With news publishing on the open web increasingly under threat, a publishing platform which incorporates generative AI could yet give publishers the tools to fight back.

This is the view of Markus Karlsson the founder of a technology company which provides a complete suite of services for publishers and which is increasingly incorporating AI into its offering.

Karlsson’s new Affino 9 software, released in October, is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) media business platform that makes it easy for publishers to publish content and monetise it. It also provides a whole suite of essential services for media groups including CRM, events and awards management, ad delivery, analytics and a subscription platform.

The new version is underpinned by the latest generation of open source technologies, Amazon AWS services, and is built to be ready for AI.

The London-based company believes that AI tools such as Large Language Models (ChatGPT for example) will be fundamental to how software is developed and how media organisations produce and deliver content and experiences in the coming years.

Affino 9 contains a framework to train and support multiple LLMs so publishers can offer chatbots and other experiences ‘trained’ on their content, Karlsson explains.

“Artificial intelligence is going to change everything,” says Karlsson. “The best analogy is the start of the industrial revolution, when we developed steam power. That gave us physical abilities that we just didn’t have before as a species. AI will do that in terms of mental power and ability.”

He says: “We are just going into the acceleration of the curve, and it will be an exponential curve. That’s what people need to understand.”

Subs, events, awards, website and advertising all on one platform

Affino is a software-as-a-service platform which lets publishers engage audiences, and monetise them, and has existed since the early years of the consumer internet.

“We were around when Mosaic was still the best browser,” Karlsson says. Mosaic was among the first browsers to integrate media such as graphics, and was discontinued in 1997.

Karlsson says the company has thrived through subsequent tech revolutions including cloud and mobile, but believes AI will be the biggest of all.

Among their customers is theatre weekly The Stage, which was founded in 1880, and turned to Affino to consolidate and optimise its offering.

Karlsson says: “The Stage has websites, and runs advertising, and does millions of turnover in subscriptions, they run events, and awards, and do quite a few special projects: every part of that runs through Affino.”

The key benefit for The Stage is that all their hundreds of thousands of users have completely seamless experiences and user journeys, Karlsson says.

The software also pulls together all the commercial aspects from selling subscriptions to selling tickets.

Karlsson says: “There is just a huge breadth in terms of what it delivers as a platform.”

Publishing on the open web is broken

The traditional model of publishing on the open internet where news sites rely on traffic delivered via social media and search is breaking, Karlsson believes, suggesting that the web “might be dead as a business model”.

The current state of the web makes many websites unusable, with users challenged to switch off ad blockers even when not using them, thanks to software companies such as Apple and Mozilla blocking adverts.

He says: “There are no ads. Signups are broken. The whole user journey is messed up. That’s the web today for 90% of publishers out there.”

The difference with Affino is that it doesn’t try to capture personal information unless users sign up and give permission, meaning sites built with the software can work smoothly and earn money by charging a premium for advertising to known users.

He says: “We can show ads, show the content, and for the end user, they have a much, much better experience. That doesn’t exist on the web today.”

Google, Facebook and even LinkedIn are looking increasingly keen to keep users on their sites.

Karlsson says: “It’s very concerning for the media industry and the SEO industry. I’m not saying it will definitely come to an end – but I am putting money on it happening over the next couple of years, in the way I’m investing in the platform.

“People are going to have to change the way they work because otherwise the business they are running today is going to be dead.”

Platforms such as Google are already ingesting content and showing readers summaries of news, rather than links to publisher sites. Google is testing its Search Generative Experience with signed-in users in the US and elsewhere.

“The whole Silicon Valley mantra is to ask for forgiveness, not permission,” says Karlssson. “You can’t operate at the speed you’re going to need to to dominate the market by waiting to see what might be required by a regulatory environment.”

How publishers can harness generative AI

The new Affino 9 is built to be AI-ready, after Karlsson judged that the technology was ready for use professionally.

