Publishers

Jewelry and flower brands who briefly ramp up ad spend for Valentine’s Day love their private marketplaces. In early February, they set up private marketplaces with publishers who can provide the right audience and context. They test which sites yield conversions in the weeks before Cupid’s holiday and dial up the spend the final week […]

Mobile is the mother of all invention at BabyCenter, an online content hub for pregnancy and parenting-related content. Founded in 1997, BabyCenter has always maintained a digital-first mindset – but the changing consumption habits of its more than 40 million global monthly users, mainly current and expectant mothers, means that mobile is fertile ground for […]

Advertisers’ demand for viewability is frustrating for publishers, who must contend with new contracts, new billing structures and new ways to value inventory, all while ensuring meeting viewability standards doesn’t erode ad revenue. During a town hall at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Phoenix, about half the publishers in the packed room said they had […]

Catering to cord-cutters, cable networks and broadcasters are unbundling their content. CBS, HBO and Viacom will all roll out paid subscription services. Ex-Hulu CEO Jason Kilar is launching both a subscription-based and ad-supported web video service, Vessel. And paid TV service Dish is rolling out Sling TV, a $20-per-month streaming service that gives subscribers AMC, […]

The company formerly known as Yellow Pages has worked hard in recent years to transfer its historical strength – helping consumers find local businesses via large printed books – into a business that’s now booking more than $1 billion in digital revenue. YP acquired mobile ad firm Sense Networks one year ago and continues to refine and experiment with […]

Pandora will leverage its data assets and introduce mobile programmatic capabilities later this quarter for its iOS and Android platforms, CEO Brian McAndrews said during the company’s Q4 and year-end earnings call Thursday. “Advertisers are looking for high engagement on mobile,” McAndrews said. “In terms of digital revenue opportunities, we are positioning Pandora to lead the […]

What is digital video going to look like in 2015? Representatives from all sides talked it out at Industry Preview 2015 in a panel discussion led by Rich Greenfield, Media & Tech Analyst at BTIG & Angel Investor. Participants included: Pooja Midha, Senior VP, Digital Ad Sales & Operations, Disney ABC TV Group Dave Morgan, CEO […]

Jeff Lucas, head of ad sales for Viacom Music and Entertainment, likes photo-messaging app Snapchat. Because its user base is dominated by females under 25, the platform that popularized the “fleeting” SMS aligns closely with Viacom property MTV’s young millennial audience. It’s one of the reasons why MTV is test driving Snapchat’s new Discover feature, part of […]

When you put five magazine magnates in a room and ask them about the future of print, things get a little tense. “Fear is not a strategy,” said Condé Nast President Robert Sauerberg, asked if he was afraid of print going away. “I’m not afraid of anything. I have the greatest brand in the world.” […]

The New York Times reported relatively modest fourth-quarter and full-year earnings on Tuesday, but chief Mark Thompson hailed it as “the most encouraging year-over-year trend” for total advertising revenue since 2005. To that end, he touted strong growth in digital advertising, sponsored content and subscription-based revenue. “We were particularly pleased with the strong growth in digital […]

Twitter is finally giving its promoted tweets wings to fly beyond Twitter’s own walls. In a blog post Tuesday, Ameet Ranadive, Twitter’s senior director of product, said that advertisers will be able to syndicate promoted tweet campaigns running on Twitter to non-Twitter properties using the same creative and audience targeting parameters. Twitter didn’t get specific on how the […]

At Industry Preview 2015, a group of top publishers took a crack at what digital publishing looks like in 2015 in this panel led by MediaLink’s Wenda Harris Millard. Participants included: Zazie Lucke, Head of Global Media Marketing, Bloomberg Dao Nguyen, Publisher, Buzzfeed Troy Young, President, Hearst Digital Jon Steinberg, CEO, Daily Mail, North America […]

“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. Two years ago, Tim Armstrong co-opted the expression “barbell strategy” to describe AOL’s approach to balancing programmatic with direct sales. On one side of the barbell […]

Ad tech observers tend to assume it’s early innings in the “programmatic-direct” game, but that may not be the case. Newly reported revenues from one early startup suggest the game hasn’t started yet. iSocket, a programmatic-direct platform company acquired by Rubicon Project in November, posted full-year revenues of just $207,000 in 2013, according to a filing with the […]

When Rant Inc. founder Brett Rosin created RantSports.com out of 150 sports blogs he pulled into one centralized hub, it became the foundation of what would soon turn into a massive portfolio of properties. Rant, founded in 2010, is no longer just RantSports. The media company now includes RantChic (fashion), RantStore (ecommerce), RantFinance and RantPolitical […]

