Native Ads are Taking Over, and Every Publisher Wants More

While traditional newspapers are becoming a dying breed, online news publications are growing their revenue quickly thanks to native advertising. Over the last few years, startup companies like Taboola and Outbrain grew rapidly with the help of large publishers like CNN, Fox News and other household names.

Now that the industry has matured, these same publishers are taking stronger control of their native inventory in order to monetize it even better. They want to grab a larger percentage of the media sold on their websites, while also deploying native ads in more customized formats that these ‘established’ native networks don’t support.

CNN and Sharethrough recently formed a partnership to expand native ads on all of CNN’s various properties. James Robinson explains on the sharethrough blog.

CNN International Commercial Takes Digital Advertising To The Next Level With New Sharethrough Partnership

New ad formats on CNN Digital platforms include instant play native video, graphic text over video, infographics, long-form video, articles and galleries to increase engagement across all digital platforms, focused on mobile. All native content is labelled as “Sponsor content” and includes clear disclosures to ensure transparency with the user.

Read more here…

Many other publishers are also taking steps to better control their native inventory. The New York Times is taking it even further. Recently the NY Times published a 360 degree native video ad for GE. They’re going places that traditional native ad networks simply don’t support. In fact, they even went as far as to acquire a marketing agency to bolster their native and VR efforts. Sara Guaglione wrote an article on MediaPost where explains how The New York Times intends to grow their native ads offerings.

New York Times Acquires ‘Fake Love,’ Ups Native Ad Services

Sebastian Tomich, senior vice president of advertising and innovation, stated that NYTCO has previously worked with Fake Love and it was “impressed with their experiential and creative skills.” The two companies partnered on a VR video ad to promote the Weinstein Company movie “Carol: Dearest…”. Tomich said the company will “pair [Fake Love’s] capabilities with our ad products on The Times with T Brand Studio as we expand into producing campaigns off of The Times and into the fast-growing worlds of VR and AR.”

Click Here to Read the full details

Traditional news channels and newspapers are not the only veterans jumping on native advertising. In the last 2 years, Yahoo grew their own native advertising platform named “Gemini”. Keep in mind that although Yahoo still provides search engine advertising services, Yahoo actually gets more engagement in their news service.

Yahoo actually one of the largest and most popular online publications in the United States. Alexa.com ranks Yahoo.com as the 5 biggest website in the USA — above any news website in America. Large websites like Yahoo attract lots of page views, and therefore offer many opportunities to monetize with native advertising. Those page views go to news articles covering every popular topic that you would see on any news website. With that in mind, Gemini makes perfect sense when considered with this context.

To see the impact of Gemini on Yahoo’s otherwise failing organization, you only need to look at the numbers. Recently, Yahoo published an infographic on their tumblr page showing the rapid growth of their native ad service.

The State of Native Advertising

With Yahoo’s 1B+ monthly visitors and an average of 375B+ monthly native ad requests, we have a ton of insight on the state of native advertising. Looking at our first half of 2016, the global native ad data from third-party publishers across web and app properties speaks for itself. Our partners benefit from this insight to increase ROI and so can you!
click to read the full PDF infographic

Clearly native advertising is a mature and highly valuable ad format. CNN, The New York Times, Yahoo, and many other publishers are all trying to grab their piece of this very lucrative advertising market.

With this new and expanding ad inventory, advertisers could expect advertising prices for native to flat line or even fall. However, due to the demand for native outpacing the available supply of quality ad space you should expect native to only get more pricey over time.

Pay attention to the new and up coming trends. If you’re an agile agency, then you should leverage the newest formats while prices are low. Large traditional advertisers tend to level the market and inflate ad rates with their branding plays. Native is still under valued, but that might not last very long.

Image Credit: Yahoo Tumblr

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Native Ads are Taking Over, and Every Publisher Wants More

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Why Did Facebook Start a War on Ad Blockers?

Facebook recently implemented changes to circumvent how ad blockers hide advertising on facebook.com. This change is specific to the desktop version of Facebook ads. They’ve joined the ‘cat and mouse’ game of ad blocker vs publisher. Publications like the New York times are well known for going to great lengths to try and make sure everyone sees their ads.

Why is this only coming now, and how is that relevant to the future of Facebook? Keep in mind, Facebook now earns the vast majority of it’s ad revenue from mobile devices.

