Publishers

BidSwitch on Monday announced a feature for its API that will incorporate the OpenRTB2.3 standards, opening up new sources of native supply and, according to BidSwitch GM Bob Walczak, “[enabling] a much higher degree of innovation and efficiency in the native market.” BidSwitch’s value proposition is its ability to integrate once and then connect with […]

The salespeople at Business Insider had a problem. Some potential advertisers wanted to buy directly with the publication, but due to minimums implemented in mid-2014, their budgets were below the minimum spend and CPM required for a direct buy. That would make them candidates for programmatic sales, but these clients didn’t have DSPs. Some were […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Reed Barker, vice president of cable ad products at The Weather Company. Remember when you were a kid and you finally realized that there was no Santa Claus? There was a decision on the […]

Beliefnet attracts a niche audience (about 5 million to 7 million uniques per month) of all faiths who come to read content about religion. But while its readers believe in a greater power, Beliefnet wasn’t always sure they had the same faith in ads. Even though advertisers began to prioritize viewability, the publication, which fielded […]

Facebook has confirmed it will begin displaying publishers’ articles natively in the Facebook mobile app, naming nine initial media partners for the program. (Read the blog post.) Participating publishers are The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild. “We’ve been comfortable with experimenting with a variety of storytelling platforms over the past […]

Even as marketers increasingly see native programmatic as a part of the core digital arsenal – alongside video, display and mobile – industry leaders like Sharethrough have encountered a lag in adoption from major DSPs. Part of the problem is that the existence of technology solutions hasn’t had a chance to sink in with brands […]

Mediabong has designs on the US. The Paris-based video platform, which revealed a $5 million Series B round on Wednesday, plans to use the bulk of its funding to beef up operations out of its nascent New York office, where the headcount is slated to increase from two to around 10 sales and business development people […]

John Montgomery, COO of GroupM Interaction, North America will appear at AdExchanger’s upcoming CleanAds I/O conference on June 3​, an event addressing inventory quality and supply chain issues in the digital advertising ecosystem. GroupM’s stance on viewability is clear: “If an ad can’t be seen, then we can’t expect clients to pay for it,” said […]

Publishers like PureWow seeking audience development have a few usual suspects to drive traffic to sites. There’s Outbrain and Taboola, social amplification and syndication or traffic exchange. And now, to help make social amplification more efficient, they have KeyWee. “At the most basic level, they find the right audience for the content,” said Anna Lee, […]

Digital advertising revenue at Time Inc. rose 20% to $73 million in the first quarter. But overall advertising revenue declined 9% to $353 million, and total revenue declined 9% to $680 million. Those declines were still slightly better than Wall Street’s expectations. “We’re in a turnaround, and turnarounds are bumpy,” said CEO and Chairman Joe Ripp. […]

Nielsen and Roku’s marriage for over-the-top (OTT) measurement, along with Roku’s development of a unique device identifier, may be a watershed moment for the connected TV ecosystem. The agreement, announced last Thursday, will enable Roku’s publisher partners to measure the impact of ads on some 10 million set-top boxes by accessing Nielsen’s demographic data and […]

PureWow, a women’s lifestyle website, raised $2.5 million in Series Seed Preferred funding Tuesday. It’s the second pre-Series A round of funding for the profitable property, which raised seed funding when it launched in 2010. PureWow’s audience tripled in the past 12 months. Advertiser RFPs have increased 200%. “The demand is there,” CEO Ryan Harwood […]

Viralnova has been hated and admired for the path it took to find an audience. It rose to the top of the Facebook news feed in 2013 with I-can’t-not-click articles like “If You Own A Microwave, Then You Absolutely Must See This Video.” And its success showed mainstream publishers the importance of social content discovery. […]

The New York Times finished a bright quarter for digital, as both online subscriptions and ad revenue rose. Digital advertising rose the same amount that print declined, 11%, finishing at $42.3 million. However, since digital constitutes just over a quarter of advertising revenue, advertising declined overall by 5.8%. Total revenue declined just 1.6% due to cost-cutting. […]

Fifty-four stories above New York’s World Trade Center site, 800 media planners gathered Tuesday evening for AOL’s annual advertiser NewFront. The big “reveal” was a new video content and distribution agreement with broadcaster NBCUniversal. Starting this summer, select NBCUniversal videos from network partners Bravo, CNBC, E!, MSNBC, NBC, Oxygen, Syfy, Telemundo and USA will be […]

