ESI Media owns The Evening Standard and The Independent, but each newspaper approaches affiliate product recommendations differently. “To add value to our consumers, we ask, ‘What’s relevant to our users? And where do we have authority?’” said Sandro Del Grosso, head of digital partnerships and ecommerce for ESI Media. For example, The Evening Standard offers […]
As ad-supported local news struggles, member-supported Oregon Public Broadcasting is expanding. In addition to radio, it now produces TV and digital content to keep an audience of 1.5 million people informed. As part of its digital investment, it doubled its newsroom in the past five years. Posting went from supporting radio features, with a 9am-5pm […]
The supply-side platform Index Exchange and WPP’s media buying unit GroupM are approaching publishers with an unusual partnership. According to three publishers who were briefed about the deal, GroupM will begin to rout a majority of its demand through Index Exchange as part of a supply-path optimization (SPO) effort. Concentrating demand on Index’s pipes will […]
Journalists regularly embed organic social posts, such as tweets, Instagram content or YouTube videos, into their stories. So, why not monetize them like any other type of ad inventory? It’s an idea that appeals to Nick Kaplan, director of programmatic at women’s lifestyle publisher SHE Media. Since October 2019, SHE Media has been experimenting with […]
Whenever Google changes how its ad server works, publishers fear that Google will wrest control over how they run their digital advertising. Those concerns often have merit. So when Google added rules about how publishers could prioritize different ad exchanges earlier this week – and buried those changes in a confusing help center document instead […]
The New York Times posted strong results stemming from digital subscriptions; Facebook licensing revenue; its new TV show, The Weekly; Wirecutter and its Crossword and Cooking apps. But advertising wasn’t a bright spot. Coming off a tough comparison quarter, advertising declined 10.7% year-over-year to $171.3 million. Advertising accounts for one-third of total revenue. Overall Q4 […]
Sports media companies are betting on gambling. Yahoo Sports launched sports betting in November 2019 with MGM Resorts. SB Nation and DraftKings are collaborating on an editorial website for fantasy sports and betting analysis. In February 2019, Caesars Entertainment joined Turner Sports to open a Bleacher Report-branded content studio that operates within the casino’s Las […]
Generation Z consumes media differently than millennials, but brands don’t always understand that. To help brands better relate to younger audiences, former Wavemaker exec Noah Mallin left a career in agencyland to join Gen Z-focused media company IMGN as its first chief brand strategist, the company said Monday. IMGN owns the social media handle of […]
With Chrome bidding farewell to third-party cookies, publishers predict a steep rise in use – and value – of their first-party data. Media companies with their own audiences and direct-to-consumer relationships expect power to accrue to them. And many publishers already have a head start. With Apple’s Safari browser blocking cookies for about 30% of […]
Change seems constant in the media business. A chain of digital media consolidations in 2019 has created new scaled players: Group Nine Media and PopSugar; Refinery29 and Vice Media; and Vox Media and New York Media. Besides a greatly transformed competitive landscape, 2020 will see publishers wrestling with new challenges. Privacy and regulation, for instance, […]
With cookies in decline, Dotdash wants to be the publisher that helps marketers weather the transition. With nearly a dozen media brands that span personal finance, weddings, lifestyle, wellness, beauty and travel, Dotdash prides itself on helping more than 100 million users find answers, yielding an enormous cache of intent data. Since its sites often […]
The New York Times is removing open marketplace programmatic ads from its mobile app starting in January 2020, because their slow loading times detract from the user experience. The decision will result in a single-digit millions loss of revenue. “We believe that this will be more than made up by gains in engagement and a […]
Vox Media and New York Media are merging to create a portfolio of brands so they can better compete against platforms and build diversified businesses at scale, the companies announced Tuesday. “The conversations we have with marketers every day are about the engagement around our brands, scale and performance,” Vox Media Chief Revenue Officer Ryan […]
People are consuming more news content than ever, but some advertisers avoid it like the plague. In fact, the word “plague” is probably on a bunch of keyword blacklists. “We battle the narrative that news is an unsafe place for marketers,” said Christine Cook, SVP and CRO of CNN’s digital portfolio, during a panel Tuesday […]
GIPHY is growing up. The search engine for GIFs is partnering with Oracle Data Cloud’s Moat to measure viewability, ad delivery and invalid traffic for short-form branded content on its platform. The metrics will be baked into the price of media and available for all campaigns and sponsored GIFs starting in Q4 when GIPHY and […]
