The Economist collects plenty of data, but until recently each type, including browsing or subscriber data, could only be analyzed in a vacuum. That meant The Economist didn’t know the types of content viewed by its most loyal subscribers and couldn’t identify the behavior of readers at risk of dropping their subscriptions. For advertising, those […]
Millennials in search of a side gig read The Penny Hoarder to find ways to make extra money and save. The site earned $20.8 million last year by focusing on native, affiliate marketing. It earns 95% of its revenue from affiliate and performance campaigns, and less than 5% from display advertising. And it expects to […]
TrustX GM and President David Kohl was sitting in the front row with a big smile on his face when P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard laid into the digital supply chain at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting last month. For the past year, Kohl has been working on a project housed within Digital Context […]
Integrated sales teams are in vogue. Print sellers usually handle digital these days, and IO-focused digital sellers pitch in on programmatic. But Forbes, which integrated its sales team in 2009, switched back to separate lanes for separate mediums at the beginning of this year. “All of this was motivated by what we were seeing when […]
Getting ad-blocking users to change their tune and opt into ads isn’t impossible. In fact, for Dennis Publishing, it has worked as much as 57% of the time. The UK-based publisher of The Week, Carbuyer.co.uk, Alphr.com and other sites conducted a six-month test of Sourcepoint’s Dialogue tech, which allows publishers to send different messages to […]
When Bloomberg writes a story about a public company or commodity, it’s bringing market information dynamically into the adjacent ad. Bloomberg is packaging up this programmatic creative as a new ad unit, which it’s calling DataLock. Bank of Montreal and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group this quarter agreed to be the first advertisers to use it. DataLock is designed to reduce […]
Time Inc. is bullish on digital, even as its print business deflates. The company – which has lately been the object of acquisitive interest from Meredith and other suitors – expects $600 million in digital revenue next year. “We see a path to $1 billion over [our strategic] plan,” said CEO Rich Battista during Time’s […]
Turner’s revenue analytics team wasn’t always quickly able to answer questions like whether the presidential inauguration affected advertising revenue. The publisher couldn’t collate data more than weekly or monthly because it worked with more than a dozen programmatic partners, each with their own user interfaces, which supplied ads across Turner’s multiple sites – from CNN […]
If programmatic advertising has reduced readers to commodities, then Topix wants to be the ultimate trader. The site focuses on slideshows, the best way to get readers to cycle through multiple page views and earn more revenue per user. Topix’s most successful slideshow in 2016 earned $400,000. But getting that $400,000 required buying about $200,000 […]
Last year, the New York Daily News created a new advertising product to give clients a simple way to tap into the benefits of its data management platform (DMP). When clients opt in to the product, dubbed AdLift, the Daily News uses insights from the DMP to target and optimize their campaigns. Six months after […]
The New York Times saw its highest subscriber increase since 2011, the year the publication introduced digital subscriptions, following the November presidential election. It added 296,000 digital subscribers in the fourth quarter, up 19% from the previous quarter and a 45.9% increase year over year. CEO Mark Thompson said digital subscriptions had accelerated even prior […]
Year-old video news startup Cheddar is shaking up the current media model in two ways. On the content side, Cheddar wants to be the CNBC for millennials, quickly offering business news about the companies they care about. On the business side, Cheddar doesn’t see advertising as a main revenue driver. Instead, it’s struck deals with […]
Brooklyn-based health and wellness publisher Mindbodygreen is bringing on BuzzFeed exec Tessa Gould as COO to put more juice behind the content and commerce model. Gould, who started Monday, is the former head of commerce and VP of ad innovation at BuzzFeed, where she helped spur around $75 million in ecommerce transactions through BuzzFeed content […]
Chinese advertisers want viewability standards – but the country’s unique media landscape offers unusual challenges. “There is definitely a growing concern among advertisers here about wasted media budget and the transparency of their media buying,” said Martin Zhang, CEO and founder of Shanghai-based verification firm Adbug. Zhang is also chair of a Mobile Marketing Association China […]
Any publisher who is not a big platform company is on the express train to becoming a niche ads business, predicts Meredith Kopit Levien, EVP and CRO of The New York Times. “Up until now, we’ve been a niche consumer business with a $1 billion-plus newspaper ad business,” Kopit Levien said, speaking Thursday at AdExchanger’s […]
