LONDON — It started out as The Manchester Guardian in 1821 and had since become a national newspaper. But, this fall, The Guardian crossed another geographical rubicon – it became more popular in the US than its native UK.
“Since we moved to theguardian.com, the US audience is bigger than the UK audience,” Guardian News & Media revenue director Tim Gentry tells Beet.TV.
The British liberal daily had tried to crack America several times, launching “Guardian America” in 2007 and “Guardian US” in 2009. After considering those as separate entities from the core site back home, this July 30 the publisher brought all its international operations under a single domain, theguardian.com, for the first time.
It’s this which has tipped the balance of the publisher’s regional traffic composition. “That’s only the beginning,” Gentry bets. “We’ll continue to see extremely strong growth of that.”
Content sponsorships are one way he hopes to monetize the new audience. Gentry says deals like that through which mobile network service EE sponsors The Guardian’s Witness citizen journalism brand “bring in seven-figure sums of revenue”. Gentry also talks about The Guardian’s use of programmatic online ad sales methods.
This video was recorded at the Beet.TV programmatic video leadership summit sponsored by Videology, hosted by Xaxis at the London offices of GroupM.
