“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Samantha Price, director of ad products for The Weather Company. In 2001, the Sloan Management Review envisioned a bright future for “m-commerce” and a theoretical young consumer named Tommy. “His cell phone beeps: It’s […]
Jewelry and flower brands who briefly ramp up ad spend for Valentine’s Day love their private marketplaces. In early February, they set up private marketplaces with publishers who can provide the right audience and context. They test which sites yield conversions in the weeks before Cupid’s holiday and dial up the spend the final week […]
Advertisers’ demand for viewability is frustrating for publishers, who must contend with new contracts, new billing structures and new ways to value inventory, all while ensuring meeting viewability standards doesn’t erode ad revenue. During a town hall at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Phoenix, about half the publishers in the packed room said they had […]
The company formerly known as Yellow Pages has worked hard in recent years to transfer its historical strength – helping consumers find local businesses via large printed books – into a business that’s now booking more than $1 billion in digital revenue. YP acquired mobile ad firm Sense Networks one year ago and continues to refine and experiment with […]
The New York Times reported relatively modest fourth-quarter and full-year earnings on Tuesday, but chief Mark Thompson hailed it as “the most encouraging year-over-year trend” for total advertising revenue since 2005. To that end, he touted strong growth in digital advertising, sponsored content and subscription-based revenue. “We were particularly pleased with the strong growth in digital […]
Twitter is finally giving its promoted tweets wings to fly beyond Twitter’s own walls. In a blog post Tuesday, Ameet Ranadive, Twitter’s senior director of product, said that advertisers will be able to syndicate promoted tweet campaigns running on Twitter to non-Twitter properties using the same creative and audience targeting parameters. Twitter didn’t get specific on how the […]
At Industry Preview 2015, a group of top publishers took a crack at what digital publishing looks like in 2015 in this panel led by MediaLink’s Wenda Harris Millard. Participants included: Zazie Lucke, Head of Global Media Marketing, Bloomberg Dao Nguyen, Publisher, Buzzfeed Troy Young, President, Hearst Digital Jon Steinberg, CEO, Daily Mail, North America […]
When Rant Inc. founder Brett Rosin created RantSports.com out of 150 sports blogs he pulled into one centralized hub, it became the foundation of what would soon turn into a massive portfolio of properties. Rant, founded in 2010, is no longer just RantSports. The media company now includes RantChic (fashion), RantStore (ecommerce), RantFinance and RantPolitical […]
During Yahoo’s earnings call Tuesday, CEO Marissa Mayer went into some detail about Yahoo’s plans to leverage Flurry’s developer connections to launch a mobile ad network. Mayer said mobile app developers who have downloaded Flurry’s free analytics will be able to turn on monetization with Yahoo Gemini, its native solution, as well as BrightRoll video ads. More than 600,000 apps […]
PubMatic has created an API that allows media buyers to find and buy private marketplace deals through their DSPs. The second phase will bring automated guaranteed deals into their platforms through the same API. Early DSP partners include DataXu, MediaMath, SiteScout, The Trade Desk and TURN. “We’re confident this will put us in a leadership […]
In April 2014 during its NewFront, Glam Media became Mode Media. The de-pinking of the company, President and CRO Dan Lagani said, “caught up the company name with where the business was.” The men’s site Brash.com, Foodie.com and parenting side Tend.com attracted audiences no longer overwhelmingly female. Hot pink walls in the office were painted […]
The three-year-old Brazilian music website Sua Musica attracts 3 million monthly unique visitors who listen to and download music from emerging local artists. With a user base focused on discovery and sharing finds, it’s become one of the most successful test publishers of Spot.IM, a chat overlay platform launched in 2012. Spot.IM looks like a […]
A year after AOL acquired Gravity, AOL-owned publication The Huffington Post has standardized the content personalization tool to power internal and external content recommendation links. This means it’s history for Taboola, HuffPost’s previous recommendation module. Gravity has powered the publisher’s “Suggested For You” internal module for the past six months, and it replaced the Taboola-powered external module […]
Can BitTorrent – often regarded as the de facto file sharing protocol for online content piracy –achieve the legitimacy to attract brand advertisers? While that remains to be seen, the company took a step toward improving its ad offering when it unveiled a partnership with Adzerk on Wednesday. Adzerk, which works with publications like social […]
Publishers don’t just brag about their content anymore – they talk about their technology, which amplifies their voices in a world of social sharing, content recommendations and sorting algorithms. But what’s the balance between being a technology company and content creator? On the eve of the Industry Preview conference, AdExchanger asked three of the panelists […]
