Street Fight Daily: Twitter Will Show Ads to ‘Casual Viewers,’ Location Startup Factual Raises $35M
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Twitter Aims to Show Advertising to Much Wider Audience (New York Times)
Twitter plans to start showing ads to casual viewers, an audience of an estimated 500 million people worldwide who are not signed in to the service but may click on a tweet that is sent to them or that they find through a web search. As an advertising platform, Twitter is healthy; its revenue is growing steadily, and it has introduced new products that refine marketers’ abilities to target potential customers both on and off the service.
Startup Factual Knows Your Commute, and Much More (Wall Street Journal)
Factual, which just announced a $35 million funding round, provides profiles of mobile users with streams of location data supplied by apps. Its fast-growing business highlights the difficulty app publishers have in targeting ads at specific audiences, and how they’ve responded with new and potentially controversial ways of tracking and analyzing peoples’ whereabouts. (Subscription required)
The Power of Pairing: 4 Reasons Matching Is Gaining Traction in Local Home Services (Street Fight)
Adam Burrows: When variables like trust, uncertainty, availability, and geography are at the core of decision-making — as they so often are when it comes to hiring professionals to perform home services — matching, especially when coupled with ratings and reviews, offers consumers peace of mind. It also provides an immediate connection in an often urgent and sometimes complicated time of need.
Billy Penn and Knight Foundation Want to Build ‘Yelp for Mobile News’ (Poynter)
In the hopes of imparting digital experience to a new generation of publishers, Jim Brady, who runs the Philadelphia-based hyperlocal news site Billy Penn, is partnering with The Knight Foundation to create an “interactive, real-time mobile journalism guide.” A grant from the foundation will be used to build a site that takes elements of Yelp and Wikipedia in creating a resource for a community of mobile news leaders.
Raise Report: Netsertive, EatStreet, Factual Secure New Funding (Street Fight)
Every two weeks we round up some of the biggest fundraises taking place in hyperlocal marketing, commerce, and tech. In this edition, new investments include rounds for Netsertive, EatStreet, Factual, Stringr, Flip, Slash, and The Tab.
SimilarWeb Buys Quettra to Move Deeper into Mobile Analytics and Big Data (TechCrunch)
Yet more consolidation is happening in the analytics world: Israeli web analytics and traffic measurement startup SimilarWeb has announced its acquisition of Quettra, a provider of mobile analytics and measurement tools founded by Ankit Jain, former head of search and discovery for Google Play.
The Exodus Continues: Yahoo Loses Ad Product Chief Prashant Fuloria (Recode)
Another major Yahoo exec is departing — this time, senior vice president of advertising products Prashant Fuloria. He joined Yahoo in 2014 after it bought mobile app analytics platform Flurry, where he led product and engineering efforts. Prior to that, he led Facebook’s ad products team.
With Cross-Platform Targeting, First-Party Data Can Be Misleading (eMarketer)
Omar Tawakol oversees all of Oracle’s data management practices and strategies, including the development of its identity graph. Tawakol recently spoke about the dangers of taking deterministic data at face value, and the increased importance of using first-party data for identifying audiences across devices.
The Airbnb Endgame (The Awl)
Airbnb’s unusual brand of real estate populism has only grown more pitched over the last year or so. Rather than advocating for its interests as an ascendant disrupter or a proponent of expansive private property or tenants rights, the company is increasingly doing so as a representative of an entire economic class actively struggling to continue to exist in the country’s most desirable cities (or at all).
LBMA Podcast: UberMedia Introduces LROI Concept, Soundpays Launches Mobile Wallet in Canada (Street Fight)
On the show: UberMedia introduces LROI concept; Soundpays launches mobile wallet in Canada; Mobify Buys Dónde; bfonics launches Wi-Fi beacon; racist tweets on billboards in Brazil; Tyrers Department Store tests “Digital Clothing Rail.” Plus, news from Aruba Networks, Domino’s, Placemeter, Krispy Kreme and NCR, and Blue Bite and Rouge Media.
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