News

Yahoo!7 rolls out new homepage touting personalisation, viewability and a mobile exchange

Digital publisher Yahoo!7 is rolling out a new “infinite scrolling” website which it claims will better translate across devices, with new commercial director Paul Sigaloff admitting he would be interested in a co-operative’ mobile ad exchange but admitting the planned publishers exchange is not going to be resurrected.

One of the main sales points with the new site is the ability to buy ads for all devices across platforms in one transaction more simply, whilst the publisher is also making a move towards endorsing viewability as a metric, with ads not displaying on the front page until 50 per cent of the frame is visible using technology called Safe Frames.

This follows on from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in the US endorsing viewability as a metric following complaints from agencies their ads were not being seen despite being served and paid for.

Sigaloff, who took up his new role in April after leaving Fairfax at the end of last year, told Mumbrella: “It’s something we’ve discussed with the IAB here, and we’re also talking to other IAB members about our views on it. One difficulty is there are a number of different technology providers offering solutions in this field, and it’s difficult to say which bit of tech is right, which is something the IAB can’t do.”

For users there will be more personalisation opportunities, however Sigaloff backed Yahoo’s decision globally to ignore the Do Not Track software users can enable on browsers, designed to stop sites harvesting personal data about them, pointing to filters on the site which allow people to make the same request from Yahoo specifically.

He also said the new personalisation features, which allow users to choose which kind of content they want to see in the news feed, would also help them target native advertising better to users.

Sigaloff was heavily involved in talks around a publishers’ exchange alliance between Yahoo!7, Mi9 and News Corp when he was at Fairfax, but admitted that deal, which aimed to take on Google’s stranglehold on digital ad dollars, was not being resurrected.

Yahoo!7 pulled out of the exchange last July saying it was not going to give them a good enough financial return on their inventory, with the deal between the other publishers falling over properly in April.

However, he said there was an opportunity for more than just the “big four” publishers to band together for a new mobile exchange, as more inventory is being traded on mobile, but there is not exchange solution.

“It would be interesting to get a conversation going around that with a view to a mobile premium exchange,” he added. “We’re definitely not against exchanges philosophically, but that (the Publishers’ Exchange) was not to our benefit.”

Alex Hayes

ADVERTISEMENT

Get the latest media and marketing industry news (and views) direct to your inbox.

Sign up to the free Mumbrella newsletter now.

 

SUBSCRIBE

Sign up to our free daily update to get the latest in media and marketing.