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We have a special place in our heart for DoubleVerify because it blacklists WOLF STREET in the “brand safety” services it touts to advertisers.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
Shares of DoubleVerify Holdings [DV] plunged 40% today, to $18.25 at the moment, after it had reported earnings last night. Shares are now down by 62% from their intraday high on June 29, 2021, and far below the IPO price of $27 in April 2021.
The ad-tech company has wedged itself between advertisers and internet publishers, trying to extract money from both for various services that it touts with dubious claims. Before today’s mishap, its market cap was $5.3 billion, now down by $2.1 billion, to $3.2 billion.
Its shares plunged today because it disclosed some issues and cut its full-year revenue guidance from a range of $688-704 million, to a range of $663-675 million; and it cut its guidance for “adjusted EBITDA”; it said, “primarily due to uneven spending patterns by the select large retail and CPG advertisers that we mentioned last quarter.”
Its net income shriveled by 42% to $7.1 million; and after the foreign currency translation adjustment, shriveled further to just $2.5 million, which is close to zero for a company even with a new-and-improved market cap of $3.2 billion. WOLF STREET downgrades DV from “should have sold already” to “should have never bought.”
The company’s IPO took place in April 2021, just two months after peak-hype-and-hoopla in February 2021. By March 2021, astonished to watch all this stuff coming apart, we created our pantheon of Imploded Stocks, where we place stocks after they plunged by 70% or more. And we’re now busy trying to make some room for DoubleVerify in this increasingly packed pantheon.
We have a special place in our heart for DoubleVerify because it blacklists WOLF STREET as part of its brand safety services that it touts to advertisers. So in effect, advertisers are paying DoubleVerify to block their carefully crafted and costly communications from reaching our readers.
Our readers tend to be high income; many have substantial investments; many work in finance or real estate; many own companies, ranging from financial advisories to manufacturing firms; many are top executives. Quite a few of them have reached out to me and have donated very generously to WOLF STREET (which is primarily supported by donations).
These are readers that advertisers scramble hard to reach with their communications, especially financial services firms. But some of these advertisers pay DoubleVerify to block their communications from reaching our readers. In addition to this being a lousy deal for advertisers, it costs WOLF STREET substantial amounts in ad revenues.
In July 2020, DoubleVerify announced that after its “social justice hackathon” – we’re not kidding – it has updated some terms. For example, it replaced the word “blacklist” in its services that it touts to advertisers with “exclusion list,” because, you know, it includes the word “black.” It also replaced the term “whitelist” because it includes the word “white.”
“DoubleVerify makes sure advertisers get what they are paying for by ensuring that ads are seen by the intended audience and don’t appear alongside objectionable content,” is how Barron’s touted this service today, when it reported on DV’s guidance debacle – the objectionable content being the articles and charts you see on WOLF STREET.
Ad tech – from Google on down, including outfits such as DoubleVerify – has sucked more and more ad dollars out of the stream between advertisers and publishers, to where advertisers keep paying more and more, and publishers keep getting less and less, to where there is now a long list of online publishers that have cut jobs to the bone, and many have shut down entirely.
Thankfully, WOLF STREET is primarily supported by the donations from many generous and loyal readers, the very people that DoubleVerify doesn’t want to see the communications from its advertiser-clients.
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The post Ad-Tech Outfit DoubleVerify Plunges 40% Today, -62% from Peak, 3 Years after IPO. Nabs WOLF STREET Downgrade to “Should Have Never Bought” appeared first on Energy News Beat.
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