“I don’t know if we are future-proof, but we are future-ready,” he says. “The new version of Affino allows publishers to take content, articles, PDFs, forums and social content, and start training AIs: the interface is like ChatGPT but it’s based on publishers’ own content and data.”

The company is building new AI tools for Travel Trade Gazette publisher TTG Media, including a “news and insights” AI, and a tool which helps people find travel service providers.

Karlsson says: “They can sell it as a subscription service, or monetise it through advertising.”

He says: “We brought an AI foundation to our platform, and we’re giving our clients the ability to create AIs from their content. We are using it ourselves, and launched an AI chatbot which we have fed in all our Help Guides and FAQs. The bot is already able to answer around half the customer queries which arise.”

There are several key advantages to the technology, when it comes to using AIs to create content.

Karlsson says: “AIs will be around forever, they don’t leave the company, and they are remarkably cost-effective to operate.”

Affino 9 will “bake in” AI support into every management screen, offering advice on what people should do and how they should do it.

Karlsson says: “This is the biggest change since the internet came out: we’re going to spend the next couple of years enhancing all aspects of Affino’s services with AI, as well as those our clients deliver to their end users.”

Karlsson admits that he has had negative reactions around the use of AI, with some people “adamantly opposed” to the whole idea.

He says: “They don’t understand: It’s a force of nature. We’ve had machine learning for more than 20 years already. It’s happening anyway: it has already happened. If you use Google Search, or your Android or iPhone, even how images are shown on TV’s, and the way cars provide driving assistance are all AI enhanced”.

The company is now working towards a new version of Affino where users simply chat with the product and it will do everything from creating websites to launching an entire media business.

He says: “That’s the dream. And that’s what we’re working towards.”

Find out more about Affino, the unified business platform for AI, media, publishing, events, membership and professional services organisations.

The post Publishing on the open web is broken, how generative AI could help fix it appeared first on Press Gazette.

With a history stretching back four centuries, Cologne’s DuMont publishing group began publishing prayer books in 1620 and published its first newspaper in Latin.

Owned by the aristocratic DuMont family since 1805, the publishing group owns ten local newspapers in Germany including the historic Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger and the Cologne-based tabloid EXPRESS.

The company has a long history of technological innovation, having adopted its first high-speed press in 1833.

The organisation adopted an ambitious AI-driven digitalisation strategy in 2021 across its newspaper sites, focusing on tagging and topic pages.

AI technology reads and categorises articles to boost SEO

The DuMont publishing group has interests in book publishing and marketing as well as newspaper publishing,specialised business information as well as SaaS solutions in the marketing-techology area. It has big ambitions to integrate artificial intelligence into many of its operations, with a dedicated ‘AI Circle’ within the company focusing on specific AI projects.

Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger Medien (KStA Medien), the newspaper publishing devision of DuMont, has a huge readership in its native Cologne and Bonn region and the company hoped to use AI to drive circulation, reach and digital subscriptions across websites including Express.de and Ksta.de.

The company turned to metadata and taxonomy experts iMatrics to boost reach and SEO across the sites, using software which automatically reads and categorises articles.

The problem with manual SEO

Previously, the organisation had relied on staff manually entering keywords – which led to problems, says Alina Gerber, data scientist at the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger Medien.

Gerber says: “As a data scientist, I had a lot of questions about, ‘What kind of topics do the readers like to read? What performs well?’ But we only had the categories that you would see in the navigation, very broad things like, the sports section or regional politics.”

The other problem was that people don’t tend to enter the same keywords, even when writing on the same subjects, Gerber says.

‘‘This was the major thing we were struggling with, because we had keywords, but they were manually entered – and people don’t just make mistakes, they enter the keywords differently every time. I learned that there were more than 100 ways to write FC Köln which is our local football club.”

The answer lay in artificial intelligence, and in particular natural language processing or NLP, Gerber said.

Before approaching iMatrics, the company was already experimenting with using AI in the newsroom in different ways.

