Publishers

Facebook’s recent courtship of publishers – like its attempt to move them onto Instant Articles, paying them to produce Facebook Live videos and allowing the posting of sponsored posts on their feeds – hasn’t insulated publishers from Facebook’s algorithm adjustments. On Wednesday, Facebook said it will change its algorithm to focus its news feed on […]

If publishers allow programmatic to compete with direct-sold impressions within their ad server, they needn’t bother with header bidding. French ecommerce site Rue du Commerce saw a sizable boost in yield when it did just that. It belongs to a family of ecommerce sites, Régie E-Commerce (REC), which together attract 14 million uniques a month. […]

How do you crush it with organic views and shares in a sea of paid content? Raw humor and parody seem to be doing the trick for Someecards, the e-card site founded by former MRM and Avenue A/Razorfish creative VPs in 2007. As the self-described antithesis of the Hallmark greeting card, Someecards started out creating […]

After a string of court losses, Axel Springer finally landed a blow on Eyeo’s Adblock Plus (ABP). On Friday, a German court granted the German publishing giant a partial victory in its appeal of a previous decision. In question was ABP’s Acceptable Ads initiative, an open source ad-block revenue channel (meaning other ad blockers can […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jarrod Dicker, head of ad product and technology at The Washington Post. The publishing world now, more than ever, is extraordinarily fast. What used to take seconds for a URL load can now take […]

Independent mobile supply-side platforms (SSPs) are going extinct, the result of commoditization and natural evolution. “It’s been really hard to be a single-point solution player in the ad tech space for a long time, but now it’s almost impossible,” said Christopher Hansen, chief product officer at IgnitionOne. “Just take a look at the Terry Kawaja […]

A year ago, E.W. Scripps–owned video network Newsy was predominantly a desktop-focused site. A lot has changed for the publisher, whose 55-person editorial team endeavors to put its own spin on the stories of the day across verticals, from global news and policy to culture and entertainment. Newsy is now on pace to hit one […]

With TV upfront negotiations underway, digital tactics are wielding more influence as networks court buyers with cross-platform guarantees and enhanced data products. “You can still invest client dollars in proven media, but upfronts are now about online video partnerships you can make long-term investments in,” said Maureen Bosetti, the chief investment officer for Interpublic Group’s […]

Investopedia launched in the dot-com era as an online dictionary of investment terms. Its financial audience attracted advertisers, and the glossary format drove traffic from Google searches. But times have changed. Investopedia needed to conquer social, which has supplanted search as a dominant traffic driver for many publishers. And reaching investors at the beginning of […]

Creating real-time content is a challenge for any brand – but for brands operating in highly regulated industries, it’s a potential compliance risk. There isn’t a federal regulator out there that doesn’t have rules around misleading, deceptive or unfair practices, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission. And […]

As more brands and publishers seek to reach millennial audiences, FOX’s video ad platform True[X] is eyeing tech like chat bots and messaging apps that are trendy with teens and 20-somethings. In a partnership with messaging app Kik, revealed Wednesday, True[X] will begin to integrate 15-second interactive video ads that allow Kik users to exchange […]

When people sign up for sweepstakes, they leave the right address. Publishers Clearing House’s (PCH) Liquid division was acquired in 2012 and uses its parent’s deterministic data sets to power media campaigns. This value prop is becoming more attractive as agency trading desks move to buying through private marketplaces and evaluating success through benchmarks like […]

Admiral, a performance marketing solution designed to help publishers reacquire and monetize audiences who use ad blockers, launched Monday with a $2.5 million seed round. Admiral identifies audiences with ad blockers turned on, works to re-establish those users (by opting in to a lightened ad experience, say, or asking to be whitelisted) and then makes a […]

Custom content was all the rage even as early as 2007, when entrepreneur and actor RJ Williams founded celebrity and lifestyle site Young Hollywood. The millennial-focused publisher claims it averages 150 million monthly video views across desktop, mobile, OTT and social today. Young Hollywood evolved from content partnerships with portals like AOL, Yahoo and YouTube, […]

Edmunds.com is revving up its audience data strategy through an exclusive hookup with Oracle Data Cloud. The partnership, announced Thursday, gives the car shopping info site the ability to scale its efforts around audience-based buys, said Jennifer Dodez, Edmund’s executive director of programmatic and data solutions. “We’ve had a lot of demand for our data […]

