As Executive Editor, Sarah oversees AdExchanger’s news and feature coverage and event content. Sarah has written extensively about publishers, sell-side technology and Google. Understanding and explaining the business implications of technically complex topics is her forte. Over her years at AdExchanger, she’s documented the rise and maturity of programmatic tech, as data-driven advertising has spread far and wide in its marketing applications.
Among all the pros and cons of adding header bidding, one challenge is often not addressed: getting buy-in from senior sales leadership. The idea of programmatic competing against direct-sold impressions can be difficult to swallow. But local news site Philly.com, the digital presence of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, received that buy-in from […]
Egmont, which operates more than a dozen publications in Europe, only started investing in digital advertising a couple of years ago. As the print business continued to decline, its Swedish operation decided to focus on fast-moving digital. By extension, that meant going all-in with programmatic. To kick it off, Lars Näslund joined in August as […]
The Awl is moving three of its four sites from WordPress to Medium, as part of the Medium for Publishers program, which was announced Tuesday. Migrating an entire site onto a platform is the latest example of the rise of platform publishing. The Awl’s publisher, Michael Macher, tells AdExchanger that “indie publishers need to streamline […]
Getting agencies to buy enterprise software is hard, which is why AppNexus quietly killed off its two-year-old product Twixt in December – which included both workflow automation (aka RFP automation) and automated guaranteed functionalities. Ultimately, Twixt was too difficult and expensive to sell. “The level of investment that would have been required to drive penetration, […]
Celebrities typically make money from their digital presences through influencer marketing, though some have become digital publishers. Consider Kim Kardashian’s app, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, Lena Dunham’s Lenny, Derek Jeter’s The Player’s Tribune and LaurenConrad.com. While many of those sites are custom-built, new companies like DWNLD and Fanbread are cropping up and offering turnkey solutions to […]
ShopStyle offers shoppers a way to search for clothes across 1,400 different retailers. After matching the shopper with that little black dress or other item she’s been looking for, the company takes a cut. But ShopStyle, part of the PopSugar family, faced a problem. To ensure the site’s shoppers end up buying that black dress, […]
While content recommendation engines used to be a commodity business, that’s no longer the case, said Camilla Cho, executive director of business development and strategy at New York Media. New York Media – owner of the NYMag.com, Vulture, The Cut and Grub Street sites – is looking for partners that share its focus on using […]
Scale is becoming less of a differentiator among digital publishers – meaning they’ll soon have to focus on metrics like engagement. According to comScore’s “Cross-Platform Future in Focus” report, released Wednesday, 20% more digital media properties, including publishers and ecommerce sites, have topped 20 million uniques in the past year. That’s a total of 206 […]
Playbuzz, a creation platform for quizzes, polls, trivia, slideshows and videos, raised a $15 million strategic investment Thursday. Saban Ventures, an existing investor in Playbuzz, led the investment, which included participation from Walt Disney Co. Playbuzz’s CEO and co-founder, Shaul Olmert, said the company was looking for “potential partners as well as investors,” but would […]
For Refinery29, the decade-old digital publisher, there’s no better time to be in the business. “We’ve seen the media world go through a lot of cycles, and this most recent one is the most exciting one for us,” said Justin Stefano, co-founder and CEO of Refinery29. “As confusing as it might be in certain ways, […]
