Facebook kills its video ad exchange LiveRail to focus on Audience Network

Facebook has confirmed to have pull the plug on LiveRail. The social giant had acquired video advertising company LiveRail in 2014 as it was looking to make video ads a bigger part of its business.

Commenting on the reports of the LiveRail platform being shut down, a Facebook spokesperson said , “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.”

This doesn’t come as a surprise as earlier this year, it had stopped taking in new customers on the monetisation platform. Announcing this on a blog , Alwin Bowles, the head of global publisher sales and operations at Facebook had said that over time, mobile app publishers had found better returns and more relevant advertising though Facebook’s Audience Network.

“We’re sharing some changes to LiveRail, our monetization platform for publishers. These changes allow us to focus our attention on growing the Audience Network, as well as LiveRail’s private marketplaces and mediation services,” said Bowles in his blog in January.