Publishers

Microsoft is hoping to gain more traction with higher priced, direct sales inventory on its network by striking an agreement with its fellow portals, AOL and Yahoo, to support technical specifications for automating the buying process around reserved ad sales. In other words, Microsoft is joining the push toward “premium programmatic” that AOL trumpeted Monday […]

Spotify, the ad-supported music streaming service, has barely scratched the surface of its advertising capabilities, but the 7-year-old company is treading carefully. The streaming service is up to more than 24 million active users, a quarter of whom are premium subscribers, and earned $577 million in total revenue last year. Part of the Stockholm-based company’s […]

Todd Haskell began his new job as Hearst Magazine Digital’s chief revenue officer less than a month ago, joining the publisher of magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle and Good Housekeeping to manage the business side of the 28 related websites and 14 mobile properties. He previously served six years as the group VP of […]

In recent months, NYTimes.com has sought to refine its homepage ad strategy with the promise of something “unique” for large advertisers in consumer packaged goods, automotive, electronics and finance. The latest effort is on behalf of Bank of America and builds on the publisher’s evolving video strategy. The twist in this case is an “interactive” […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Alex Linde, vice president of monetization at The Weather Company and board member of the San Francisco Bay Area Innovation Group. In the race from TV dollars to so-called digital […]

Scale continues to be one of the most challenging aspects of native advertising, and a growing number of companies are working to solve it. As advertisers look for solutions, a number of trends are beginning to emerge, according to a new report from the research firm Altimeter Group. “We’re seeing two fundamental ways that the […]

Buying MoPub does a few things for Twitter, potentially. It adds $100 million in 2013 revenue to Twitter’s income statement in the months leading up to a probable IPO. It creates an opportunity to monetize Twitter’s valuable data “off-platform” through an internally run mobile exchange. This could work by creating BlueKai-like data segments that would […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Kristine Welker, vice president, publisher and chief revenue officer of Dr. Oz Magazine at The Hearst Corp. I just embarked on my third startup, and it is as thrilling as […]

Like a lot of midsize independent newspapers, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is starting to see some thaw in the economic downturn that hurt the print business at large. While the climate is better, the challenge of declining print ad revenues has been replaced by the challenge of developing a more mature online ad strategy. The […]

Lori Tavoularis, managing director for Revenue Partnerships at Tribune Digital, said she is ignoring the uncertainty around a possible sale of some or all of the newspaper division that houses her unit. Last week, according to The Daily Caller, Koch Industries decided to give up its pursuit of the newspaper chain, which was split from […]

“Native advertising” is a projection of publisher desires to revamp traditional print advertorials. Advertisers, too, like the idea of doing something unique that dovetails with editorial content and looks good across devices without requiring three creative versions. But scalability remains an issue. Ad-tech provider Appssavvy is one of several players looking for ways to combine the […]

A year after unveiling the Wall St. Journal’s private exchange, WSJ Audex, its parent company News Corp has expanded that model to cover the rest of its global publications. The News Corp Global Exchange, as its known, won’t replace WSJ Audex, but will instead serve as an umbrella over that offering and will include inventory […]

Google is ramping up its focus on online gaming by bringing its video ad-skipping tool TrueView to the space. In doing so, Google is making good on a promise Susan Wojcicki, SVP of advertising, made back in February at the IAB Annual Meeting to expand the use of TrueView, which the company sees as a […]

With 12 years experience in digital, Jeff Burkett has seen his share of sell-side ad tech at The Washington Post.  His latest role, senior director of sales operations, is perhaps a sign of the times for the publishing world in general, as Burkett is now building his reach to the print side of “ops” while […]

Links may be the workhorses of a publisher’s marketing strategy, but to Pete Sheinbaum, former CEO of the online newsletter Daily Candy, they represent a multitude of opportunities. After the publisher was acquired by Comcast in 2008, Sheinbaum founded LinkSmart, which offers tools to help publishers manage and monetize their links. AdExchanger sat down with […]

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Jeremy Hlavacek, vice president of operations and strategic partnerships at The Weather Company’s WeatherFX Data Unit. Yield is the lifeblood of digital publishers. The primary business goal of all […]

