Publishers

Comcast’s drumbeat of new video services is designed to support content parity across devices rather than to create a cord cutter’s alternative, per se. The cable giant recently rolled out to Xfinity Internet customers a $15-a-month streaming video service appropriately dubbed Stream. Comcast has also flirted with a Web video portal to rival YouTube and […]

Media General will acquire Meredith Corp. for $2.4 billion, combining the two companies’ TV and digital assets to create greater reach and efficiency. The new company, Meredith Media General, will own 88 TV stations in 54 markets, making it the third-largest owner of network affiliates. On the digital side, it will reach 200 million monthly unique […]

The digital media industry is mourning Curt Hecht. Hecht passed away this week at the age of 47, ending a brilliant 26-year career at Publicis Groupe and The Weather Company. His death has come as a shock to many, not only because of Hecht’s intellectual and physical vigor but also because he chose to keep […]

NewsCred, a maker of content marketing software for enterprise brands like Barclays, Toyota and Conair, has raised $42 million in growth equity led by FTV Capital – bringing its total to $88.8 million. NewsCred’s co-founder and CEO, Shafqat Islam, has voiced concerns in the past regarding oversaturation in the content marketing technology category, citing $100 million […]

Visitors to Allrecipes’ redesigned mobile and desktop sites, which launched Tuesday, will find what looks like a personalized Pinterest page, complete with social elements including like button variants and the ability to follow other cooks and food brands. Founded in 1997 as a place for home cooks to find and share recipes, Allrecipes needed to […]

Connected TV ads have piqued marketers’ interest, but there is not a watershed of demand – yet – as marketers still cite measurement and inventory challenges. According to a joint study released by the Association of National Advertisers and BrightLine, the maker of an interactive video ad server built exclusively for the connected TV space, […]

Some publishers believe programmatic creates a “race to the bottom” for its inventory. Purch, whose portfolio includes TopTenReviews and Tom’s Guide, is taking the opposite approach by using programmatic to establish the baseline value of its media. This effort, called Purch RAMP (revenue and advertising management platform), will help it create premium, custom advertising opportunities. […]

Publishers are concerned about content blocking in iOS 9 – but how concerned should they be? At first glance, the single brief reference to content blocking in Apple’s iOS 9 release notes seems innocuous enough. “Use the Content Blocking extension point to give Safari a block list describing the content that you want to block while […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by James Curran, CEO and founder at Staq. Publishers, including Refinery29 and BuzzFeed, represent hot digital content brands that have recently decided to opt out of the real-time bidding (RTB) ecosystem. Some, like BuzzFeed, don’t […]

Even if terrestrial radio still has the bulk of audience, the growth – and ability to target – is in streaming audio. And an international brand like Hard Rock Hotels and Casinos needs its tune to reverberate across a global stage. This is one of the reasons why it signed on to use a native […]

The Washington Post’s revamped home page, unveiled Wednesday, purports to bring average desktop load time to less than one second – meaning better reader experiences and more ads viewed, since visitors won’t bounce. The fresh home page completes the Post’s sitewide reboot, which started in the middle of last year with its article pages. Content […]

While Imgur has 150 million monthly active users, many of them use ad-blocking software and access the site on mobile, where banners go for lower CPMs. The image-sharing community is strongly tied to Reddit, hosting much of its image content. And like Reddit, Imgur’s audience is filled with tech-savvy male millennials suspicious of advertising. Native, done […]

Beginning this fall, advertisers will be able to programmatically buy Hulu video inventory in a private marketplace across desktop, mobile and connected TV via Facebook’s LiveRail supply-side platform. In its Tuesday announcement, Hulu said it will also use Oracle’s data-management platform (née BlueKai), through which marketers can enrich their buys by combining their anonymized first-party […]

WhoSay is one of the more undefinable companies in the advertising and marketing landscape. It’s a celebrity news site, a HootSuite-like social media platform for celebrities, and it also functions as an influencer marketing agency in that it accepts RFPs from brands, builds campaigns with celebrity spokespeople and distributes those campaigns using the power of […]

BlackArrow, a 13-year-old provider of live and video-on-demand ad products to TV operators, was acquired Monday by Cross MediaWorks, the owner of a national media network called Cadent and the full-service Cross Agency. Although BlackArrow, which has 100 employees, will remain as an independent entity, it will partner with Cross MediaWorks’ other business divisions to […]