Traditional cable nets are increasingly turning to video demand-side platforms to factor things like digital purchase habits into the TV-planning process. Cadent Network, a national media network that partners with more than 200 multichannel video programming distributors (MVPD) and more than 80 cable networks at the local and national level, including Verizon FiOS, Comcast and […]

On the opening day of advertiser NewFronts, BuzzFeed and Bloomberg Media were clear about their intentions: They’re pursuing video. Aggressively. At its Monday event in New York, BuzzFeed said it will release by the year’s end a proprietary tool called Pound, designed to show advertisers how BuzzFeed stories and video content travel across the web. […]

Polyvore, a site where fashionistas make product recommendations, on Monday rolled out Promoted Trends, a native ad package purchased on a per-day basis. This structure contrasts with the CPC pricing of the company’s Promoted Products, which integrates ads into Polyvore’s news feed. Since its launch in 2013, Promoted Products has more than 300 advertisers, including etailer […]

The $45 billion Comcast-Time Warner Cable (TWC) deal is officially kaput. If the merger had materialized, it would have created an unsurpassable media and cable conglomerate with massive audience reach. From day one, regulators were wary about one company controlling too much broadband access, resulting in Comcast terminating the deal Friday. “Today, we move on,” […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Peter Spande, chief revenue officer at Business Insider. While we love stories of disruption in business, actual disruption of your personal life and work is a lot less fun. At this moment, any advertising […]

Advertisers are no longer interested in hitting demo targets alone and, leading into upfronts, media companies are baking behavioral and audience-based guarantees into their sales pitches. Buy- and sell-side parties want to link TV programs with purchase propensity to determine whether a media exposure helped loosen purse strings. “We’re seeing more demand to bring together business […]

It’s not enough anymore that Scripps Networks’ channels are, according to its Wednesday upfront presentation, “naturally optimized.” While CPGs know to find food lovers on the Food Network or Cooking Channel, and home improvement brands gravitate toward HGTV or the DIY Network, the broadcaster is working on providing more data to advertisers to enable purchase-based […]

Pangia Games doesn’t have money to waste. What app developer does? Monetization and user acquisition are tricky for anyone – although it certainly helps to have extra cash to throw at the problem. But the smaller devs out there, like Pangia, need to get creative. “We’re a team of two,” said Nick Barbato, managing partner at […]

It’s a tough road for a stand-alone second-screen app. Beamly, the social TV network formerly known as Zeebox, would appear well positioned to help publishers engage millennial audiences across all platforms. Its install base grew from 2 million monthly active users in 2011 to 10.5 million today, and Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Viacom have a joint […]

This story is part of a series on publisher coalitions and co-ops around the world. Read our earlier pieces on Pangaea and the Association of Online Publishers in the UK, La Place Média in France, SouthernX in Africa, Project Agora in Greece and Romania, Apex in Australia and CPAX in Canada. The problem with programmatic in Israel was that there weren’t many options. Google and […]

On April 21, Google will begin instituting a change to its mobile search algorithm that will take a site’s mobile-friendliness into account when ranking results. Indexed apps will also start showing up among organic search results. The update applies to mobile search only. In somewhat un-Google-like fashion, Google, which normally makes its search algorithm changes […]

Quizzes perform. They’ve set traffic records at publications like Slate and The New York Times and given rise to platforms like PlayBuzz and sites like Zimbio. That’s why Refinery29 was eager to partner with quiz platform Hone to create quizzes that have the look and feel of Refinery29 articles along with the incredible engagement that […]

Banners weren’t cutting it for Vaibhav Gupta, CEO and founder of Bidstalk, a Singapore-based company that provides a white-label mobile and video DSP platform for advertisers and publishers. But the alternative – native – presented its own attendant complications. “Marketers are ready to experiment with newer mobile-focused ad formats, but such traffic is still limited,” Gupta said. […]

When Rich Sutton became Reader’s Digest Association’s CRO in January, his top priority was to extract more revenue from the advertisers accessing its audience of 53 million monthly uniques. “We’re moving to a mix that’s more video, native and high-impact, because those are the formats that are commanding the high CPMs,” Sutton said. “I’m not […]

Google’s plan to rival Netflix and Hulu by introducing its own ad-free subscription service has left some questioning as to whether it will restrict content creators enough to move elsewhere. Although YouTube creators will receive a 55% cut of paid subscription revenue for their videos, which is equal to the percentage they earn for pre-roll […]