Quartz publisher Jay Lauf expects the site to be profitable by 2015, The Media Briefing’s Jasper Jackson reports. The business news site has had success with native ads, partly because it is continuously looking for ways to improve them.
“Any of these things you come up with around return on investment will be caught up with at some point, so it’s more about how can we iterate and improve our ad product so it does better. We’re doing really consultative ad-products in understanding what works on the site,” [Lauf] says.
“We’re even pushing back on advertisers when they want something, saying it won’t work as well as something else. We’re trying to be more service oriented.”
Lauf says Quartz doesn’t plan to charge for content and wants to “create as little friction as possible for people to share…content and experience it in their streams.” The site, which is owned by the Atlantic Media Company, gets about 3.5 million unique visitors a month and had 5 million in July, Jackson reports.
Here’s a look at some other native news from the past week:
- “Gone native: The magazines whose editors write ad content,” by Digiday’s Josh Sternberg
- “Storytelling ads may be journalism’s new peril,” by The New York Times’ David Carr
- “Federal Trade Commission giving native ads a closer look,” by Search Engine Watch’s Jennifer Slegg
- “StumbleUpon quietly becomes profitable as advertisers flock to mobile-friendly ads,” by Marketing Land’s Ginny Marvin
- “How native ads are challenging the obsession with scale in mobile advertising,” by Business Insider’s Marcelo Ballve
Related: Edelman suggests an “ethical framework” for paid content | Atlantic publishes, then pulls, sponsored content from Church of Scientology