KStA Medien had already experimented with using an AI-driven service to allow reporters to access data about readers, says Robert Zilz, head of data at the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger Medien.

Zilzs said: “We have done a lot of data analytics and generated a lot of insights: we have a lot of users visiting our websites and we have a very deep understanding of them thanks to backtracking and cloud-native custom tracking solutions.

“I hoped to enable people to work in a more data-driven way, not in terms of like reading dashboards or reading reports, or asking the data team, but more being more self-reliant.”

Automatic article tagging drives reach, advertising and personalisation

The whole idea of using natural language processing to understand and tag articles is relatively new.

Zilz hopes that by categorising articles using iMatrics’ technology KStA Medien can drive reach, boost advertising and personalise the site for users.

“We had this vision that we would be able to use NLP to get a better understanding of our article information.

“It was a game-changer for us to have a natural language processing service in place inside the content management system where the editorial team are actually doing their daily work, without interrupting them.”

iMatrics tags articles automatically, managing metadata to create topic pages.

Zilz says that doing this made the newspapers’ stories more visible to the ‘bots’ Google uses to create its search results. Google is one of the company’s major traffic sources, accounting for up to 60% of site traffic.

“It was a big deal to look at our biggest traffic source, Google, and make sure we are doing our best, using the topic pages to gain trust and visibility. This is one of our core features.”

Zilz now hopes to build other applications using the tagged articles, particularly around the company’s live advertising service.

With third-party publisher cookies set to be switched off on Google’s Chrome browser next year ability to serve contextual advertisements based on website data will become even more important.

At express.de the topic pages on subjects ranging from Young Cologne to Boris Becker now account for 10% of the site’s visibility on search.

Clicks on the topic pages rose 50% in one year, following the iMatrics integration, and drove more traffic across the whole site.

The company now hopes to work closely with iMatrics to build further applications based on article metadata.

Zilz says: “iMatrics are very much on the same level as us, and are super-stoked about stepping further into the world of AI.”

The post Using AI to transform discoverability at Germany’s oldest news publisher appeared first on Press Gazette.

When horse racing stopped in Britain for three months during the first lockdown of 2020, the iconic Racing Post daily newspaper faced arguably the most difficult period in its history: an enforced shutdown caused by the complete cessation of the equine events that provide the lifeblood of the paper.

While some sports managed to continue behind closed doors, UK racing was halted for an open-ended timeframe – a disaster for a title that thrived on reporting and breaking news of events throughout the country each day.

Not only did this remove the source of much of the paper’s content and affiliated income, but it also removed a major distribution pathway to circulation success, which was already hammered by the reduced footfall in newsagents.

The paper’s management and owners – Exponent Private Equity group – were presented with a terrible decision and, as editor Tom Kerr explained, the title was forced into ‘hibernation’, with the print editions halted for the foreseeable future and 89% of staff furloughed during the pandemic.

The remaining digital team doubled down on features, news and insight content, with a determination to show its loyal readers that while the events may have paused, the Post’s ability to bring news on the people and industry of horse racing remained undulled.

Meanwhile, the title itself was reimagining what it could be as a digital proposition in the future. It committed towards a plan of improved sites and apps, with better content and accessibility for when the events restarted – whenever that would be.

When racing returned – at first behind closed doors – there was, as Kerr says, an “extraordinary velocity” behind the digital versions, which include a free version for casual horse-racing fans and a paid version for professionals in the industry.

As Kerr explains: “We saw massive subscriber and audience growth during that period, and it also allowed us to think about how we were structured as a business.”

Now post-pandemic, on the days of large equestrian events, such as the Grand National or Cheltenham Festival, digital visitors to the Racing Post’s sites and apps now top 1.5 million – up from around 300,000 on an average day pre-pandemic, Kerr says.

Online subscribers now number 15,000, up by more than 20% from the pre-2020 numbers.

The title has bounced back with this new focus on digital, and its online revenues are set to outpace the print edition for the first time this year.