During Yahoo’s earnings call Tuesday, CEO Marissa Mayer went into some detail about Yahoo’s plans to leverage Flurry’s developer connections to launch a mobile ad network. Mayer said mobile app developers who have downloaded Flurry’s free analytics will be able to turn on monetization with Yahoo Gemini, its native solution, as well as BrightRoll video ads. More than 600,000 apps […]

Data marketing company eXelate on Tuesday launched the eXelate Customer Data Cloud, unifying its data exchange, data-management platform (DMP) and analytics. It also launched a streaming audio DMP in partnership with digital audio measurement company Triton Digital and is partnering with interactive video ad platform Innovid and set-top box provider Roku to create a smart […]

Linear TV as a distribution channel is splintering and the impact will be most felt in planning and buying around audience, said Forrester analyst and report author Jim Nail. In a survey of 3,166 adults in the Forrester report “Making Sense Of New Video Consumption,” released Friday, it’s estimated that only 46% of TV viewers […]

PubMatic has created an API that allows media buyers to find and buy private marketplace deals through their DSPs. The second phase will bring automated guaranteed deals into their platforms through the same API. Early DSP partners include DataXu, MediaMath, SiteScout, The Trade Desk and TURN. “We’re confident this will put us in a leadership […]

In April 2014 during its NewFront, Glam Media became Mode Media. The de-pinking of the company, President and CRO Dan Lagani said, “caught up the company name with where the business was.” The men’s site Brash.com, Foodie.com and parenting side Tend.com attracted audiences no longer overwhelmingly female. Hot pink walls in the office were painted […]

The three-year-old Brazilian music website Sua Musica attracts 3 million monthly unique visitors who listen to and download music from emerging local artists. With a user base focused on discovery and sharing finds, it’s become one of the most successful test publishers of Spot.IM, a chat overlay platform launched in 2012. Spot.IM looks like a […]

A year after AOL acquired Gravity, AOL-owned publication The Huffington Post has standardized the content personalization tool to power internal and external content recommendation links. This means it’s history for Taboola, HuffPost’s previous recommendation module. Gravity has powered the publisher’s “Suggested For You” internal module for the past six months, and it replaced the Taboola-powered external module […]

Can BitTorrent – often regarded as the de facto file sharing protocol for online content piracy –achieve the legitimacy to attract brand advertisers? While that remains to be seen, the company took a step toward improving its ad offering when it unveiled a partnership with Adzerk on Wednesday. Adzerk, which works with publications like social […]

The singles ad would read like this: Mobile native inventory seeks demand. In an effort to act as matchmaker, global mobile ad platform Opera Mediaworks launched Tuesday a private marketplace native extension of its mobile ad exchange, Opera Mediaworks Ad Exchange (OMAX), which until now had just focused on programmatic display and video. Because the […]

Publishers don’t just brag about their content anymore – they talk about their technology, which amplifies their voices in a world of social sharing, content recommendations and sorting algorithms. But what’s the balance between being a technology company and content creator? On the eve of the Industry Preview conference, AdExchanger asked three of the panelists […]

As the Financial Times reported last month, The Washington Post is making its content management system (CMS) available to partners, like universities and fellow newspapers. The University of Maryland, Yale and Columbia have already adopted the CMS. Additional users may come from the more than 200 newspaper partners with which the Post has established subscription-sharing […]

With its acquisition of Selectable Media this week, Meredith picked up two new ad products: one that requires users to choose a video to watch before viewing content, and another enabling native-style placements that link to a branded content page. The companies did not disclose the terms but said the exit made money for Selectable […]

Cord-cutting forecasts present a cautionary tale for linear TV’s $70 billion ad market. Interpublic Group’s media research and buying division, MAGNA Global, for instance, found live, DVR and video on-demand viewing decreased 14% year over year among the 18-24 demo set for the 2014-2015 season. Conversely, eMarketer expects the viewership for connected devices like set-top […]

Although programmatic direct solutions – which automate direct relationships between sellers and buyers – started cropping up around six years ago, growth has been slow. But that’s likely to change. eMarketer predicts automated direct deals will grow from $800 million this year to more than $8 billion in 2017, which would make programmatic direct 42% […]

“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. Back in September, ahead of the banner ad’s 20th birthday, Mediasmith’s Marcus Pratt opined on its uncertain future and proclaimed that it has long passed its […]