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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

I find the most surprising thing in this thread that there apparently is an event that sells billions of dollars advertisement space each year. I thought all this happened on online auctions.

I wanna know more about New Fronts.

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If you've heard of TV "upfronts"¹, NewFronts² are the same thing with a focus on digital content. They're marketplaces that bring together brands, creators, advertisers, marketers, and distributors.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upfront_(advertising)

² https://www.digitas.com/en-hk/services/newfront

If you wanted to buy 10 billion of twitter, you wouldn’t use robinhood.

Same deal for advertisers. The premium buys and the big space goes through heavy negotiations (but might be rtb’d for execution as needed)

An easier analogy is the ad industry term « inventory ». When you want to commit to buying very large quantities of inventory you might want more guarantees, discounts and other specific terms that wouldn’t be feasible or reasonable in small quantities. It happens for goods, and it’s roughly the same B2B negotiations for ad space. That’s also why most big advertisers never pay the actual rate card price of an ad slot. In TV or print, I’ve seen many discounts of over 50% on the official price for large ad buy commitments.

Who wants to buy a billion dollars worth of Twitter ads? Nike? Nestle?

I can only imagine some sort of middle man. But why would I buy ads through that middle man?

They meant stock. If you wanted to buy a lot of public stock you don't use a random app - you engage at a higher level. Same with buying a lot of advertising.

Twitter isn’t publicly traded.

I think that analogy doesn’t make much sense. If you’re trying to buy a lot of stock it’s basically going to depend on how good you are at execution whether you do it yourself in tiny bits or as a big block trade with someone who is good at execution. If you want a significant % and you’re not eg black rock, you’ll often need to negotiate with the board.

I don't have any inside information, but as I understand it's basically just a spending commitment. The online auctions still take place, however the purchaser will gain some sort of bonus for agreeing to a certain amount of spending over the next year.

The deals seem to be rather secretive, but from what I can tell bonuses can be anything from a straightforward discount, to a guaranteed amount of impressions for some campaign, to things like guaranteeing that the client will win a certain percentage of auctions above some price.

It makes sense that there should be a futures market for both big buyers and big sellers.

Everyone wants at least a little predictability...

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