Within the Racing Post, digital now accounts for almost 60% of revenue. Across the wider Spotlight Sports Group business – which includes sports betting websites in America and an Australian racing newsletter – digital accounts for 70%.

Across the Spotlight Sports Group, there are 180 full-time editorial staff, including 40–45 ‘traditional’ journalists at the Racing Post who produce editorial content for both digital and print.

There are also specialist teams who handle jobs such as analysing races and producing handicap ratings, with most of the work handled in-house.

An industry icon

Racing Post is Britain’s leading newspaper covering horse racing and greyhound racing. It was founded in 1986 by Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the current ruler of Dubai and a keen horseman, with his own stables in the UK.

It was a rival to the venerable Sporting Life newspaper, which began publishing in 1859 before the two publications merged in 1998.

The Racing Post’s top-tier online subscription is £39.95 and the print paper is £4.50 or £4.95 on Saturdays.

Commenting on the paper’s pricing structure, Kerr says: “We know this makes us an expensive newspaper, but we provide a highly specialised service producing a vast range of racing news, insight and data. It’s expensive to do it properly, and we decided long ago that it was far better to ask our customers to pay the price necessary to fund, that than to cut corners and get into the inevitable cycle of decline.”

The Racing Post’s print edition claims a circulation of 50,000, but its digital business model is “quite unusual”, according to Kerr, as it has both a free and a premium model, rather than the free version simply being a taster for the paid one.

“We’re not just trying to get everyone down the funnel into being subscribers,” says Kerr. “We have a very diverse audience: it encapsulates people who may watch the racing on a Saturday and have a few five-pound bets, through to professionals who work within racing and who need our journalism and data for the purposes of doing their job.”

The free version offers accessible, lighter content, whereas the paywalled version offers more in-depth reporting, “almost a bit more like a B2B publisher”, as Kerr describes.

“There are a lot of publishers out there covering racing: the stuff which goes into our free package is the stuff other publications do as well, although we set out to do it better than anyone else,” Kerr explains.

“The stuff that’s behind the paywall, no one else does: it’s in-depth reporting, original reporting, investigations, deep dives, interviews and features that you really can’t get anywhere else.”

The newspaper has broken exclusive stories that have shaken the world of horse racing, including an investigation into a major racehorse owner, Amer Abdulaziz, with the investigation overseen by reporter Peter Scargill.

Kerr says: “Abdulaziz burst onto the racing scene from nowhere in 2017, spending millions of dollars and claiming to be operating the world’s first ‘regulated thoroughbred fund’.

“It subsequently emerged that the money he was spending was alleged to have come from OneCoin, a multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency scam led by the ‘Missing Cryptoqueen’ of BBC podcast fame and for which it was claimed he was laundering money.”

The Racing Post’s reporting established that OneCoin had been based at an office owned by Abdulaziz and that his ‘regulated fund’ was not operational.

Abdulaziz has subsequently been banned from racing horses in many countries.

A digital approach

Today, the “vast majority” of the business is geared around Racing Post’s digital platforms, with separate print teams taking online content and forming it into print products.

Digital revenues come from subscriptions, advertising and affiliate activity, Kerr says, with a significant B2B operation that supplies racing and sports betting content to publishers and bookmakers.

Before the pandemic, group revenues were 50/50 print and digital, yet the digital ‘bounce back’ since the pandemic has seen online advertising revenue rise by 70% and affiliate activity rise by 20%.

Before 2020, Racing Post had been using two bespoke internal CMSs, which had become expensive to maintain.

In 2020 they migrated to Glide Publishing Platform, a specialised headless CMS for the publishing industry.

“Looking back, you think the pandemic was a traumatic period and it definitely left a few scars,” Kerr says. “But it also allowed us to make a lot of progress, to bring a lot of new customers to our digital products and to our subscriber product. We made a lot of progress in a short period of time.”

