Washington Post

All of Cadent’s SSP’s CTV supply paths are now direct; Netflix is thriving on repurposed YouTube content; and the Washington Post continues to struggle.

Democracy dies in darkness, but also in newspaper layoffs; The Trade Desk loses its CFO (again); and start saving up for ChatGPT ads now.

In today’s newsletter: Users’ rare anime collections disappear as Sony consolidates Funimation and Crunchyroll; Instagram and Threads stop promoting political content; and why Fortnite is winning the metaverse.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Live Shopping ROI … Or RIP? Amazon, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube have all tried their darndest to make livestream shopping happen in the US. But Americans just aren’t into it, Wired reports, and Chinese influencers and companies aren’t having much success exporting their […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A Verified Love Triangle When Netflix jumped into ad sales, it promised to include ad verification through both DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. And so it came to pass. On Monday, DV and IAS both released their verification solutions for Netflix inventory. Considering […]

Mergers and acquisitions, the industry’s slow-motion pivot away from third-party data and the expansion of commerce-based business dominated the headlines for media and sell-side ad tech in 2021. What does the industry predict for 2022? More of the same as these trends continue to play out in the year ahead. First-party first In 2022 and […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Buy What You Know Shopify and Roku announced a partnership to bring a Roku app for CTV ad creation and campaign management to the dashboard of all Shopify merchants. The idea is to crack into the $16.4 billion that small and medium-sized businesses spend […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jeffrey Turner, director of digital ad operations at The Washington Post. Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat are among the highest grossing companies in digital media, earning billions as users scroll through an endless feed of content. […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Kerel Cooper, CMO at LiveIntent. Around 2015, publishers who put all their eggs in the basket of being promised rising engagement from videos on Facebook were caught in a precarious position when it turned out […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Amanda Hicks, director of product for The Washington Post’s Research, Experimentation & Development (RED) team. In the ever-evolving struggle to maximize traffic and ad revenue, publishers increasingly favor search traffic to bring audiences to their […]

Since The Washington Post opened up its header-bidding wrapper and ad-rendering engine Zeus Performance to publishers last fall, more than 50 sites have signed on, including The Dallas Morning News and fake news debunker Snopes. For both sites, improving page performance and ad viewability was a major draw. While those short-term boosts provide an immediate […]

If you’re blocking the word “coronavirus,” you’re essentially blocking everything. In this episode of “Social Distancing With Friends,” The Washington Post’s VP of commercial tech, Jarrod Dicker, checks in from his high-energy household (its members include three boys and two dogs) to talk publisher problems, including aggressive advertiser blocklists and the general trend of deflating […]

“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 Jeff Turner, head of ad product for RED at The Washington Post. For the digital advertising industry, 2019 was a year publishers, media buyers and ad tech vendors spent predicting how […]

The Washington Post became the latest publisher to develop a self-serve platform to compete with Facebook when it released Zeus Prime on Tuesday. Zeus Prime adds a self-serve buyer interface to Zeus, The Washington Post’s revenue platform. The software-as-a-service platform emphasizes fast ad load times and high viewability. Most recently, it added the cookie-less contextual […]

Advertising on news content has become a third rail that many brands won’t touch. Hundreds of brands block words like “Trump,” and others use broad keyword blocks that catch innocent articles in the crossfire. Joy Robins dove into this skittish advertiser environment in March, when she started at The Washington Post as chief revenue officer. […]

The Washington Post’s former chief revenue officer, Jed Hartman, has landed at Channel Factory, which uses video AI to help brands curate their YouTube buys for better brand safety and contextual relevance. For Hartman – whose departure from the Post was left unexplained – the new role as chief commercial and strategy officer fulfills a […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. No Mo’ CMO Silvia Lagnado, McDonald’s global CMO since 2015, will leave the company in October, Ad Age reports. McDonald’s plans to scrap the global CMO role in favor of two marketing SVPs: Bob Rupczynski will oversee marketing tech and Colin Mitchell will focus […]

Inserting fresh ads into podcasts is challenging and time-consuming. An online article loads fresh ads every time a page loads. But in the podcasting world, readers download content and ads together, which means the two must be stitched together beforehand. Because of this challenge, many older podcasts run with no ads or stale ones, even […]

Removing a bad ad unit can mean that publishers take a big revenue hit. The most intrusive ad units often please advertisers and drive large amounts of revenue. And a heavy ad load brings in more revenue per page view. So how do publishers balance the two? And when do they decide to pull the […]

Google AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, Snapchat: It’s enough to make a publisher’s head spin. With so many third-party distribution points, publishers need to be in constant test-and-learn mode. Yet too many fall into a trap of leaning too heavily on platforms – or not enough. When it comes to succeeding with platform distribution, half the […]

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Once upon a time, The Washington Post took a conservative approach to digital platforms like Facebook. Then Jeff Bezos bought the paper and everything changed. The latest episode of AdExchanger Talks brings you an in-depth discussion with Jarrod Dicker, WaPo’s head of commercial product […]

Although The Washington Post partners with Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP, which help speed mobile load times, it’s also striking out on its own. Over a two-month period, a team of Post engineers cobbled together a proprietary tech solution called Zeus that sped mobile page-load times by 75%. Viewability improved by 20% in current […]

Have you looked at The Washington Post’s website lately? The storied publication is enjoying a breakout year. In October, it posted 66.9 million unique visitors, according to comScore. That boosted its total audience by 59%, while page views soared 95% year over year, reaching nearly 770 million. Those monthly uniques put the Post ahead of […]

The Washington Post on Tuesday released a video product called FlexPlay that loads videos faster in diverse environments and customizes them to extract more engagement. Advertisers can use FlexPlay for video ads that run on the Post’s website, as well as those that run offsite, in exchange for a premium on the CPM. The idea […]

The Washington Post’s revamped home page, unveiled Wednesday, purports to bring average desktop load time to less than one second – meaning better reader experiences and more ads viewed, since visitors won’t bounce. The fresh home page completes the Post’s sitewide reboot, which started in the middle of last year with its article pages. Content […]

As the Financial Times reported last month, The Washington Post is making its content management system (CMS) available to partners, like universities and fellow newspapers. The University of Maryland, Yale and Columbia have already adopted the CMS. Additional users may come from the more than 200 newspaper partners with which the Post has established subscription-sharing […]

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 […]

Like many publishers, The Washington Post’s Kelly Andresen grapples with success metrics for native advertising campaigns. As director of ad innovations and product strategy, she has a front-row seat on her publication’s digital evolution and oversees teams that are dedicated to creating new digital advertising revenue, including native. “When you move into content marketing, it’s […]

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 […]

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 […]