One vendor dominates the market for advertising on the buy and sell side – Google. However with their own huge advertising business, not only are Google a potential partner but also a competitor for many media owners.

In PaidContent, our Chief Commercial Officer, Rags, discusses the challenges of working with the Google ‘death star’ and the desire of many media owners to have an end to end ad tech stack from a more ‘independent’ provider.

Read the article in full here.

This month we’ve been taking stock and looking at the data emerging from Karbon, and one key trend we see is a big growth in iPad video monetization: with 150% growth of iPad traffic in the last 6 months across Karbon clients.

Are tablets the new combined TV and PC in one?

Delivering billions of ad impressions every month and reaching around 10% of the Internet’s population, we are fortunate to sit on top of some exciting data. The shift towards tablets is one of the themes emerging:

• iPad traffic accounts for 10% of all the traffic across Karbon, having grown by over 10x in the last 12 months
• Overall, non-PC traffic is around 30% of all the ads delivered, meaning that iPad comprises a third of all our non-PC traffic
• iPhone traffic is stable at around 5% of total ads

We currently integrate with over 50 device environments, through native SDKs, our Brightcove integrations and native multidevice support. The growth in iPad traffic comes from across our footprint – with clients across 25 markets in Europe and Asia.

What’s driving tablet growth?

Mobile phones demonstrated some growth in video ad monetisation in the last two years, based on the data from Karbon, however mobile phone growth stabilises as access to tablets increases.

In Apple’s latest results, they reported a rise of 65% in iPad sales from 11.8 million units a year ago, compared to 19.5 million units in Q1 2013. Mac sales, however decreased to 3.95 million units (compared to the 4 million units sold in Q2 2012). Industry analysts IDC claimed that 49.2M tablets were shipped in Q1 of 2013, a 142% increase on sales in the same period last year.

A number of factors drive iPad usage including the great user experience. Publishers and broadcasters are investing in native apps and features such as AirPlay in conjunction with Apple TV, also increasing adoption.

The audience is accessing video content more and more via tablets such as the iPad making the tablet is the new PC at home. And in some ways, it’s the new TV at home, either complementing or replacing the existing big screen in the living room.

This is only the beginning of something more significant. In advanced markets, we expect tablets and mobile to outperform PC in less than 2 years. Being in this industry, you need to constantly follow the audience as that is where the ad dollars will go.

Read more about this post on Techcrunch.