Join us Dec. 1-3 in Nashville for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit
Ning shifted businesses about a year ago, ditching its original business model of allowing millions of free social networks in favor of a paid model. The move helped Ning get a higher quality of publisher, according to Jason Rosenthal, Ning’s CEO who will become evp of social media at Glam. It now boasts 100,000 publishers and attracts 60 million unique visitors per month.
Glam sees an opportunity to offer the technology platform to its publishers and extend its advertising across Ning sites. The question is whether the kind of brand advertising Glam is after will fit on tens of thousands of Ning properties. It’s the wrong question, if you ask Rosenthal, who thinks the nature of quality publishing is totally changing.
“Historically the highest quality content came from the largest media companies,” he said. “Today the highest quality, most engaging content online is coming from independent publishers across the Web.”
Glam sure hopes so. It is building a new-style media company that’s a hybrid of ad network and technology company. It has branched out from its roots as a woman-focused network to build tech tools, like an ad server and mobile and content-creation platforms. Ning will add a needed social piece to the puzzle, according to Glam CEO Samir Arora.
“The downturn almost wiped out many social companies,” he said. “Ning was one of the survivors.”
More in Media
How a sports betting creator drove 200 million short-form views of his podcast
Zach “Mystic Zach” Hirsch has figured out how to maximize engagement around sports-betting content while staying brand safe.
As publishers await click data, Google’s AI visibility push complicates the opt-out decision
Google is moving on two fronts: working up the U.K’s Competition and Markets Authority-mandated search opt-out publishers have long sought, while enhancing AI Overviews in ways that could make opting out less appealing.
WTF is the AI training opt-out policy token?
Major AI companies are backing a new AI training opt-out standard proposal for publishers, but it exposes deeper tensions over AI scraping.