Condé Nast enjoyed a 3.3% growth in ad pages last quarter, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. While modest, this was the company’s highest Q1 ad page gain – typically a weak ad quarter following the heavy holiday spending period – in five years. Condé Nast Chief Revenue Officer Lou Cona and VP of Corporate Partnerships Josh […]
Business Insider, the chief digital tabloid with its screaming headlines, bold commentary and incessant slideshows, attracts a lot of pageviews, controversy and ad spending. But the mix has left it grasping for profitability. Now, with Jeff Bezos’ venture capital group leading a $5 million funding round — bringing the total raised to $18.3 million over […]
A variety of publisher analytics firms are analyzing the yield of the digital publisher today. But for Scout Analytics, which is based just outside of Seattle, it’s not about better advertising yield as the end game. The 40-person company lays claim to the optimization of well over $2 billion in annual client revenues according to […]
The Weather Company, owner of The Weather Channel and its digital extensions, unveiled a plan to bring more addressability to its TV advertising. Dubbed “CableFX,” the new offering from the company’s WeatherFX Division brings existing “big data” to its local and regional TV targeting system. The idea is to more closely bridge TWC’s TV, web, […]
Like a lot of content aggregators, Examiner.com saw its traffic rise to new heights by focusing on search results, then saw the multitudes evaporate when Google changed its algorithm two years ago. Since then, the company has been trying to shift away from the hyperlocal model it had when it launched in 2008, and develop […]
Earlier this month, Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, hosted a “digital upfront” designed to showcase the McLean, Va. media company’s value across the web and mobile. After years of struggle, Gannett has recently begun to see strength in its traditional TV ad sales and newspaper circulation revenues, which gained 46 percent and 24 percent, […]
Six months ago, when Steve Hansen was named CEO of blog network Buzzmedia, he realized that he shared a problem with the company’s readers and advertisers: He had no idea what the company’s identity amounted to. This week, as Buzzmedia (not to be confused with BuzzFeed) rebrands as SpinMedia, after one of its newer properties, […]
During the first week of college basketball’s March Madness, the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship, there were 36.6 million live video streams across all digital platforms, according to the NCAA, Turner Sports, and CBS Sports. This is more than twice the number of live video streams in 2012, which saw only 18.3 million for […]
Even as its parent Time Warner works on spinning off Time Inc. into its own separately traded entity, the company has been pursuing a more aggressive approach to programmatic ad sales the past few months — albeit quietly. But it will have to go forward without two champions of that process. Earlier today, Chief Revenue […]
The private marketplace – or exchange – strategy has been bubbling for several years as large publishers look to collect programmatic media budgets from advertisers that are hunting audience across “brand-safe” sites. On Wednesday, sell-side platform PubMatic announced that business news site Business Insider had signed on as a client for its private marketplace product. […]
Lifestyle blog network and ad rep firm operator Evolve Media is working on what executives say is a balanced approach to digital sales, albeit one that will continue to tilt more toward direct selling over programmatic methods for at least the next few years. Unlike other digital publishing and ad services rivals, such as Federated […]
For the past decade, it had become a matter of when, not if. Time Warner, the entertainment conglomerate that took the first part of its name from the publishing empire that grew in the early 20th century, is spinning off its magazine division into a separate, publicly-traded entity. As a result, Laura Lang, the interactive […]
Christopher Reynolds, VP of marketing analytics at Condé Nast, spoke about how the publisher is improving its audience knowledge and helping advertisers better leverage its sites, at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit this morning. “There is a lot of pressure from the buying side to focus more on the audiences,” Reynolds told Adobe’s Brad Rencher […]
There’s not much debate about the value of house ads. Maybe there never was. The house ad, like the TV promo, is just a way to fill some unsold inventory and promote the brand of a newspaper, magazine, or website. Or it could be an Ad Council placement. At a time when sites can fill […]
Just two years after Federated Media Publishing founder John Battelle handed the reigns over to then president Deanna Brown so he could step back as executive chairman, Battelle is taking back the CEO position. In an official blog post, Battelle said that Brown told him that she planned to do something “smaller” and directly involving […]
