It’s never a surprise to hear a high-end digital publisher lampoon the chaotic digital ad environment, but a sharp invective delivered yesterday by Mark Thompson, CEO of The New York Times, went beyond the usual sniping. “The world of digital advertising is a nightmarish joke,” he said during a panel hosted by Omnicom Group agency […]
NBC News wanted to mix up its news coverage to include more “near news”: content someone reads after they get their fix of breaking news and politics – or as a relief from it. Two pop-up sites, future-oriented “Mach” and self-improvement site “Better,”officially launched May 31 with a fresh web design to test the content […]
When the Flashpocalypse comes in July, CNN aims to offer advertisers space in its fallout shelter. The video-heavy publisher moved early to transition its video platform from Flash to HTML5 during Q1 of this year. CNN averages over 464 million video starts a month, so it knew it needed to get in front of the […]
While header bidding can increase publisher CPMs and revenue, the growing complexity of the implementations makes it harder to differentiate vendor partners. Ancient History Encyclopedia, for instance, saw CPMs rise 75% after adding header bidding a year ago. The online encyclopedia operates as a nonprofit and relies on advertising for the majority of its revenue. […]
Bots are to web traffic what broken turnstiles are to amusement parks – they make it impossible to get an accurate read on how many people are coming through the door, and that messes with optimization. But at least in the case of a physical location, the visitors are human. On Thursday, bot detection company Distil […]
Google wants to clean up where it places ads, but it also doesn’t want to hurt its publishers’ revenue. So instead of kicking out an entire site that violates a Google policy, Google will remove individual pages from a publisher’s site that violate Google policies. AdSense publishers will receive emails when content violates Google policies, […]
Time Inc. had a lousy Q1 as print revenue plunged 21% and the company struggled with a sales reorganization. Total advertising revenue declined 8% to $360 million. The stock declined 14% in the wake of the earnings, putting its share price well below the $18 a share three different buyers offered. The bright spot is […]
European broadcaster RTL Group is creating a unified auction where direct video deals must bid to compete with programmatic video buys. And to do so, it’s changing how it incentivizes the sales team to focus less on the size of the deals and more on the true value of the inventory. Because RTL Group puts […]
As brands flee the open marketplace, publishers like The New York Times are positioned to scoop up their programmatic spend. The Times’ programmatic strategy has long catered to marketers who value its context. It views programmatic as a way to transact, not a way to secure inventory inexpensively. And more marketers want to use its […]
Scale gets digital publishers noticed by advertisers, but audiences increasingly want content addressing niche interests, not broad ones. Some digital pubs, like Vox Media, build out a portfolio of completely separate brands, while others develop sub-brands, like BuzzFeed’s food-focused Tasty. Mic, which raised $21 million in Series C funding in April to fuel expansion, launched […]
Publishers are learning to love influencer marketing as a way to grow broader advertising and sponsorship deals. “An advertiser might come with a traditional sponsorship package, and to complement that, they want a programmatic component,” said Rachel Parkin, SVP of strategy and sales at digital media company CafeMedia. CafeMedia owns a network of women’s interest […]
The Weinstein Co.’s Oscar-nominated tearjerker “Lion” was a big hit in markets where the distributor expected to see more modest results – including Salt Lake City, Boise, Kentucky, Dallas, Houston, Nebraska, Minneapolis and Las Vegas. Native content created by values-oriented publisher FamilyShare and distributed on Facebook improved the box office receipts in those markets. The […]
Like other platform-focused media companies, Vice produces lots of data. Its sources include an ad server, programmatic ad exchange, data management platform, site analytics, viewability analytics, order-management software, Facebook and YouTube. As the media brand increased its data team from one to three data scientists, Vice knew it needed to collate its sources and automate […]
Affiliate marketing is old news, but not for newspapers. Most startup and legacy lifestyle publishers, such as Refinery29 or Condé Nast, and digital-first news companies have had affiliate networks quietly churning out reliable, incremental revenue streams. Now some newspapers, built on crumbling subscription and print advertising pillars, are starting to come around to the idea. […]
Location-based shopping app Retale will now offer advertisers a warranty: foot traffic or your money back – at least in the form of a media makegood. As of Tuesday, Retale will start doling out performance guarantees against its ability to drive in-store traffic within specific time parameters. “We don’t talk to anybody anymore that doesn’t say they […]
