Advertising & Marketing

The cost of Facebook ads is on the rise – but advertisers don’t seem to mind because they’re seeing results. At least for now. According to the most recent Q2 benchmark report from Facebook ad partner Nanigans, the click-through rate (CTR) on Facebook ads was up 146% year over year and rose 47% from the Continue Reading →

One of my friends just wasted six months and lost $75,000 because he tried to launch a business before discovering he had insufficient funding. Do you have enough money? Answering these five key questions would have let him know that he didn’t really have enough funds and prepared him before he spent too much money Continue Reading →

For the marketing executives whose job it is to round up eyeballs to watch television, the summer is turning out to be hazy, crazy, anything but lazy. A deluge of original programming is replacing many of the reruns that typically dominate schedules this time of year, offering viewers perhaps the most new summertime series since Continue Reading →

Although Social TV is barely four years old, television program selection for Social TV may be in danger of becoming predictable and unimaginative. When the industry talks about Social TV, we tend to focus on three areas: Tentpole Events, e.g. the Super Bowl, The Oscars. Larger Reality Shows, e.g. American Idol, The Voice. Genre-specific programming: Continue Reading →

Facebook has just bought video ad tech startup LiveRail, which connects marketers to publishers on web and mobile to target 7 billion video ads to visitors per month. Facebook tells me it will invest in keeping LiveRail running and is evaluating how to intermingle their data, but it plans to use its use data to Continue Reading →

Twitter announced on Monday that it’s acquiring mobile ad startup TapCommerce. Re/code’s Ina Fried broke the news about the acquisition earlier this afternoon, reporting that the deal price was $100 million. (Twitter declined to provide a price). TapCommerce helps mobile businesses retarget their ads, i.e., target ads based on previous user activity — something that’s Continue Reading →

Social networking platform Twitter says its MoPub ad network now reaches more than 1 billion iOS and Android users every month, and so on Monday it is making its latest move to build out that mobile advertising business with more products. Twitter is kicking off the global rollout of mobile app promotion ads — units Continue Reading →

World of Warcraft — on a resume. I know it sounds dumb, but what if I told you the geeky info helped someone land two big jobs? CNNMoney reports Stephen Gillett, the chief operating officer at Symantec, an online security firm, has touted his WoW credentials to become an executive at Starbucks and Symantec. Gillett: “Some people look at it and say, Continue Reading →

Curiyo, a content discovery and curation tool which helps publishers increase user retention and add a layer of content in context without users leaving the page, just closed a $1.9 million seed round. Founded by Bob Rosenschein, the founder and former CEO of Answers.com, Curiyo is available as a downloadable browser extension, mobile app for Android, WordPress Continue Reading →

We were expecting an Android-news heavy show at this year’s Google I/O, and boy did we get one. More than anything else, today’s keynote demonstrated Google’s ambition to take its mobile OS basically everywhere: to your car, to your body, to your television, to your laptop, even into your workplace. We saw a preview of Continue Reading →