Publishers

For major publishers that built their businesses on print and glossy magazine pages, there is a clear sense that programmatic ad sales methods are becoming mainstream. What’s less clear is how to address the problems that programmatic has forced on them, namely, the struggle over developing a common metric and how to define terms like […]

Though associating display advertising with a popular character from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings makes for an entertaining visual, Legolas Media and its new CEO Jonathan Shaevitz have decided it’s time to call a spade a spade and purposefully engage the guaranteed media marketplace; they’ve re-branded the company Upfront Digital Media effective immediately. The […]

Worldwide advertising revenue for Amazon will reach more than $800 million in 2013, as the company leverages its rich customer data and deals with the challenges of mobile advertising, according to a new forecast from eMarketer. “We’ve been looking at Amazon as a business for a while now, and at this point we felt there […]

For the past year, executives at The New York Times Company speaking on its quarterly earnings calls have singled out a particular challenge for the newspaper publisher’s display ad business: programmatic media buying methods. With this month’s hire of online ad veteran Matt Prohaska as programmatic advertising director, the NYT still regards exchange and automated […]

About seven days ahead of last week’s NewFronts digital content showcases held by Yahoo, Aol, The Weather Company, Blip, Digitas and others, NBC Universal tried to get a jump on things with its own interactive presentation, which it dubbed “Digital.Amplified.” Although it was a participant in the NewFronts last year, the feeling this year was […]

A collaboration between Condé Nast and social images aggregator Chute has led the startup to create its first advertising product, designed to use consumers’ photos as backgrounds for marketers’ messages. Chute Ads will make their first appearance on Condé Nast Traveler‘s site next month with an as-yet-unidentified marketer. While neither Condé Nast executives nor Chute […]

Mediaocean, fresh from striking a collaboration with digital video rights manager FreeWheel for handling Aol’s ad inventory across TV and online, has just netted an even bigger assignment – Comcast. The media buying workflow software company will be in charge of processing ad buys for Comcast AdDelivery, the cable operator’s cloud-based tool for distributing spot TV. It’s […]

The NewFront – the digital world’s answer to the TV upfront marketplace – wrapped up last week with a number of high-profile, extravagant showcases of new content from Yahoo, Aol, The Weather Channel and others. At the same time, programmatic buying methods have adopted traditional models of locking in guaranteed sales, months ahead of schedule. But can […]

At yesterday’s Digitas NewFront, Huffington Post executives said they would offer their native advertising content distribution system exclusively to the Publicis Groupe interactive shop’s clients. While billed as “real-time,” the self-serve content system will post marketers’ content within a two-hour window of receiving the request. “We’re bringing our year-old BrandLive service to HuffPost that will […]

“Can the TV upfronts work in digital, too?” This is a question the Wall Street Journal’s Nina Lawrence gets to consider after she and her WSJ team present their wares at today’s Digital Content NewFronts, produced by the IAB. With only five months under her belt as VP of Global Marketing and Advertising Sales, after […]

The New York Times Co. CFO Jim Follo reiterated a point he’s been making on earnings calls since last year, namely that “premium” digital advertising continues to be challenged by the rise of audience targeting and the infinite amount of digital inventory generated by social media. Read the release. During the Q1 earnings call, Mark […]

Pasadena, California-based Perfect Market has had a ringside seat while its publisher clients have battled to keep revenues flowing as an important slice of ad spend has moved to audience-based, programmatic campaigns. Consequently, in the past couple of years, Perfect Market CEO Julie Schoenfeld says her 60-person company has gone from helping publishers monetize content […]

MailOnline’s site is an endless broadsheet of breaking news, tabloid gossip and tawdry thrills (pictured: the money a stripper makes in just ONE shift – and it’s more than most people make in a month). Some might consider this publishing format tailor-made for real-time bidding. But the site, which has its own dedicated editorial and […]

Falling ad revenues hurt Gannett in Q1, even as the company enjoyed the fruits of its paywall strategy. Digital revenues and the completed national rollout of its all-access content subscription model contributed to Gannett’s 1.6% increase in overall revenue for the first quarter 2013. Total revenues were $1.2 billion, while advertising revenues accounted for $526.5 […]

The Weather Company (TWC) has partnered with Lotame to target ever-narrower segments of audiences across PC and mobile screens. Lotame, the seven-year-old data management platform, beat out four other DMPs for the assignment, TWC Chief Revenue Officer Curt Hecht confirmed. Hecht declined to say who the other contenders were, but sources indicate Lotame bested Bluekai […]

