and it was rebranding to "Rainbow."
Rainbow says it has "quietly" been working with the mobile advertising industry over the past few months to create a consumer mobile ad blocker that only blocks ads that don't meet industry standards (Such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau's "LEAN" principles). The previous version of Shine aimed to block all ads.
Consumers sign up for the Rainbow ad blocker by opting in through their carrier or internet service provider, via a web portal, SMS, or call center.

http://www.businessinsider.com/shine-rebrands-to-rainbow-stops-selling-ad-blocking-2017-2?r=US&IR=T&IR=T
https://getrainbow.com/

Pedestrians and robots will soon share the pavements

A new breed of ’droids that are about to take to the world’s pavements. 

The latest, called Gita, was unveiled earlier this month by Piaggio Fast Forward, a subsidiary of Piaggio, an Italian firm that is best known for making Vespa motor scooters. Gita’s luggage compartment is a squat, drumlike cylinder that has been turned on its side. This, as the picture above shows, is fitted with two wheels of slightly larger diameter than the drum. These let the whole thing roll smoothly along, keeping the luggage compartment upright, at up to 35kph (22mph). Normally, though, Gita does not travel anything like that fast. Instead, it follows at walking pace a metre or two behind its human owner—or, more accurately, an electronic belt that the owner wears. A wireless connection to a stereoscopic camera on this belt lets it map its surroundings, better enabling it to trail its owner around street corners or through doors. 

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One problem faced by the designers of ’bots such as these is that unlike roads, which have well-established rules, lane markings and traffic signals to guide autonomous vehicles using them, the pavements running alongside those roads are what roboticists refer to as “unstructured environments”. People can walk, jog or roller-skate wherever they please on them, and there is an ever-shifting array of dogs, prams, signs and rubbish to avoid, as well.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21717025-streetwalkers-pedestrians-and-robots-will-soon-share-pavements 

 

How The Economist turns social visitors into subscribers

That means The Economist is very clear about what it wants out of platforms: to reach non-subscribers and give them samples of Economist content to eventually turn into more subscribers. Over the year, it has grown social media followers by 25 percent to now reach 44 million across platforms, mostly Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and LinkedIn. It has seen a surge of subscribers, first after Brexit and more recently after Donald Trump’s election. In the last year, digital subs have grown by nearly 14 percent from 303,500 to 345,500. (The Economist’s overall subscription base is 1.5 million.)

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The Economist has a metered paywall through which non-subscribers can view three articles a week.

http://digiday.com/publishers/economist-turns-social-readers-subscribers/ 

 

E-handelsplattformens butiker omsatte 15,4 miljarder dollar

Betalplattformen Shopify är duktiga på att locka nya e-handlare till sig.

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 Omsättningen för Shopifys e-handlare landade på 15,4 miljarder dollar. Plattformen i sig gör dock en förlust på 35,4 miljoner dollar.

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Och i antal e-handlare som använder Shopify verkar det minst sagt gå framåt. Totalt anslöt sig 133 000 e-handlare under 2016 och vid årets slut var siffran 377 500 handlare som använder Shopifys plattform.

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Plattformen används i 175 länder världen över.

http://www.ehandel.se/E-handelsplattformens-butiker-omsatte-154-miljarder-dollar,9635.html 

 

Journalists are getting sacked across India but it’s still the only major market where print is growing

India’s newspaper industry is estimated to be worth over Rs28,000 crore. Many of its over 82,000 publications cater to small towns and cities and are printed in regional languages. Print attracts 30% of ad money but trails television, the most preferred medium among advertisers.

https://qz.com/910271/journalists-are-getting-sacked-across-india-but-its-still-the-only-major-market-where-print-is-growing/

Here’s how much the biggest tech companies grew in terms of revenue last quarter

http://www.businessinsider.com/tech-companies-biggest-revenue-growth-chart-2017-2?r=UK&IR=T&IR=T

NewsWhip nabs $6.4M from the AP, more to shed light on what’s trending

NewsWhip — which tracks what stories and themes are trending, along with influencers, and provides that data to publishers and brands so that they can follow the money, so to speak, and build out their editorial strategy — is getting its funding from two strategic investors, The Associated Press and Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/14/newswhip-nabs-6-4m-from-the-ap-more-to-shed-light-on-whats-trending/ 

 https://www.newswhip.com/

 

VCs swipe left on dating apps

The romance between venture capitalists and dating startups appears to have hit a rocky patch.

