Publishers

Both major publishers like Forbes and startups like Buzzfeed have found there’s little point in trying to replicate the traditional ad model when it comes to digital. And even programmatic has its limits, in their view. In what was billed as a “debate” on the value or hype of native advertising at the Interactive Advertising […]

QuadrantONE, a joint venture of newspaper companies that sought to pool inventory resources and capitalize on the programatic selling opportunity, has shut down. In a note posted to its website today, the company said its joint owners — The New York Times Co., Tribune Company, Hearst and Gannett – will pursue “different paths” for U.S. display […]

Tribune Digital, the interactive arm of the newspaper and broadcasting company, expects mobile traffic on its 36 WAP sites and 60 apps to exceed the PC-based usage it gets this year across its 50 websites. But the question facing it and other publishers looking to nudge ad spending to more closely match users’ smartphone and […]

“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jeremy Steinberg, SVP, Digital Ad Sales at The Weather Company.   I started writing this post from my iPad. I finished it on my iPhone. Then I wordsmithed it on my MacBook. And I did it […]

In the two months since tech publisher IDG finished a major redesign of its PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive sites, the company is ready to expand the centerpiece of that effort: the “Homepage Hero” box. The box is intended to serve as a front door for each site, displaying a large slot called the “Content Hero,” […]

Publishers, marketers and agency executives are still talking about native advertising, whether it’s to say it’s hype, hope, old wine in a new bottle, or some combination.  We spoke with interactive shop veteran Adam Kleinberg, CEO of San Francisco’s Traction, about the headaches and opportunities associated with native ads and whether this model can stand […]

Add “holistic yield management” to the list of buzzy terms content companies are sorting through in trying to determine what’s real and what’s hype when it comes to building audiences and ad revenue. Over the past few weeks, Visual Revenue, which bills itself as the operator of a “Bloomberg terminal” for editors, has expanded into […]

The Weather Channel may have taken some heat from meteorologists for naming this past weekend’s East Coast snowstorm “Nemo,” but doing so was certainly good for ratings and web/mobile traffic. The storm also highlights an issue that its owner The Weather Company has been trying to address since bringing on several digital ad heavy hitters […]

Vikram Somaya, GM of The Weather Company‘s marketing insights group, WeatherFX, began his Media6Degree’s AdsCON presentation about the importance of data by reciting a passage from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In a stentorian voice, Somaya read lines about Caesar talking about “threatening clouds” to the attendees seated in a seminar classroom at NYU’s Stern School of […]

Last week’s news out of the Consumer Electronics Show that Time Warner Cable had struck a deal with streaming video delivery device Roku had ad industry attendees wondering whether “over-the-top” TV was near to having an advertising moment. So we put the question to a mix of video ad observers: “Given news such as this […]

Earlier this week, Thrillist Media Group, publisher of a young men’s local lifestyle guide network and e-commerce app, brought in digital ad sales vet Todd Anderman as the company’s president of sales, marketing and operations. Most recently the chief media and revenue officer of mobile ad targeter Jumptap, Anderman spent much of the past decade […]

Among the questions facing publishers last year: (1) What should be done about the rise of audience buying?, and (2) How do we make mobile advertising really pay off? Meredith Corp., the publisher of women’s magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle, has been focused on mobile for years, particularly through the […]

It’s been a little over a year since Anthony Katsur joined sell-side pricing and inventory manager Maxifier as COO from demand side platform MediaMath, and the former DoubleClick executive is moving up to the CEO seat. He replaces Jonathon Shaevitz, who steps down from the post just two years shy of taking it. The move […]

Last month, local TV broadcast operator Belo Corp. launched its attempt at a pure play digital marketing unit, ScreenShot Digital. The move is similar to ones taken by Time Inc., Gannett, Meredith Corp. and others the last three years. Unlike some of those integrated digital marketing units, ScreenShot isn’t being positioned as a way to leverage […]

In a sense, there’s nothing really new about “native advertising.” Advertorials have been around in some form since modern periodicals first began appearing over a century ago. And now, with Facebook and Twitter inserting “promotions” that are sometimes hard to distinguish from regular user posts, more traditional publishers are giving thought to going beyond sponsored posts […]

For the past seven years, Techmeme, the technology news aggregator, has relied heavily on algorithms to help it organize hundreds of breaking reports every day. While it has employed a growing team of editors to sift through and monitor the tweets, emails and other news items that come in from around the tech sector to […]

