online news

The world’s biggest digital newspaper site wants to fast-forward its video ambitions – not just for editorial, but for advertising. “We’re an absolute giant,” says Mail Online sales VP Matt Kaplan. “We drive more video consumption than any other player in our space – upwards of 50m streams per month – and yet it’s less than 2% of our total […]

LONDON — Users’ news consumption habits are shaped by their devices and the time of day, says Guardian chief digital officer Tanya Cordrey. “In the morning, smartphones completely rule as people snack on bits of content before they go to work,” Cordrey tells Beet.TV. “At lunchtime, we see a huge pickup on desktop traffic. By […]

CANNES, France — The conservative British mid-market tabloid is a gargantuan celebrity traffic driver online. Now it wants to both align and connect with a leading social messaging service. “It’s a little bit like WhatsApp,” says Jon Steinberg, the BuzzFeed president who was named Mail Online north America CEO this week. “It’s this giant thing that […]

LONDON — In January, Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG) announced it would re-use some US publishers’ “evergreen” articles to tell marketers’ stories. Now it is about to ope the program, Content@Scale, elsewhere in the world. “We’ve rolled it out in the US and will roll it out in 2014 in many other markets around the world,” […]

LONDON — Guardian News & Media is getting set to report that digital publishing revenue is helping make up for print revenue that is shrinking, according to the group’s commercial director. “This year, when we report our results in July, we’ll say that, for the second year in succession, the growth in digital has exceeded the […]

Quartz editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney professes to be “really optimistic about the future of journalism”, now that he’s no longer writing stories for “robots”. “Ten years ago, we were writing headlines for Google’s search index robots,” Delaney tells Beet.TV. But things have changed: “There are a few dynamics at play that push you toward equality content. “Success is […]

LONDON — If “data is the new oil“, The Guardian is sitting on a well. The news publisher has built its own in-house analytics platform, dubbed “Ophan”, to measure dozens of metrics for thousands of stories, chief digital officer Tanya Cordrey tells Beet.TV. “It shows the performance of our content at any moment of any […]

Publishers and brands spend a lot of money trying to draw audiences from other sites and services, whether through social awareness-raising or through marketing efforts. But what audiences do on your site depends very much on where they came from, says an exec from a content discovery engine. “Referral-based information can have a really big […]

LONDON — From Google’s Loon to Facbeook’s drones, the internet that Silicon Valley’s giants will create in Africa will be quite different to the one back home. With many first-time consumers adopting mobile devices before desktop, Africa may be a vision of the west’s media future. “The rate at which the mobile phone has grown […]

LONDON — The Washington Post already invested in its Post TV online video brand last year. Now it plans to increase editorial video volume and to make more video available to native ad brands. “We’ll be telling more stories using more video content than ever before,” chief revenue officer Kevin Gentzel tells Beet.TV. “We’ll lead […]

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 […]

If Instagram and Vine are the media in which millennials spend their time, why aren’t news producers publishing there? That’s what NowThisNews, a news startup founded by Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer, is doing. “We’re building the first video news org that produces original videos for the platforms and devices you take with you,” SVP […]

ABC News re-engineered its iPad app last year to present info in the morning and video in the evening, because data showed video consumption skewed later. “Our ABC News users on our tablet apps consume five times more video than users on our desktop site per session,” ABC News Digital’s product development VP Doug Vance […]

Once upon a time, people poo-pooed the idea that consumers would watch news video on their mobile phones. But data shows otherwise – and consumption isn’t always as “mobile” as you’d think. “We’re up to tens of millions of users a month on mobile,” ABC News’ head of mobile product development Peter Roybal tells Beet.TV […]

Newspaper websites in the BH Media Group are taking on the syndicated online video wire from NDN (News Distribution Network) in an effort to gain more viewers and video ad dollars. “We just signed Berkshire Hathaway properties,” NDN COO Eric Orme told Beet.TV’s programmatic leadership summit, presented by SpotXchange and hosted by The Hearst Corporation. […]

The programmatic ad-targeting techniques that are making waves in display advertising are commonly associated with low-value ad inventory. But The New York Times, a top-tier publisher which started selling some of its ads programmatically in May, doesn’t see it that way. “We’re set up a little differently from a lot of other publishers,” the Times’ […]