Around 2013, news publishers were getting the knack of advertising for the desktop page and realising these tactics could not be applied to the mobile page with the same impact.

They were working with a single column layout and fewer ads that were small, static, and unengaging. Because of this, advertisers had the expectation that they could buy fewer ads and pay less for them. Publishers said mobile ads were earning them much less than desktop ads.

“But they were seeing as much as a quarter or more of their traffic coming from mobile devices, which lent to the monetisation problem,” Sasha Heroy, executive director of advertising products and platforms at The New York Times, said.

This created a sense of urgency and huge potential, and some publishers made it worse by cramming loads of ad code into mobile pages. They sold extra inventory for pennies, the ads and content loaded slowly, and users bounced before they even saw the ad or the content.

During the recent Mobile-First News Sites master class, recently organised as part of INMA’s Product and Tech Initiative, Heroy and product leaders from Onet and Relevo discussed how their companies have approached the mobile space in a way that maximises monetisation without sacrificing user experience.

Creating a new ad format at The New York Times

The redesign of The New York Times’ Web site was a turning point for the development of ad products and the trajectory of the ad business, Heroy said.

Teams of people from the innovation department, the news product design team, and newsroom reps started sitting together side by side to create a unified experience for readers and advertisers. This approach shifted to a new day of The Times with “Flex Suite” formats.

Flex Suite formats are a major pillar of the display ad business at The Times, and they say this works even better for them when used in conjunction with another major pillar: proprietary targeting solutions.

“Insights into our users’ reading behaviour and preferences have guided the development of flex formats and creative messaging,” Heroy said. “Marketers can assure the relevance of ads to the users who see them by using any array of our first-party audience and contextual targeting solutions.”

Data from the first half of last year shows campaigns that pair flex formats with proprietary, first-party targeting performed more than twice as well as benchmarks.

Onet doubles scroll depth, increases ad revenue

The team at Onet in Poland aimed to create a cohesive ecosystem for all of their content, Grezegorz Krawczyk, chief product officer at Onet owner Ringier Axel Springer, said.

They wanted to contain everything within the same site and to minimise redirects outside of their Web site. This mirrors the strategy that Google did; however, unlike Google, they’re maintaining their approach to this. They call this approach “instant articles.”

“This Onet instant articles idea is connected to our partnership programme and may appear in our ecosystem only via those instant articles,” Krawczyk said. “We are not redirecting content between different sites but putting almost all brands into instant articles.”

They also implemented a way for people to react to articles and give their feedback, helping them gauge the amount of views and people’s perspectives on the pieces they produce.

“The effect was outstanding because we doubled scroll depth and increased our qualitative inventory,” Krawczyk said.

Their practices led them to increase their total viewable ad inventory. However, it also lead to a loss in total inventory. But after much discussion between the different members of the team, they determined it was the best approach for their company.

They learned many valuable lessons from their work as well, Krawczyk said: “If you ask me which of these features has got the biggest impact, I would tell you the content architecture and the layout of the teasers.”

Relevo creates premium video formats

Launched in October 2022 by the Vocento group in Madrid, Relevo has quickly positioned itself as a frontrunner in sports journalism, particularly among the younger demographics of Gen Z and Millennials.

This audience, often feeling “disengaged or disillusioned with traditional, football-obsessed, male-dominated sports coverage,” gravitates towards content that is not only engaging and visually rich but also easily accessible on mobile devices, Germán Frassa, digital strategy director, said.

Understanding the unique preferences of this demographic, Relevo made a deliberate choice to adopt a mobile-first strategy. This strategic emphasis on mobile users allowed Relevo to develop a user interface that is not only minimalistic but also incorporates premium video formats.

Moreover, recognising the dual importance of monetisation and delivering a premium advertising experience, Relevo has integrated a premium, full-size video format within its mobile interface. This choice not only suits their swipeable content presentation but also offers advertisers an enticing opportunity to engage the audience with immersive, high-quality video content.

In just a few years since its launch, Relevo has achieved remarkable success, boasting 2.2 million monthly users in Spain and amassing 1.3 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X.

With 75 million monthly video views across its social channels, Relevo has not only become the leading Spanish sports newspaper on TikTok but has also set a new standard for sports journalism in the mobile era.

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