Minneapolis’ Star Tribune has been a relatively early and aggressive adopter of programmatic ad sales. The newspaper site has just finished a re-installation of Google DoubleClick’s DFP system as part of a wider effort to expand its own Advantage program, which covers real-time biddable inventory and targeting. The basic promise of Star Trib’s Advantage is […]

Last October, European social gamer Spil Games began shifting away from direct sales to completely programmatic by automating ad buys across its 46 local gaming sites network. The company is attempting to grow its business in the rest of Europe, Russia and Asia as well as the US, claiming an average active user base of […]

Yahoo has reported it’s Q1 2013 results. Get the release here.  And, the earnings call slides (PDF). Display “Highlights” from the release: GAAP display revenue was $455 million for the first quarter of 2013, an 11 percent decrease compared to $511 million for the first quarter of 2012. Display revenue ex-TAC was $402 million for […]

Condé Nast enjoyed a 3.3% growth in ad pages last quarter, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. While modest, this was the company’s highest Q1 ad page gain – typically a weak ad quarter following the heavy holiday spending period – in five years. Condé Nast Chief Revenue Officer Lou Cona and VP of Corporate Partnerships Josh […]

Business Insider, the chief digital tabloid with its screaming headlines, bold commentary and incessant slideshows, attracts a lot of pageviews, controversy and ad spending. But the mix has left it grasping for profitability. Now, with Jeff Bezos’ venture capital group leading a $5 million funding round — bringing the total raised to $18.3 million over […]

A variety of publisher analytics firms are analyzing the yield of the digital publisher today.  But for Scout Analytics, which is based just outside of Seattle, it’s not about better advertising yield as the end game. The 40-person company lays claim to the optimization of well over $2 billion in annual client revenues according to […]

The Weather Company, owner of The Weather Channel and its digital extensions, unveiled a plan to bring more addressability to its TV advertising. Dubbed “CableFX,” the new offering from the company’s WeatherFX Division brings existing “big data” to its local and regional TV targeting system. The idea  is to more closely bridge TWC’s TV, web, […]

Like a lot of content aggregators, Examiner.com saw its traffic rise to new heights by focusing on search results, then saw the multitudes evaporate when Google changed its algorithm two years ago. Since then, the company has been trying to shift away from the hyperlocal model it had when it launched in 2008, and develop […]

Earlier this month, Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, hosted a “digital upfront” designed to showcase the McLean, Va. media company’s value across the web and mobile. After years of struggle, Gannett has recently begun to see strength in its traditional TV ad sales and newspaper circulation revenues, which gained 46 percent and 24 percent, […]

Six months ago, when Steve Hansen was named CEO of blog network Buzzmedia, he realized that he shared a problem with the company’s readers and advertisers: He had no idea what the company’s identity amounted to. This week, as Buzzmedia (not to be confused with BuzzFeed) rebrands as SpinMedia, after one of its newer properties, […]

During the first week of college basketball’s March Madness, the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship, there were 36.6 million live video streams across all digital platforms, according to the NCAA, Turner Sports, and CBS Sports. This is more than twice the number of live video streams in 2012, which saw only 18.3 million for […]

Even as its parent Time Warner works on spinning off Time Inc. into its own separately traded entity, the company has been pursuing a more aggressive approach to programmatic ad sales the past few months —  albeit quietly. But it will have to go forward without two champions of that process. Earlier today, Chief Revenue […]

The private marketplace – or exchange – strategy has been bubbling for several years as large publishers look to collect programmatic media budgets from advertisers that are hunting audience across “brand-safe” sites. On Wednesday, sell-side platform PubMatic announced that business news site Business Insider had signed on as a client for its private marketplace product. […]

The old thinking: social media channels like Facebook and Twitter will be the death knell of traditional publishers. The new thinking: they need each other desperately. And just maybe, they can actually generate a worthwhile amount of ad dollars and audience engagement through mutual benefit. That was the consensus at the opening panel of the […]

Lifestyle blog network and ad rep firm operator Evolve Media is working on what executives say is a balanced approach to digital sales, albeit one that will continue to tilt more toward direct selling over programmatic methods for at least the next few years. Unlike other digital publishing and ad services rivals, such as Federated […]