New York Times Website Uniques Grow With Paywall; Adobe's Cloud Strategy

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Paywalls Improve Traffic?

Journalism.co.uk reports from the World Editors Forum in Vienna and relates a story from New York Times Assistant managing editor Jim Roberts who says the NYT’s paywall is NOT driving away traffic. In fact, unique users to the NYT’s website in the US increased by 2.3 per cent year-on-year (34 million uniques) this past September, despite the introduction of digital subscriptions in March. On a panel, Roberts said the numbers were “incredibly surprising,” according to Journalism.co.uk, and admitted “that at first he thought the paywall was ‘at least potentially a bad idea. I argued against it. It was a position that wasn’t extremely popular throughout our newsroom but I really worried a lot that our audience which we had worked so aggressively to build would shrink a lot.” Read more.

Adobe’s Cloud Strategy

In case you missed it, Adobe announced its Creative Cloud strategy at an industry conference recently. Though not directly related to ads, considering Adobe’s position in the Marketplace, it’s relevant as Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch tells San Jose Mercury News about the reasons for “the cloud”: “Creative Cloud is Adobe re-imagining itself amid a world of these three transformations — cloud, multi-screen and social computing — which are all happening at the same time.” The common thread here is mobile. Read more. Adobe is addressing the creative front-end of advertising, let alone the back-end with Adobe’s Omniture unit. The mining of both sides’ data – and insights thereafter – will bring it all together.

Ad (Agency) Tech Love

Judith Messina reports in Crain’s New York Business that advertising – especially agencies – is getting reinvented by technology and highlights several ad tech companies including mobile DSP TapAd. TapAd’s CEO Are Traasdahl expresses optimism about mobile in particular and tells Messina, “The mobile and tablet space is exploding. It’s almost like the cards are being dealt again.” Read what he means.

DG MediaMind DSP In EMEA, FYI

DG’s MediaMind continues to expand geographies for its Smart Trading product as the EMEA region is the latest target according to Marketing Week. Nerissa MacDonald is the new Director of Trading for MediaMind’s demand-side platform play. Read more.

Ad Exchange Goes Local

Ad serving platform ZEDO is aggressively expanding its Zinc ad exchange strategy by rolling it out as its own company in India – Zinc India Pvt Ltd, to be headquartered in Mumbai according to VCCircle. Zedo CEO Roy de Souza says “that he would strategically partner with an ad agency to jointly run the firm. Zedo will hire a team of 20 and a CEO to run its India unit, which is expected to have 200 people on board in the next 3-5 years.” -Tech company needs agency to drive demand. -Agency wants differentiating tech to offer clients and prospect for new ones. Read it.

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Living Off Of Facebook

In Digiday, Mike Shields highlights humor site Cracked and how the Demand Media-owned property’s audience thrives with social’s help. Shields writes, “Unlike other Demand properties, which are trying to evolve their users’ in-and-out status, Cracked has loyal users and has built a sizable social media following. (…) Cracked’s traffic comes from social media, with 50 percent of that traffic coming from Facebook. ” Read it.

Talking Futures

CEO Yoav Arnstein gives MediaPost readers his view on the world of futures buying – likely reflecting his company’s focus – and where it fits in data-driven, digital advertising. Arnstein sees less value in the spot, RTB markets as he writes: “The industry’s ongoing attempt to migrate more and more dollars to real-time-bidding, based on third-party audience data and direct response-based metrics, is the equivalent of flying coach. If you’re like Seinfeld — and me — you don’t want to do that anymore.” Read more.

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