The prolific film writer and director Alfred Hitchcock once said he liked to play his audience like a piano, meaning he’d push their buttons and pull their emotions; he aimed for complete control, directing their attention and behaviour.

You’ve likely heard buzz about an update coming to Chrome in 2018 that will block bad and intrusive ads in desktop and mobile versions of the browser. While accurate, the rumour is maybe a little bit misleading. According to the search engine giant, the new feature will simply filter out certain types of ads on websites.

Programmatic advertising is a very smart, efficient, and cost-effective way to deliver highly-focused personalized ads to web audiences. Programmatic is so good at serving better-quality ads to more consumers, it generates higher revenues for each player in the supply chain.

Before we get going here, I’m going to provide some context around how I view digital publishing. I’m an engineer, and Sortable got into the publishing industry by launching a number of product comparison websites, powered by technology we created. Digital publishing is full of inefficiencies, and we were fortunate to have the engineering resources internally to develop solutions through technology and, as we pivoted, start offering these solutions to others. Publishing is both an art and a science, and publishers need to give as much attention to the science (engineering) as they do to the art (content and marketing). I believe that solving engineering problems, or focusing on the science, of this industry improves the ecosystem for everyone and that building technical solutions to common challenges enables the artists to do their best work.

Sortable Analytics is here! We’re excited about the launch of our comprehensive dashboard and how it can empower publishers and make their lives easier. Right now content, marketing, and revenue operations teams largely sit in separate silos, each with their own tools, staff, and access to engineering resources. We don’t think siloing the three most important areas of your publishing business makes sense, and so the first thing we want to do is help publishers break down those barriers. Enter Sortable Analytics - a platform purpose-built to surface content, marketing, and revenue data in a unified dashboard to help publishers optimize both their yield and ‘non-yield yield’.

In what is becoming a common refrain among large publishers, Forbes reports that the rollout of a new internally developed ad tech product “Zeus” by The Washington Post has increased site performance considerably.

Building a successful publishing strategy for millennial audiences is not easy, which is exactly why we included this as an agenda topic at Sortable Publisher Day back in February. 

Back in 2015, we walked through a State of the Ad Blocking Nation, an article describing ad blocking, its adoption, and how it might affect businesses that rely on ads for revenue.

It’s now 2017, and the landscape for ad blocking is largely different that what we described two years ago. We’re going to take a look at some updated statistics and news to see what has changed.

Facebook is cracking down on publishers with low quality web page experiences, and this will have a big impact on publishers running content recommendation widgets.

“The reality is that Facebook is one of the most powerful companies in the tech industry — and arguably, the world.”