Innovations from that time include the ability to integrate racecard data directly into stories – information that is hugely important to the Racing Post’s readers, whether amateur or professional.

“We wanted to remove the barrier between journalism and data and meld them together as much as possible,” explains Kerr. “Racecard results are a massive part of what we do at Racing Post, so if you’re reading a race report, you should be able to see the result on the same page. It shouldn’t be an onward journey, it shouldn’t be a link, it should actually be sitting there.”

Kerr says the interactive racecard widgets “create a far richer experience for our customers”.

Racing Post is currently also working on a new app for subscribers, with an improved offering to audiences. As Kerr describes, “It’s a big challenge in how we present content: how we give both those free and subscriber audiences the best possible experience.”

While Racing Post’s site visits are driven by large events such as the Grand National and Cheltenham, the team is also focusing on a longer-term effort to make racing more accessible.

“We want to make racing more accessible to more people, bringing in new generations and new fans,” Kerr says. “We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make the sport as accessible and engaging as it possibly can be.

“One key challenge is to make race cards instantly accessible to everyone regardless of their knowledge level – because, to the uninitiated, they can look like hieroglyphs,” Kerr notes.

“Can we simplify it without taking anything away? That’s one of the puzzles we are trying to solve.”

As with most publishers, print circulation is steadily declining, but, as Kerr explains, this is less of a problem for Racing Post due to its position within the industry.

He adds: “Our percentage decline compares really well against the wider industry. Racing Post goes to every betting shop in the country as well, which gives us a pretty robust position.

“Digital growth and diversification have more than offset that decline.”

The post How Racing Post survived pandemic shutdown and bounced back to growth appeared first on Press Gazette.

Sakal Media Group partnered with Quintype to modernise its CMS after the Indian newspaper group was left in situations where reporters could not file stories – and the whole organisation was slow and inefficient.

Publishing stories, even from the office, took minutes rather than seconds to appear on the group’s seven websites and 14 apps, due to a CMS which the company tactfully describes as “vintage”.

This was a huge issue in an energetic news market where seconds really count, said Swapnil Malpathak, Business Head at SMG Digital, part of the AP Globale Group which also includes Sakal Media Group.

Malpathak said: “Indian news is very sensational, very fast. It’s very different to how Western news organisations operate.”

Leaders at Sakal Group became aware they had to modernise after their creaking CMS led to severe delays in publishing stories to their sites and apps in Maharashtra, a state in the west of India to the north of Goa.

Their custom set-up left Sakal Media Group dependent on agencies, and facing pain points including difficulty publishing to different platforms and the lack of formatting options.

The company’s user base had stalled, and their titles were stifled by a lack of innovation in a rapidly changing market.

They also faced several unique challenges – and needed a new CMS built to work even over 2G connections.

Malpathak said: “We needed a CMS that understands the news media business in India.”

Sakal Media Group: 14m readers and 3,500 staff

Sakal Media Group includes three newspapers, and a local TV channel, and is the largest independently owned media business in Maharashtra.

Sakal Media Group is part of AP Globale group – which boasts a combined readership of 14 million in Marathi and English.

Headquartered in Pune, Sakal Media Group was founded in 1932 and has a workforce of 3,500 and a vendor network of 25,000 people.

The group campaigns for social change with campaigns such as the Young Inspirators Network (YIN) which aims to inspire young people to get involved with nation-building.

The wider group also has interests in commercial printing, digital media and event management services.

“We run seven websites at the moment, along with the apps that go with them,” says Malpathak. “We also have a local cable TV channel.”

Old system could not cope with slow internet speeds

Indian news relies on being able to respond rapidly to breaking stories, and having reporters “on the ground” is an important part of that, Malpathak says.

For years, business leaders at Sakal News had been aware that their system was not up to scratch.

Malpathak said: “Since about 2013 onwards, we were working on a system that was not up to the standards that the industry is using. It was a nightmare to deal with.”

