Admiral, a performance marketing solution designed to help publishers reacquire and monetize audiences who use ad blockers, launched Monday with a $2.5 million seed round. Admiral identifies audiences with ad blockers turned on, works to re-establish those users (by opting in to a lightened ad experience, say, or asking to be whitelisted) and then makes a […]
Edmunds.com is revving up its audience data strategy through an exclusive hookup with Oracle Data Cloud. The partnership, announced Thursday, gives the car shopping info site the ability to scale its efforts around audience-based buys, said Jennifer Dodez, Edmund’s executive director of programmatic and data solutions. “We’ve had a lot of demand for our data […]
Impressions don’t impress – “Attention is the key, not just being on the screen,” said Moat CEO and co-founder Jonah Goodhart at an event Wednesday about time-based metrics hosted by Parsec (formerly Sled Mobile). That’s part of why advertisers buy TV – it’s a viewable playground for branding. But viewability, after all, is just a baseline for just […]
The dander was up at AdExchanger’s Clean Ads IO in New York on Tuesday as the CEOs of two ad blockers engaged in a contentious debate with two prominent adversaries about the rock-and-hard-place situation publishers presently find themselves in. “It might be ironic that an ad blocker can really play a very important role in […]
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 […]
Playboy’s first NewFront is Friday and the publisher is treating the event as a “multi-platform” coming-out party. Following its recent rebrand as a safe-for-work men’s lifestyle media option, Playboy wants to attract more millennial males. The publisher’s first no-nude print issue in Playboy history ran in March. The rebrand is a key moment. Despite Playboy’s position […]
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 […]
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. […]
Conversational UI is hot right now, and Playbuzz is hopping aboard the trend with a static content format that’s designed to mimic the layout of an SMS text conversation, including emoji, images and GIFs. Dubbed Convo, the main purpose of the unit is to spice up editorial, improve engagement and generate more time spent. That’s […]
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 […]
Acorns is an app that allows users to invest spare change left over from daily purchases in the stock market. Now it’s making an investment of its own with the creation of a digital magazine called Grow aimed at millennials. “We’re looking to satisfy a hunger our users have for financial content,” said Jeff Cruttenden, […]
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 […]
Yahoo reported earnings on Tuesday. Details are below – but that’s hardly what people care about now. The real question is: Who’s going to buy it? Verizon’s the clear frontrunner, but there also a few upstarts. One such is a joint investment group that includes big names like former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn and […]
Facebook invited three new third-party ad verification partners into its inner sanctum on Tuesday – further evidence that what the buy side demands, the buy side gets. Integral Ad Science, comScore and Nielsen will now be able to verify viewability and attention metrics for display and video ads on Facebook, including mobile web and in-app. […]
Apester, a self-described digital storytelling platform, rounded out its Series A on Tuesday with $12 million, bringing its total funding to $17 million. The fresh infusion, which came after an initial $5 million round in July, was led by Blumberg Capital, with participation from Mangrove Capital, Wellborn Ventures and several others. The cash is earmarked for […]
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, […]
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 […]
VICE is prioritizing off-platform distribution to reach new, loyal consumers who want more than a casual fling with its content. But although VICE has a gut read on who its audience is, it’s less clear what content mix resonates best across YouTube, Snapchat Discover and other platforms. “We have to recognize that Facebook is required […]
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 […]
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 […]
Beyond the headlines, the drama and all the talk, there’s the daily reality of actually putting viewability into practice. “The questions around how to transact around viewability have been such a big issue for both publishers and advertisers that I think there has been a session in just about every major conference over the past […]
Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) and Time Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a new measurement product for attributing offline sales to print magazine advertising. “It’s the culmination of years of work and of a lot of pieces coming together,” said Leslie Wood, NCS chief research officer. And the product relies on a dense web of partners and […]
Consumer tech and lifestyle publisher Digital Trends always tries to provide what its brands request – rich media, video, custom units, home-page takeovers – but that can-do attitude is tested when it comes to native advertising and sponsored content. Since it was founded in 2006 out of Portland, Ore., product reviews have formed the core […]
Even with a header bidding solution, there can still be money left on the table. Spanish mobile optimization company Marfeel is looking to address that issue with the general launch of a supply-side platform Wednesday that sets dynamic floor prices. The product was in beta for the last two months. “Basically, our platform tries to […]
TheStreet is kicking standard mobile banners to the curb. Although the financial news and services site will still use them for internal ads and self-promo, banners will no longer be part of its sales team’s repertoire for apps or the mobile web. That’s because mobile consumption is moving steadily up and to the right – […]
Ad tech has long poached talent from agencies and publishers. But those with publishing backgrounds have been returning to the media world recently. Media companies are seeing an uptick in resumes from people with ad tech backgrounds. Plus, as companies have created programmatic roles, they’ve staffed them with people who have experience in the ad […]
The combination of content and commerce can be a complex cocktail to get just right. Alcohol delivery service Thirstie is experimenting to find the right mix. “It’s not that content to commerce is all that hard to do,” said Devaraj Southworth, CEO and co-founder of Thirstie and a former AmEx exec. “It’s just hard to […]
Brands need to earn the right to advertise directly to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. It’s a matter of credibility, said Albert Thompson, a digital strategist at multicultural marketing agency Walton Isaacson, in charge of the Lexus business. The car brand has a longstanding relationship with LGBT media company Q.Digital, the parent to […]
