Meredith Kopit Levien

How a hacker cost Binance $6 billion; The NYT sees a slowdown in its (sizable) ad revenue growth; and opting out of smart TV tracking doesn’t always work.

The New York Times’ growth rate blows other large news companies out of the water; Shopify’s shares leapt by 20% after an upbeat Q2 earnings report; and Google’s AI Overviews may or may not be causing web traffic to plummet, depending who you ask.

At NewFronts, marketers weigh new budget priorities under the Trump tariffs; The New York Times isn’t letting tariffs temper its 2025 outlook; and video podcasting is taking over CTV.

The New York Times and News Corp are case studies in how news publishers are evolving to be less reliant on ad revenue. Both publishers have also increasingly looked to new revenue streams for sustained growth.

While WaPo recently lost 250,000 subscribers due to concerns over its journalistic independence, NYT added 260,000 subscriptions in Q3 thanks largely to the popularity of its non-news offerings.

The challenges facing digital advertising feel bigger than ever. But when you’re in Cannes, you can’t help but focus on the positives. Here are the six biggest ad industry trends and positive takeaways from this year’s show.

Appealing to advertisers’ better angels is never going to bring ads back to the news. But appealing to their bottom lines might.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Black Boxes All The Way Down Unsurprisingly, Google’s first AI-generated creative, which forms custom imagery and copywriting by prompt, was built into Performance Max, Google’s AI-operated advertising product. In a way, creative generation is the black box inside the black box of campaign optimization, […]

The New York Times’s subscription-focused strategy seems to be paying off amid a downturn in ad revenue. The Times reported 8% YoY revenue growth for Q3 2022, “with subscription revenue growth more than making up for a slight decline in overall advertising,” said President and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Soup To Box Did you know Chicken Soup for the Soul has a streaming service? Well, it does, and now it also owns Redbox – it paid $375 million for the 20-year-old movie rental kiosk and closed the deal Thursday, the same day it […]

Digital ads that use The New York Times’ first-party data accounted more than 20% of the Times’ core ad revenue in Q4 of 2020. The year before, revenue from ads with first-party data totaled just 7%. Overall, digital ad revenue fell 2% from the year before, to $90.1 million. Q4 revenue overall rose .2% to […]

Meredith Kopit Levien will assume the role of CEO and president of The New York Times Sept. 8, the company said Wednesday. She will succeed Mark Thompson, who has served as CEO since 2012. Read the release. “I see a big opportunity to expand journalism’s role in the lives of millions more people around the […]

The digital advertising business ain’t easy – just ask any traditional publisher. But there are bright spots. The New York Times had its best year last year for ad revenue – $709 million – in the roughly 15 years since print writ large really started to suffer, said NYT COO and EVP Meredith Kopit Levien, speaking Tuesday at […]

Any publisher who is not a big platform company is on the express train to becoming a niche ads business, predicts Meredith Kopit Levien, EVP and CRO of The New York Times. “Up until now, we’ve been a niche consumer business with a $1 billion-plus newspaper ad business,” Kopit Levien said, speaking Thursday at AdExchanger’s […]

The New York Times’ two-year-old sponsored content initiative is an apparent success: T Brand Studio posted more than $30 million in revenue in 2015, double what it did in 2014. That $30 million was just a slice of the $197 million in digital revenue the company recorded last year. Much of the rest is what […]

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” […]