With LiveRail changes, Facebook puts priority on native and video

Dive Brief:

Facebook’s Audience Network is growing in success: it saw the number of apps on the network grow ten times year-over-year, and it hit a $1 billion annual run rate in ad spending in Q4 2015.
Because of Audience Network success, Facebook is no longer accepting new customers for its LiveRail ad server and will transition existing customers to other publisher products or ad servers over the next few months.
LiveRail will remain available for publishers and will be built out with programmatic private marketplaces and mediation services with a focus on native and video.

Dive Insight:

In a Facebook blog post, Head of Global Publisher Sales and Operations Alvin Bowles wrote, “At Facebook, when there is a product that gains traction like Audience Network, we look for ways to build it out quickly and make it even better. That also means shifting away from other efforts, if necessary."

According to Facebook, its Audience Network hit $250 million in ad spending in Q4 2015. Though Facebook did not disclose run rates for any other quarter last year, it did say that apps running on the Audience Network now account for 6% of all time spent in mobile apps.

"Over the past two years, a growing number of mobile app publishers have found success – better returns and more relevant advertising – through Facebook's Audience Network and the people-based marketing approach that powers it," Bowles said in the blog post.

The changes the social network announced were to the LiveRail, which Facebook said would allow them to prioritize growing the Audience Network. Facebook's Head of Ad Tech David Jakubowski told Ad Age that dropping LiveRail's ad server business wasn't much of a loss for the social titan.

"You're talking well under a hundred – you're talking tens of clients on it," he said.

Bowles explained in the blog post that Facebook will keep up its focus on native and video as it develops LiveRail's programmatic private marketplaces and mediation services.

"We believe native and video are key ad formats and that programmatic platforms are the best way through which to deliver them," Bowles wrote.