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.
Upstart publishing platform The Odyssey is reminiscent of fellow “platishers” like Medium, Thought Catalog and Slant News. Its twist is to cultivate pods of writers who create content for their own communities. By harnessing interest about local events, The Odyssey hopes to attract a millennial audience and the advertisers that want to reach that audience. […]
Publishers distributing their content on Facebook have discovered a way to buy traffic on Facebook – but it isn’t through amplifying their posts. Instead, publishers place their content on Facebook pages that already have millions of engaged followers, such as “I Love Halloween,” George Takei, Lil Wayne or (perplexingly) “Music for Deep Meditation,” giving it […]
The stereotype of parents being behind the times didn’t hold true at “Take Your Parents To Work Day,” an event held in New York on Thursday at data-driven agency Kepler. The program explained to parents how their kids plan targeted advertising campaigns. It also gave parents a better idea about just why that pair of […]
Programmatic advertising makes it difficult for publishers like Hearst Newspapers to ensure that users enjoy fast-loading pages and quality ad experiences. Hearst closely monitors its site templates, optimizing for fast load times and ad viewability. But once it starts letting third parties run scripts on its website – aka programmatic advertisers – that can slow […]
Until a few years ago, Bauer Media sat on the digital advertising sidelines. Since Bauer Media earned most of its revenue from newsstand sales of well-known brands, such as InTouch Weekly, J-14 and Life & Style, it didn’t want to give content away for free online. “The strategy until a few years ago was to […]
Media General will acquire Meredith Corp. for $2.4 billion, combining the two companies’ TV and digital assets to create greater reach and efficiency. The new company, Meredith Media General, will own 88 TV stations in 54 markets, making it the third-largest owner of network affiliates. On the digital side, it will reach 200 million monthly unique […]
Rubicon Project CEO Frank Addante has long expressed a vision to automate the buying and selling of all advertising. On Thursday, the company took the first step in expanding beyond digital by partnering with out-of-home trading platform BitPoster to bring inventory into Rubicon’s orders platform. “It’s the first foray into media outside of digital,” said Jay […]
On any given day or month, the programmatic marketplace is filled with spiky peaks and valleys as CPMs rise and fall and as audiences ebb and flow. The best trading desks, advertisers, publishers, DSPs and exchanges don’t just understand these variations in price, volume and user behavior. They act on them. That action might mean […]
Visitors to Allrecipes’ redesigned mobile and desktop sites, which launched Tuesday, will find what looks like a personalized Pinterest page, complete with social elements including like button variants and the ability to follow other cooks and food brands. Founded in 1997 as a place for home cooks to find and share recipes, Allrecipes needed to […]
Some publishers believe programmatic creates a “race to the bottom” for its inventory. Purch, whose portfolio includes TopTenReviews and Tom’s Guide, is taking the opposite approach by using programmatic to establish the baseline value of its media. This effort, called Purch RAMP (revenue and advertising management platform), will help it create premium, custom advertising opportunities. […]
Many publishers have jumped on the sponsored content bandwagon, but few have attempted to take on a creative agency role for brands. But that’s what Time Inc. is doing with Land Rover around its launch of the Discovery Sport SUV. Time Inc. differentiates between “native content” – written in the voice of a Time Inc. […]
The Washington Post’s revamped home page, unveiled Wednesday, purports to bring average desktop load time to less than one second – meaning better reader experiences and more ads viewed, since visitors won’t bounce. The fresh home page completes the Post’s sitewide reboot, which started in the middle of last year with its article pages. Content […]
While Imgur has 150 million monthly active users, many of them use ad-blocking software and access the site on mobile, where banners go for lower CPMs. The image-sharing community is strongly tied to Reddit, hosting much of its image content. And like Reddit, Imgur’s audience is filled with tech-savvy male millennials suspicious of advertising. Native, done […]
WhoSay is one of the more undefinable companies in the advertising and marketing landscape. It’s a celebrity news site, a HootSuite-like social media platform for celebrities, and it also functions as an influencer marketing agency in that it accepts RFPs from brands, builds campaigns with celebrity spokespeople and distributes those campaigns using the power of […]
The founder and CEO of Hello Products, Craig Dubitsky, will appear at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference on Sept. 10, an event designed to educate marketers on advanced solutions for building seamless cross-channel brand experiences. Most CPG brands have shifted to using data to make decisions about selling products. To challenge the giants in the space, startup […]