As the Financial Times reported last month, The Washington Post is making its content management system (CMS) available to partners, like universities and fellow newspapers. The University of Maryland, Yale and Columbia have already adopted the CMS. Additional users may come from the more than 200 newspaper partners with which the Post has established subscription-sharing […]
With its acquisition of Selectable Media this week, Meredith picked up two new ad products: one that requires users to choose a video to watch before viewing content, and another enabling native-style placements that link to a branded content page. The companies did not disclose the terms but said the exit made money for Selectable […]
Movie advertising timelines are rough. Over 80% of a campaign spend occurs within two weeks of a movie’s premiere. If something isn’t working, it’s usually too late to fix it. Moviepilot — part publisher, part platform, part agency – is helping them change that. The secret of its insight into moviegoers’ habits and intent: data. The […]
There’s a reason most publishers turn to partners like Outbrain or Taboola for content recommendation: simplicity. But conservative news publisher Newsmax Media saw the benefits of creating a content recommendation network in-house: more revenue, more control over the content and its partners and more flexibility to make the feeds look truly native. The main Newsmax […]
Goodreads’ 30 million members save books to their “want to read” shelves, write reviews and share recommendations with friends. Started as a place to help readers find books through real-life friends, it’s since become a social destination for people connecting with online and offline friends, attracting 45 million unique visitors a month. The trove of […]
Earlier this year, Yieldex – mostly known as a yield-management, forecasting and pricing tool for the largest publishers – expanded its focus with an automated guaranteed product. About a third of Yieldex’s customers use it. eMarketer has predicted programmatic direct will grow from $800 million this year to $8.57 billion by 2016. Two weeks ago, […]
From the start, foodie site Food52 planned to have two revenue streams: advertising and commerce. Today, commerce drives two-thirds of its revenue, with advertising accounting for the other third. The site now averages four million unique monthly visitors. After building up content, 98% of which is contributed by readers, Food52 had the audience to add […]
Not every publisher sees selling drones as a natural extension of its business. But converting readers into customers is the next goal for The Next Web, an online tech magazine that has 6.6 million unique monthly visitors. For the past three months, the company has been using StackCommerce to power its e-commerce store, called TNW […]
For recipe sites, the days leading up to Thanksgiving bring a rush of users searching for turkey-basting tips and instructions for making stuffing and pumpkin pie. In the coming weeks, the winter holidays will bolster traffic even more. These audience surges represent an opportunity and challenge for publishers as they try to maximize yield. Sales […]
The walled gardens around publishers’ premium inventory are hard to take down, since publishers are reluctant to put premium inventory in channels associated with low-priced, performance-focused inventory. But Sonobi, whose platform combines direct-sold impressions with those sold programmatically, is trying to chip away at those walls. The company hosted a Premium Programmatic Summit with its […]
This Old House, the venerable home-improvement brand, possesses a trove of video assets highly valued by users and advertisers alike. Video is the very foundation of This Old House. The brand started off as a local Boston television show in 1979, and it now runs nationally on PBS. Time Inc., which had been running This Old […]
Does anyone want to be a content creator anymore? Women’s lifestyle site SheKnows has jumped into the user-generated content fray by buying BlogHer, which provides a technology platform for bloggers as well as opportunities to monetize. SheKnows paid an estimated $30 million-$40 million, The acquisition fits with SheKnows’ recent efforts to turn its community into […]
CEO Tim Armstrong thinks AOL’s bets on programmatic are paying off. Programmatic grew to 37% of non-search ad revenue, compared to 12%. Forty seven percent of revenue from AOL’s network Advertising.com was programmatic, compared to 18% during the same period last year. Advertising revenue grew 18% YoY to $473.4 million. Armstrong attributed the increase to larger shifts in the […]
TripAdvisor grew revenue by 39% in the third quarter but disappointed investors by missing its guidance for Q3. Half of TripAdvisor’s traffic now comes from mobile, big news for a site that attracts 315 million monthly unique visitors. That shift has challenged many traditional publishers, but TripAdvisor said it has mobile monetization and user experience […]
Time Inc. reported increasing digital revenues and declining print revenue for the third quarter. Digital revenue rose 5% YoY, but that increase upped to 19% excluding the impact of corporate transactions related to the spinoff from Time Warner. During September 2014, Time Inc. attracted 93.6 million multiplatform unique visitors, an increase of 27% from December […]