Malpathak says that, before the company partnered with Quintype, there was a huge delay after editors hit ‘publish’ which meant that, on occasion, a story which had taken just ten minutes to write would then take nine minutes to appear on the home page.

Malptathak said: “The story would have begun, unfolded and ended and we would be late to the party.”

Previously, Sakal Media Group had been unable for reporters to publish “on the go” due to the poor speeds of Indian mobile networks.

“In my office, you will find very fast internet,” Malpathak said, “but if I move a kilometre away, the speed will drop to a point where you can’t even have a video call.”

“Our reporters could not publish any stories from the ground where they were working or from the field.”

Malpathak and his colleagues began to look for a CMS that could meet their needs – and the different demands of the Indian news market.

He said: “We reached out to one major American publisher, who is marketing their CMS as a product,

“We found they could not understand Indian and Asian pain points when it comes to a CMS. Also, specifically, they could not match the cost expectations that Indian publishers can afford.”

At this point, Malpatahak and his colleagues began to speak to Quintype and found the company was understanding about the challenges they faced.

Quintype enables reporters to publish via the browser, even if reporters are on an Edge network (a 2G technology built to enhance data rates) and unable to pick up 3G, 4G or 5G connections.

Quintype also boosted efficiency and productivity across the board, which led directly to a large increase in traffic and article count.

The adoption of the new CMS also enabled new cutting-edge native and programmatic advertising formats, as well as multimedia content.

One CMS for print and digital on multiple products

The previous CMS which Sakal Media had used had also meant that different parts of the organisation used different software.

Since switching to Quintype, every part of the organisation now uses the same CMS – whether on print or on digital.

Reporters and editors also all access the same media library (something that was impossible before).

“It has completely optimised our news flow,” said Malpathak. “Now, things are pretty simple, pretty aligned, the whole organisation has moved on to one CMS.”

After adopting Quintype, the company saw 100% traffic growth year-on-year.

RSS feeds from the newspapers feed into the CMS, so that reporters don’t have to look for articles in a print CMS and bring them over.

“The publishing time has gone down to milliseconds now,” Malpathak said. “The editorial team finds it easy to use, because social media handles and everything is integrated into the CMS. You publish articles, press one button, the story appears on all your social media.”

Previously reporters and editors had to produce a story, then go to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram individually to promote it.

The net result has been a huge increase in the number of stories Sakal Media Group publishes per day, Malpathak says – with the Group’s sites seeing increases in story count of up to 75%.

The number of articles published on the group’s six websites has jumped from 425 to more than 750 per day.

Malpathak said: “The whole organisation is aligned, and everything is streamlined.”

Quintype Bold is available from $100 per month.

Visit quintype.com/products/bold for more information.

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Video advertising was a subject that Randy Petersen dreaded raising with his network of 70-plus travel bloggers, due to disastrous experiences in the past.

Petersen is known for having travelled millions of miles and has been described as the ‘Frequent Flyer Miles Guru’.

He has founded multiple companies, including BoardingArea, a blog network for business travellers which focuses on frequent flyer miles and points.

Petersen says that he had bad experiences with video advertising networks, which caused videos to auto-play (a big problem when many of your readers are accessing pages from planes with slow internet connections).

He had avoided video advertising for several years before deciding to switch to EX.CO, a publisher-first solution which allowed him to get his bloggers on board.

BoardingArea: From magazine to website to blogging network

BoardingArea has been online for more than 25 years, and Petersen describes himself as an ‘early adopter’ of new technology. The site began life as a magazine in the late 80s, and Petersen launched his first website in 1995, FlyerTalk.

BoardingArea is now a network of more than 70 bloggers, which publishes 120 pieces of content per day, Petersen explains. In total, Petersen’s sites serve up around two billion adverts per year.

Petersen says: “We host the blogger’s adverts, we build their sites and we run the exclusive network for their display advertising. Over the years, we’ve gone from people telling us to get real jobs to people now wanting our jobs.”