Barbara Ortutay for the Associated Press covers the full story in her article aggregated to ATT.net

Facebook Hates Ad Blockers So Much It Now Blocks Them

In the most recent quarter , Facebook made $6.24 billion in advertising revenue, an increase of 63 percent from a year earlier. Mobile advertising (which is not affected by the changes) accounted for 84 percent of this.
Read more here…

With that in mind, it’s obvious that looking at the percentages is misleading. To put it into dollars and cents: 80% of $6 billion is $4.8 billion and 20% is $1.2 billion.

Now, increasing that 1.2 billion by even 1 percent means 12 million dollars per year. However, it’s easy to predict that the projected ‘boost’ to yearly revenue is actually much more than 12 million dollars.

AdWeek recently reported on the statistics surrounding desktop ad blocker usage. Lauren Johnson discusses a study by IAB which revealed some key facts.

IAB Study Says 26% of Desktop Users Turn On Ad Blockers Report digs into why people tune out digital promos

According to a new IAB report, 26 percent of desktop users and 15 percent of mobile consumers use blockers to remove ads from publishers’ websites. Roughly 32 percent of ad blockers across both groups are males between 18 and 34, and 22 percent are women of the same age.

IAB adblock statistics

Click Here to Read the full details

With that in mind, it’s easy to understand why any Facebook executive could conclude that 26% of desktop users are essentially ‘freeloading’ on Facebook.

Take the figure I mentioned earlier, 1.2 billion dollars. That represents about 3 of the 4 pieces of the desktop ad revenue ‘pie’. Now if you had all 4 pieces of the pie, what would their revenue be, all else equal?

400 million dollars is the ‘value’ at stake in Facebook’s “ad block war”.

Adam Levy explains, on The Motley Fool, why this “tiny” fraction is so important to Facebook.

Facebook’s Block on Ad Blockers Is Important for Investors

Not only do desktop ad impressions typically convert better than similar ads on mobile, thus costing more, but Facebook also benefits from the addition of right-hand column ads on desktop. It’s those right-hand column ads that drive down average ad prices on desktop compared with mobile, but they’re incremental to Facebook’s regular news-feed ads. That makes a minute spent on Facebook’s desktop site more valuable than a minute spent on its mobile app.

That’s assuming Facebook’s visitors aren’t using ad blockers.

click to read full article

Put all the pieces together, and now you’ll see what this really means: Facebook is desperately fighting for their most valuable audience.

The past few years have brought Facebook to a great peak thanks to the growth of mobile devices. Millions of new people are signing up for Facebook for the first time ever thanks to their mobile phone.

At the same time, advertising on Facebook is more sophisticated than ever. Digital experts like Gary Vaynerchuck are correctly proclaiming Facebook Ads as the best value in advertising right now.

However, after mobile device adoption plateaus, Facebook won’t be able to ride that growth any further. It’s clear they see it coming because they know their data better than anyone else.

When they’re relying on desperate moves to boost their quarterly earnings for shareholders, that’s a clear sign that the future isn’t bright for Facebook. Instead of innovating and giving people reasons to spend more time on their platform, and bring back their friends to Facebook (thus viewing more ads) they’re relying on the same moves that newspapers have resorted to in order to fund their existence online.

Facebook is following, they’re not leading any more.

Image Credit: Data from IAB, Published on AdWeek

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Why Did Facebook Start a War on Ad Blockers?

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How to Make Impressive Blog Thumbnails in 2 Minutes

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How to Make Beautiful Blog Thumbnails Easily in Less Than 2 Minutes

Images are an effective way to generate interest in your content marketing efforts. Thumbnails are the first thing that someone sees when they’re scrolling through their twitter or their facebook feed. That’s why it’s critical to spend just 1 or 2 minutes to create a simple but attractive thumbnail image for your blog posts.

That’s not just hand-wavy speculation by the way, it’s real science. Jeff Bullas showed some statistics about that in his blog post on May 28th 2012.

6 Powerful Reasons Why you Should include Images in your Marketing

• Articles with images get 94% more total views
• Including a Photo and a video in a press release increases views by over 45%
• 60% of consumers are more likely to consider or contact a business when an image shows up in local search results
• In an ecommerce site, 67% of consumers say the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing a product
• In an online store, customers think that the quality of a products image is more important than product-specific information (63%), a long description (54%) and ratings and reviews (53%)
• Engagement rate on Facebook for photos averages 0.37% where text only is 0.27% (this translates to a 37% higher level of engagement for photos over text)
• read the full list…

Clearly it’s important and valuable to add images to your blog posts. But if you’re really trying to scale your content marketing, how can you constantly produce high quality images at the same time?

