Overriding FAN’s Runaway Success, Facebook to Close Down LiveRail’s Ad Serving Unit

Facebook recently came out with an update on its Audience Network’s (FAN) recent showing and on the sidelines decided to cut short their company’s LiveRail business through it’s latest blog post.

FAN, the in-house advertising wing of Facebook was launched a year and half ago on a worldwide basis; not only to provide in-app advertising solutions to advertisers, but also to make optimum use of Facebook’s audience network potential. Since last year the company has been experiencing a tenfold surge, with a plethora of brands joining its FAN base network and in the process helping the company rake-in more ROI.

Let’s see what Alvin Bowles, Facebook Head of Global Publisher Sales and Operations has to say about the initial success of FAN through his blog post.

In Q4 we reached a $1B annual run rate for advertising spend through the Audience Network, with the bulk of that value being passed to publishers, and the remainder being recorded as net revenue for Facebook. With Audience Network, we will continue to introduce new ways for publishers to take advantage of everything that makes Facebook ads valuable to our partners: high-quality demand, people-based marketing, measurement and our ads delivery engine.

Despite FAN’s runaway success adding to Facebook’s revenue generation sources, the company, at the moment is mulling the option of closing LiveRail’s ad serving unit. This is being done primarily to shift LiveRail’s efforts towards aiding private businesses and providing mediation solutions pertaining to native and mobile video ads.

Let’s see what Peter Naylor, SVP of Advertising Sales at Hulu has to say about the recent development.

We believe native and video are key ad formats and that programmatic platforms are the best way through which to deliver them. LiveRail already powers about 75 programmatic private marketplaces for some of the world’s largest publishers, including Hulu and A+E Networks.

For our readers’ information, it was two years ago in 2014 that Facebook got LiveRail on-board as an addition to its other existing services. It was only last year that Facebook added FAN, with its ad serving capabilities, to its LiveRail network. But the company says that it’s ad serving capabilities is the primary focus of its business. Furthermore, the company adds that it is planning a smooth transition of LiveRail ad server’s current customer base to its other in-house services, or outsourcing them to other ad server platforms outside Facebook in the near future.

In addition to that, Peter Naylor was also quoted as saying,

We are excited to see Facebook double down on LiveRail’s platform of media automation and data informed targeting as it is an important part of every branded publisher’s success in the future.” LiveRail was set up in Hulu in August, 2015.

Besides that, private marketplaces allow publishers to sell their ad inventory in a more organized way, preferably on invitation basis. Owing to their increasing popularity in private marketplaces, they are fast becoming the next big thing, but they may not be able to replace open exchange markets.

For more info, write to us at sales@agencyplatform.com.