IDG Communications, publisher of more than 1,000 tech websites including PCWorld, TechHive and CIO.com, is launching a native platform Wednesday. The platform will span across all its properties and include contextual placements such as in-feed video or links to branded content created by IDG’s team. IDG is embracing native because it better aligns with how […]
After Gannett CRO Kevin Gentzel reads his hometown newspaper, the Pensacola News Journal, he puts on his sales hat. Local papers are a “powerful environment” and Gentzel’s first order of business, as Gannett’s new sales chief, is to harness that power with branded content. If he has his way, that content will appear not just […]
LifeZette, a lifestyle site created by conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, launched in April and is quickly scaling up its video production. Moving fast will allow the fledgling site to grab some of the projected $1 billion in digital ad spend for the 2016 election. Ten percent of that spend will go to online video, according […]
Cox Media Group’s libertarian startup site Rare recently won a showdown with old media. After Steven Tyler released his country music video on “Good Morning America,” where it got some traction, Rare linked to the video and generated 10 times the impressions: It drove 2.5 million page views in 48 hours, with an average time spent […]
Facebook on Tuesday expanded the ad formats publishers can add to their mobile apps via the Facebook Audience Network (FAN). These formats include a native video unit that shows in-feed as well as three interstitial formats: carousel ads, which show up to five ads in a single unit; dynamic product ads, often used by retailers […]
LittleThings, which collects uplifting stories and DIY tips, went from 8 million monthly unique visitors in November 2014 to 31.5 million last June, making it part of the comScore 100. But though it’s the third most shared publisher on Facebook according to Newswhip, LittleThings suffers from low brand recognition. That’s something LittleThings is trying to […]
The New York Times’ digital business grew both in subscriptions and ad revenue in Q2. Digital revenue grew 14% to $48.3 million because of “mobile, paid posts and programmatic,” CEO Mark Thompson said. Digital subscriptions grew 19% to 990,000 and, by the time of the earnings call, had passed 1 million subscribers. Growing the scale […]
When Evolve Media’s male lifestyle site CraveOnline relaunches Thursday with a new look and voice, it hopes to improve its advertising products by offering unique branding opportunities, native ads, a rich media unit and a strong mobile experience. The refresh, which brought in launch sponsors Jack In The Box, Adidas and the National Highway Transportation […]
The New York Times hopes to address mobile advertising problems with a customizable native in-stream ad unit called Mobile Moments, set for a mid-September launch. The publisher built the unit in-house using insights from its editorial team. It will be available both on apps and the mobile web, and a few advertisers have already signed […]
Sonobi, an ad tech company serving both publishers and agencies, has raised $10.4 million in Series A funding and made a few notable hires. Among the appointments is Tony Katsur, who joins as president. A former senior exec with Rubicon Project and CEO at Maxifier, Katsur said he was drawn to the company’s audience insights, […]
Publishers seeking to create more competition and access for programmatic buyers have embraced header bidding over the past year. AppNexus first brought header bidding technology to market in 2009, back when RTB first started, but not many of its customers used it. Now it’s seeing increased demand from publishers adding its header bidding (or pre-bid) […]
After launching programmatic print in February, Time Inc. on Friday unveiled a new phase of the sales initiative. It adds 12 audience categories to the original half dozen. Media planners can purchase new audience segments across 18 of Time Inc.’s US brands, including sport enthusiasts, travelers, fashion followers, moms and foodies. By doing so they […]
Publishers, users and advertisers hate in-banner video. It creates a poor user experience and, for advertisers, it doesn’t even drive ROI like pre-roll video. “If you want the entire video to be viewed and have complete attention, in-stream works best,” said Anush Prabhu, chief channel planning and investment officer for ad agency Deutsch Inc. In-banner […]
Mobile gaming company Gameloft removed all ad networks from its apps last year and hired a direct sales team. The company sees its future in advertising revenue, not from users making in-app purchases. And that means taking control of what will be its primary source of revenue. Gameloft is one of the biggies in the […]
Rubicon Project branched out into new areas in a strong Q2 that saw revenue grow 88% to $53 million. Managed revenue grew 48% to $227.2 million. Rubicon increased its cut of managed revenue, with take rate going up from 18.4% from last year to 21.4% this year. (Read the full earnings release here.) The company closed […]