Petersen attributes the success of BoardingArea to sticking to a successful formula and not branching out into other areas.

“We have a narrow niche – we’re all about the business traveller and the frequent flyer,” he says. “Mostly about miles and points around the globe. We stayed within our niche and it’s grown very, very well. We average just under a million sessions a day across our network.”

First BoardingArea video advertising was a disaster

Petersen said he has always been experimental in adopting new technology and tested out video advertising a few years ago. It was an unmitigated disaster and was highly unpopular with the bloggers in the BoardingArea network.

He says: “In the early days, video was very demanding for bandwidth. It came with audio switched on as a default to begin with. It soured the reading experience for a lot of readers.”

The reaction from the bloggers on Petersen’s network was furious.

“We shut down after about three months,” he says. “The feedback from each blogger was that our readers are complaining about the video.”

The nature of the content published by BoardingArea made it essential that blogs load quickly. Petersen explains: “For us, it’s very important not to damage that because sometimes our readers are trying to access on a flight, where there’s no bandwidth, or in hotel lobbies that don’t have a great deal of bandwidth either. The reading experience really matters.”

After pulling the video adverts, Petersen focused on building the rest of his advertising stack, and said “Video had become a distant memory – a bad one.”

Needed a video ads solution ‘that wouldn’t embarrass me’

When Peterson finally returned to video advertising, he investigated pitches from various companies in his inbox before settling on EX.CO. Petersen noticed that most video advertising companies seemed to promise vast increases in revenue, but that wasn’t what he was initially looking for.

He said: “I was still looking for a solution that wouldn’t embarrass me with the bloggers. They were like elephants, they never forgot. They always remembered the video experience. They still said, ‘You have to promise that it won’t be audio-on.’”

He spoke to a representative at EX.CO and liked the company’s approach, in part because the adoption of EX.CO wasn’t viewed as an ad unit by Google, it was viewed as content, which meant it didn’t interfere with existing advertising.

Petersen said: “We did a demo. I liked what I saw because it really was about content and that’s a big thing for me.”

Download this free in-depth guide from EX.CO for 21 ways publishers can increase revenue from video and much more.

Content-first video advertising

The EX.CO ad units showed content first, based on an RSS feed from each blog, and only then segued into showing video.

“I thought that was a novel approach,” Petersen says. “The bloggers loved me. They like the idea that content was showing because somebody could click on the video of content and stay within the blog. In fact, they were going deeper into the blog.”

Petersen says he has stayed loyal to EX.CO in part because “the customer service has been extraordinary”. With one blogger, EX.CO created a custom video player specifically for his blog which appears embedded within the content itself.

Video ads have become top revenue channel

EX.CO suggested a small change to the way Petersen interacted with demand partners, which ended up boosting his revenues, by running demand through EX.CO players. The move was an instant success, and within a couple of months of adopting the process, EX.CO was the number one revenue channel for the whole company.

The average revenue lift per site has been 27%, with more than 12 million player loads per month. The adoption of EX.CO’s player also tripled dwell time across BoardingArea’s network of sites.

“They run about 30% of our revenue,” Petersen says. “Two years ago, that was nothing. So this is all a plus to bloggers and it doesn’t take away an ad unit from our regular ad stack from Google.”

The problem of auto-playing videos with audio on has never resurfaced since the move to EX.CO.

“We have never had a video that came on with audio, in the millions we have put out to display,’ Petersen says. “So I have been able to solve that issue with the bloggers. In this case, video is not video. It’s content first, and that has solved our problems.”

Being able to customise content was highly important to Petersen, who needed a player that could read news in multiple local languages from Korean to German to Brazilian Portuguese.

“The player has been able to make exceptions for those languages,” he says.

Peterson said that as well as being a technology company, he sees EX.CO as a customer service company: “In today’s world that’s not a bad thing!”

Download this free in-depth guide from EX.CO for 21 ways publishers can increase revenue from video and much more besides.

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