Impressions don’t impress – “Attention is the key, not just being on the screen,” said Moat CEO and co-founder Jonah Goodhart at an event Wednesday about time-based metrics hosted by Parsec (formerly Sled Mobile). That’s part of why advertisers buy TV – it’s a viewable playground for branding. But viewability, after all, is just a baseline for just […]

While still in its infancy, CafeMedia’s three-month-old platform for millennial women, Revelist, is already exploring opportunities for further monetization. Now at 1 million monthly unique visitors and 76 million video views, the publisher, which embeds “body positivity” into all content across multiple verticals like beauty, entertainment, news and politics, has attracted large advertisers like P&G […]

Jed Hartman, the CRO of the Washington Post, knows that a focus on user experience can also conflict with a publisher’s ability to drive revenue “Our owner Jeff Bezos focuses relentlessly on the consumer,” Hartman said during a publisher panel at AdExchanger’s Clean Ads conference on Tuesday. “It’s UX-first, which is a challenge for me […]

The dander was up at AdExchanger’s Clean Ads IO in New York on Tuesday as the CEOs of two ad blockers engaged in a contentious debate with two prominent adversaries about the rock-and-hard-place situation publishers presently find themselves in. “It might be ironic that an ad blocker can really play a very important role in […]

Publishers are still working out journalism on mobile devices. While basic responsive design is usually a given today, mobile article formats haven’t dramatically changed. Most innovation happens on platforms like Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat Discover – not on owned-and-operated sites. Which is why Quartz’s app, a conversational news app launched in February, is a […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Paul Bannister, co-founder and executive vice president at CafeMedia. With the rapid growth of header bidding, publishers are now employing many supply-side platforms (SSPs) and demand sources in their technology stack. This benefits publishers, […]

When tech site Softonic was at its peak roughly three years ago, it attracted 120 million global uniques searching for downloadable computer software. But when mobile app stores took over the role of software search and review, Softonic and its peers got into the toolbar downloading business, accepting huge bounties from toolbar creators to push […]

As some industry insiders speculated, IBM is starting to merge its Weather Co. asset with its cognitive supercomputer Watson, a move that will benefit its marketing cloud and commerce businesses. “Everyone wondered why an IT company like IBM would make such an acquisition, a company that produces forecasts for 2.2 billion locations every 15 minutes,” […]

Since Google opened up its ad server and brought exchange bidding to dynamic allocation a month ago, publisher ad tech and media companies have been asking many questions but receiving few answers. People in the industry want to know: How much will Google charge? Nobody seems to know. What kind of data will publishers be […]

Playboy’s first NewFront is Friday and the publisher is treating the event as a “multi-platform” coming-out party. Following its recent rebrand as a safe-for-work men’s lifestyle media option, Playboy wants to attract more millennial males. The publisher’s first no-nude print issue in Playboy history ran in March. The rebrand is a key moment. Despite Playboy’s position […]

Because Seeking Alpha attracts a financially savvy audience, financial services advertisers want to be there. But often, those advertisers want to reach even finer slices of Seeking Alpha’s audience. One of the most coveted demos on the site is financial advisers, who make decisions about vast amounts of other people’s money. Seeking Alpha needed a […]

At face value, AwesomenessTV looks like your average YouTube multichannel network (MCN). Except it’s not, according to Paul Kelly, AwesomenessTV’s chief partnerships officer. AwesomenessTV has amassed 160 million total subscribers and now boasts nearly a billion monthly video views across platforms. A network of creators helps support its shows, but the company is also a […]

Clients want their agencies to operate in fluid, multidisciplinary teams. That’s hard to achieve for larger holding companies traditionally siloed into distinct arms. Disparate units working toward internal goals often find themselves competing instead of collaborating to meet client KPIs. Hearst-owned marketing agency iCrossing is challenging this model with a new structure that promotes omnichannel […]

When Gawker Media first started selling ads programmatically in late 2014, it only sold through private marketplaces (PMPs). Since then, the publisher behind Gawker, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Gizmodo and other sites has expanded its programmatic offerings. First it added an open marketplace option and then it implemented header bidding. Programmatic revenue has grown by triple-digit percentages […]

Mobext, the mobile arm of Havas Media Group, is hoping to get away from using pain-in-the-neck manual whitelists and blacklists to manage brand safety and contextual placements. Consequently, it’s been testing the fruits of an integration – revealed Wednesday – between Peer39, the brand safety and online semantic platform Sizmek bought in 2012, and StrikeAd, […]