Exclusive benchmarks from Polar show news publishers are driving increased engagement with sponsored content
New benchmarks pulled from MediaVoice, Polar’s powerful native advertising platform, show news focused publishers’ sponsored content continues to perform above average in engagement and viewability. Everyday, these publishers are serving almost 20-million native ads to audiences looking for the latest content related to the day’s breaking stories.
Each placement of a native unit is viewed nearly 1-million times by readers, double that of the average native ad. Publishers like Associated Press, Condé Nast, Forbes, Hearst, The Huffington Post, The Mail Online, Postmedia, Slate, The Economist, The Globe And Mail, The Toronto Star, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, Time Inc UK and many more attract new, innovative advertising campaigns and initiatives made possible with the flexibility offered through MediaVoice.
Native advertising is proving a fundamental facet of news publishers’ revenue growth strategy in 2015 and the performance numbers back this up. Aggregate data from MediaVoice based on news publishers performance against their peers and industry averages show us:
• News publishers see a 0.18% average click-through-rate (CTR)
• News focused publications see a click through rate 6X of
• Headlines between 6-20 words increase CTR by 30%
• The average news focused publisher pushes 14 sponsored content campaigns per quarter
• News publishers achieve 50% better CTR when there is a number in the headline of their native ads
News And Social – More Than Just Likes
Social networks are the modern newsstand, where readers scroll through headlines and pick the publication or story which best appeals to their sensibilities. Beyond raw numbers like Facebook Likes or Twitter Retweets, data from MediaVoice shows that referral traffic delivers a more engaged reader – spending 3x the amount of time reading a piece of sponsored content than that of a reader who clicked on the ad.
Facebook accounted for almost 80 percent of social referral traffic for news verticals. MediaPromote helps publishers push their sponsored content to social sites like Facebook and amplify the footprint of their native advertising.
