Freestar

The group that turned header bidding software into an open standard is bringing the same approach to publisher-side AI agents.

Gamera, a media quality measurement startup for publishers, announced on Tuesday it raised $1.6 million to promote its service that combines data about a site’s ad experience with data about how its ads perform.

Unauthorized ID stuffing, rampant reselling and misaligned signals inflict incredible damage on the programmatic ecosystem. If publishers want to compete with the walled gardens, we must raise our standards. 

As display falters, Minute Media is acquiring AI tech that cuts longer-form video content and full-length games into bite-size clips.

After adopting OpenPath, Freestar pubs now see 3x higher inventory fill rate from The Trade Desk demand and 27% higher programmatic revenue from these buyers.

Freestar adopted a new approach to curation developed by Audigent that gives buyers a priority lane to publisher inventory with higher viewability and attention scores than most open-auction inventory.

Here are the pros and cons of client-side and server-side header bidding, and some typical use cases for each.

What happens when you get a bunch of smart, technical, pissed off publishers and SSPs in one room? Here are some of the spicier things AdExchanger overheard at the inaugural Prebid Summit.

Publishers are facing enough headwinds to make their heads spin. These challenges mean opportunity for publisher tech companies like Freestar, which announced Wednesday that it hired Heather Carver as its first-ever chief revenue officer. Smaller publishers will need help navigating an uncertain future, Carver told AdExchanger. The deprecation of third-party cookies and other identifiers, the […]

With so much reliance on third parties in all of our businesses, it is important to remain appropriately skeptical and vet each company.

The 2022 Inc. 5000 list was published on Tuesday, and although its purpose is mostly for marketing (companies pay for inclusion, after all), it is a useful benchmark for tracking the startup ecosystem.

Google may have a solution to the antitrust regulatory pressure it’s facing from governments around the world: a proactive spinoff. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is exploring splitting Google’s digital ad business into a separate entity under the Alphabet umbrella. The question is whether Google’s proposed solution will pass muster with regulators, and if it does, who stands to win – and who stands to lose?

Ad blockers are still a thing, even if you haven’t heard much about them in the past few years. And they still see widespread use among ad-weary audiences. But while some publishers may write off ad-blocker users as a lost cause, some like AccuWeather are finding success monetizing this part of their audience through bypass solutions.

With third-party cookies on the road to nowhere, data management platform Audigent has been working to develop its own cookieless identifier, which it’s calling the Hadron ID. Audigent hopes the new identifier will keep the company competitive in a world where DMPs are being supplanted by customer data platforms.

Ad management solutions provider Freestar announced Wednesday that it acquired UK-based Google AMP monetization company Triple13. Terms of the deal were not made public. However, in a conversation with AdExchanger, Freestar CEO Kurt Donnell disclosed that the deal was fully funded from Freestar’s balance sheet. Freestar will be adding all 15 of Triple13’s employees to […]

The ad management space is consolidating. Freestar acquired Sortable Wednesday in a deal that expands Freestar’s inventory by 30% and increases its staff from 90 to 130 people. Freestar, which is profitable, self-funded the acquisition. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition is “completely additive” on multiple fronts, Freestar CEO Kurt Donnell said. […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Premesh Purayil, CTO, Freestar. As we all know, Google’s Core Web Vitals scores and related changes to search result prioritization have thrust site speed and user experience to the forefront for all publishers.  Ask […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Brian Weiss, yield and product strategy manager at Freestar. Publishers battling for the top ranking among the most-searched keywords face a big change to the rules of the game in May 2021, when Google will […]

Ad management firm Freestar said Tuesday it has acquired Chocolate’s app mediation platform so it can serve more mobile app publishers. Terms were not disclosed. Freestar is largely a services company that performs tasks such as setting up header bidding and optimizing yield for about 400 desktop and mobile web publishers. But the fast-growing company […]

  Although the coronavirus pandemic has caused CPMs to plummet, the news isn’t all bad for publishers. How sites have been affected by the coronavirus’s economic impact vary, depending on the type of content they produce and the type of advertisers they attract. Freestar handles the advertising for 300 publishers – from sports (Barstool Sports) […]

After Freestar landed atop Inc.’s 2019 list of “Most Successful Companies in America,” co-founder Chris Stark pointed to header bidding as the reason the 45-person company’s growth exploded 36,680% over three years. Freestar solves for the complexity programmatic and header bidding created for publishers. In recent years, publishers managed bids through AdSense, then waterfalls, then […]

Looking for proof that the ad tech sector is still growing? Well, you won’t find much on Inc. Magazine’s most recent revenue survey, released on Wednesday. The list, which keeps tabs on the three-year revenue growth of independent companies, was nearly devoid of ad tech startups – although there are a handful of notable exceptions. Freestar, […]