Here’s your daily dose of goodish news about the Web ad business, courtesy (again) of Mark Mahaney, who says display ads are perking up. Or at least some of them are.
Here’s a front-page story the New York Times would rather not be running: The paper is warning readers to be aware of bogus ads running on its Web site.
The paper says “some readers” have seen unauthorized pop-up ads promoting antivirus software on NYTimes.com, and warns visitors who see the ad not to click on it but to restart their browsers instead. While the Times doesn’t spell this out, it has likely had its site hijacked by a “malware” scammer who is trying to trick visitors into installing pernicious software onto their hard drives.
When will the online ad market finally start bouncing back? We’ve yet to see it in Q2 earnings reports from the likes of Google and Yahoo.
But one observer says it’s already here: Ad optimization firm PubMatic reports that prices for ad-network inventory it sees have increased 35 percent since the beginning of the year.
Many of you are just hearing Josh Marshall’s name for the first time, following the New York Times’s admission that columnist Maureen Dowd “failed to attribute” some of her column to him. But that’s a shame because Marshall’s site is noteworthy on its own merits: It’s a self-funded, profitable new-media site that does both blogging/aggregation and real reporting.
The paper of record provided a helpful peek into its business–and the ad business in general–during its earnings call yesterday. It’s not all bad news, and it’s all pretty interesting. Here’s the CliffsNotes version.
I’ve yet to find anyone with a firm grip on the number of ad networks out there: 300? 400? Many more? But now there’s one fewer: Peer39, a New York- and Israel-based company, has turned off its “Semantic Ad Network” and laid off its four-person sales staff.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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