Publishers

The Economist is still mulling the particulars around how it’s going to monetize its just-launched video initiative, Economist Films, but one thing is sure – native advertising will have nothing to do with it. “There will never be a native element to our films because they have to stand alongside the newspaper as a purely […]

ABC, A+E Networks, Comcast and Canoe have initiated a pilot with broadcaster ad server FreeWheel to manage dynamic ad insertion in VOD and set-top box inventory alongside digital ads. Video-on-demand advertising has been relatively slow to take off, namely because of greater need for back-end integration in the underlying TV tech infrastructure. “The benefit for […]

Outbrain will allow publishers to sell native in-feed placements via their direct sales channels. In beta testing with four publishers, publishers can offer the units on a CPC or CPM basis. “Over the last six months, we’ve had more and more publishers dipping their toe into native ads,” said Matt Crenshaw, Outbrain’s VP of product […]

Comcast’s plan to acquire Visible World, announced late Thursday, will deepen its addressable TV prowess, but the real target might be Visible World subsidiary AudienceXpress and its burgeoning buy-side dealings. Comcast’s inheritance of AudienceXpress, which provides provides digital workflow automation for the buying and selling of linear TV ads, could reduce the media giant’s reliance […]

Most publisher sites are not oversubscribed – not by a long shot, said Amiad Solomon, chairman and co-founder of Komoona, a company that bills itself as an “RTB router.” Solomon put it bluntly: “Publishers are bleeding.” A lot of that has to do with the CPMs most publishers are able to attract for their non-direct programmatically […]

When Reddit revealed it would produce original video, code for “more premium content,” it was right in line with its pitch to brand advertisers – as well as more tools for publishers – through features like embeddable comment threads. That said, the last thing it will compromise is a solid user experience in its community […]

Publishers taking the role of an ad agency by creating content for marketers should make sure they’re not creating misleading native advertising: The Federal Trade Commission will hold publishers responsible. “For us, the concern is whether consumers recognize what they’re seeing is advertising or not,” Mary Engle, the FTC’s associate director of advertising practices, told […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Peter Spande, chief revenue officer at Business Insider. The advertising industry loves the term “premium.” Every supply-side platform (SSP) claims to possess the most premium publishers, while every media company will, when given the […]

Business Insider’s “big reveal” this quarter was its planned launch of a standalone consumer tech site, but the publisher’s lifting the curtain on some other priorities – like video and a push into personalization. Business Insider’s video team totaled about 10 at the beginning of the year, but Business Insider president and COO Julie Hansen […]

Hearst Magazines UK was looking for a way to take its mobile strategy from out of the box to outside the box. “We definitely had a history of 320 x 50 mobile banners,” admitted Rob Wilkin, head of commercial product at Hearst UK, which is home to 26 titles including Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, […]

Since Denmark’s third-largest media house, Jysk Fynske Medier, started bringing in programmatic demand, CPMs for non-direct sold inventory have risen more than 300%. Its portfolio of sites, which includes everything from local news to classifieds to daily deals, attracts 3 million uniques and 500 million page views per month. Though small, Denmark has a highly […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Dave Marquard, director of product management, publisher products, at Integral Ad Science. Now that the MRC has defined that for a digital display ad to be viewable, half of the creative must be in […]

Professional food bloggers have long relied on ad networks to monetize their audience. A few million page views or more can be enough to earn a living. But these long-tail content creators are also feeling the effects of programmatic, viewability and the shift to mobile. One example: Food blog Pinch of Yum, run by a […]

BidSwitch on Monday announced a feature for its API that will incorporate the OpenRTB2.3 standards, opening up new sources of native supply and, according to BidSwitch GM Bob Walczak, “[enabling] a much higher degree of innovation and efficiency in the native market.” BidSwitch’s value proposition is its ability to integrate once and then connect with […]

The salespeople at Business Insider had a problem. Some potential advertisers wanted to buy directly with the publication, but due to minimums implemented in mid-2014, their budgets were below the minimum spend and CPM required for a direct buy. That would make them candidates for programmatic sales, but these clients didn’t have DSPs. Some were […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Reed Barker, vice president of cable ad products at The Weather Company. Remember when you were a kid and you finally realized that there was no Santa Claus? There was a decision on the […]

