City AM will let advertisers publish directly to its site

The publisher features native advertising packages on its site (which relaunched a few weeks ago), including in-stream on the home page and also within article pages. Four separate packages are available currently, which cost an average of £2,000 ($2,830) per day.

But it hasn’t previously allowed advertisers to access its CMS directly, and Yardley said there is no native revenue currently. Naturally he plans to change that with the launch of City Talk, and he wants to have three brand partners on board by the end of the year.

What City AM hasn’t done is launch its own content studio to create ads for brands.  All brand partners will be responsible for the content they upload, which will be clearly labelled and will extend to mobile.

“We’re adopting this because of client demand, the changing brand journalism landscape and the desire to be among the first to market a proposition in the UK that is already gaining a lot of positive dialogue. It’s a key part of our plans as we undergo a meaningful transformation of our business in a highly competitive environment,” added Yardley.

The new product is one of many changes happening at the title, which also announced Tuesday that it’s upping its programmatic advertising sales, courtesy of a partnership with Automated Guaranteed marketplace AdEye. Last year programmatic revenues accounted for single digits in City AM’s overall digital revenue pot, but Yardley wants to also aggressively scale its programmatic revenue this year.

“This quarter we will start to market cross-platform solutions around editorial franchises that we know our audience is already engaged with,” said Yardley.

That includes commercial packages around new editorial products, like the Power 100 Women List due to launch next month, which will also extend to a live event. The print newspaper will also be guest-edited by the CEO of Virgin Money Jayne Anne Gadhia, for the day of the launch.

City AM also made headlines recently, after it became the first U.K. title to ban desktop visitors with ad blockers enabled. The title was encouraged by the initial results, which showed a number of readers switch off their ad blockers. It’s still running the ban on the relaunched version of its site.

The new site has been designed to offer a cleaner, richer experience, and easier navigation. New channels and sections have been added, along with live public page-view counters on every article.

Main image: courtesy of Wikimedia.