The word “premium” is bandied about the advertising industry to – at a minimum – add a glow to digital ad inventory. But, what does “premium” mean? AdExchanger reached out to executives in the online ad tech ecosystem for their thoughts on the following question: “What makes ‘premium’ premium? Please share your top three attributes of […]
Both major publishers like Forbes and startups like Buzzfeed have found there’s little point in trying to replicate the traditional ad model when it comes to digital. And even programmatic has its limits, in their view. In what was billed as a “debate” on the value or hype of native advertising at the Interactive Advertising […]
QuadrantONE, a joint venture of newspaper companies that sought to pool inventory resources and capitalize on the programatic selling opportunity, has shut down. In a note posted to its website today, the company said its joint owners — The New York Times Co., Tribune Company, Hearst and Gannett – will pursue “different paths” for U.S. display […]
Tribune Digital, the interactive arm of the newspaper and broadcasting company, expects mobile traffic on its 36 WAP sites and 60 apps to exceed the PC-based usage it gets this year across its 50 websites. But the question facing it and other publishers looking to nudge ad spending to more closely match users’ smartphone and […]
In the two months since tech publisher IDG finished a major redesign of its PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive sites, the company is ready to expand the centerpiece of that effort: the “Homepage Hero” box. The box is intended to serve as a front door for each site, displaying a large slot called the “Content Hero,” […]
Add “holistic yield management” to the list of buzzy terms content companies are sorting through in trying to determine what’s real and what’s hype when it comes to building audiences and ad revenue. Over the past few weeks, Visual Revenue, which bills itself as the operator of a “Bloomberg terminal” for editors, has expanded into […]
Earlier this week, Thrillist Media Group, publisher of a young men’s local lifestyle guide network and e-commerce app, brought in digital ad sales vet Todd Anderman as the company’s president of sales, marketing and operations. Most recently the chief media and revenue officer of mobile ad targeter Jumptap, Anderman spent much of the past decade […]
Among the questions facing publishers last year: (1) What should be done about the rise of audience buying?, and (2) How do we make mobile advertising really pay off? Meredith Corp., the publisher of women’s magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle, has been focused on mobile for years, particularly through the […]
Last month, local TV broadcast operator Belo Corp. launched its attempt at a pure play digital marketing unit, ScreenShot Digital. The move is similar to ones taken by Time Inc., Gannett, Meredith Corp. and others the last three years. Unlike some of those integrated digital marketing units, ScreenShot isn’t being positioned as a way to leverage […]
For the past seven years, Techmeme, the technology news aggregator, has relied heavily on algorithms to help it organize hundreds of breaking reports every day. While it has employed a growing team of editors to sift through and monitor the tweets, emails and other news items that come in from around the tech sector to […]
Among the many concerns ad sellers and ad agency staffers harbor about the rise of automated audience buying is that all these advancements will ultimately put people out of a job. The ethos of doing “more with less” is a general worry that happens anytime an industry finds itself in the throes of technological change. […]
J.T. Batson is leaving his post at media buying workflow systems provider Mediaocean to become chief revenue officer at Cumulus Media, which is primarily known for running the former ABC Radio Network. Meanwhile, Mediaocean, which was the resulting brand from last year’s merger between Mediabank and Donovan Data Systems, will not be replacing Batson directly, […]
Last month’s ad spending tally from the Interactive Advertising Bureau was another “record-breaker,” as marketers lavished $17 billion on web ads between January and the end of June 2012. Display revenues in the first half totaled almost $5.6 billion, up 4 percent from $5.3 billion in the first half of 2011. So everything should be […]
Over the past two years, Ziff Davis has transformed itself from a digital-only tech publisher primarily known for PCMag.com to a broader content/digital marketing play by adding audience ad targeting, e-commerce and enterprise IT functions. Now, after roughly five acquisitions since CEO Vivek Shah took over the media property with investment assistance from Great Hill Partners, […]
Content marketing tech company Outbrain has decided to make a change in its algos and how it delivers content links to publishers. In a move similar to what you might see with Google’s search product and its intriguingly-named “Panda” update, which sought to improve search results, Outbrain says it isn’t going to let just any […]
