Group Black, a collective that represents 200 Black-owned media publishers, launched in 2021 with a mission to make Black-owned media easier to buy. Now, it’s partnering with Magnite to help scale Black-owned inventory by making more of it available programmatically.
Kevel launched a new set of APIs on Thursday, called Relay, for publishers and their ad tech partners to build their own programmatic stacks. Kevel’s overarching vision is to provide an AWS cloud-like infrastructure to support online advertising. The purpose of Relay, specifically, is to help publishers get more innovative with their programmatic monetization strategy.
New York Times-owned sports publisher The Athletic introduced display ads on its site and in its app on Monday – but don’t expect to be able to buy these ads on the open web. The goal is to make The Athletic profitable within three years.
Chrome Unboxed, which started in 2015 as a YouTube channel for unboxing videos featuring Google’s Chromebook products, is emblematic of the early struggles upstart publishers have in monetizing their content. Its path to ad-supported profitability shows there’s still hope for the little guys in digital media.
The programmatic payment gap is a well-known issue. In the latest OAREX half-year payment report released this week, late payments are back on the rise, although to a lesser degree than in 2020.
Brands and tech vendors can do a lot more to make good on their public promises to support diverse and Black-owned media, says Rhonesha Byng, the CEO and founder of Her Agenda, a digital media platform for millennial women, and co-creator of the Black Owned Media Equity and Sustainability Institute.
What happens when your main monetization partner starts flagging your content as spam? Freecycle turned to header bidding to reduce its reliance on Google AdSense, but the company’s one-person engineering team had trouble managing the header-bidding system and the constant stream of Prebid updates on top of web development duties. So, after a 70% drop in ad revenue, Freecycle handed its digital ad business over to PubWise’s managed service.
The market is not being kind to digital media companies. The nearly 40% drop in BuzzFeed’s stock price on Monday and the decline of its valuation from $1.5 billion when it went public in December to roughly $300 million now is no doubt causing other digital-native publishers to rethink their IPO plans. But any doom and gloom about the long-term viability of digital publishers in public markets is likely overblown.
Cookie deprecation is hanging over the media and advertising industry like a storm cloud. New identity solutions built on first-party data are clearly one solution, but publishers and advertisers differ on whether they’re building their own proprietary solution or a shared shelter that will scale – and explained why at AdMonsters’ Ops conference in New York City.
Jay Glogovsky, vice president of revenue operations and analytics for The New York Times, talked to AdExchanger about how The Times relies on direct partnerships to create a positive ad experience for its readers, why open-web programmatic is the wrong choice for a privacy-centric in-app experience and why publishers should double down on close partnerships rather than worry about who will control the keys to monetization.
Direct-sold inventory is still big business for publishers. But processing insertion orders and campaign reconciliation between buyers and sellers has been an often tedious and mostly manual process. To reduce the strain on its ad ops staff, Vice Media is testing an integration between the sell-side order management platform Boostr and Prisma, Mediaocean’s digital advertising campaign management offering.
Does the rise of the subscription media model signal the end of ad-supported journalism? Not likely. But big-name news outlets like Bloomberg are finding subscriptions offer a more stable revenue source than advertising, said Bloomberg Chief Digital Officer Julia Beizer.
Small mid-sized publishers often have trouble “getting connected into the programmatic ecosystem, says Mark Walker, the CEO and co-founder of ad tech and martech holding group Direct Digital Holdings. That’s why he founded the company in 2018, to help. Now, Direct Digital Holdings is a public company and its stock is popping.
The Trade Desk recently made waves with the rollout of OpenPath, its direct-to-publisher offering, and its plan to turn off Google Open Bidding, a one-two punch in supply path optimization (SPO). Both of these SPO moves could reshuffle the ad buying ecosystem, making publishers less reliant on SSPs and cutting off a revenue source for Google’s Open Bidding.
