by Jacqueline Koch | Nov 30, 2015 |
According to the recently published IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, internet advertising revenue in the US grew 19 per cent to $27.5bn during the first six months of 2015. While this healthy growth is surely good news for industry players, advertisers are becoming more and more concerned about whether they are getting a good return on their investment and are demanding better accountability for ad viewability and measurement.
A November 2014 report by Google titled The Importance of Being Seen: Viewability Insights for Digital Marketers and Publishers, highlighted why this is a key issue for digital advertisers today. Their research shows that 51.6 per cent of ad impressions are not seen. On average, publishers have 50 per cent viewability rates, but some publishers have much lower viewability. The problem is even more severe for video ads which are generally more expensive than static image ads. The Google study found that just 54 per cent of video ads across the web are viewable.
Making sure online ads are viewable
In an attempt to provide parameters and best practices, this year IAB is recommending that 70 per cent of a campaign’s impressions should meet the minimum standard viewability definition of 50 per cent of the ad in view for at least 1 second.
Clearly, neither advertisers nor publishers can control whether ads will be watched by online audiences, but more and more advertisers are starting to demand they only pay for ads that can be seen. Typically, some percent of ads are not viewable because they are displayed or playing in the background while users look at something else, according to the Google study. Furthermore, Google found 76 per cent of unviewable ads were in a background tab or never on-screen at all, while the remaining 24 per cent were scrolled off-screen or abandoned in less than a second.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Nov 19, 2015 |
From humble beginnings in 2004 as a daily email targeted to men in New York City, lifestyle destination Thrillist has grown steadily and has evolved one city and one topic at a time.
Today, the site operates in over 30 markets, including a few outside the United States like London and Amsterdam, and attracts more than 15m unique visitors each month. Thrillist.com is one of three properties owned by Thrillist Media Group (TMG); the others are ecommerce site JackThreads and tech site Supercompressor.
Not content with steady growth of core businesses, earlier this summer, TMG CEO Ben Lerer was out and about talking to potential investors. The result was a US$54m investment from German publisher Axel Springer, Oak Partners and SBNY (formerly Softbank) in late September. To appeal to investors who were interested in either content or commerce, but not both, TMG decided to split Thrillist and JackThreads as separate businesses, with Axel Springer being the lead investor for the content site.
This week, it became clear how Ben Leher, now the CEO of Thrillist and chairman of JackThreads, plans to spend some of the new capital. Building on the company’s history of continuous geographic expansion, Thrillist is now expanding its vertical coverage beyond food and drink to include health, entertainment as well as sex and dating.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Nov 19, 2015 |
By David Darby
This spring ushered in momentous change in the media distribution and consumption landscape. Novel content delivery methods offer publishers exciting opportunities for engagement, but also exposure to clear risks and dizzying complexity.
| Consumers have faster access to quality content as a result of the growth in mobile delivery. Standing in line at the grocery store, we can raise our smartphones to easily discover and read compelling news articles as the line inches forward. But when mobile content is discovered via Facebook feeds, an Apple News app, or similar gated spaces, publishers must weigh the gain in reach against a loss in control.
Now with this month’s launch of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), publishers have new reason for excitement, concern, and a bit of confusion.
How does your garden grow?
Facebook, of course, owns the most acreage in the world of “walled gardens”. These self-contained web environments direct and control a user’s content navigation with the goal of meeting so many of their needs, they won’t see a reason to leave.
And it’s a rich plot of garden to hoe: the longer a user stays on the site, the more data Facebook collects, allowing it to more accurately target users with the ads that power the company’s US$12bn annual revenue. |
by Jacqueline Koch | Nov 6, 2015 |
By guest blogger, Chris Carr, MerlinX Development Manager at MerlinOne
In the closing scene of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, a crate containing the Ark of the Covenant, recovered in a great adventure, is wheeled into a cavernous government warehouse and piled among a sea of other identical crates. The irony is not lost on the viewer: The priceless artifact is about to vanish, once again, perhaps to be discovered by some future archaeologist in another few thousand years.
This is the precise scenario that unfolds every day in countless publishing organizations. At some point an organization amasses enough files and documents that finding what you need, let alone knowing what you have, starts to feel very much like archaeology. This is the point where most organizations start to look into digital asset management (DAM). Whether that point is reached once you amass tens or hundreds of thousands of files or more depends on the organization, but the day invariably arrives.
Indeed, storing and finding assets was the primary focus of the earliest DAM systems—and is still a core function—but along the way DAM has evolved, matured and learned a few tricks. Let’s look at a few of the roles DAM has taken on along the way.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Nov 4, 2015 |
By Steven Wise
Hyperlocal journalism is a concept that has struggled for more than a decade to prove its viability as a profitable business model. Yet the potential for citizen-driven news continues to inspire new efforts in the space.
‘The magic of hyperlocal sites,’ according to Mark Potts, founder of the pioneering Backfence.com, ‘is that they provide a forum for community members to share and discuss what’s going on around town.’
Pott’s site shut down in 2007, two years after launch, joining a list of early hyperlocal content casualties that includes the demise of CitySearch and Microsoft Sidewalk in the 1990s. After so many flame-outs, the 2013 collapse of the much-heralded hyperlocal content site Patch.com may have come as no surprise to many. What’s truly remarkable is, after downsizing and retooling, Patch is back and becoming an example of how hyperlocal content can work.
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According to the recently published IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, internet advertising revenue in the US grew 19 per cent to $27.5bn during the first six months of 2015. While this healthy growth is surely good news for industry players, advertisers are becoming more and more concerned about whether they are getting a good return on their investment and are demanding better accountability for ad viewability and measurement.
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