Weekly Roundup - 02/17

[Do check out 100 essential facts and figures for thinking about the future of advertising.] 

∞ Google accounts for 95% of all global web searches on mobile devices.
[New York Times]

∞ A study comparing ad tech deployment on mainstream news websites and fake news websites found that the former do more tracking, dropping 129 percent more cookies (a median of 167 cookies per page) and resulting in 19 percent more tracking. The discrepancy can be attributable to the differing goals of these two media vehicles - legitimate news operations are expensive to operate and need to maximize revenue potential while fake news is easier to produce and is also more concerned with pushing an ideology over purely making money.
[Digiday]

∞ Samsung announced at CES that it has sold more than 5 million of its Gear VR headsets.
[Adweek]

∞ Israel topped the list for ad revenue per person per year in 2016 at $719, followed by Switzerland ($555.2) and the US ($552.9). China generated only $65 per person in advertising, despite being the second largest advertising market.
[IHS Markit]

∞ There were 343 global ad tech venture financing deals in 2016, a 17% drop compared with the 414 deals in 2015.  There was also a 33% drop in the volume of funding in 2016, from $3.2bn to an estimated $2.2bn. (1/2)
[Financial Times]

∞ Apart from the overwhelming dominance of Google and Facebook in online advertising, ad tech is also likely a victim of its own success. The efficiency of automated algorithms is easily and widely copied increasingly making any gains marginal and temporary. (2/2)
[Financial Times]

∞ Facebook will start to show "mid-roll" ads in the videos people watch in its newsfeed, sharing the raised revenue with publishers. But, crucially, it stipulates that these "mid-roll" ads can only run once a viewer has watched a clip for at least 20 seconds and the video itself should have a run time of at least 90 seconds.
[recode]

∞ Medium shuttered its native ad sales operation saying that ad-driven publishing model on the web is a broken system. It will now focus its efforts on getting paid by readers.
[Digiday]

∞ For the first time, in October 2016 mobile and tablet devices accounted for 51.3% of internet usage worldwide compared to 48.7% by desktop. In mature markets like the UK and US, desktop is still the primary mode of internet access (55.6% and 58% respectively); meanwhile, India currently sees over 75% internet usage through mobile devices.
[StatCounter]

∞ Snapchat is deploying machine learning to improve its ad targeting offering. Advertisers inform the Snapchat API that they value swipes over impressions and how much a swipe is worth for them - Snapchat then auto-optimizes bidding and delivery to a target audience that's likely to engage with the ad.
[Adweek]