Reading List: Does a Twitter Follower Beat a Facebook Like?

Google-Admeld Reactions: The ad tech industry had its say on Google’s latest blockbuster acquisition, its nearly $400 million purchase of yield optimizer Admeld. The reactions collected by AdExchanger were pretty much as you’d expect. Those on the vendor and agency side were giddy with the idea that real-time bidding has arrived for real. There’s a little more circumspection among ad networks like Undertone and Admeld comptetitors. The Rubicon Project, like Admeld a supply-side platform, had an interesting reaction. CEO Frank Addante issued a statement baldly calling the deal as “bad for publishers.” Addante accused Admeld of “being mostly an RTB arbitrageur, buying inventory at low prices from publishers and selling it for higher prices to advertisers while keeping the spread for themselves – without giving any transparency into this practice to publishers.” That might open a can of worms if true. AdExchanger

YouTube Users Watch Ads: Web video often banks on the fact that there isn’t a Tivo for it. But it turns out it might not matter as much. A YouTube executive said it found users skip just 30 percent of ads when given the option. YouTube rolled out TrueView in December, giving users the option to skip pre-roll ads. The low number might raise some eyebrows — it could be viewers just didn’t understand the option — but YouTube sales director Bruce Daisley said viewers who didn’t skip were 75 percent more engaged. If the findings hold up, and there are successful trials of ad-selector formats like VivaKi’s ASq, Web video might find a middle ground in giving consumers more control over what they watch. Maybe. The Next Web

Gawker’s Return from the Dead: Remember back when Gawker Media redesigned its sites in February? Bloggers fell all over themselves to flagellate proprietor Nick Denton and call it his Waterloo. His abandonment of the blog format for something more magazine-like was supposedly hated. Denton stayed the course, as Digiday wrote last month. And now, it seems like the move is working. Felix Salmon of Reuters tracks a page view rebound at Gawker sites over the past month. The stable of properties is now near its all-time peak — all the while sticking with its maligned format, designed in large part to cater to advertiser needs. Denton is all but declaring victory, although one commenter points to Gawker’s dismaying habit of using placeholder pages to drive pageviews. Reuters