Publishers

The New York Times is making good on its goal to rev digital subscription revenue, but not at the expense of its other key growth driver: digital advertising. The Times’ total subscription revenue surpassed $1 billion in 2017 as the company added 157,000 net new, digital-only subscriptions in Q4, it announced during its Q4 earnings […]

Pixability, a platform that originated as a tool for identifying high-performing YouTube channels, is putting its money where its mouth is. The company will refund advertisers for views that run on YouTube inventory that is not brand-safe or fails to meet an advertiser’s agreed-upon brand safety terms, either through cash or TV-like “make-goods.” Although Pixability […]

 The magazine industry is consolidating in the face of multiple challenges. Rather than the newsstand, competition is coming from social platforms. Marketers want the performance advertising sold by key digital players. And as print circulation declines, magazines struggle to maintain the steady revenue from their direct-to-consumer subscription businesses. The CEOs and presidents of Condé Nast, […]

The current crop of forced mobile redirect ads tell users they’ve just won a $1,000 Amazon gift card or an Apple iPhoneX. People in ad tech have come to view them in the same way they see blizzards: They’re a hassle and unavoidable in certain climates, including programmatic advertising. “This comes up every year – […]

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. The rollup of magazine media continues apace. Meredith’s acquisition of Time Inc, and Hearst’s buyout of Rodale have reduced much of the sector to just a few large companies. But the competitive set has if anything grown to include tech, digital publishers and “commerce + […]

Three magazine media vets on Thursday launched Full Time Travel, a media brand catering to 30-40-year-old upscale consumers. Think of it like TheSkimm, but for travel content. The founders – Nick Van Sicklen, former digital VP at Time Inc., Matt Carroll from Modern Luxury and Gabby Blitz Rosen from Travel + Leisure and Food & […]

Meredith closed its acquisition of Time Inc. Wednesday to create a media company with 174 million digital US unique visitors – not far behind Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. Meredith will triple its digital revenue by acquiring Time Inc., with projected digital revenue this year of $700 million. Digital will contribute 30% to overall […]

Last year, Group Nine Media, a holding company that owns publications including NowThis and Thrillist, created 23 360-degree videos on Facebook for the VR headset Samsung Gear 360, racking up 161 million views in five months. It was the most popular brand campaign on Facebook in 2017. But will Group Nine be able to replicate […]

Twitter is a company that always seems on the verge of flight. The potential is there, but the question remains: Will the platform ever be able to fulfill it? Instability in Twitter’s C-suite doesn’t help. On Tuesday, COO Anthony Noto – second in command to Jack Dorsey – became the most recent top Twitter exec to fly […]

As the value of publisher data surges, Adam Harris, VP of data products at Hearst Magazines Digital Media, is tasked with maximizing its opportunities. When Harris joined in May, he looked at how Hearst data can be used to create experiences that drive sales, which performance-focused advertisers demand from their digital media. The work builds […]

Conde Nast wants to quickly build up its data science practice, so it acquired Lighthouse Datalab on Monday. In so doing, it added three people to its data science team who will enhance the machine-learning and AI capabilities of Spire, its data platform. Lighthouse Datalab founder Sriram Subramanian will serve as head of data science […]

TBS and TNT’s new CMO, Michael Engleman, is on a mission to make the networks’ brand marketing engine much more agile. Engleman, who helped rebrand the Sci Fi Channel as SyFy during his time at NBCUniversal, thinks broadcasters will be forced to adapt as new content producers and channels compete for consumer attention. For years, […]

Netflix will inevitably need ads, predicted Jo Ann Ross, CBS’ president and chief advertising revenue officer, during a fireside chat at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview on Thursday. “Maybe they’ll offer a lower-cost version of their service [or a different model],” she said, “but if they’re spending that much money [on content], they will look for ways […]

Advertisers for the first time can tap Roku’s first-party data via a managed service measurement system called Ad Insights, released on Wednesday. The Ad Insights platform builds on Roku’s support of third-party measurement partners like existing partner Nielsen, Kantar Millward Brown, Oracle, Placed and Experian. “This launch was really the result of us stepping back […]

In-app header bidding is coming to MoPub. On Tuesday, the Twitter-owned mobile ad exchange started testing an advanced bidding solution to replace the app ads waterfall with a unified auction. Roughly a dozen publishers are testing the solution. The closed alpha test does not have a set end date. Until now, advertisers could buy MoPub […]

