Publishers

Roku, the first streaming player to translate Netflix to TV, has reached the 10 million-device mark. With 1,000-plus channels ranging from free to subscription (Hulu Plus, Netflix) and on-demand services (HBOGo and WatchESPN), Roku is scaling up its ad-supported vertical. Bringing publishers and brand partners onboard in a cookieless, connected TV environment comes with its own unique challenges, […]

Linear TV may not exactly “lean in” to programmatic (yet), but the connected device constituency is proving programmatic TV is more than just futurespeak. In a series of buy and sell-side discussions at LiveRail’s Video Publisher Forum Tuesday in New York, a number of industry execs agreed connected TV apps, publishers, ad servers and measurement […]

The Association of American Railroads (AAR) is after the kind of Washington, D.C., influencers who can impact change. But with a limited budget and a potentially boring topic, the organization needed to find a way to tell people about the vital role freight trains play in the economy. After “a difficult year for freight rail,” during […]

“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. Many publishers see their programmatic and native advertising as two very different ends in their yield spectrum. Whether called the barbell or the see-saw strategy, the […]

Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail can forecast revenue and optimize yield across its direct-sold and programmatic inventory, using a partnership between yield management firm Yieldex and ad tech company AppNexus. When the publisher signed up with Yieldex at the beginning of the year, it didn’t support AppNexus until The Globe and Mail requested it, […]

Do open auctions have a future? It depends which publisher you ask. According to executives from Meredith, Yahoo and AOL, who spoke at the Programmatic I/O Conference on Wednesday, change is coming. “It won’t live on” in its current form, said Meredith’s VP of programmatic sales and strategy, Chip Schenck. “Because it’s used and thought […]

Given the building momentum around native advertising and the growing number of publishers and startups seizing on the trend, it was only a matter of time before the 800-pound gorilla of ad technology threw its hat in the ring. While Google has yet to formally introduce its native offering, numerous AdExchanger sources with knowledge of […]

In three years, Daily Dot, an online publication focusing on Internet-related issues, has grown from zero to 10 million monthly unique visitors. The site’s monthly uniques are up 3.5 times year over year, growth the site says outpaces the third year of Gawker, BuzzFeed and Thought Catalog. If you ask CEO Nick White and CTO […]

Last month, Slate served 100 million impressions of native ads in 30 days. For the coming fourth quarter, 15 native campaigns are in development. Some are running for a few weeks. A handful of native campaigns involve publication of dozens of posts over a year. Despite that scale, until April of this year, Slate created and […]

ICrossing, a digital marketing agency owned by publishing giant Hearst, unveiled Wednesday the beginning phases of a long-term partnership with marketing software provider Kenshoo. ICrossing will integrate its Connected Marketing Platform (CMP) with Kenshoo’s tools that automate and add intelligence to bids in paid search campaigns. The ability to automate campaign functions is a key […]

From a certain point of view, it’s surprising car-shopping site Edmunds.com took the plunge into programmatic selling at all. During the annual upfronts, much of its inventory sells out, including homepage placements, sponsorships, key sections and so-called “conquest” opportunities. Car manufacturers and dealerships prize the inventory because more than half of those browsing the site end […]

Men’s Health is selling mobile native advertising campaigns directly to advertisers using Sharethrough. The move is part of an expansion in Sharethrough’s business from an in-feed native ad exchange to a facilitator of native deals sold directly via SFP (Sharethrough for Publishers). As of today, all publishers will be able to sell native directly through […]

Few publishers can match the scale and reach of The Huffington Post’s 86 million monthly global uniques. The AOL-owned property also has a highly international and social audience, said Tessa Gould, senior director of native advertising at the HuffPost Partner Studio. The studio, created last June, helps brands conceptualize, execute and evaluate native campaigns. “Being […]

A year-long effort to redesign About.com and ramp up native ad formats forced the publisher to take a hard look at itself. On the plus side, there was no dearth of content onsite. “We make 6,000-7,000 new pieces of long form content every month and we have a corpus of over 3.5 million articles,” Neil Vogel, About.com’s […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Receive The Sell Sider in your inbox twice a week by signing up for the email here, and selecting The Publisher Newsletter.  Today’s column is written by Alex Linde, senior vice president of monetization at The Weather Company. Mobile can sometimes […]

