I read with interest recently that the brightest spot in the earnings release for New York Times was the performance of it’s About.com unit.

About.com has a lot of inventory and to monetize, and has been an aggressive user of various ad exchanges including the Doubleclick Ad Exchange where it is disclosed as one of the participating publishers. That is not to say that is the reason for their good performance of course, just an interesting data point. Online revenues dropped for the other parts of the company but not as much as the problems on the offline side of the business:

The company posted a loss of $35.6 million for the quarter. On an operating basis, the company reported a profit of $80.6 million ($0.16 cents a share). Total revenues were down 16.9 percent. Revenues at the About Group unit were up 7.2 percent, but on the digital front in total, it was a different story. Website dollars dropped 7.2 percent. The main point of the NYTCo’s digital struggles in Q3 were centered at the News Media Group, which posted an 18.5 percent decline in online ad revenue. On the print side, the digital declines don’t seem nearly as bad.  Advertising revenues fell almost 30 percent for the News Media Group, as print ads declined 31.2 percent.

Publishers need to start thinking about how they can extend the reach of their inventory into various online exchanges, including those that will be enabled for real-time bidding. As our CEO Rob Leathern mentions in this piece on AdExchanger, publishers will only be able to have a voice and shape the online advertising environment and hence their revenue picture by having a seat at the advertising exchange / real-time bidding table. Part of this will relate to participating as providers of data into these ecosystems, about attaching that data to their inventory but there will also be innovations that none of us can yet predict that need strong publisher participation to help make happen.