In this short tutorial video, Hayk explains how to make impressive thumbnails in just under two minutes.

How to Make Impressive Blog Thumbnails in Less Than 2 Minutes

6 Steps To Make Quick Blog Thumbnails

Blog thumbnails are the first impression you make as readers pour into your site. It is essential to put your best foot forward, and it has, to begin with, a good understanding of these thumbnails and how to create them.

Let’s go through the steps:

1) Type “pablo.buffer.com” into the address bar.
2) Sift through the images (on left). Pick an image and double click to edit text.
3) Insert text as desired with the font you prefer. Tweak the sizing and placement.
4) You can add logos and other details as required.
5) Once happy with the thumbnail, click “Share and Download” on the side. This will give you a set of options as to where you can save the file. You will click “Download” and it should save on your computer.
6) That’s all. You will now have a thumbnail that can be uploaded as you wish.

These are the primary steps of creating quick blog thumbnails. They should take less than two minutes as long as you have a vision in mind of what is required. Some can do it even faster!

How To Sign Up For Buffer Account

All you need in order to do this yourself is a free tool called Pablo from Buffer. Just click that link to go to their website.

Go to “Get Started With Buffer” At the top right-hand corner. You will follow all of the instructions given on this page and fill out everything.

This should give you access to all of the features this excellent thumbnail tool has to offer. All you do after you’re logged in is just go to pablo.buffer.com to access the graphics tool.

Now that you’ve watched the video and signed up for buffer, you’re well on your way to beautiful blog thumbnails every time.

Benefits Of Good Blog Thumbnails

What are the advantages of good blog thumbnails? Why should you spend time doing this when you could leave it as is and hope for the best?

The first thing is the impression you make. An excellent blog thumbnail is going to show a sense of professionalism and attention to detail. Sub-consciously, readers are attracted to these thumbnails.

Want a good example of how that is the case? Go to YouTube and look at videos with professional thumbnails and those wish wing it. Which one is better? It is always the professional one.

Look at these thumbnails. I just searched “content marketing” on youtube and think about which video you would watch.

content marketing thumbnails searching “content marketing” on YouTube

Making nice thumbnails is very quick, so you are not wasting a lot of time. It is beneficial because it increases the volume of conversions (i.e. readers coming in) and that is what matters.

Make your blog thumbnails and notice how it bolsters your results in seconds.

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The post How to Make Beautiful Blog Thumbnails Easily in Less Than 2 Minutes appeared first on Logic Inbound – Digital Marketing Agency.

How to Make Beautiful Blog Thumbnails Easily in Less Than 2 Minutes

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Evergreen Topics to Write About – Guide to find them for ANY Industry

Content marketing has taken the world by storm. In order to constantly publish valuable content that will bring more people to your website you need to know what to write about.

It’s more than just having a general idea and a catchy title. You need to know exactly what people are searching for in order to rank your content more quickly on Google.

Ahrefs.com is a great tool for quickly finding new evergreen topics to write about. It’s a paid tool, but it’s well worth it for any content marketing or SEO company.

Evergreen Content Ideas

Hayk from Logic Inbound shows how you can find lots of quality evergreen content ideas in only a few minutes.

Evergreen Keywords

To quickly filter out your list and only narrow down to informational evergreen keywords, there are a few terms you can search with:

• how
• what
• when
• where
• why
• who
• guide
• tips
• tutorial

You’ll build your own list over time, as you do more and more of this kind of research

Evergreen Writing Guide

This tutorial is just a quick guide on finding topics to write about. You should also learn about how to actually rank the content on Google. What kind of links should you have to your articles? We’ll cover links for content in a future article.

If your website is already very powerful, then the internal links within your site will be enough to get it indexed on Google. At that point you might already rank for the exact title of your post.

The post Evergreen Topics to Write About – Guide to find them for ANY Industry appeared first on Logic Inbound – Digital Marketing Agency.

Evergreen Topics to Write About – Guide to find them for ANY Industry

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How to Quickly find Evergreen Topics to Write About for SEO

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