If you prefer your good news with a grain of salt, you can take note that Triggit makes its living by helping marketers buy ads on Facebook’s exchange — the bidding platform where brands can buy ads in real time. The exchange, known as FBX, was supposed to jumpstart the social network’s advertising efforts.

According to Triggit, which is one several ad tech companies that Facebook permits to broker the ads, the cost for a large international retailer to obtain a customer on the news feed exchange is one-third the price of a traditional “right-hand rail” ad and 1/16th that of a traditional Google display ad. The company says the ads are especially taking off in international markets like Latin America.

“The big takeaway is that this is a game changer for advertising. It changes the economics for publishers too,” Triggit CEO Zach Coelius said by telephone, claiming that every other company that has a news feed will soon look to create an automated exchange too.

For believers, news feed-style ads are “native” and less likely to be ignored by consumers, while the use of real-time bidding permits masses of them to sold to the right people (based on retargeting data) with minimal effort.

If Triggit’s claims are even mostly true, that will be welcome news for investors who fret that Facebook’s advertising results haven’t lived up to their original promise.

Ad industry watchers, meanwhile, agree that the newstream ads more effective than other forms of Facebook ads. But they also caution that too many of them, including forthcoming video ads, could be off-putting to users of the social network.

A new study by Forrester Research claims that so-called “programmatic” buying or “real time bidding” will account for nearly 25 percent of online video ad purchases by next year. This mirrors what is going on in the world of display advertising where more big advertisers are using ad tech tools to serve ads to diverse audiences in real time.

The report, which was commissioned by SpotXchange (an online video exchange that has skin in the ad game), also says that premium publishers have been slower to adopt programmatic bidding, in part because they fear it will undercut the value of their inventory. The report predicts, however, that many of these hold-out publishers will change their position as brands get accustomed to programmatic buying and begin to demand it.

The impact of programmatic on video ad prices is debatable. People in the ad tech industry point out that automated ad buying is simply a tool — not a reflection of ad quality. By this reasoning, publishers can hold their pricing line if they wish while also ensuring that their space is available in real time when there is a surge in demand. Conversely, as the report points out, publishers remain wary that brands will use the tools (as they did for display advertising) to drive down prices.

Overall, the future of video prices in the short term may be determined less by ad tech tools than by more basic principles of supply and demand. On this front, the good news for publishers can be seen in this chart which shows online ad spending rising quickly:

Another recent report is even more optimistic — pegging the 2013 number at $4.1 billion.

The bad news, though, is that the word is out about video’s promise and more and more people are showing up to grab a slice of the pie. Ad industry sources told the Wall Street Journal last month that there is ”not enough to feed everybody.” The Journal reported that, despite brands beginning to reallocate their TV budgets, prices are already under pressure; $15 to $20 per thousand views (CPM’s) last year versus a CPM of $17 to $25 in 2011.

The Forrester report also predicts that video ad inventory will be become increasingly divided between private and public exchanges.

Fox News is a case in point. On Friday, the day of the Newtown massacre, Fox published an ad for a novelty T-shirt that appeared like this:

Chicago lawyer Evan Brown noticed the ad late Friday afternoon. Appalled, Brown took a screenshot of the ad and published it here.

How did this happen?

Fox News did not respond to a request for comment, but the t-shirt company and advertising-industry people I spoke with provided enough information to piece together what happened. The unfortunate ad is not the result of Fox’s insensitivity or someone’s screw-up, but instead just reflects the reality of online advertising.

According to Mike Grouse of Bad Idea T-Shirts, the company has been running the bloody shirt ad for the last year. On Friday, it moved to take the ad down.”Yes, we removed the ads from Google upon becoming aware of the tragedy. We worked directly with our Google rep to expedite the process. We also blocked Fox News from receiving our ads,” he told us by email.

Google was involved in this case because it was the company that provided the back-end tools that let the t-shirt company buy the ads (other companies offer similar tools). In situations like this, Google works with both publishers and advertisers to help hit the kill switch on the technology that serves the ads.

“As soon as we recognized the sensitivity of the ad in this context, we stopped serving it,”  said a Google spokesperson by email.

Fox and the t-shirt company weren’t the only ones to publish ill-advised ads on the day of the Newtown killings. As Fast Company reported, Facebook ads on Friday invited people to try machine gun video games:

Do publishers have any control anymore?

While newspapers make ad blunders from time to time, their publishing process often means they are in the driver’s seat in deciding whether ads appear in their papers, and if they do, on which pages. The situation is far different for online publishers — even rich, powerful ones like Fox or Facebook — which serve millions of diverse ads in real time.

It’s just publishers that can be stung by this — big brands that buy through ad-bidding exchanges (and many do) and whose ads wind up near unflattering content could also be dinged reputationally.

All of this is a function of how the online ad industry has evolved. Publishers used to simply sell ad space ahead of time, usually at a given dollar amount for every thousand times an ad was seen. But as ad inventory grew, publishers began turning to third-party services that that helped them fill unsold spots with low cost ads. The benefit was extra money; the downside was a loss of control over what appears on their site.

Dealing with third-party ad suppliers can be tricky because you’re effectively opening a portal to a flood of unknown content. This appears to be what happened in the case of Fox. If Fox had sold the ad space directly, it would have been better prepared to stop the ads from appearing; but since, the bloody t-shirt ads were just some of the millions of third-party ads flowing onto its sites, Fox’s ability to react was limited.

Publishers do have some control, of course. They can rely on tags to screen out certain categories like politics or pornography. But in unlucky cases like this one, it took hours for the diverse parts of the ad operation — the advertiser, the ad broker and the publisher — to respond (but as one source noted, news sites like Fox publish sensitive stories all the time so Fox may need to tighten its controls).

The bottom line

Publishers will have an easier time responding to a Fox-like situation if they have pre-sold their ad inventory, according to people I talked with. Nonetheless, they do not have technology to be pro-active about ad-screening — there are too many ads and it’s impossible to foresee every type of mismatch. And, unlike a newspaper, publishers and ad staff do not have a time delay to review how an ad will appear.

With the spread of new ad tools that make it easier for brands to bid on ad space in real time, mishaps like this could become more common. According to IDC, real-time ads will amount to $2 billion and 20 percent of all display ads in 2012.

If there is bright spot for nervous advertisers, it’s that online publishing is transient, and it’s easy to scrub mistakes. Unlike ill-advised newspaper ads, ads like the bloody t-shirt one will simply vanish — unless, of course, someone captures them with a screenshot.