Business-to-business information companies are scrambling to expand their revenue mix and reduce their vulnerability of being overly dependent on any one revenue stream. But when everyone has an events business, a marketing services business and fledgling paid content and data business, is recurring revenue emerging as the real king of valuations?

In January 2017, SourceMedia tapped Matt Yorke as chief marketing officer. Yorke, who previously served as CEO of IDG Enterprise and IDG Solutions, and most recently as managing director of business development and marketing for global media and marketing agency OMD, was tasked with setting Source on the path to creating a modern advertising and marketing services operation. “Matt Yorke will play a vital role in enabling us to capitalize on our recent accomplishments and realize the full potential of our brands and audiences as a platform for marketing services,” said SourceMedia CEO Doug Manoni at the time.   

This week, SourceMedia launched a new digital publishing platform and state-of-the-art content management system offering an improved user experience by delivering superior cross-platform and native advertising integration, better mobile viewing and seamless integration of content feeds, events promotion and other services into the reader workflow.

In conjunction with Polar, a solutions provider for publishers and a leader in native advertising, Connectiv recently conducted a survey amongst B2B publishers regarding their native advertising business, and gathered new insights from aggregate data based on MediaVoice, Polar’s native advertising platform. Here we present the current, most informative look yet at B2B industry benchmarks which shed light on the established revenue growth opportunity native advertising presents, including:

On one side sit publishers who are getting revenue from running native advertising/sponsored content and finding that—when made valuable and clearly labeled—readers are engaging with it and mostly not objecting.

Two years after holding a workshop on “native advertising,” the Federal Trade Commission (FTC or Commission) has issued an enforcement policy statement and guidance for businesses on how to utilize native or sponsored content without crossing the line into deceptive advertising.

In summarizing SIIA's recent webinar on native advertising for another audience, I focused on positives such as:

All too often we hear the phrase that readers don’t mind native content. It can mean dollars for you and not be a distraction for your audience.

All too often we hear the phrase that readers don’t mind native content. It can mean dollars for you and not be a distraction for your audience.

The FTC Takes Close Look at Native Advertising, Additional Guidance Likely On Dec. 4, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hosted a full day workshop to examine the blending of advertisements with news, entertainment, and other editorial content in digital media, referred to as “native advertising” or “sponsored content.” The workshop was titled “Blurred Lines,” highlighting the FTC’s concerns about the ability of users to distinguish editorial content from sponsored content. FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez identified the key focus of the workshop to explore whether industry self-regulation and best practices are working, to ensure that users are able to distinguish between paid and editorial content, and the retransmission and aggregation of native advertising and the various ways this is done.