NewsBeat

8 NewsBeat August 2016 By JEFF SONDERMAN Newsonomics: Are ads on top news sites worth more? A new study says yes hat's the difference between premium branded news sites and other sites? Maybe about $20. Producers of unique, high quality, branded news sites are considered "premium" media. That means they can charge advertisers "premium prices," as compared to the great mass of all other sites. That $20 or so difference is how much more the premium news sites can charge for access to each thousand of its readers (a cost-per-thousand rate, or CPM) as compared to lesser-branded sites. It's just an approximation but it holds true: branded media companies believe that the "context" they provide and their "quality audiences" justifies higher-than-average rates. Their pitch to advertisers goes like this: We've got tons of readers, and they're smart and affluent. They really trust us. And when they're on our site, they're paying attention. In a word, their argument is a single word: effectiveness. With the publication of a new comScore study this morning, they just got more justification for their justifying. Entitled "The Halo Effect How Advertising on Premium Publishers Drives Higher Ad Effectiveness," comScore puts a few numbers on that effectiveness. Its key word: lift. If you are an advertiser, you want lift-off. You want increasing proof that your investment is denting the minds of digital audiences. So here's a line from the study: "Display ads on premium publisher sites had an average of 67% higher brand lift than non-publishers." "There's been a lot of commoditization in digital advertising. It's being bought like pork bellies," comScore's Andrew Lipsman, comScore's vice president of marketing and insights, explained to me this week. He designed the comScore study and wrote the paper. Given the programmatic-driven commoditization of the booming $68 billion trade, he wanted to know if premium news and entertainment brands could really justify their claims in the hyper- competitive marketplace. That design, though, allowed comScore to use a wide variety of its previously published studies, 15 of them, all to get at this question of how much brand lift advertisers were really seeing. The studies drew on comScore survey results and concentrated only on digital display advertising. Though it makes up by far the largest slice of W By KEN DOCTOR PHOTO BY JEREMY BROOKS USED UNDER A CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE.

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