Keeping up with tech-savvy consumers who demand personalized experiences is a challenge for publishers and advertisers alike. Like other companies, health information provider WebMD realized it needed to revamp its advertising strategy with a greater focus on mobile devices and customizable features. Earlier this month, the company launched a new version of its app that […]
Spotify, the ad-supported music streaming service, has barely scratched the surface of its advertising capabilities, but the 7-year-old company is treading carefully. The streaming service is up to more than 24 million active users, a quarter of whom are premium subscribers, and earned $577 million in total revenue last year. Part of the Stockholm-based company’s […]
Todd Haskell began his new job as Hearst Magazine Digital’s chief revenue officer less than a month ago, joining the publisher of magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle and Good Housekeeping to manage the business side of the 28 related websites and 14 mobile properties. He previously served six years as the group VP of […]
In recent months, NYTimes.com has sought to refine its homepage ad strategy with the promise of something “unique” for large advertisers in consumer packaged goods, automotive, electronics and finance. The latest effort is on behalf of Bank of America and builds on the publisher’s evolving video strategy. The twist in this case is an “interactive” […]
Like a lot of midsize independent newspapers, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is starting to see some thaw in the economic downturn that hurt the print business at large. While the climate is better, the challenge of declining print ad revenues has been replaced by the challenge of developing a more mature online ad strategy. The […]
Lori Tavoularis, managing director for Revenue Partnerships at Tribune Digital, said she is ignoring the uncertainty around a possible sale of some or all of the newspaper division that houses her unit. Last week, according to The Daily Caller, Koch Industries decided to give up its pursuit of the newspaper chain, which was split from […]
A year after unveiling the Wall St. Journal’s private exchange, WSJ Audex, its parent company News Corp has expanded that model to cover the rest of its global publications. The News Corp Global Exchange, as its known, won’t replace WSJ Audex, but will instead serve as an umbrella over that offering and will include inventory […]
With 12 years experience in digital, Jeff Burkett has seen his share of sell-side ad tech at The Washington Post. His latest role, senior director of sales operations, is perhaps a sign of the times for the publishing world in general, as Burkett is now building his reach to the print side of “ops” while […]
Links may be the workhorses of a publisher’s marketing strategy, but to Pete Sheinbaum, former CEO of the online newsletter Daily Candy, they represent a multitude of opportunities. After the publisher was acquired by Comcast in 2008, Sheinbaum founded LinkSmart, which offers tools to help publishers manage and monetize their links. AdExchanger sat down with […]
In a surprise Monday afternoon announcement, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has struck a deal with the Washington Post Company to buy its namesake newspaper for $250 million. Read the release. The purchase comes just a few days after WaPo’s Q2 earnings demonstrated some slight income and revenue gains, though, as usual, that was due to […]
With unwavering digital-only focus, Anthony Hitchings, head of advertising technology and digital operations at FT.com, has had a front-row seat to the promises and pitfalls of programmatic media from within a large newspaper publisher’s online unit. “I see the programmatic space as providing a great opportunity for us. But there are ‘teething troubles,’ if you […]
While the New York Times Co.’s digital advertising revenue could have been worse in Q2, the publisher saw its display strategy continued to be challenged by what the company said was a “complex and fragmented” marketplace. Read the release (PDF). Digital ad sales brought in $51.2 million during the quarter, a decline of 2.7%. In […]
During the NYTCo’s Q1 earnings call in April, executives had discussed the possibility of a turnaround in the newspaper publisher’s display ad sales, particularly mobile, but analysts don’t expect a change any time soon. For now, it looks like more of the same, particularly for the company’s display ad sales, which fell 4% in Q1. […]
The combined media spending of Publicis Groupe and Omnicom would amount to roughly $53 billion, according to separate sets of data from Pivotal Research’s Brian Wieser and WPP analytics unit Kantar Media. That translates into a tremendous amount of buying clout. Major publishers across all media continued to absorb the news from this weekend about […]
As one of the country’s largest broadcast and newspaper owner, Gannett‘s Q2 results continue to perfectly demonstrate the promise and problems of media in transition: digital dollars are growing at a healthy 20% clip over last year, but it still only supplies 30% of the total revenues. Read the release (PDF). As the McLean, Va.-based […]
