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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 are going to be shouldering the bulk of the burden of the user consent policy Google announced Monday. Google, in an effort to proactively comply with upcoming EU data protection legislation, outlined a user consent policy requiring publishers using AdSense, DoubleClick Ad Exchange or DoubleClick for Publishers to add cookie notifications across desktop, mobile […]
A year after Yahoo’s disastrous Q2, the company reported year over year revenue growth of 15%, or $159 million, its best in nearly nine years. Yahoo saw Q2 revenue of $1.24 billion. So-called “Mavens” revenue (mobile, video, native and social) grew 60% to $399 million from $249 million during the same time last year. Yahoo CEO Marissa […]
Publishers selling programmatic need trained “digital media operators” who can speak the language of buyers. That’s how Intermarkets, which owns or represents media properties like Drudge Report, CNSNews.com and The Political Insider, aims to differentiate itself in a crowded field of sellers: speaking the language of programmatic to buyers, and setting up its technological stack […]
When Ellen Pao stepped down from her post as CEO of Reddit on Friday – ceding the spot to Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman – it left Reddit’s monetization situation murkier than ever. In a question and answer session on Reddit’s popular AMA (Ask Me Anything) section, Huffman wrote, “Reddit has a lot of cash. Monetization […]
Recipe publishers have realized they can tap into shopper marketing budgets by making their recipes shoppable. Matching brands and stores to relevant recipes requires technology, and the arms race is on. Meredith Digital on Monday acquired Grocery Server, which provides technology to make recipes shoppable. Separately, Reader’s Digest-owned Taste of Home, once a customer of […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jeremy Hlavacek, vice president of programmatic at The Weather Company. Why aren’t more marketers moving budgets to mobile? Two recent articles caught my attention because they resonated personally and professionally, illustrating that we have […]
Zealot Networks acquired viral news site ViralNova Thursday, citing its audience and underlying technology. The deal valued ViralNova close to $100 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. Zealot Networks declined to name the exact figure, but said the acquisition is the biggest of the 15 it’s made so far. Formed 18 months ago by the […]
While some publishers – like BuzzFeed – are going the native-only route, Salon thinks the the best way to serve advertisers is by combining custom native programs with scaled options like programmatic. The highbrow news organization creates bespoke native content for clients like Mercedes Maybach, Glenlivet scotch, Panera and HBO. Eighty-five percent of the advertisers […]
Imagine native advertising with a buy button. Or, a stunning travel story that ends with the option for the reader to go on the same trip. Switzerland Tourism sought to turn these scenarios into realities when it teamed with travel publication Afar Magazine to create the custom native program Afar Journeys, running from June to […]
Turn on ad blocking and in most cases you’ll have a better user experience, a fact readily acknowledged by Sourcepoint COO and co-founder Brian Kane. Sourcepoint focuses on circumventing ad-blocking software. But rather than the problem itself, Kane views ad blocking as the surface manifestation of a deeper issue: “The value exchange between publishers and […]
Like all programmatic buyers, Xaxis faces a challenge – and that’s securing the best and most inventory for its clients. In a publisher waterfall, ad servers generally prioritize programmatic below direct-sold campaigns, prompting other buyers and exchanges to start asking publishers to implement a practice known as header bidding. But Xaxis, WPP’s trading desk (or, […]
Horizon Media had done plenty of direct-to-publisher native campaigns to promote shows for its entertainment clients, including The History Channel. But the campaigns lacked scale. “Curating these experiences in a way where we can impact scale is vitally important when we’re trying to drive a [Nielsen] ratings number,” said Joe Hadari, SVP and managing director […]
When Better Homes and Gardens refreshed its site last week, it did so with mobile in mind. About 50% of site visits to the Meredith Corp.-owned property happen on mobile devices, which made creating a better consumer and advertising experience on mobile a priority. But desktop got attention too, with both mobile and desktop redesigned […]
CafeMom has long seen programmatic sailing along the horizon. “Over the past few years, we saw the programmatic boat coming, and have been trying to figure out what to do,” said Paul Bannister, EVP of CafeMom, which includes mom-oriented sites The Stir and MamásLatinas. Now, the ship is in port. Programmatic revenue is growing significantly […]
Data-based buying requires data-based selling, a theme that ran through the Association of Magazine Media’s Programmania conference Thursday. Magazine publishers have an advantage over digital-only publishers. Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith and Bloomberg Media have all strengthened their first-party data by creating insights and segments within data-management platforms and offering them to advertisers. “Not only do […]
The traditional publisher waterfall, where impressions are exposed to sales channels in descending order of the perceived value of each channel, has always stuck in the craw of yield-obsessed media sellers. At its worst, the model ignores pockets of high-value inventory and reduces competition, and thus artificially caps a publisher’s revenue. Publishers have by […]