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 VCs look for a loyal, active, long-term user base, and dating apps tend to attract periodic, short-term users. Monetization is also a challenge, as paid apps have to compete with free ones. There also are few deep-pocketed acquirers with interest in the space. 

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/14/vcs-swipe-left-on-dating-apps/

 

Privacy browser Cliqz has acquired the ad and tracking blocker Ghostery

German startup Cliqz, backed by Mozilla, acquired privacy tool Ghostery in an all-cash deal, the companies announced on Wednesday.
Cliqz is a German startup building a privacy browser, which protects its users from ad tracking.
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The deal will see the startup acquire the consumer assets of Ghostery, which has 10 million users, in a bid to grow Cliqz's user base outside of its home market.
http://nordic.businessinsider.com/privacy-browser-cliqz-has-acquired-the-ad-and-tracking-blocker-ghostery-2017-2

Don’t Look Now, but the Great Unbundling Has Spun Into Reverse

We are in the age of the great rebundling, when firms use packages of services as a way to increase their scale advantage and thus deepen the moat around their businesses.

In music, the story is even starker than in television. At one time, consumers used to buy a collection of songs — on vinyl, cassette and then compact disc. It was possible to buy a single song or two in these formats, but the internet facilitated more and more people downloading individual tracks.

Yet, today, there is an inexorable consumer shift to all-you-can-eat bundles of music. Already more than 60 million people pay for Spotify, Apple Music and others. These music bundles will increasingly be combined with other services as well to build competitive advantage. This newspaper currently includes Spotify with certain new subscriptions.
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 Bundling has always worked well for products for which consumers have widely varying tastes and willingness to pay. The magic of bundle economics allows consumers to get more for less, while also maximizing revenue for the provider.
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First, the near-zero marginal cost of distribution makes all-you-can-eat packages compelling. Even heavy users of streaming services can potentially be profitable customers if the underlying economics of rights payments are well managed.
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But investors often forget that network effects are just a subset of scale advantages. Superior scale is what protects most businesses from competition. It would be hard to start a business to take on Coca-Cola because of its size advantage — especially in local bottling, distribution and marketing.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/business/dealbook/bundling-online-services.html?ref=dealbook&_r=0&referer=

Where does the Ivanka Trump brand go from here?

Panjiva, a global trade data company, says that imports of products that bear the Ivanka Trump name were 54.4 percent lower in the three months ended Jan. 31 compared with the three months that ended Sept. 30, the period that represents the peak of imports of that brand in Panjiva’s records.

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 And on social media, the boycott campaign called Grab Your Wallet is gaining momentum. According to data from Captiv8, a social media analytics firm, there have been more than 496,000 “engagements” — likes, retweets, and so on — since October on Twitter and Instagram posts that use the #grabyourwallet hashtag. After a burst of activity in November and a cool-down in December and January, engagement on the hashtag soared to its highest level in early February.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/02/13/where-does-the-ivanka-trump-brand-go-from-here/?utm_term=.30c9551f14c1

https://grabyourwallet.org/

Taiwan, Singapore widen lead over Hong Kong on digital ad spending, says report

Digital media, comprising online interactive and mobile platforms, accounted for a 13 per cent share of total advertising spending in Hong Kong last year, according to admanGo.

http://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/2068208/taiwan-singapore-widen-lead-over-hong-kong-digital-ad-spending-says 

 

Böcker på nätet – så mycket växer prenumerationstjänsterna

De prenumererade strömningstjänsterna Storytel, Bookbeat och Nextory omsatte tillsammans 353 miljoner kronor i Sverige under 2016. Det är en ökning med 134 miljoner kronor eller 61 procent jämfört med 2015.

 http://www.breakit.se/artikel/6505/bocker-pa-natet-sa-mycket-vaxer-prenumerationstjansterna

With $6B in deals in 2016, ID management is a hot sector you may have missed

Perhaps the most closely watched is Okta. The provider of a cloud-based identity tools for enterprises has raised more than $200 million from venture backers and is on the long list tech unicorns said to be contemplating an IPO this year. 

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/13/with-6b-in-2016-ma-id-management-is-a-hot-sector-you-may-have-missed/

A Surreal Trip to a Domain-Names Conference

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been shocked by the cold financial reality I watched unfold at this auction during NamesCon, an annual conference for the domain-names industry. Why would approximately 1,400 people voluntarily come to Las Vegas for four days to talk about domain names if there wasn’t money involved?

