The Financial Times Is Selling Time to Advertisers (with Chartbeat!)

The online advertising world is buzzing today over the announcement from the Financial Times, published in The Drum, that the company is starting to sell its ads inventory using time—audience exposure time to ads, specifically—as a currency. The Financial Times has partnered with Chartbeat to measure and now monetize their audience’s time and attention.

In The Drum, Jon Slade, the Financial Times Commercial Director of Digital Advertising and Insight, says, “We can now report back to a client and say ‘we served you a thousand ads, and of those, 500 were seen for one second, 250 were seen for 10 seconds and 250 were seen for 30 seconds,” Slade went on, “The next obvious step is to sell blocks of time.”

Advertisers can now buy inventory based on how long readers are actively exposed to ads, and according to Slade, so far so good: “We have three trials running at the moment, and we’re able to tell pretty conclusively so far that when we serve an ad to an audience that we know is going to spend a long time with the ad in view that the benefit to that client is far more profound.”

And the data backs it up:

Here at Chartbeat, we’re excited to help pioneer this movement of publishers going beyond just measuring their audience’s attention, but actually monetizing it as a means to build sustainable businesses based on the quality of their content and loyal audiences.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can sell ads based on your audience’s time, get in touch with us. We’d love to show you what we’ve been working on.