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.
Facebook’s growth led to a strong first quarter and stock that shot upward post-earnings. Facebook’s Q1 2016 revenue grew 57% year over year to $5.4 billion, compared to $3.5 billion the same time last year. Advertising comprised $5.2 billion of that revenue. Of that ad revenue, 82% came from mobile, compared to 73% in Q1 2015. Meanwhile, monthly […]
To grow its readership, Engadget focused on quality and relevance. The tactic – simple to imagine but hard to execute – has paid off: The AOL-owned site posted 13.6 million unique visitors in January during the Consumer Electronics Show, according to comScore. That’s its highest-traffic month ever and nearly double the number of visitors compared […]
US online ad revenue hit $59.6 billion in 2015 – $10 billion more than in 2014 (a 20.4% YoY increase), according to the IAB 2015 Internet Advertising Revenue report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Innovation in areas like mobile drove the industry’s consistent high growth, according to David Silverman, a partner at PwC. Nonmobile digital advertising […]
The wave of acquisitions in digital media is almost always driven by the need for scale. Access to millennial audiences often plays a role as well. Both of these challenges played a role in the marriage of humor sites Cheezburger and eBaum’s World, which are uniting under the umbrella of Literally Media. A private group […]
While publishers combatting the rise of ad blocking can select from a growing number of vendors who address the issue, many of the available solutions are largely the same. One group of offerings is designed to change user behavior. There are generally four methods: asking users to turn off ad blockers, blocking content when ad […]
Publisher network and ad tech firm Sovrn bought UK-based viewability company OnScroll Wednesday for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock. Sovrn plans to deploy the technology across the 80,000 publishers in its network, according to CEO Walter Knapp. OnScroll creates highly viewable ad units for publishers by analyzing user behavior patterns. So if a […]
Frankly’s content management system (CMS) and its “managed programmatic” ad selling service help more than 200 local TV news stations with their digital presence. As consumption shifts from desktop to mobile, the company is positioning itself to help these local TV stations make the transition too. But Frankly itself was under transition a year ago, […]
Consumers across the globe find advertising too frequent and irrelevant, and the younger ones are more aware of ad blocking, according to an Accenture Digital Consumer study released Monday. More than 80% of the 28,000 people surveyed in 28 countries thought they saw too many ads. Seventy-three percent of those aged 14-17 know about ad […]
In a major change to its Double Click for Publishers ad server, Google will bring in the real-time bids of a publisher’s outside exchange partners to its dynamic allocation product. The feature addresses a key problem that led to the rise of header bidding, essentially doing away with Google’s previous policy where it only allowed […]
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, […]
On Monday, Pandora appointed a new CEO, CFO, COO and CPO. And the company has lately begun evaluating a possible sale. But at least one member of the C-suite is still standing: CRO John Trimble. That may be because while Pandora’s user growth has stalled in the wake of competition from places like Spotify and […]
A group of publishers is testing a header bidding solution from Rubicon Project that is compliant with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages program. Tribune Publishing is among those who have implemented header bidding for AMP. It’s the first time header bidding functionality has been leveraged in support of the “platform publishing” craze that has lately seen […]
Condé Nast is expanding its programmatic offerings, giving buyers more options to use its first-party data and adding header bidding to boost programmatic supply. The new offerings, unveiled in a pitch to buyers Wednesday evening as “premium programmatic at scale,” comes three months after the company hired Evan Adlman as its head of programmatic. Condé […]
Michael Zimbalist – who spent the past 10 years at The New York Times, most recently as SVP of advertising products – is hopping to ad tech, taking a post as Simulmedia’s CMO. “I’m a change agent by career and inclination,” Zimbalist said. “TV is in the early stages of volcanic eruption of change, and […]
Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart finds himself in the middle of the industry’s rocky transition from transacting on ad impressions served to running campaigns with tags to track bots and viewability. He says the first step in this transition is to ditch the served impressions in favor of a standard that’s based on how many impressions […]
LinkedIn is no Facebook, but it is a growing source of referral traffic for publishers. And as it turns to sponsored updates for more of its revenue, LinkedIn is encouraging users to spend more time scrolling through the feed – a move that will only benefit publishers posting content in that feed. Forbes, Bloomberg and […]
Ikea customers have a problem: “design paralysis.” They have a hard time envisioning how to fix their living space. Which is why Ikea’s marketing team two years ago dreamed up the “Ikea Home Tour”– a three- to five-minute show in which a team of five employees, pulled from the retail floor, travel across the country […]
Purch CEO Greg Mason doesn’t see his company’s future in advertising. Instead, he says Purch’s greatest business opportunity revolves around using content to drive commerce. By getting close enough to the point of sale to earn an affiliate fee or lead gen, he sees a way out in a market “where the traditional role of […]
The FTC reached a settlement with Lord & Taylor on Tuesday for an influencer marketing campaign last March that did not disclose to consumers that the content was a paid endorsement. While the luxury goods company won’t have to pay a fine, in the future it will need to not only require disclosure from influencers, […]
Automated guaranteed has been the slowest part of programmatic to get off the ground. But one of its biggest proponents is the Dentsu Aegis-owned trading desk Amnet, which sees the technology as key to making programmatic a central part of everything an agency does. From January to December last year, budgets going to automated guaranteed […]
To reach the diverse purchasers of Hunt’s Tomatoes with the message that would best resonate with them, ConAgra looked to its customer data. ConAgra – which owns the brand –created dozens of messages targeting dozens of consumer segments for a campaign that ran from September through early March. The goal was to move away from […]