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 The comparisons are pretty hard to ignore—in their idealized forms, the domain name industry and Las Vegas are manifestations of the fantasy of making something from nothing, wealth seemingly conjured from thin air but dependent on very old, very fraught infrastructure. 

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Some TLDs are hot right now (.io), and some single words are always a good investment (lotions.com, furs.com), but good TLDs and good words together don’t always work (as was explained to the owner of furs.io and lotions.io in one session). Long-time domainers also had oddly specific advice—”Hyphens make your domain less valuable—unless you’re in Germany” and “.info is a dead zone.”

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Michael Cyger, the operator of domain industry website DomainSherpa.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/domain-names-dot-horse/516438/ 

http://www.domainsherpa.com/ 

http://thedna.org/ 

 

Hollywood blockbusters are becoming a bigger driver of toy sales

Licensed toy sales of brands, such as Disney’s ‘Frozen’ and ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ grew 10% in 2014 and 2015.

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The toy industry has become increasingly tethered to films and pre-existing entertainment properties. According to Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Ng, toys based on these properties are growing faster than non-licensed toys. From 2008 to 2015, these licensed toys made up 21% of toy sales, but contributed 41% of the growth.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-hollywood-blockbusters-are-a-big-driver-of-toy-sales-2017-02-13 

71 Instagram Tools to Skyrocket Your Social Media Marketing

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/71-instagram-tools-skyrocket-your-social-media-marketing

Wikipedia - List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet

How to devise the perfect recommendation algorithm

Spotify, a music-streaming service, offers a different model with its Discover Weekly playlist, which it produces for more than 100m customers. It analyses billions of users’ playlists to find songs that others with similar interests have liked. These tracks are combined into a playlist of 30 songs (perhaps including some familiar as well as new ones) delivered each Monday.
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Music lends itself well to this treatment. Streaming services have catalogues of around 30m songs each, compared with mere thousands of film and TV titles. And songs, unlike films, are short enough for a poor recommendation not to matter much. Spotify’s experience shows that algorithms can occasionally nudge people away from hits and expand their horizons.
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21716464-recommendations-must-be-neither-too-familiar-nor-too-novel-how-devise-perfect

The Economist - Special report: Mass entertainment

http://www.economist.com/

Special Fashion Week Content Delivered Through Google Search

When users search "fashion week," designer-supplied content, street style and party photos will appear. 

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This season, designers and brands including Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Burberry, Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein and others have signed on to post fashion week content directly to Google Search during fashion shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris.

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This type of search feature, in which Google builds special search results tied to an event, has previously been used with the Olympics, Coachella, the Oscars and more.

http://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-scoops/special-fashion-week-content-delivered-through-google-search-10782007/ 

http://nyfw.com/ 

 

 

Flipboard's Quest To Save Online Publishing—And Itself

The iPad was a futuristic gadget when it debuted in April 2010.

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One of the early hits was Flipboard, a graphical embodiment of social media that launched in July 2010. It turned Twitter and Facebook feeds into an online magazine by displaying the photos, articles, or other pages that people linked to. Previews of articles were laid out like items on a newspaper page.

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Flipboard has also grown to over 100 million monthly active users.

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"To get a company of 160-some people [to profitability], you need about somewhere in the range of $50-$80 million in revenue annually," he says. "We are well over more than halfway there."

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Mike says that advertisers "love" Flipboard's ad options, but the proof will come in revenue. Flipboard is currently selling just 20% of its ad inventory.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3062258/newsreader-app-flipboards-quest-to-save-online-publishing-and-itself 

https://flipboard.com/topic/advertising

Meitu confident of global success despite bumps in the road

The past two and a half months has been a both a tough and exciting time for Chinese technology company Meitu.

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“Few Chinese companies can reach overseas users,” company chairman Cai Wensheng said on Monday. “Meitu will be the leading one.”