Coming from the agency world three years ago, Alexa Christon brought creative rather than media experience to her evolving role at GE, where she is now head of media innovation. And, with responsibility for GE’s US media today and an eye toward what her mega-corporation can produce globally, she’s helping to push the envelope of more […]

Because advertisers are willing to spend the most at the last click before purchase, it’s where publishers can reap the highest rewards. That’s the focus of publication family Purch – which rebranded from TechMediaNetwork in April and whose owned and operated sites include TopTenREVIEWS, Tom’s Hardware, Tom’s IT Pro, Laptop and Connectedly. “We believe the […]

Refinery29 started out as a fashion blog, but it’s since expanded its vision: It plans to be the go-to source for millennials on the subjects of beauty, travel and points of view on subjects ranging from dieting to news coming from Ferguson, Mo. It’s also a high-growth company. The digital publication has 15 million monthly uniques, according […]

The Local Media Consortium, a 55-member-strong organization of local media startups, newspapers and local television news websites, signed a three-year contract with Yahoo on Tuesday enabling reach extension through the Yahoo platform. Members will also be able to take advantage of Yahoo’s targeting capabilities on behalf of their advertising clients. “If you take a local dry cleaning […]

Ever since his company, Automated Insights, announced a partnership with the Associated Press (AP), CEO and founder Robbie Allen says it’s been a bit of a whirlwind. The idea that his Durham, N.C., firm’s technology could automate what reporters do with the appropriate data inputs clearly has larger implications. As The Washington Post and Poynter, among […]

Yieldbot, whose technology looks at a user’s clickstream and search data in order to determine likeliness to buy, is extending its business to give publishers a new way to monetize their first-party data. To help with this push, it hired Scott Portugal as GM of publisher platforms to assist publishers as they add Yieldbot to […]

“Remember, I’m on day five,” Greg Coleman said on Friday. The former president of Criteo, which went public earlier this year, recently hopped aboard BuzzFeed, where he’ll serve as president and on the board of directors. The switch reunites Coleman with many of his old co-workers at Huffington Post, including BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti. Shortly […]

AOL is both a technology company and a publisher, a fact that works in Gravity’s favor. Acquired by AOL in January, Gravity’s 45-person team is a part of AOL’s 4,800-strong workforce and its content personalization engine now powers internal links to AOL’s content repository, which sees 4,000 to 5,000 new articles every day. Gravity’s engine […]

Marketers hunger for native ads and publishers, spurred by the format’s lucrative cost, are happy to feed it to them. Yet while most publishers – 93% according to a survey conducted by the Online Publishers Association – claim to have a native offering, 47% of marketers said they were unsatisfied with their ability to distribute […]

The shift to programmatic isn’t making things easier for Scripps, the media company behind properties like HGTV, The Food Network, and The Travel Channel. Programmatic, difficulties monetizing mobile, and declining display revenues brought Scripps’ digital business down 5.3% year over year. Since digital accounted for just $27 million out of Scripps’ $684 million in revenue […]

As mobile traffic grows, the stakes for advertisers also climb. This is especially true for a publisher like Time Inc., where mobile traffic increased 35% in six short months – from 39 million unique views in December to 53 million unique views in June. As more traffic shifts to mobile, “being able to provide more […]

“Programmatic ads grew at over 100% year-over-year, and we’re growing faster than the programmatic field overall,” AOL CEO Tim Armstrong told investors looking over the company’s second-quarter results. “Programmatic [ad revenue] has grown from 5% to 34% of our business in a year, which is part of a large industry shift and the biggest shift […]

Supply-side platforms (SSPs) such as OpenX, Rubicon Project and PubMatic are under heavy pressure to increase value for publishers who pay a premium to use their technologies. “The fact that SSPs are positioned on the sell side after much of the transaction value has been extracted by other intermediaries puts more pressure on their margins […]

App developers are on an increasingly complex journey to understand what the heck users are doing — and, ultimately, figure out how to get them to do it more…or less. Mobile exchange Nexage is hoping to help by making its premium monetization solution available to the app developer community, as of Wednesday. It’s a move […]

Gannett is splitting its business into two separate, publicly traded companies. One will be the publishing division, including USA Today, USAToday.com, and 81 newspapers across the US. The other company will hold Gannett’s digital and broadcasting properties. That will include 46 television stations, as well as Cars.com and CareerBuilder.com. Gannett will also pay $1.8 billion in […]