Digital-media buying may have moved from buying placement to buying audience, but vertical publishers are still gladly carrying the “contextual” torch as valuable audience continues to be attracted to niche content – an opportunity TechMediaNetwork is looking to exploit. Having raised $33 million in 2011 in hopes of unseating other tech publisher networks such as […]
Premium direct sales and real-time biddable display advertising … can they co-exist? IDG Enterprise thinks so. The owner of top-tier B2B media brands Computerworld, CIO, Network World and InfoWorld announced last week (see the release) that it has plunged into the exchange model in search of programmatic ad dollars. According to IDG Enterprise CEO Michael […]
United Online is not a typical publisher. Unlike newspaper or magazine sites, it operates the social-media yearbook site Classmates, online florist shop FTD, consumer internet-access tools NetZero and Juno and the MyPoints loyalty rewards program. But it does have plenty of inventory and claims to reach a collective 100 million registered consumer accounts every month, […]
Most of Gannett’s acquisitions in recent years have been about making the company more digital, but its $1.5 billion purchase of local broadcast operator Belo is a nod to the media business’s main advertising driver: television. But as McLean, VA-based Gannett goes about creating an advertising and content “SuperGroup,” as the company stated in its […]
Worldwide advertising revenue for Amazon will reach more than $800 million in 2013, as the company leverages its rich customer data and deals with the challenges of mobile advertising, according to a new forecast from eMarketer. “We’ve been looking at Amazon as a business for a while now, and at this point we felt there […]
For the past year, executives at The New York Times Company speaking on its quarterly earnings calls have singled out a particular challenge for the newspaper publisher’s display ad business: programmatic media buying methods. With this month’s hire of online ad veteran Matt Prohaska as programmatic advertising director, the NYT still regards exchange and automated […]
About seven days ahead of last week’s NewFronts digital content showcases held by Yahoo, Aol, The Weather Company, Blip, Digitas and others, NBC Universal tried to get a jump on things with its own interactive presentation, which it dubbed “Digital.Amplified.” Although it was a participant in the NewFronts last year, the feeling this year was […]
The NewFront – the digital world’s answer to the TV upfront marketplace – wrapped up last week with a number of high-profile, extravagant showcases of new content from Yahoo, Aol, The Weather Channel and others. At the same time, programmatic buying methods have adopted traditional models of locking in guaranteed sales, months ahead of schedule. But can […]
“Can the TV upfronts work in digital, too?” This is a question the Wall Street Journal’s Nina Lawrence gets to consider after she and her WSJ team present their wares at today’s Digital Content NewFronts, produced by the IAB. With only five months under her belt as VP of Global Marketing and Advertising Sales, after […]
The New York Times Co. CFO Jim Follo reiterated a point he’s been making on earnings calls since last year, namely that “premium” digital advertising continues to be challenged by the rise of audience targeting and the infinite amount of digital inventory generated by social media. Read the release. During the Q1 earnings call, Mark […]
Pasadena, California-based Perfect Market has had a ringside seat while its publisher clients have battled to keep revenues flowing as an important slice of ad spend has moved to audience-based, programmatic campaigns. Consequently, in the past couple of years, Perfect Market CEO Julie Schoenfeld says her 60-person company has gone from helping publishers monetize content […]
MailOnline’s site is an endless broadsheet of breaking news, tabloid gossip and tawdry thrills (pictured: the money a stripper makes in just ONE shift – and it’s more than most people make in a month). Some might consider this publishing format tailor-made for real-time bidding. But the site, which has its own dedicated editorial and […]
Falling ad revenues hurt Gannett in Q1, even as the company enjoyed the fruits of its paywall strategy. Digital revenues and the completed national rollout of its all-access content subscription model contributed to Gannett’s 1.6% increase in overall revenue for the first quarter 2013. Total revenues were $1.2 billion, while advertising revenues accounted for $526.5 […]
Minneapolis’ Star Tribune has been a relatively early and aggressive adopter of programmatic ad sales. The newspaper site has just finished a re-installation of Google DoubleClick’s DFP system as part of a wider effort to expand its own Advantage program, which covers real-time biddable inventory and targeting. The basic promise of Star Trib’s Advantage is […]
Last October, European social gamer Spil Games began shifting away from direct sales to completely programmatic by automating ad buys across its 46 local gaming sites network. The company is attempting to grow its business in the rest of Europe, Russia and Asia as well as the US, claiming an average active user base of […]