The director of ad technology for Netflix, Tony Ralph, and director of marketing for Abe’s Market, Michelle Goldstein, will appear at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference on Sept. 10, an event designed to educate marketers on advanced solutions for building seamless cross-channel brand experiences. Cross-channel attribution will be one topic discussed at the conference. As Netflix’s director of […]

IDG Communications, publisher of more than 1,000 tech websites including PCWorld, TechHive and CIO.com, is launching a native platform Wednesday. The platform will span across all its properties and include contextual placements such as in-feed video or links to branded content created by IDG’s team. IDG is embracing native because it better aligns with how […]

After Gannett CRO Kevin Gentzel reads his hometown newspaper, the Pensacola News Journal, he puts on his sales hat. Local papers are a “powerful environment” and Gentzel’s first order of business, as Gannett’s new sales chief, is to harness that power with branded content. If he has his way, that content will appear not just […]

LifeZette, a lifestyle site created by conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, launched in April and is quickly scaling up its video production. Moving fast will allow the fledgling site to grab some of the projected $1 billion in digital ad spend for the 2016 election. Ten percent of that spend will go to online video, according […]

“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 digital ad industry spent much of the past 10 years working on ways to improve its ability to target and isolate audiences online. We now […]

Sarah Sluis and Ryan Joe contributed. NBCUniversal’s $200 million investment in Vox Media and its expected (though unconfirmed) $200 million investment in BuzzFeed isn’t the big broadcaster’s first date with a digital publisher. It had a disastrous marriage with top women’s lifestyle publisher iVillage, which it acquired for $600 million in 2006 and eventually merged into […]

Scripps-owned video news site Newsy is boosting its programmatic operation. One tactic is rewiring its yield management provisions to help prioritize programmatic direct vs. open auction deals. It is using a new real-time reporting tool in Tremor Video’s supply-side platform to do so. Although Newsy is six to seven years old, it’s relatively new to […]

LittleThings, which collects uplifting stories and DIY tips, went from 8 million monthly unique visitors in November 2014 to 31.5 million last June, making it part of the comScore 100. But though it’s the third most shared publisher on Facebook according to Newswhip, LittleThings suffers from low brand recognition. That’s something LittleThings is trying to […]

The New York Times’ digital business grew both in subscriptions and ad revenue in Q2. Digital revenue grew 14% to $48.3 million because of “mobile, paid posts and programmatic,” CEO Mark Thompson said. Digital subscriptions grew 19% to 990,000 and, by the time of the earnings call, had passed 1 million subscribers. Growing the scale […]

The New York Times hopes to address mobile advertising problems with a customizable native in-stream ad unit called Mobile Moments, set for a mid-September launch. The publisher built the unit in-house using insights from its editorial team. It will be available both on apps and the mobile web, and a few advertisers have already signed […]

Publishers seeking to create more competition and access for programmatic buyers have embraced header bidding over the past year. AppNexus first brought header bidding technology to market in 2009, back when RTB first started, but not many of its customers used it. Now it’s seeing increased demand from publishers adding its header bidding (or pre-bid) […]

After launching programmatic print in February, Time Inc. on Friday unveiled a new phase of the sales initiative. It adds 12 audience categories to the original half dozen. Media planners can purchase new audience segments across 18 of Time Inc.’s US brands, including sport enthusiasts, travelers, fashion followers, moms and foodies. By doing so they […]

Publishers are going to be shouldering the bulk of the burden of the user consent policy Google announced Monday. Google, in an effort to proactively comply with upcoming EU data protection legislation, outlined a user consent policy requiring publishers using AdSense, DoubleClick Ad Exchange or DoubleClick for Publishers to add cookie notifications across desktop, mobile […]

Nielsen’s acquisition in March of data-management platform and exchange eXelate is already proving its value, the measurement company said during its Q2 earnings call Tuesday. EXelate is part of Nielsen’s marketing effectiveness suite and has been instrumental in securing client buy-in of marketing analytics. Recent wins include Walmart and major consumer packaged-goods companies, said Nielsen CEO Mitch Barns. “An increasingly programmatic […]

A year after Yahoo’s disastrous Q2, the company reported year over year revenue growth of 15%, or $159 million, its best in nearly nine years. Yahoo saw Q2 revenue of $1.24 billion. So-called “Mavens” revenue (mobile, video, native and social) grew 60% to $399 million from $249 million during the same time last year. Yahoo CEO Marissa […]