Although connected TV buyers have become pretty sophisticated at targeting and delivering an ad to individual users, managing frequency across video providers is a work in progress. But despite the industry’s recognition that consumers demand better ad experiences, many viewers find themselves bombarded with the same ad. Worse, those ads sometimes run within the same […]

The global health and wellness industry is on the fast track to growth, and upstart publisher Well+Good is reaping the benefits. Well+Good began in April 2010 with only 69 subscribers and today, its reach is well over 10 million uniques across digital, social and email, according to Tyler Del Vento, SVP of sales and marketing […]

Mobile ad network and Indian unicorn InMobi paid $90 million for mobile video monetization platform AerServ in a bid to build a header bidding solution for apps. The deal, announced Wednesday, will bring together their respective programmatic exchanges to create “fair auction dynamics for in the in-app space,” said Abhay Singhal, InMobi’s CRO and co-founder. […]

Hulu closed 2017 on a high note. Hulu’s advertising revenue crossed $1 billion for the first time in 2017, the company revealed Tuesday. Underpinning its ad momentum was the growth of Hulu’s subscriber base, which increased 40% year over year from 12 million paid subscribers in 2016 to 17 million in 2017. Those figures include […]

Brad Bender will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 17-18, 2018, at the Grand Hyatt New York. Google’s rallying cry for 2018? Better and possibly fewer ads. While that theory may seem counterintuitive for a company whose revenues come almost exclusively from advertising, rethinking the ad experience may mean recutting standard formats or reducing […]

Condé Nast has long distinguished itself for having the right context to buy ads against. But these days, it’s also focusing on helping advertisers reach new audiences when they buy ads alongside its content with its Spire platform. Condé Nast allows advertisers to use its own data signals to build lookalike audiences and reach more […]

In recent years, enterprise giants like Salesforce, Oracle, IBM and Adobe monopolized M&A activity as each marketing cloud raced to buy their way into ad tech. That tide has turned. These days, strategic acquisitions are more about expanding access to content, audiences and new means of distribution. Just look to media company team-ups like Disney-21st […]

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. CafeMedia, operator of CafeMom, MamasLatinas and other sites, is a technology-first media company. It employs seven developers who do nothing but manage pre-bid implementations, upgrade bidders, monitor code on-page and so on. “The delivery of programmatic media is what we do,” says EVP for Strategy […]

Although cable operators used to be the primary keepers of TV’s distribution and data pipes, the pendulum is swinging toward programmers and smart-TV providers. Addressable inventory is increasing, driven by a surge in smart-TV OEMs licensing their data directly and local TV companies adding data and automation to their sales mixes. Sorenson Media, which is […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is by Paul Bannister, co-founder and executive vice president at CafeMedia. Contextual targeting is one of the original forms of targeted marketing, hearkening back to the days when Chevrolet might have run an ad next to a local newspaper’s feature story on […]

Brand safety and transparency were top-of-the-agenda items for advertisers in 2017. But if this was the year of faux pas, mea culpas and the start of a move toward better controls, 2018 will be about buckling down. “The billions of ad dollars pulled off platforms in 2017 was a clarion wake-up call,” said Bill Marino, […]

In India, the media company behind its biggest news websites – Times of India, The Economic Times and the Mumbai Mirror – also offers apps and sites where users can make restaurant reservations, study for a test, stream music, buy stocks or track cricket scores. By building its own ad tech stack and developing mobile-heavy […]

In 2017, many online publications realized that data and revenue diversification could drive success. And not being diversified enough could hurt their business. While many publishers tout their branded content businesses, programmatic provides a reliable, easily scalable revenue stream. Publishers that were programmatic holdouts, avoiding the main way advertisers do data-driven buying, course-corrected this year […]

The New York Times acquired Wirecutter last year because its Consumer Reports-like product coverage mirrored the Times’ aspirations to expand into service journalism. “The Wirecutter was doing what the Times would have done if we were to start from scratch,” said David Perpich, Wirecutter’s president and general manager. Buying Wirecutter helped the Times diversify its […]

Twitter is gunning to become publishers’ platform partner of choice, and it’s leveraging live video as a way to capture content – and dollars – currently flowing to the duopoly. This week, Bloomberg debuted its 24/7 global news network TicToc on Twitter after reaching nearly 8 million people during Bloomberg TV’s live stream of three […]