Cai said Meitu now has over 430 million users abroad.
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Yu Jianpeng, an analyst at ICBC, said Meitu will find its apps more difficult to attract advertisers compared to social networking platforms. 
“Meitu is basically an editing tool,” he said. “It has a large number of users, but they don’t open it frequently. Investors still can’t see a clear way for it to better monetize its traffic.”
http://www.scmp.com/business/article/2068537/meitu-confident-global-success-despite-bumps-road
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mt.mtxx.mtxx&hl=sv

Flipboard - Platform & Stream

https://flipboard.com/@platformstream/platform-%26-stream-l0a1f5rvy
http://blog.synchtank.com/projecting-trends-the-music-streaming-playlist-economy

Here's how Apple's retail business spreads across the world

As this chart from Statista shows, Apple currently has close to 500 stores spread across 19 countries, covering most of the major global markets. According to Deloitte’s latest “Global Powers of Retailing” firm, that’s enough to make Apple a top-40 retailer in the world, and one of the 15 fastest-growing retailers beyond that.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/apple-stores-how-many-around-world-chart-2017-2

DHL-boxar ska lyfta näthandeln

DHL Parcel planerar att ställa ut minst 200 paketautomater i Sverige under 2017, enligt ett pressmeddelande. Satsningen görs mot bakgrund av e-handelns allt starkare ställning.

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 Paketautomaterna installeras oftast på offentliga platser som till exempelvis matvarubutiker. DHL Parcel samarbetar med danska paketautomatleverantören Swipbox.

På DHL:s hemmamarknad Tyskland är paketautomater vanliga och räknas in till över 3 000 stycken.
http://digital.di.se/artikel/dhl-boxar-ska-lyfta-nathandeln
https://www.swipbox.com/

Facebook is within reach of 2 billion users

Facebook now reaches 1.86 billion monthly active users, having added 70 million users in the quarter.
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From all those billions, Facebook pulled in $8.8 billion in revenue over the quarter, but the numbers get quite staggering when you look at the year overall. While in 2015, Facebook bought in $17.9 billion, the company closed out 2016 with $27.6 billion.
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 For ad revenue, mobile represents 84 percent of the total
http://mashable.com/2017/02/01/facebook-earnings-record-user-growth/#Sdjn3KPuciq3

The marijuana industry's first $1 billion 'unicorn' is a Canadian company you've probably never heard of

In a once-abandoned Hershey chocolate factory in the small town of Smiths Falls, Ontario, the largest legal marijuana producer in the world grows, trims, processes, packages, and ships weed across the Great White North.
Canopy Growth is a cannabis holding company that supplies the drug to nearly half of Canada’s current medical marijuana patient base.
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Canopy wants to become the Proctor & Gamble of pot. Several brands fall under its umbrella and cater to different user preferences. There’s Tweed, a medical marijuana producer with slick and youthful branding that could be mistaken for a designer jean company. The Quebec-based Vert Medical allows Canopy to tap into the French-speaking market, while Bedrocan Canada has a distinct clinical feel that is likely to gain favour among strictly medicinal users.
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/canopy-growth-1-billion-revenue-giant-marijuana-industry-2017-2

Australians shoppers spent a mammoth $21.65 billion online last year

The emergence of meal delivery services such as Foodora, Menulog and UberEats produced a big jump in online sales at the end of 2016. 

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/australians-shoppers-spent-a-mammoth-21-65-billion-online-last-year-2017-2

 

E-handelsjätten omsatte 136 miljarder dollar 2016

Totalt omsatte Amazon 136 miljarder dollar 2016 vilket kan jämföras med 107 miljarder året innan. En ökning med 27 procent.

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Över 100 000 säljare hos Amazon ska även under 2016 ha passerat 100 000 dollar i försäljning. Detta samtidigt som deras tredjepartslager, Fulfillment by Amazon, levererat ut över 2 miljarder produkter åt säljare på marknadsplatsen.

http://www.ehandel.se/E-handelsjatten-omsatte-136-miljarder-dollar-2016,9545.html 

 

Snap’s IPO will be the largest in years

WHEN Snapchat first became popular in 2013, many thought the messaging app would disappear almost as quickly as its vanishing messages. Instead, it has become one of the most intriguing internet firms to emerge in years. 

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21716070-app-company-has-pioneered-distinctive-vision-internet-snaps-ipo-will-be-largest

Fountain Pen Sales Are Surging, Despite Flat Luxury Global Sales

Like the mechanical watch, the fountain pen has survived by pulling a neat trick: transforming its obsolescence into an aura of indulgent luxury.

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According to market-research firm Euromonitor, global fountain pen retail sales were up 2.1 percent in 2016 from a year earlier, reaching $1.046 billion.

