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BuzzFeed, Group Nine Media and Insider forge video ad alliance

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By John Glenday, Reporter

September 24, 2019 | 3 min read

Three of the biggest names in digital media have forged an alliance to maximise video advertising by creating a single entity that is greater than the sum of its parts.

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BuzzFeed, Group Nine Media & Insider forge video ad alliance

BuzzFeed, Group Nine Media and Insider will set aside rivalries to combine ad sales across all their websites, apps and YouTube channels, a process which will see each sell video advertising collectively with the untitled entity then distributing ad revenue in proportion to the number of ads they deliver.

The partnership could grow further in the weeks and months ahead with reports in The Wall Street Journal suggesting that Discovery could also be poised to join the partnership, highlighting the growing importance of scale in a sector dominated by YouTube.

While even collectively the new alliance is nowhere near as big as the major digital platforms including Facebook and Amazon, a collective audience base of 100 million, generating over 1bn video views, represents significant scale.

Crucially however, the new partnership hopes to differentiate itself from the market leader by guaranteeing brand-safe content, something YouTube has been criticised for lacking despite its huge resources.

Group Nine Media president Christa Carone said: “We continue to hear from clients that they’re looking for a more brand-safe environment, but still needed the scale they get on the platforms.”

Ken Blom, senior vice president of ad strategy and partnerships for BuzzFeed, added: “For all of us to get together in a room like this, we’re not going to do a deal that we could normally have got on our own.”

The publisher alliance follows a similar coming together of The Guardian, The Telegraph and News UK in Britain for the Ozone Project.

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