In a surprise Monday afternoon announcement, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has struck a deal with the Washington Post Company to buy its namesake newspaper for $250 million. Read the release. The purchase comes just a few days after WaPo’s Q2 earnings demonstrated some slight income and revenue gains, though, as usual, that was due to […]

With unwavering digital-only focus, Anthony Hitchings, head of advertising technology and digital operations at FT.com, has had a front-row seat to the promises and pitfalls of programmatic media from within a large newspaper publisher’s online unit. “I see the programmatic space as providing a great opportunity for us.  But there are ‘teething troubles,’ if you […]

While the New York Times Co.’s digital advertising revenue could have been worse in Q2, the publisher saw its display strategy continued to be challenged by what the company said was a “complex and fragmented” marketplace. Read the release (PDF). Digital ad sales brought in $51.2 million during the quarter, a decline of 2.7%. In […]

During the NYTCo’s Q1 earnings call in April, executives had discussed the possibility of a turnaround in the newspaper publisher’s display ad sales, particularly mobile, but analysts don’t expect a change any time soon. For now, it looks like more of the same, particularly for the company’s display ad sales, which fell 4% in Q1. […]

The combined media spending of Publicis Groupe and Omnicom would amount to roughly $53 billion, according to separate sets of data from Pivotal Research’s Brian Wieser and WPP analytics unit Kantar Media. That translates into a tremendous amount of buying clout. Major publishers across all media continued to absorb the news from this weekend about […]

After six months in beta, LinkedIn unveiled its “Sponsored Updates” feature for marketers with budgets of all sizes, and mindful of balancing current trends around programmatic, native advertising and content marketing. Alison L. Engel, LinkedIn’s senior director of global marketing, acknowledged that those terms sum up the latest evolution of the professional social network’s advertising […]

As one of the country’s largest broadcast and newspaper owner, Gannett‘s Q2 results continue to perfectly demonstrate the promise and problems of media in transition: digital dollars are growing at a healthy 20% clip over last year, but it still only supplies 30% of the total revenues. Read the release (PDF). As the McLean, Va.-based […]

Digital-media buying may have moved from buying placement to buying audience, but vertical publishers are still gladly carrying the “contextual” torch as valuable audience continues to be attracted to niche content – an opportunity TechMediaNetwork is looking to exploit. Having raised $33 million in 2011 in hopes of unseating other tech publisher networks such as […]

Premium direct sales and real-time biddable display advertising … can they co-exist? IDG Enterprise thinks so. The owner of top-tier B2B media brands Computerworld, CIO, Network World and InfoWorld announced last week (see the release) that it has plunged into the exchange model in search of programmatic ad dollars. According to IDG Enterprise CEO Michael […]

 “Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.   Today’s column is written by Sacha Xavier, partner, media and innovation director for for Neo@Ogilvy, and Paul Chenier, vice president of national sales at AskMen.com. Are you frustrated by the number of emails and calls […]

United Online is not a typical publisher. Unlike newspaper or magazine sites, it operates the social-media yearbook site Classmates, online florist shop FTD, consumer internet-access tools NetZero and Juno and the MyPoints loyalty rewards program. But it does have plenty of inventory and claims to reach a collective 100 million registered consumer accounts every month, […]

At a time when most of the established video-ad players are looking to serve as marketplaces catering to both buyers and sellers, LiveRail is strictly focused on publishers. The 6-year-old company, which began life as yield optimizer for publisher video inventory, now offers a broader set of supply-side platform tools. Sixty percent of the 4 […]

Streaming video distributor Ooyala, one of the first video technology companies to take advantage of Twitter’s addition of rich media embeds into users’ feeds, is working on similar integrations for LinkedIn while expanding its publishers’ abilities to post and target live video on Facebook, the company told AdExchanger. “As you get beyond the mainstream TV […]

Most of Gannett’s acquisitions in recent years have been about making the company more digital, but its $1.5 billion purchase of local broadcast operator Belo is a nod to the media business’s main advertising driver: television. But as McLean, VA-based Gannett goes about creating an advertising and content “SuperGroup,” as the company stated in its […]