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“The relevance that fountain pens and handwriting had is diminished,” says Nicky Pessaroff, editor-in-chief of Pen World magazine. “It’s become more of a lifestyle choice and an identity choice. It’s a throwback and a cultural comment.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-02/fountain-pen-sales-are-surging-despite-flat-luxury-global-sales 

 

There are finally enough H&M stores in the world, H&M says

H&M operates more than 4,300 stores worldwide.

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In the year ahead, the company plans to open around 430 new stores, entering new markets in Kazakhstan, Colombia, Iceland, Vietnam, and Georgia, among others. That’s about the same number of stores it opened in 2016, and represents roughly 10% growth of its current portfolio—in line with its former target.

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H&M also plans to enter six new markets online in 2017, focusing on Asia. Shoppers in 35 of the 64 markets H&M serves could already browse and purchase clothes online by the end of 2016.

https://qz.com/900227/even-hm-thinks-there-are-enough-hm-stores-in-the-world/ 

 

Amazon captured more than half of all online sales growth last year, new data shows

According to the receipt mining company Slice, which culled data from more than 2 million digital transactions, Amazon accounted for 53 percent of U.S. e-commerce growth in 2016. That's up from 2015, when it accounted for 40 percent of e-commerce growth.

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Slice attributed much of Amazon's win to its two- to three-day lead when it comes to shipping speed. Whereas the average Amazon package was delivered in 3.4 days, that was 5.6 days from everyone else.
In all, Amazon accounted for 43 percent of all online revenue last year, according to Slice.
 http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/01/amazon-captured-more-than-half-of-all-online-sales-growth-last-year.html

Art Market Mines Gold on Instagram

“Instagram has become the leading social media tool for discovering, showing and following art, particularly for people below the age of 35,” said Anders Petterson, an author of the Hiscox Online Art Trade Report. Of the more than 650 art buyers questioned for the 2016 report, 48 percent said that Instagram was their preferred social media platform. The figure rose to 65 percent among the younger buyers contacted. “It has hit a sweet spot in the market for sharing information,” Mr. Petterson said, “but no one saw this coming as a sales tool.”

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The quirkily personal Instagram accounts of tastemaking specialists like Mr. Gorvy and Mr. Carey-Williams, or of high-profile private collectors and dealers like the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa (38,500 followers), Simon de Pury (177,000) and the art world “disrupter” Stefan Simchowitz (77,600), remain the unquantifiable “soft power” of today’s art market.

Just as difficult to gauge is the impact of the huge Instagram followings on sales at the world’s major galleries. Gagosian Gallery’s Instagram site has at least 593,000 followers, with that of Pace not far behind, at 506,000.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/arts/art-auction-instagram.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&_r=0 

 

You choose

Dec 16th 2010

Wheel a trolley down the aisle of any modern Western hypermarket, and the choice of all sorts is dazzling. The average American supermarket now carries 48,750 items, according to the Food Marketing Institute, more than five times the number in 1975. Britain's Tesco stocks 91 different shampoos, 93 varieties of toothpaste and 115 of household cleaner. Carrefour's hypermarket in the Paris suburb of Montesson, a hangar-like place filled with everything from mountain bikes to foie gras, is so vast that staff circulate on rollerblades.  

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As options multiply, there may be a point at which the effort required to obtain enough information to be able to distinguish sensibly between alternatives outweighs the benefit to the consumer of the extra choice. “At this point”, writes Barry Schwartz in “The Paradox of Choice”, “choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannise.” In other words, as Mr Schwartz puts it, “the fact that some choice is good doesn't necessarily mean that more choice is better.”

http://www.economist.com/node/17723028

Förlust för tidningarnas Spotify – tvingas byta strategi

Konkurrensen med bland annat Readly är stenhård. Nu parkerar förlusttyngda tidningsappen Ztory sin ambition om att växa globalt. För att få intäkterna att växa ytterligare ändrar de i stället sin strategi – och börjar licensiera ut sin tekniska plattform i andra länder.

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 Tidnings- och boktjänsten Ztory lanserades officiellt 2014. Målet med tjänsten är att få fler att läsa böcker och tidningar i en app – ett sorts Spotify för den som vill läsa. Men hittills har tjänsten inte riktigt lyft.

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I Sverige finns också tjänsten Readly, som tagit in uppemot 300 miljoner kronor i riskkapital. Som jämförelse har Ztory tagit in drygt 15 Mkr vilket gjort det svårt för bolaget att konkurrera, speciellt på de internationella marknaderna.

