‘Fundamentally, the SSP business is not very attractive’: The fall out of ad tech’s latest round of closures | DigiDay

This article shares that the latest round of layoffs by Yahoo and EMX is “a reckoning for a sector of the digital landscape; a sector that has been heralded as the most dynamic branch of the ad industry for the past 10 years.”

Check out latest week’s ICYMI to learn Freestar’s take on the Yahoo layoffs.

Exclusive: Time will launch a new commerce site powered by Taboola | Axios

Time plans to launch a new commerce website next quarter powered by content created by a team of editors and writers at Taboola, executives told Axios. Taboola CEO Adam Singolda shares that “it’s a long-term investment.” Specifically, 5 years to be exact and designed to build trust among consumers and Time readers.

Trade Desk stock rockets after earnings as CEO says company is outperforming like never before | MarketWatch

This article shares “Chief Executive Jeff Green spoke positively on the earnings call about the company’s performance relative to rivals, saying that the company grew 24% in the fourth quarter while most of its “large competitors” saw negative growth.”

A positive earnings report for industry bellwether TTD.  

Freestar CEO, Kurt Donnell, notes “The Trade Desk continues to push the industry forward with its focus on quality, supply path optimization and progressive initiatives like its DSP-to-publisher OpenPath product. Clearly these efforts are resonating with the buyside and will ultimately benefit publishers that bring high quality inventory to market.”

Increasing Our Ads Transparency | Meta

Meta announced that they “updating [their] “Why am I seeing this ad?” tool, providing more transparency about how your activity both on and off [their] technologies may inform the machine learning models [they] use to shape and deliver the ads you see.”

Meta collaborated extensively with external privacy experts and policy stakeholders to gather feedback on what transparency changes they’d like to see on Meta’s ads systems. A common suggestion was to improve the transparency of their machine learning algorithms’ role in determining the ads that users encounter on their platforms.