Earlier this year we reported that LiveRail, Facebook‘s video ad exchange was not going to be accepting any new customers in favour or concentrating on its Audience Network which has become a billion-dollar business on its own. If any of you were wondering what Facebook’s long-term plans with LiveRail were, here’s your answer: Facebook is shutting it down.
LiveRail had been acquired by the company in the summer of 2014 in order to work on its video ads offering, but it is now taking the same road that Facebook Exchange took. That too, is being phased out, while its ad-bidding technology is already being used in Facebook’s current ad offerings.
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Commenting on LiveRail’s “demise”, a spokesperson for Facebook explained to The Wall Street Journal that
[quote]We are discontinuing the LiveRail private exchange to focus on finding better ways for publishers to sell their ad space directly to advertisers, as well as expanding our video ad offering via Audience Network. This is what many of our publishing partners told us they wanted, and we believe this will make video ads more relevant to the people who watch them.[/quote]
The LiveRail brand is not disappearing though, and existing customers will slowly transition over to newer ad products. Facebook has also recently launched various Audience Network features, so this shouldn’t make much of a difference for the publishers who were interested in LiveRail or Facebook Exchange’s features.
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For the near future, Facebook is working heavily on building out “LiveRail’s programmatic private marketplaces and mediation services” and “will continue to focus on native and video”.
In January’s announcement, head of global publisher sales and operations, Alvin Bowles had explained how important these formats are:
[quote]We believe native and video are key ad formats and that programmatic platforms are the best way through which to deliver them.[/quote]
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