Publishers

Two years is a long time for online publisher Vox Media. In that span, the owner of seven editorial sites – including The Verge, SB Nation, Eater and Polygon – went from eschewing programmatic to embracing it. Vox’s strategy changed because its sites grew, explained Joe Purzycki, Vox Media’s VP of advertising. Vox totaled 20 […]

Hearst Magazines plans to remove its marketing data from silos and bring it to the cloud using Acxiom. Hearst hopes this move helps it bring together siloed customer information. Finding the overlap between Hearst newspaper and magazine subscribers, for example, is a manual process under the current system. “If a customer engages with us in one […]

Roughly a year ago, CPXi began building out two consumer-facing sites: PressRoomVIP for celebrity culture, and the music-oriented portal Hip Hop My Way. These two sites formed the foundation of CPXi’s Consumed Media publishing division, which launched in late September. What’s unusual is that CPXi, which used to be the ad network CPX Interactive, doesn’t […]

This is the 12th and final installment in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Read previous interviews with comScore, DoubleVerify, Dstillery, Forensiq, Integral Ad Science, Moat, PubChecker, RTB Asia, Telemetry, Videology and White Ops. Wasted delivery is not necessarily fraud – but all fraud is wasted delivery. In other […]

Because AARP serves a specific demographic – people over 50 – the magazine has long understood just how valuable it was to provide advertisers with a segmented audience. But within that age bracket, there is incredible diversity of segments that the AARP knew would provide value to advertisers. So the team decided to use Krux to […]

Distributing the same sponsored posts across a network of sites isn’t a widespread practice – yet. While planning the media spend for Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, ad agency Mediasmith turned to Distroscale, which allowed the team to leverage existing content to connect with readers about the hospital at scale. “Native advertising had a key role to […]

FreeWheel, a video ad server owned by Comcast and used by broadcasters like ABC and Discovery Communications, has teamed up with digital demand-side platform (DSP) TubeMogul to make premium digital video inventory accessible on a programmatic reserved basis. FreeWheel is arranging several data escrows with TubeMogul and providing access to agencies and marketers like Allstate, […]

The best way for publishers to survive these days may be to become technology companies. “Media businesses will win because of their content platform strategies,” predicted Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez. Say Media is both a technology provider and publisher of numerous online magazines including xoJane, ReadWrite, Remodelista, xoVain and Not Impossible Now. As a […]

The clock’s ticking for the click, and its replacement is rounding the corner: attention. Real-time analytics startup Chartbeat has some illustrious publisher partners on board for its attention-based metrics – which snagged Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation last week – including the Financial Times (FT), Wall Street Journal and Time.com. While publishers have traditionally used […]

As of Friday, Hearst Corporation will offer so-called premium ad units across its digital media network (which includes Cosmopolitan.com, Esquire.com and GoodHousekeeping.com) through a programmatic direct partnership with Varick Media Management. Hearst premium units involve high-impact placements that expand or include rich media, like the “lightbox,” “billboard” and cross-device “pushdown” unit that fills the page. […]

Publishers looking to maximize their yield need to think more like buyers.  With that goal in mind, Rubicon Project unveiled Ad Engine on Thursday, a beta feature running in its Seller Cloud with NewsCorp as a launch partner. Although Rubicon hasn’t released an official date for when the product will made made generally available, Josh […]

Consumers may spend a lot of time watching video on over-the-top devices and mobile, but advertisers still haven’t invested heavily in those areas. While panelists throughout Advertising Week in New York City agreed that the development of measurement techniques will help close that gap, device fragmentation complicates these initiatives. Still, connected TV makers and distributors […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jeremy Hlavacek, vice president of programmatic at The Weather Company. Quick question: What’s the fastest way to kill the enthusiasm and energy of a media sales team? Lost business? Re-orgs? Missed goals? I don’t […]

If AOL hadn’t already made it clear it would double down on digital video and end-to-end marketing tech at its Digital Newfront in May, Monday’s Programmatic Upfront at Advertising Week in New York left no doubt. AOL’s latest development? The company has layered in and built a data-management platform (DMP) out of attribution vendor Convertro, which it purchased […]

Sift Media, publisher of such websites as Accountingweb.co.uk and HRZone.co.uk, wanted to use data to create better experiences for the reader and better results for its advertisers. It found its technology match in Cxense, which offers audience data management and analytics geared to the publisher. “It was the first solution [we came across] that came […]

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 […]