Financial Times has started using automation to make selling long-tail inventory more efficient. Automation allows Facebook and Google to capture significant ad revenue from small buyers. But for publishers like the FT, managing those campaigns requires tremendous manpower. Consider that 55% of its global ad campaigns in 2018 had budgets under 10,000 pounds. Salespeople and […]
The Axios Sports newsletter recently hit a major milestone: 100,000 subscribers, up nearly tenfold in less than nine months. But this is not just growth for growth’s sake, said Ernesto Arrocha, associate director of growth and engagement at Axios, which publishes just under 20 daily and weekly newsletters. Its sports newsletter maintains a 42% open […]
A successful article at HuffPost doesn’t have the most traffic – it has the most traffic from loyal readers with the highest engagement time. HuffPost overhauled its audience strategy last year to super-serve its most faithful readers and increase their numbers. The publisher is also diversifying its revenue through subscriptions. In April, it soft-launched a […]
If all goes according to plan, America’s two largest newspaper chains will become one by the end of the year. Earlier this week, New Media Investment Group, parent company of GateHouse Media, announced its intention to buy USA Today publisher Gannett in a deal valued at $1.4 billion. If antitrust regulators approve the merger, GateHouse […]
NBC News, whose portfolio includes Today.com, CNBC and MSNBC, doubled the clickthrough rate (CTR) on its branded content when it used tech that fine-tuned distribution of the content on its sites. The branded content tech, Polar, automatically tested different pairings of headlines and images, optimizing how it pulls readers into a story, and automating more […]
Hearst is building a self-serve ad platform so advertisers can overlay their audience data against Hearst’s to reach readers across sites like Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle and Car and Driver. Designed for smaller advertisers, the platform – dubbed Hearst Audience Select – is slated to launch in time for Q4 ad campaigns. Audience Select will also […]
Creative automation is proving to be just the ticket as StubHub earmarks more of its marketing budget for video. Historically, StubHub has spent a lot of money successfully on lower-funnel tactics, such as paid search and retargeting, to encourage ticket sales. But there’s a lot more to performance than simply pointing in the direction of […]
Slow-loading ads are still a perennial problem for publishers. Wise Publishing, a Toronto-based publisher of personal finance content with around 5 million monthly unique visitors, acquires a significant portion of its traffic through paid channels. But if an ad loads slowly and a visitor leaves, so does that monetization opportunity. “Dealing with latency is incredibly […]
CalMatters reports nonpartisan, in-depth stories about California state politics on a nonprofit budget – and it needed a tech stack to fuel that vision. The site is shifting this week to use a suite of publisher tools bundled together by The News Project. Founded last year, The News Project wants to serve the wave of […]
Brands must be ubiquitous across platforms to remain relevant to their consumers. That requires producing content consistently and quickly – a trick publishers know well. Gallery Media Group, the media umbrella within Gary Vaynerchuck’s holding company, VaynerX, aims to help brands solve their content needs by applying its distributed media playbook across Fortune 1000 clients. […]
The digital advertising business ain’t easy – just ask any traditional publisher. But there are bright spots. The New York Times had its best year last year for ad revenue – $709 million – in the roughly 15 years since print writ large really started to suffer, said NYT COO and EVP Meredith Kopit Levien, speaking Tuesday at […]
Dotdash, a top destination for millennial women, lacked bridal content. So the digital publisher, which rebranded from About.com in 2017, purchased Brides magazine from Condé Nast Wednesday for an undisclosed sum. The 85-year-old magazine will fit well into Dotdash’s verticalized online portfolio, said CEO Neil Vogel. Dotdash’s properties are each devoted to specific categories like […]
Publishers of all sizes are cutting ties with programmatic resellers. Just as buyers are employing supply-path optimization to eliminate exchanges that provide little value, publishers are removing ad tech intermediaries that clutter their setups or harm monetization. By working with fewer partners, publishers are prioritizing control over their ad setup and site experience over the […]
College-age consumers shouldn’t be too hard for advertisers to find, since many are, not surprisingly, on college campuses. But most college newspapers don’t have a systematic way to sell their inventory. Student-run outlets generally have reps to pound the pavement, visiting small businesses – their bread and butter – one by one to drum up ad […]
Hearst Magazines named Mike Smith as its first chief data officer Thursday. When Smith joined Hearst in 2013, he introduced programmatic to its sites and oversaw programmatic buying. As chief data officer, Smith will oversee data use in programmatic campaigns, branded content, direct sold campaigns, sales operations and editorial. “When Troy [Young] became president of […]
