Earlier this year, Yieldex – mostly known as a yield-management, forecasting and pricing tool for the largest publishers – expanded its focus with an automated guaranteed product. About a third of Yieldex’s customers use it. eMarketer has predicted programmatic direct will grow from $800 million this year to $8.57 billion by 2016. Two weeks ago, […]
From the start, foodie site Food52 planned to have two revenue streams: advertising and commerce. Today, commerce drives two-thirds of its revenue, with advertising accounting for the other third. The site now averages four million unique monthly visitors. After building up content, 98% of which is contributed by readers, Food52 had the audience to add […]
Not every publisher sees selling drones as a natural extension of its business. But converting readers into customers is the next goal for The Next Web, an online tech magazine that has 6.6 million unique monthly visitors. For the past three months, the company has been using StackCommerce to power its e-commerce store, called TNW […]
For recipe sites, the days leading up to Thanksgiving bring a rush of users searching for turkey-basting tips and instructions for making stuffing and pumpkin pie. In the coming weeks, the winter holidays will bolster traffic even more. These audience surges represent an opportunity and challenge for publishers as they try to maximize yield. Sales […]
The walled gardens around publishers’ premium inventory are hard to take down, since publishers are reluctant to put premium inventory in channels associated with low-priced, performance-focused inventory. But Sonobi, whose platform combines direct-sold impressions with those sold programmatically, is trying to chip away at those walls. The company hosted a Premium Programmatic Summit with its […]
This Old House, the venerable home-improvement brand, possesses a trove of video assets highly valued by users and advertisers alike. Video is the very foundation of This Old House. The brand started off as a local Boston television show in 1979, and it now runs nationally on PBS. Time Inc., which had been running This Old […]
Does anyone want to be a content creator anymore? Women’s lifestyle site SheKnows has jumped into the user-generated content fray by buying BlogHer, which provides a technology platform for bloggers as well as opportunities to monetize. SheKnows paid an estimated $30 million-$40 million, The acquisition fits with SheKnows’ recent efforts to turn its community into […]
CEO Tim Armstrong thinks AOL’s bets on programmatic are paying off. Programmatic grew to 37% of non-search ad revenue, compared to 12%. Forty seven percent of revenue from AOL’s network Advertising.com was programmatic, compared to 18% during the same period last year. Advertising revenue grew 18% YoY to $473.4 million. Armstrong attributed the increase to larger shifts in the […]
TripAdvisor grew revenue by 39% in the third quarter but disappointed investors by missing its guidance for Q3. Half of TripAdvisor’s traffic now comes from mobile, big news for a site that attracts 315 million monthly unique visitors. That shift has challenged many traditional publishers, but TripAdvisor said it has mobile monetization and user experience […]
Time Inc. reported increasing digital revenues and declining print revenue for the third quarter. Digital revenue rose 5% YoY, but that increase upped to 19% excluding the impact of corporate transactions related to the spinoff from Time Warner. During September 2014, Time Inc. attracted 93.6 million multiplatform unique visitors, an increase of 27% from December […]
Because AARP serves a specific demographic – people over 50 – the magazine has long understood just how valuable it was to provide advertisers with a segmented audience. But within that age bracket, there is incredible diversity of segments that the AARP knew would provide value to advertisers. So the team decided to use Krux to […]
The best way for publishers to survive these days may be to become technology companies. “Media businesses will win because of their content platform strategies,” predicted Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez. Say Media is both a technology provider and publisher of numerous online magazines including xoJane, ReadWrite, Remodelista, xoVain and Not Impossible Now. As a […]
Publishers looking to maximize their yield need to think more like buyers. With that goal in mind, Rubicon Project unveiled Ad Engine on Thursday, a beta feature running in its Seller Cloud with NewsCorp as a launch partner. Although Rubicon hasn’t released an official date for when the product will made made generally available, Josh […]
Sift Media, publisher of such websites as Accountingweb.co.uk and HRZone.co.uk, wanted to use data to create better experiences for the reader and better results for its advertisers. It found its technology match in Cxense, which offers audience data management and analytics geared to the publisher. “It was the first solution [we came across] that came […]
Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail can forecast revenue and optimize yield across its direct-sold and programmatic inventory, using a partnership between yield management firm Yieldex and ad tech company AppNexus. When the publisher signed up with Yieldex at the beginning of the year, it didn’t support AppNexus until The Globe and Mail requested it, […]
