Dive Brief:

• The New York Times' much-hyped social ad product, Ricochet, has been abandoned as a standalone product following the October shuttering of the Times' R&D Ventures.
• The Ricochet website now redirects to the newspaper's media kit and most of the employees who worked on it are now working elsewhere in the organization.
• Lauded as the "new model of digital marketing," the social ad program debuted in 2012 and was supposed to pioneer socially driven inventory, making the New York Times a shining example at the time of an old publisher adjusting to the times.

Dive Insight:

Ricochet may have failed, but it can still serve as a valuable example that many in ad tech can learn from. New York Times VP of Research and Development Operations Michael Zimbalist told Digiday that, unfortunately, advertiser uptake didn't match up to marketplace enthusiasm — though he didn't say how many advertisers had actually used the product. That could be representative of another problem, as Ignired SVP of Media Dave Martin says measuring such a product's success can be difficult.

Still, its functionality is still available at the Times as part of an ad buy, and Zimbalist says the product incubation experience was a great one for those involved.