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The New York Times Has Decide To Build Its Own Standard Advertisement
The New York Times has announced that it will be removing display advertising from its website, and instead of relying on the IAB standard advertisements for its properties, the company will be releasing custom ad alternatives to marketers.
Explaining what native advertising is can be painfully difficult, considering it means something different to everyone. At its core, Native can be described as a user experience (UX) optimized ad unit that fits into a publisher’s design style guide. The New York Times is creating advertisements that meet their internal, advertiser, and reader needs. It’s the right move for the New York Times, and it’s certainly a trend worth keeping an eye on as the industry starts to move forward.
One-size fits all advertising like all things one-size fits all, doesn’t always work out as one would expect. Publishers have unique needs, different audiences, and uncommon perspectives on what constitutes an advertisement for their publications. The New York Times has decided that it’s the right time to start providing its unique audience with unique ads.
Standards, to this point, have helped advertisers and marketers quickly build campaign creative and disseminate the files across thousands of publications with ease. Native advertising has finally reached the same place, and the New York Times is about to prove it. Creating native ad campaigns is as simple as creating a traditional display advertisement now. The performance of native campaigns, however, far outperform other types of advertising online already.
Audiences are different, and the publishers who recognize that first stand to gain the strongest foothold with advertisers looking to promote their brands with native ad campaigns.
Solving The UX Conundrum With Advertising.
When it comes to assuaging readership concerns regarding advertising online, selling custom, ethical, and UX friendly advertisement placements to marketers is the only way that a publisher can ensure a consumer-friendly placement. Standards-based placements and fully automated systems reliant on exchanges will always make that difficult. These systems have historically put publishers on the sideline and then hold them hostage to technologies that may not be in the best interest of their companies.
Deeper publisher involvement in advertising, especially in the form of native offerings, is an excellent first step in solving the UX conundrum the publishing industry has faced with display advertising over the last half decade. The tools exist, the technologies are already available for automating the buying and selling of native ads directly to advertisers. A new advertising paradigm may finally be on the horizon.
The new advertising standard is no standard. It’s time to set custom free.
PS - When I say the tools exist, I mean it - here’s a native ad that you can easily purchase on StockTwits. It’s using DFP Custom Templates, and the sales and trafficking of the ad is fully automated on the BuySellAds Platform.
Todd Garland, CEO, and Founder at BuySellAds
As Publishers Go Native, The New York Times’ Flex Ads Lead The Pack
The Flex Frame ads can look like a close cousin of banner ads, although on mobile they extend to the edge of the screen. But they perform better: The Times sees double the click-through rates for its Flex Frame ads.
New York Times Shuns Banner Ads in Favor of Proprietary Ad Format
The New York Times is moving away from standardized “banner” advertisements on its website and plans to replace them with its own proprietary display ad formats.
AdTech News And Editorial
Viewability Measurements Are Lying to You, Here's How
Viewability not a good measure of quality or usefulness in driving business impact; it cannot even be measured accurately given the cross-domain restrictions of all browsers.
Snapchat’s automated ad sales have arrived, and real ad dollars are likely coming next
The company rolled out its ads API this weekend, which allows third parties to sell Snapchat’s ad inventory using automated bidding algorithms. Essentially, the technology will let Snapchat fill more ad inventory more quickly than selling it via a sales team, which is one of the reasons Facebook and Twitter and Instagram all offer similar APIs.
Spotify ads slipped malware onto PCs and Macs
Spotify's ads crossed from nuisance over to outright nasty this week, after the music service’s advertising started serving up malware to users on Wednesday. The malware was able to automatically launch browser tabs on Windows and Mac PCs, according to complaints that surfaced online.
Apple starts showing ads in App Store search results
Apple has started showing ads in the iOS App Store for US users. Searching for popular terms like "taxi," "calendar," or "to-do list" delivers a banner advert for promoted apps above the search results.
Roku Greases The Wheels For Media Companies To Put TV-Style Apps (And Ads) On Its Platform
On the monetization side, Roku will offer to sell video ads on publishers' behalf through a 60-40 revenue share, where publishers take 60% of the cut.
Bloomberg claims new article page cuts load time in half
Launching Oct. 5, Bloomberg Technology will feature a new article template called Javelin that’s built solely for speed.
4chan is running out of money
Nisimura says ads haven’t been effective enough to support the site, nor have subscriptions offering additional features. "We had tried to keep 4chan as is. But I failed," Nisimura writes. "I am sincerely sorry."
To combat ad blocking, publishers ask staff and users to fight bad ads
But despite publishers’ best efforts, some offending ads make it through, usually through programmatic pipes.
Some publishers, like the Guardian, are democratizing the process of catching those ads. The emails go to Soch’s ad ops team, which in turn works on a remedy with the client or ad exchange responsible for the ad.
Acquisitions
Ad-Tech Firm Criteo Just Acquired Ecommerce Startup HookLogic for $250 Million
French ad-tech company Criteo has bought startup HookLogic to beef up its ecommerce capabilities for advertisers.