Beliefnet attracts a niche audience (about 5 million to 7 million uniques per month) of all faiths who come to read content about religion. But while its readers believe in a greater power, Beliefnet wasn’t always sure they had the same faith in ads. Even though advertisers began to prioritize viewability, the publication, which fielded […]

Facebook has confirmed it will begin displaying publishers’ articles natively in the Facebook mobile app, naming nine initial media partners for the program. (Read the blog post.) Participating publishers are The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild. “We’ve been comfortable with experimenting with a variety of storytelling platforms over the past […]

Even as marketers increasingly see native programmatic as a part of the core digital arsenal – alongside video, display and mobile – industry leaders like Sharethrough have encountered a lag in adoption from major DSPs. Part of the problem is that the existence of technology solutions hasn’t had a chance to sink in with brands […]

Mediabong has designs on the US. The Paris-based video platform, which revealed a $5 million Series B round on Wednesday, plans to use the bulk of its funding to beef up operations out of its nascent New York office, where the headcount is slated to increase from two to around 10 sales and business development people […]

John Montgomery, COO of GroupM Interaction, North America will appear at AdExchanger’s upcoming CleanAds I/O conference on June 3​, an event addressing inventory quality and supply chain issues in the digital advertising ecosystem. GroupM’s stance on viewability is clear: “If an ad can’t be seen, then we can’t expect clients to pay for it,” said […]

Publishers like PureWow seeking audience development have a few usual suspects to drive traffic to sites. There’s Outbrain and Taboola, social amplification and syndication or traffic exchange. And now, to help make social amplification more efficient, they have KeyWee. “At the most basic level, they find the right audience for the content,” said Anna Lee, […]

Digital advertising revenue at Time Inc. rose 20% to $73 million in the first quarter. But overall advertising revenue declined 9% to $353 million, and total revenue declined 9% to $680 million. Those declines were still slightly better than Wall Street’s expectations. “We’re in a turnaround, and turnarounds are bumpy,” said CEO and Chairman Joe Ripp. […]

Nielsen and Roku’s marriage for over-the-top (OTT) measurement, along with Roku’s development of a unique device identifier, may be a watershed moment for the connected TV ecosystem. The agreement, announced last Thursday, will enable Roku’s publisher partners to measure the impact of ads on some 10 million set-top boxes by accessing Nielsen’s demographic data and […]

PureWow, a women’s lifestyle website, raised $2.5 million in Series Seed Preferred funding Tuesday. It’s the second pre-Series A round of funding for the profitable property, which raised seed funding when it launched in 2010. PureWow’s audience tripled in the past 12 months. Advertiser RFPs have increased 200%. “The demand is there,” CEO Ryan Harwood […]

Viralnova has been hated and admired for the path it took to find an audience. It rose to the top of the Facebook news feed in 2013 with I-can’t-not-click articles like “If You Own A Microwave, Then You Absolutely Must See This Video.” And its success showed mainstream publishers the importance of social content discovery. […]

The New York Times finished a bright quarter for digital, as both online subscriptions and ad revenue rose. Digital advertising rose the same amount that print declined, 11%, finishing at $42.3 million. However, since digital constitutes just over a quarter of advertising revenue, advertising declined overall by 5.8%. Total revenue declined just 1.6% due to cost-cutting. […]

Fifty-four stories above New York’s World Trade Center site, 800 media planners gathered Tuesday evening for AOL’s annual advertiser NewFront. The big “reveal” was a new video content and distribution agreement with broadcaster NBCUniversal. Starting this summer, select NBCUniversal videos from network partners Bravo, CNBC, E!, MSNBC, NBC, Oxygen, Syfy, Telemundo and USA will be […]

Traditional cable nets are increasingly turning to video demand-side platforms to factor things like digital purchase habits into the TV-planning process. Cadent Network, a national media network that partners with more than 200 multichannel video programming distributors (MVPD) and more than 80 cable networks at the local and national level, including Verizon FiOS, Comcast and […]

On the opening day of advertiser NewFronts, BuzzFeed and Bloomberg Media were clear about their intentions: They’re pursuing video. Aggressively. At its Monday event in New York, BuzzFeed said it will release by the year’s end a proprietary tool called Pound, designed to show advertisers how BuzzFeed stories and video content travel across the web. […]