Among the many concerns ad sellers and ad agency staffers harbor about the rise of automated audience buying is that all these advancements will ultimately put people out of a job. The ethos of doing “more with less” is a general worry that happens anytime an industry finds itself in the throes of technological change. […]

J.T. Batson is leaving his post at media buying workflow systems provider Mediaocean to become chief revenue officer at Cumulus Media, which is primarily known for running the former ABC Radio Network. Meanwhile, Mediaocean, which was the resulting brand from last year’s merger between Mediabank and Donovan Data Systems, will not be replacing Batson directly, […]

Last month’s ad spending tally from the Interactive Advertising Bureau was another “record-breaker,” as marketers lavished $17 billion on web ads between January and the end of June 2012. Display revenues in the first half totaled almost $5.6 billion, up 4 percent from $5.3 billion in the first half of 2011. So everything should be […]

Over the past two years, Ziff Davis has transformed itself from a digital-only tech publisher primarily known for PCMag.com to a broader content/digital marketing play by adding audience ad targeting, e-commerce and enterprise IT functions. Now, after roughly five acquisitions since CEO Vivek Shah took over the media property with investment assistance from Great Hill Partners, […]

Content marketing tech company Outbrain has decided to make a change in its algos and how it delivers content links to publishers. In a move similar to what you might see with Google’s search product and its intriguingly-named “Panda” update, which sought to improve search results, Outbrain says it isn’t going to let just any […]

Nate Silver’s perfect forecast of the electoral map outcome in yesterday’s presidential election has created a stir in digital marketing circles almost as much as it has in political and publishing ones — and it’s easy to see why. There’s a comfortable analogy here for the media ecosystem. Just as Silver — via the New York Times’ […]

Ian Lowe is CEO of AdSlot, formerly Webfirm Group Limited, based in Australia. Recently, his company launched the AdSlot platform in North America and Europe. According to the release, AdSlot was created by the founders of Hitwise, Andrew Barlow and Adrian Giles, and Adslot Publisher is “a direct sales platform” that currently includes several properties […]

The two leading presidential campaigns are exposing website visitor data to third parties via URL and page title information, according to Jonathan Mayer, a privacy advocate and Stanford graduate student. Mayer examined the information made available on the two candidates’ campaign websites, and found “both leak.” What’s more, he says the information visible to third parties […]

As of the fall of 2012, the newspaper industry had limped through 20 straight quarters of decline, according to figures collected by the Newspaper Association of America. The consecutive decreases began in the third quarter of 2006, when combined print and online ad dollars fell 1.5 percent to $11.7 billion. Since that point, newspaper ad […]

The fearsome and punishing effects from Hurricane Sandy along the east coast the past few days has contributed to a series of record-breaking events across The Weather Company’s cable and digital properties. In particular, The Weather Channel’s parent company tells AdExchanger  that on Friday, the amount of ad dollars coming in from programmatic channels exceeded […]

Publishers are under pressure to embrace programmatic buying, but Vox Media is resisting the call. The company publishes sports blog network SB Nation, tech news provider The Verge, and video gaming info site Polygon, which made its debut this week. The introduction of Polygon represents what Vox CEO Jim Bankoff and sales director Joe Purzycki call a […]

In yet another sign that major publishers are embracing real-time bidding, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network has teamed up with The Rubicon Project to launch its first branded private ad exchange called “WSJ AUDEX.” The invitation-only exchange will allow select advertisers and marketers access to the WSJ Digital Network’s first-party data across its flagship […]

For the past couple of years, Jonathan Mendez, founder and CEO of Yieldbot, has been focusing his company’s efforts on unlocking the value in publisher data – specifically “intent.” Last week, Mendez discussed with AdExchanger the evolution of his company’s analytics product and its move towards media. AdExchanger:  Since I last spoke with you on […]

More than at any other time, publishers are trying to solve the e-commerce riddle. Consider guy-focused Thrillist. The eight-year-old lifestyle media company’s properties include its namesake e-newsletter and mobile app, a local deals provider called Thrillist Rewards, and shopping recommender JackThreads. CEO Ben Lerer spoke to AdExchanger about the way editorial and shopping curation fit together as Thrillist prepares to roll out […]