Dive Brief:
- Facebook stopped accepting new customers for LiveRail beginning in January and since that time has been transitioning existing customers to other publisher products or ad servers.
- Now, the social network has accelerated its phasing out of the LiveRail ad platform by laying off 40 members of its account management and sales teams, according to reporting by Business Insider.
- Mark Trefgarne, the CEO of LiveRail at the time of Facebook’s acquisition of the ad tech firm in 2014, left the company last Friday. The dismissed LiveRail team members were told they had six weeks to find new roles within Facebook.
Dive Insight:
As a result of Facebook’s dismantling of LiveRail, those customers are being pushed into using Facebook’s advertising network.
"Over the past few months, we have communicated our desire to build advertising technology products that create the most value for advertisers and publishers. That meant removing certain parts of the LiveRail business that weren't creating value: we deprecated the LiveRail ad server and removed LiveRail publishers that did not reach our quality standards," Facebook said in a statement it provided Business Insider regarding the latest moves around LiveRail.
The social network cited issues with ad fraud and viewability concerns with its ad server and real-time bidding market as reasons for making changes to LiveRail. Facebook's answer to those problems was to turn LiveRail into a private marketplace with invitation-only auctions for ad inventory.
"Those decisions resulted in the need to re-purpose several roles. While organizational change can be difficult, we are confident that these moves will allow us to continue to grow our publisher monetization efforts with Audience Network and LiveRail," the statement continued.
What publishers want is to combine their own data with the vast audience data Facebook has, which would allow them to boost their ad targeting. A source told Digiday Facebook was effectively folding LiveRail into the Facebook Audience Network, which gives the social network control over their publishing partners. Facebook, however, told Digiday it is committed to building out tools that provide publishers with what they need to manage their ad inventory.
What these moves really do is bolster Facebook's ad tech offering.