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It’s a…Pin!

The new, new thing in content amplification is live in the wild. That’s right, Pinterest’s Promoted Pins are now up on the site and being tested. If you don’t see one on your on Pinterest feed, no need to fret: All Things D had good coverage earlier this week:

Here Come the Bots

Where there’s money in online advertising, there will be click fraud. And trust is critical to making any online marketplace function properly, including the nascent one for content amplification. It’s not actually about paid content amplification, but Digiday did a nice job covering the broad outlines of the fears in the banner ad world around click fraud from automated computer programs, or so-called “bot nets.”  This is a topic we’ll continue to cover here, since we believe it will be a critical piece for the content amplification world to get right.

Clash of the (Israeli) Titans

The 800-pound gorilla in the content amplification space, Outbrain, and the next-biggest gorilla, Taboola, are both Israeli companies. (Though both actually maintain headquarters in New York City.) From Calcalist,an Israeli publication translated via Al Monitor, comes great coverage of these two behemoths and the “war for market share” between them. From the article: “In fact, it is primarily on account of Taboola that, while it is considered to have a highly lucrative operation, Outbrain has not yet achieved its target profit rates.” There are some good nuggets in the article: the two companies, which originally focused on different markets — Outbrain on text articles and Taboola on video recommendations — coexisted reasonably happily side-by-side until Outbrain offered to purchase Taboola two years ago, which kicked off a fierce war.

The article caps off by listing a number of other players in the space: Contextly, nRelate, and Disqus.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/business/2013/10/taboola-outbrain-monetized-content-recommendations.html

Industry Consolidation?

Advertising solutions company Adiant, operator of the AdBlade and ContentNet content amplification networks, just acquired IndustryBrains, a relative graybeard (13 years old, according to Crunchbase) in the content amplification space. IndustryBrains provides targeted private exchange-style monetization solutions to vertical publishers, giving them more control over the recommended content than a typical content recommendation monetization solution.

People Love Sponsored Content!

We missed this a few weeks ago: the Onion has given us their take on sponsored content, and as usual does a good job of capturing the risks with great nuance. “The marketing and advertising team at a major American company actually believed that commissioning, paying for, approving, and publishing this sponsored post you are reading right now was a smart move, sources confirmed this week.” Read the whole article: http://www.theonion.com/sponsored/advertiser-thought-this-sponsored-post-was-good-id,41/


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