As Editorial Director, 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.
Boasting about double- or triple-digit mobile growth is a staple of every ad platform earnings report. But peer deeper and actual mobile revenues for advertising companies differ widely, ranging from 20% to nearly 90% of total revenue. But mobile revenue – and revenue growth – doesn’t neatly correlate to success. Sometimes mobile revenue growth reflects […]
Bloomberg Media wants to reach its target audience of affluent businesspeople wherever they happen to be over the course of the day. That might mean mobile and TV in the morning, radio on the way to work, websites during the workday and magazines at night. “Our brand has the ability and importance to connect to […]
Optimizing a programmatic ad stack today involves constant manual adjustments. More demand? Move floor prices up. Less demand? Dial them back down. It’s pesky work for ad ops teams. “We want to mediate that mess for publishers,” said Sortable founder and CEO Chris Reid. Sortable boosts a publisher’s revenue by deciding which price floors, ad […]
Google is cracking open the gates on its AdWords demand. Its giant pool of search buyers will be able to dip into other exchanges when they need to find a user for retargeting campaigns. The move was buried in a blog post about mobile innovation Tuesday. The change makes Google far more open, benefiting buyers, […]
One Kings Lane, the home furnishings and décor e-tailer, puts a lot of time and money into its blog. With home tours of celebrities and tips from professional designers, the content evokes luxe shelter magazines. Plus, there are shoppable links within each post. While the content team used to promote the posts, the rise of […]
Publishers are still working out journalism on mobile devices. While basic responsive design is usually a given today, mobile article formats haven’t dramatically changed. Most innovation happens on platforms like Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat Discover – not on owned-and-operated sites. Which is why Quartz’s app, a conversational news app launched in February, is a […]
When tech site Softonic was at its peak roughly three years ago, it attracted 120 million global uniques searching for downloadable computer software. But when mobile app stores took over the role of software search and review, Softonic and its peers got into the toolbar downloading business, accepting huge bounties from toolbar creators to push […]
SAP entered the digital advertising market this week, creating a DSP and DMP from scratch it’s dubbing SAP Exchange Media (XM). Wolfgang Faisst, co-founder and head of SAP XM, acknowledged that despite an ecosystem of “thousands of ad tech companies,” SAP decided to step up because of demand for end-to-end integration. Because SAP XM connects […]
Facebook’s head of ad tech, David Jakubowski, will participate in a panel discussion on sell-side impressions at the May 24 CLEAN ADS I/O conference in New York. As Facebook expands its Audience Network, it faces a number of challenges. Keeping out fraud. Achieving high viewability. Ensuring off-site placements still drive performance. By directly integrating with publishers versus […]
Since Google opened up its ad server and brought exchange bidding to dynamic allocation a month ago, publisher ad tech and media companies have been asking many questions but receiving few answers. People in the industry want to know: How much will Google charge? Nobody seems to know. What kind of data will publishers be […]
Since Time Inc.’s spinoff from Time Warner two years ago, CEO Joe Ripp has been beating the drum of transformation. That push is now starting to bear fruit. The company just reported its strongest quarter yet as an independent company, including digital ad revenue growth of 23%. Part of that success comes from a shift […]
Because Seeking Alpha attracts a financially savvy audience, financial services advertisers want to be there. But often, those advertisers want to reach even finer slices of Seeking Alpha’s audience. One of the most coveted demos on the site is financial advisers, who make decisions about vast amounts of other people’s money. Seeking Alpha needed a […]
When Gawker Media first started selling ads programmatically in late 2014, it only sold through private marketplaces (PMPs). Since then, the publisher behind Gawker, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Gizmodo and other sites has expanded its programmatic offerings. First it added an open marketplace option and then it implemented header bidding. Programmatic revenue has grown by triple-digit percentages […]
Peloton’s biggest problem with digital advertising is that it’s difficult to succinctly explain its product in a banner ad. The four-year-old company, which started on Kickstarter but projects $150 million in revenue this year, sells exercise bikes with video screens. It also live-streams classes funded by monthly subscriptions, sells bikes in showrooms and runs an […]
The claim that Facebook Instant Articles is about a faster user experience is a red herring. While that may be one goal, the program has a strong business rationale: It extends Facebook’s walled garden and creates a new foothold for its $1 billion Facebook Audience Network ad platform. Instant Articles does not allow third-party monetization. […]
Time Inc. on Thursday reported its best quarter in two years: It grew revenue 1%. For a Facebook or Google, those results would be alarmingly bad, but for a traditional media company trying to grow digital revenue as its large print and subscription businesses decline slowly year after year – well, that isn’t so bad. […]
Here’s a scenario that has played out millions of times in recent months: A user clicks a Taboola or Outbrain link to arrive at a content page of marginal quality, such as the ViralWalrus.com slideshow “These 16 Celebs Served Real Jail Time.” When the reader clicks the right arrow button to see the second page […]
Rubicon Project enjoyed a strong first quarter, growing overall advertising revenue by 26% year over year, while its cut of the revenue swelled even more. Non-GAAP net revenue reached $63.6 million, a 71% year-over-year increase. That’s largely because Rubicon Project acquired the DSP Chango a year ago to form its Buyer Cloud, causing take rates […]
Four years ago, Hollywood trade pub Variety Magazine was aging and under threat. A paywall pushed Variety.com’s traffic dip to fewer than 1 million uniques. A revamped Hollywood Reporter and industry blogs like The Wrap and Deadline.com created new competition for advertising dollars. Its then-parent company, Reed Business Information, had stopped investing in Variety and […]
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 […]
