Publishers

The walled gardens around publishers’ premium inventory are hard to take down, since publishers are reluctant to put premium inventory in channels associated with low-priced, performance-focused inventory. But Sonobi, whose platform combines direct-sold impressions with those sold programmatically, is trying to chip away at those walls. The company hosted a Premium Programmatic Summit with its […]

This Old House, the venerable home-improvement brand, possesses a trove of video assets highly valued by users and advertisers alike. Video is the very foundation of This Old House. The brand started off as a local Boston television show in 1979, and it now runs nationally on PBS. Time Inc., which had been running This Old […]

Does anyone want to be a content creator anymore? Women’s lifestyle site SheKnows has jumped into the user-generated content fray by buying BlogHer, which provides a technology platform for bloggers as well as opportunities to monetize. SheKnows paid an estimated $30 million-$40 million, The acquisition fits with SheKnows’ recent efforts to turn its community into […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Ed Kozek, senior vice president of product and engineering for WeatherFX at The Weather Company. How would you say 25% of your week is spent? If your answer is vendor meetings, you aren’t alone. My […]

Last month AdExchanger reported on plans by AppNexus to roll out a “Certified Supply” stamp of approval for demonstrably valid impressions, and thereby cut off the flow of spend to impressions that are fraudulent, nonviewable or otherwise undesirable. The certified program came amid growing industry concerns about the persistence of fraud in the AppNexus supply. […]

CEO Tim Armstrong thinks AOL’s bets on programmatic are paying off. Programmatic grew to 37% of non-search ad revenue, compared to 12%. Forty seven percent of revenue from AOL’s network Advertising.com was programmatic, compared to 18% during the same period last year. Advertising revenue grew 18% YoY to $473.4 million. Armstrong attributed the increase to larger shifts in the […]

“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. I want to get out ahead of all the year-end stories about resolutions and predictions. If you are in charge of yield for a publisher and […]

TripAdvisor grew revenue by 39% in the third quarter but disappointed investors by missing its guidance for Q3. Half of TripAdvisor’s traffic now comes from mobile, big news for a site that attracts 315 million monthly unique visitors. That shift has challenged many traditional publishers, but TripAdvisor said it has mobile monetization and user experience […]

Time Inc. reported increasing digital revenues and declining print revenue for the third quarter. Digital revenue rose 5% YoY, but that increase upped to 19% excluding the impact of corporate transactions related to the spinoff from Time Warner. During September 2014, Time Inc. attracted 93.6 million multiplatform unique visitors, an increase of 27% from December […]

Sometimes, a standalone app might be more trouble than it’s worth – especially if we’re talking about a branded game as part of a single activation. For WWE Studios, a subsidiary of World Wrestling Entertainment that focuses on film development and production, that proved to be the case for “Road to Wrestlemania,” its first-ever mobile […]

Krishan Bhatia oversees a portfolio that reaches north of 130 million monthly unique visitors across desktop, mobile and over-the-top devices as EVP of digital strategy and operations for NBCUniversal’s digital portfolio. Bhatia, who reports directly to president of advertising sales Linda Yaccarino, is charged with growing NBCUniversal’s digital advertising business, including its maturing programmatic discipline. […]

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 […]