 

http://digital.di.se/artikel/forlust-for-tidningarnas-spotify-tvingas-byta-strategi

https://www.ztory.com/sv 

 

The lemon dilemma

Oct 11th 2001

Signalling is used in many markets, wherever a person, company or government wants to provide information about its intentions or strengths indirectly. Taking on debt might signal that a company is confident about future profits. Brands send valuable signals to consumers precisely because they are costly to create, and thus will not be lightly abused by their creators. Advertising may convey no information other than that the firm can afford to advertise, but that may be all a consumer needs to know to have confidence in it. Perhaps advertising, as a signal, is not money entirely wasted, as some economists argue.
The theory of signalling can also help to explain why companies pay dividends, even though they are less tax-efficient than share-price rises in compensating investors. Dividends, under the signalling theory, serve as a way of highlighting a strong profit outlook.
http://www.economist.com/node/813705

How publishers manage header bidding: Server-to-server vs. browser-based wrappers

For an imperfect technology, header bidding had a big year in 2016. Over 40 percent of the comScore 200 adopted header based technologies. 

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eCPMs improved, but new partners meant new costs. These included increased page latency, and a corresponding decrease in average page views per session. Tech ops budgets increased significantly, and an untenable strain was placed on ad servers as the amount of line items they managed continued to multiply. In fact, due to the complex ad server configurations required for handling multiple partners and buys, some publishers even saw disruption in their directly sold campaigns.  

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Enter server-to-server bidding
Companies from Sonobi to Amazon are now offering this solution that drives yield, while fixing some of the egregious design flaws that exist with browser-based wrappers. 

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While header bidding has made quite the impact, the industry needs to step back and understand that the wrapper, as commonly implemented today, is poorly designed.   Header bidding was developed by publishers’ programmatic teams, but these browser-based executions are affecting the value of their consumer product.  A server-to-server model is a better path to drive more yield through the header while protecting the most important thing in media: the relationship between reader and content.  

http://digiday.com/sponsored/sonobi-005-776-how-publishers-manager-header-bidding-server-to-server-vs-browser-based-wrappers/  

Ad blocker usage is up 30% — and a popular method publishers use to thwart it isn't working

Ad blocker usage surged 30% in 2016, according to a new report from PageFair, a company that helps publishers regain revenue lost to the software.
There were 615 million devices blocking ads worldwide by the end of 2016, 62% (308 million) of those mobile. Desktop ad blocker usage grew 17% year-on-year to 236 million.
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The largest geographical driver of mobile ad blocker use has been in the Asia-Pacific, where 94% of mobile ad blocking takes place.

http://www.businessinsider.com/pagefair-2017-ad-blocking-report-2017-1?r=US&IR=T&IR=T
https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport

CB Insights: 3,358 tech exits in 2016, ‘unicorn births’ down 68%

CB Insights has published its annual report of how tech companies performed in 2016 when it came to funding and exits.

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CB Insights notes that there were 3,358 total tech exits in the year (3,260 M&A exits, 98 IPOs), down 4% over 2015.

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As for who is doing the buying, CB Insights reports that Google, which disclosed acquisitions of some 18 companies in 2016, took the crown in terms of volume (not value), with Salesforce and Accenture tying in second place. (Why not value? It’s harder to calculate this, as the price for many of the deals never gets disclosed.)

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Meanwhile, startups that focus on advertising, sales and marketing were far and away biggest category for both sales and IPOs, coming in at 54 companies exiting, with some biggies among them, such as mobile ad company AppLovin‘ selling to Orient Hontai Capital for $1.4 billion. In second came business intelligence and analytics services.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/31/cb-insights-3358-tech-exits-in-2016-unicorn-births-down-68/
https://www.cbinsights.com/



 

Google partners with Cloudflare and TripleLift to improve AMP ads

As a security company, Cloudflare is approaching AMP ads from a different direction. It is launching Firebolt today, a new ad verification and optimization service. AMP ads — unlike regular ads — need to be verified by an authorized signing service before they can appear on an AMP page. Cloudflare is now one of these verification services. The ads will also use Cloudflare’s AMP cache to deliver them faster.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/30/google-partners-with-cloudflare-and-triplelift-to-improve-amp-ads/ 

https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/firebolt/