Do open auctions have a future? It depends which publisher you ask. According to executives from Meredith, Yahoo and AOL, who spoke at the Programmatic I/O Conference on Wednesday, change is coming. “It won’t live on” in its current form, said Meredith’s VP of programmatic sales and strategy, Chip Schenck. “Because it’s used and thought […]
In three years, Daily Dot, an online publication focusing on Internet-related issues, has grown from zero to 10 million monthly unique visitors. The site’s monthly uniques are up 3.5 times year over year, growth the site says outpaces the third year of Gawker, BuzzFeed and Thought Catalog. If you ask CEO Nick White and CTO […]
From a certain point of view, it’s surprising car-shopping site Edmunds.com took the plunge into programmatic selling at all. During the annual upfronts, much of its inventory sells out, including homepage placements, sponsorships, key sections and so-called “conquest” opportunities. Car manufacturers and dealerships prize the inventory because more than half of those browsing the site end […]
Few publishers can match the scale and reach of The Huffington Post’s 86 million monthly global uniques. The AOL-owned property also has a highly international and social audience, said Tessa Gould, senior director of native advertising at the HuffPost Partner Studio. The studio, created last June, helps brands conceptualize, execute and evaluate native campaigns. “Being […]
Because advertisers are willing to spend the most at the last click before purchase, it’s where publishers can reap the highest rewards. That’s the focus of publication family Purch – which rebranded from TechMediaNetwork in April and whose owned and operated sites include TopTenREVIEWS, Tom’s Hardware, Tom’s IT Pro, Laptop and Connectedly. “We believe the […]
Refinery29 started out as a fashion blog, but it’s since expanded its vision: It plans to be the go-to source for millennials on the subjects of beauty, travel and points of view on subjects ranging from dieting to news coming from Ferguson, Mo. It’s also a high-growth company. The digital publication has 15 million monthly uniques, according […]
The Local Media Consortium, a 55-member-strong organization of local media startups, newspapers and local television news websites, signed a three-year contract with Yahoo on Tuesday enabling reach extension through the Yahoo platform. Members will also be able to take advantage of Yahoo’s targeting capabilities on behalf of their advertising clients. “If you take a local dry cleaning […]
“Remember, I’m on day five,” Greg Coleman said on Friday. The former president of Criteo, which went public earlier this year, recently hopped aboard BuzzFeed, where he’ll serve as president and on the board of directors. The switch reunites Coleman with many of his old co-workers at Huffington Post, including BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti. Shortly […]
The shift to programmatic isn’t making things easier for Scripps, the media company behind properties like HGTV, The Food Network, and The Travel Channel. Programmatic, difficulties monetizing mobile, and declining display revenues brought Scripps’ digital business down 5.3% year over year. Since digital accounted for just $27 million out of Scripps’ $684 million in revenue […]
As mobile traffic grows, the stakes for advertisers also climb. This is especially true for a publisher like Time Inc., where mobile traffic increased 35% in six short months – from 39 million unique views in December to 53 million unique views in June. As more traffic shifts to mobile, “being able to provide more […]
“Programmatic ads grew at over 100% year-over-year, and we’re growing faster than the programmatic field overall,” AOL CEO Tim Armstrong told investors looking over the company’s second-quarter results. “Programmatic [ad revenue] has grown from 5% to 34% of our business in a year, which is part of a large industry shift and the biggest shift […]
Supply-side platforms (SSPs) such as OpenX, Rubicon Project and PubMatic are under heavy pressure to increase value for publishers who pay a premium to use their technologies. “The fact that SSPs are positioned on the sell side after much of the transaction value has been extracted by other intermediaries puts more pressure on their margins […]
Gannett is splitting its business into two separate, publicly traded companies. One will be the publishing division, including USA Today, USAToday.com, and 81 newspapers across the US. The other company will hold Gannett’s digital and broadcasting properties. That will include 46 television stations, as well as Cars.com and CareerBuilder.com. Gannett will also pay $1.8 billion in […]
Scout Media is pulling together an A-team of digital talent in the wake of founder James Heckman’s repurchase of the business from Fox/News Corp. The new leadership, including Ross Levinsohn as executive chairman and Ramsey McGrory as EVP of programmatic and media partnerships, will help build Scout into a larger content and commerce play with programmatic […]
Earlier this month, Upworthy – a curator of socially-conscious content – revealed native content was outperforming editorial content. The data was striking: Branded content received 3.5 times as many views, 2.9 times more “Attention Minutes” (an Upworthy-developed metric) and three times as many social shares compared to its in-house editorial content. All this for a […]