Facebook is taking the wraps off its header bidding solution, but it’s relying on partners to build the technology. On Wednesday, Facebook officially tossed its hat into the header bidding ring after a lengthy beta period by opening Audience Network as a demand source for mobile web publishers that work with a short list of […]
Nielsen Catalina Solutions is teaming up with Facebook on a cross-media measurement product that aims to analyze how the combination of digital and TV drive incremental sales lift for CPG advertisers. “The biggest ask from all advertisers has been to help them with comparability,” said Fred Leach, director of marketing science at Facebook, Nielsen Catalina’s […]
The Economist collects plenty of data, but until recently each type, including browsing or subscriber data, could only be analyzed in a vacuum. That meant The Economist didn’t know the types of content viewed by its most loyal subscribers and couldn’t identify the behavior of readers at risk of dropping their subscriptions. For advertising, those […]
Millennials in search of a side gig read The Penny Hoarder to find ways to make extra money and save. The site earned $20.8 million last year by focusing on native, affiliate marketing. It earns 95% of its revenue from affiliate and performance campaigns, and less than 5% from display advertising. And it expects to […]
TrustX GM and President David Kohl was sitting in the front row with a big smile on his face when P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard laid into the digital supply chain at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting last month. For the past year, Kohl has been working on a project housed within Digital Context […]
Integrated sales teams are in vogue. Print sellers usually handle digital these days, and IO-focused digital sellers pitch in on programmatic. But Forbes, which integrated its sales team in 2009, switched back to separate lanes for separate mediums at the beginning of this year. “All of this was motivated by what we were seeing when […]
Getting ad-blocking users to change their tune and opt into ads isn’t impossible. In fact, for Dennis Publishing, it has worked as much as 57% of the time. The UK-based publisher of The Week, Carbuyer.co.uk, Alphr.com and other sites conducted a six-month test of Sourcepoint’s Dialogue tech, which allows publishers to send different messages to […]
When Bloomberg writes a story about a public company or commodity, it’s bringing market information dynamically into the adjacent ad. Bloomberg is packaging up this programmatic creative as a new ad unit, which it’s calling DataLock. Bank of Montreal and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group this quarter agreed to be the first advertisers to use it. DataLock is designed to reduce […]
Time Inc. is bullish on digital, even as its print business deflates. The company – which has lately been the object of acquisitive interest from Meredith and other suitors – expects $600 million in digital revenue next year. “We see a path to $1 billion over [our strategic] plan,” said CEO Rich Battista during Time’s […]
Turner’s revenue analytics team wasn’t always quickly able to answer questions like whether the presidential inauguration affected advertising revenue. The publisher couldn’t collate data more than weekly or monthly because it worked with more than a dozen programmatic partners, each with their own user interfaces, which supplied ads across Turner’s multiple sites – from CNN […]
If programmatic advertising has reduced readers to commodities, then Topix wants to be the ultimate trader. The site focuses on slideshows, the best way to get readers to cycle through multiple page views and earn more revenue per user. Topix’s most successful slideshow in 2016 earned $400,000. But getting that $400,000 required buying about $200,000 […]
Last year, the New York Daily News created a new advertising product to give clients a simple way to tap into the benefits of its data management platform (DMP). When clients opt in to the product, dubbed AdLift, the Daily News uses insights from the DMP to target and optimize their campaigns. Six months after […]
The New York Times saw its highest subscriber increase since 2011, the year the publication introduced digital subscriptions, following the November presidential election. It added 296,000 digital subscribers in the fourth quarter, up 19% from the previous quarter and a 45.9% increase year over year. CEO Mark Thompson said digital subscriptions had accelerated even prior […]
Year-old video news startup Cheddar is shaking up the current media model in two ways. On the content side, Cheddar wants to be the CNBC for millennials, quickly offering business news about the companies they care about. On the business side, Cheddar doesn’t see advertising as a main revenue driver. Instead, it’s struck deals with […]
Brooklyn-based health and wellness publisher Mindbodygreen is bringing on BuzzFeed exec Tessa Gould as COO to put more juice behind the content and commerce model. Gould, who started Monday, is the former head of commerce and VP of ad innovation at BuzzFeed, where she helped spur around $75 million in ecommerce transactions through BuzzFeed content […]