Fake news flourishes with easy access to programmatic revenue. Real news doesn’t. The online pub Slate – in the real news category – has been diversifying its revenue stream through subscriptions since 2014. But the 2016 US presidential election dramatically accelerated its membership growth – up 50% from 18,000 in November to 27,000 now. This […]
Facebook is trying to reset its relationship status with publishers from frenemy to friend. “That is an area we can do better in,” acknowledged Brian Boland, Facebook’s VP of publisher solutions. As for exactly how Facebook will build stronger ties with publishers, Boland only said, “We’re listening to our partners.” On Wednesday, Facebook unveiled its […]
When Bankrate decided to add header bidding late last year, it chose a server-side solution. “When we did our RFI [request for information], it became clear to me that server-to-server is a much better and more enhanced version of header bidding,” said Irene Kwak, VP of revenue operations for Bankrate. The financial publisher plans to […]
2016 was the year that header bidding crossed over and became a disruptive force in the ad industry. The wave of publisher adoption spurred tech companies to create header bidding solutions. Vendors that were slow to adopt, like Rubicon Project, saw their stock crash as their rivals scooped up market share in a world […]
As part of The Weather Company’s shift to a vertical-based sales organization, it has hired Sarah Ripmaster as VP of automotive sales. Ripmaster, who has a decade of experience working with auto manufacturers, will help advertisers use The Weather Company’s location data, weather data and the Watson Ad platform in their ad campaigns. Ripmaster worked […]
One of Piera Gelardi’s personal mottos: “Friction creates sparks.” As executive creative director and co-founder of Refinery29, Gelardi is constantly working to balance quality with quantity and achieve scale while staying true to Refinery29’s roots as a “mission-driven publisher for millennial women.” “There was a point when I was scared to grow because I thought […]
Data-driven editorial just added a new weapon to its arsenal: a Slackbot. Clique Media Group (CMG), which owns flagship style site WhoWhatWear as well as MyDomaine, Byrdie and Obsessee, created a Slackbot in November to alert editors when stories over-index the benchmarks set for each author. The editors receive a Slackbot notification with details about […]
As more money flows programmatically, Prisa Group and other publishers are changing their sales organizations and ad products to focus on serving data-driven buyers. Prisa Group owns or represents media brands in 22 Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries. Its properties, including El País and the sports site AS, reach 25 million unique users. It also serves […]
Mitú, a digital media company for young Latinos, started out as a multichannel network on YouTube and has since expanded onto Facebook and OTT devices. On Tuesday, the four-year-old publisher will add Snapchat Discover to the mix. “Snapchat recognized a significant portion of their audience, based on demo, is Latino, and wanted to find the […]
Purch, which first implemented header bidding three years ago, has moved on. The portfolio of product review and tech sites turned off most of its header bidders last month and moved to server-to-server integrations with the same partners. Industrywide, server-to-server is considered a logical next step after header bidding. Amazon is moving server-to-server, and Google’s […]
Mindbodygreen is making a credible run at the content-and-commerce model. The health and wellness publisher, which sees around 10 million unique visitors a month, eschews traditional advertising in favor of a combination of content and commerce, “with community in the middle,” said CEO and founder Jason Wachob. Mindbodygreen has 5,000 contributors, some of whom are […]
Some publishers are raking in the traffic courtesy of Apple News, but not everyone on the buy side is impressed. “I want to be able to upload my own audience, match it to theirs and know what’s running where so I can customize the ad,” said Angelina Eng, VP of media platforms and operations at […]
Investing Media Solutions (IMS), exclusively represents the advertising for 375 long-tail and mid-tail publications that offer financial advice. As the financial network looks to the future, it’s adding first-party data and more compelling ad formats to maintain stride with its sophisticated financial advertisers. IMS helps financial advertisers like Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab, and brands like […]
The programmatic salesperson only came into existence about five years ago. What started out as an outsider position in the sales organization has become more mainstream as programmatic adoption increases. But the very people holding programmatic sales roles are already predicting its extinction, as the role gets absorbed into the entire sales process. “In three […]
CBS Interactive-owned CNET has long relied on data to make editorial decisions. But its branded content program, Studio 61, also applies editorial insights to branded content. When Motorola wanted branded content to support its Moto Z phone launch, CNET analyzed which content performed best against Motorola’s target segment: Verizon and Android users aged 18 to […]