Seller-defined audiences, the IAB Tech Lab’s spec to help publishers work together to monetize their first-party data on the open web, is ready for prime time. The idea behind seller-defined audiences is to make a publisher’s own data and site traffic transactable programmatically across multiple sites and sellers in a privacy-safe way.
Dotdash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel has a post-cookie plan. IAC is planning to consolidate the Dotdash and Meredith ad sales teams within the next two weeks and unify their ad stacks with a focus on contextual targeting.
What does it mean, in practice, to take a privacy-first approach to addressability? Respecting the consumer, of course. But it also means living in “data privacy hell.”
Since Newsweek revamped its digital business in 2019, the publication grew its readership to more than 100 million unique visitors a month and increased digital ad revenue by 166%. Newsweek CEO Dev Pragad attributes this growth to the implementation of an objectives and key results (OKR) framework that completely changed how the publication approached its […]
Advertisers understandably seek to protect themselves from fraud, awkward placements and inadvertently funding misinformation, but in doing so rely on overzealous or blunt brand-safety filters that steer them away from news and diverse content.
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 […]
The Vox Media/Group Nine deal is only the most recent example of the consolidation trend in digital media. Publishers have been turning to M&A as a method to grow their audiences and increase their ad revenue, in addition to boosting their valuation for further deals down the road.
Future PLC wrapped up a strong year for its advertising business that was fueled largely by the growth of its ecommerce offerings, its first-party data innovations and some recent acquisitions. Hoping to continue its momentum in the new year, Future announced Horizon, a new video ad unit for mobile platforms, on Monday. Jason Webby, Future’s […]
Gannett’s current president of sales development, Kelly Andresen, has been promoted to president of USA TODAY, national sales. Andresen will assume her new role at the start of 2022. Andresen will lead Gannett’s national sales division, including the USA TODAY network, which encompasses the company’s inventory across its portfolio of local and national sites. She […]
Ad management solutions provider Freestar announced Wednesday that it acquired UK-based Google AMP monetization company Triple13. Terms of the deal were not made public. However, in a conversation with AdExchanger, Freestar CEO Kurt Donnell disclosed that the deal was fully funded from Freestar’s balance sheet. Freestar will be adding all 15 of Triple13’s employees to […]
Content recommendation doesn’t have the best reputation. It’s primarily known for spammy clickbait around the web. But it doesn’t have to be that way, said Alon Rosenthal, CEO and founder of WhizzCo, a startup that allows multiple content recommendation vendors to compete for native inventory so publishers can maximize their yield. Typically, publishers only work […]
Programmatic and privacy don’t have to be mutually exclusive, even though they’re often treated that way, according to Joe Root, CEO and co-founder of London-based publisher technology startup Permutive. “A privacy-first web is about removing the data leakage that’s inherent in programmatic,” Root said. Permutive aims to stop that leakage with technology infrastructure to preserve […]
First-price auctions are coming to Google AdSense. The change will go into effect later this year, Google shared in a blog post on Thursday. Google Ad Manager and AdMob have already switched to a first-price auction. Though not nearly as momentous as when Google flipped the switch for Ad Manager, the AdSense change signals that […]
Sustainable digital media business models exist – just look at Dotdash. Dotdash acquired Meredith at a $2.7 billion valuation Wednesday to form a new media business to be called Dotdash Meredith. At first glance, the two entities coming together feels like a marriage of opposites: a century-old magazine media company and a digital native. But […]
The ad management space is consolidating. Freestar acquired Sortable Wednesday in a deal that expands Freestar’s inventory by 30% and increases its staff from 90 to 130 people. Freestar, which is profitable, self-funded the acquisition. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition is “completely additive” on multiple fronts, Freestar CEO Kurt Donnell said. […]
Google’s AdX is a primary demand source for many small- and mid-size publishers. But the way they access that demand is about to change as Google gears up to revamp the partner program that smaller ad sellers use to access AdX. Pubs need a direct integration with Google in order to tap into AdX. Because […]
