The continued spread of coronavirus has clouded the outlook for much of the second half of the year. But that uncertainty has been great for publishers’ back to school commerce plans. Just a few weeks into the unofficial start of this short shopping season, Meredith’s back to school gross sales are up 380% year over year for July, driven by strong sales in categories ranging from sanitary products to e-learning subscriptions, Meredith SVP of consumer revenue Andy Wilson said. Ziff Davis,...

Summer is usually a suboptimal time to sell advertising. But for publishers that rely on open exchanges for their programmatic ad revenue, the past two months have been among the hottest of the year. The news and politics publisher Salon is likely to close out June and July with its revenues up year over year for both months, thanks to weeks of sustained highs in CPMs for its site inventory and RPM for its pages. Through the first 23 days of July, Salon’s programmatic revenues are up 25% year...

Many of the revenue streams that power media companies have begun to come back to life in the past several weeks. But events is not one of them, a fact that has begun to really squeeze many B2B media companies. Last week, Access Intelligence, which operates several B2B media brands including AdExchanger and AdMonsters, and generates close to 70% of its revenue from live events, announced in an internal memo obtained by CNN’s Kerry Flynn that it would be slimming its workforce by 16%, through...

After years of talk about bundles being key to digital media’s future, the economic shocks of past few weeks, plus some headlines from the past few days, have put the subject backat the front of everyone’s thinking. Bloomberg Media and The Athletic announced on August 4 that they were partnering on a bundle offering six months of the Athletic free to customers. The week before, the Local Media Consortium, a trade group that represents local publishers including The Dallas Morning News and the...

At the beginning of October, at an all-hands meeting headed by CEO Guru Gowrappan, a number of Verizon executives spent nearly an hour laying out a host of new products and programming changes designed to lay the foundation of something they hope can deliver one-third of their revenue in the next five years. Some of these tools have helped Verizon Media develop strong relationships with retailers such as Walmart, which counts Verizon as one of its top drivers of affiliate transactions. But...