Culture comes from the top: Outbrain

Last week I found a distasteful ad underneath a Guardian article about the sad death of cricketer Phil Hughes. It was one of this ‘native’ units that directs you to a similar article on another site. Like a typical middle class whinger, I expressed my dismay on Twitter. Not the right ad for Outbrain to […]

Is it time to abandon IAB standard ad formats?

I spoke on a panel this week about media innovation alongside Andrew Girdwood of LBi, and moderated by Amit Kotecha of Quantcast. Two topics dominated the discussion: native ads and data. Native isn’t just advertorial Native formats attract a certain amount of derision (“it’s just advertorial”) – one of the reasons I don’t like the name. Ben […]

Comparing Google’s and Microsoft’s revenues

I was struck by this tweet over the weekend by Patrick Collison: The increase in Microsoft’s annual revenue since Google was founded is still greater than Google’s total annual revenue. — Patrick Collison (@patrickc) October 26, 2014 It’s worth digging out the actual numbers to see what that comparison really is. Google was founded in […]

Moving on to something new

Eight years ago today, I walked into a small serviced office in Covent Garden. Four-and-a-half desks was the grand total of Efficient Frontier in Europe. Mine was the half.I gave myself three months to check out whether the technology they said they had really did what it claimed. Otherwise I’d be off and back to […]

Ad tech IPO performance

In the last 12 months a number of ad tech companies gone public, and more are thought to IPO this year (such as Rubicon, LiveRail and Mediaocean). Of those who have gone public so far, how have they performed? I thought I’d have a quick look. Here’s the chart. But in short, if you’d invested […]

Google: the $50bn advertising company

Google announced its Q4 results this week. Yet again it’s an incredible story. Advertising revenue for the whole of 2013 was $50.6bn. On top of that there’s nearly another $10bn from other revenues and Motorola. In the UK, Google earned $5.6bn (around £3.58bn) in total revenue for 2013. As a reference, ITV will turnover £2.0-2.5bn […]

Jonathan Beeston

Online advertising, digital marketing, social media and technology