What is a business, revenue, and advertising model?

Is the native advertising model working for new media publishers like Buzz Feed, Business, Insider, and others?

• Native advertising is obviously a much talked about term right now. Whatever you call it, it has it's ardent supports and stubborn detractors. Does anyone know how the underlying economics are functioning for companies that are building their business models around native advertising/custom content/sponsored advertorials? How much are brands paying? How much of the publisher's revenue is coming from native campaigns vs continued RTB banners and the like?

• Answer:

  There is quite a variation among price points depending on quite a few factors, but in terms of the larger media publishers such as Buzzfeed, BI, or Forbes, they are doing quite well, and their native advertising revenue is growing quickly for them.  Forbes is heavy on both display and native now, and this article recently came out highlighting that half of their revenue now comes from their BrandVoice: http://www.adweek.com/news/press/forbes-sponsored-content-bet-pays-148341 Buzzfeed transparently is 100% based off it, and they supposedly charge around $20k for a branded post with a $100k minimum buy, which ends up being around a $3 CPM based on their average impression numbers. http://www.digiday.com/brands/what-a-4-mil-superbowl-ad-could-buy-in-digital/ These are publishers that everyone knows about though, for more 'mid-sized' independent publishers, let's say 500k to 5 mil pageviews per month, the ratio and revenue of native/display in terms of revenue differs quite a bit depending on their sales focus among other factors.  From my experience, when it is in that traffic range, the variation in pricing is pretty large, ranging anywhere from $250 to $5-7k per sponsored content piece.  This usually depends on the audience (who they are, how much they engage - reads, shares, etc.), targeted niche (dog .gifs vs. marketing software), the sponsored content type (branded content vs. advertorial vs. giveaway, etc.) and publisher's brand/share of voice (supply vs. demand).  Banner ad networks can obviously provide a more consistent revenue stream, although usually disappointing as CPMs are getting consistently lower, but if you getting private banner sales anyways, there is no reason why you couldn't leverage native advertising as a lucrative revenue growth channel, while still maintaining a reasonable balance between the two.