Connatix launches Stories for Publishers to bring native Story units to mobile sites

Everybody’s got a Story these days, it seems. The immersive mobile ad format pioneered by Snapchat and ripped off by Instagram, its parent Facebook and most recently, Google with AMP Stories, is now emerging from the so-called walled gardens.

Connatix, a video syndication and monetization platform used by publishers such as Variety, Tribune Media and Meredith, launched Stories for Publishers on Thursday. Publishers have control over both the content and the ads — and the revenue from ads — that appear in their Stories.

The units appear natively in-stream on publishers’ mobile sites. Users can swipe, click and tap on the interactive units that can include vertical video ads, as shown in the example below.

Stories for Publishers from Connatix.

“For way too long, publishers were dependent on social platforms to give their end users access to the interactive mobile web experience they had come to expect,” said David Kashak, CEO of Connatix. “The problem with this structure is that these walled gardens siphoned all of the ad revenue and data. What we have created with Stories, is a way for publishers to offer the same experience, while retaining all revenue. The days of social media dependency are over.”

Connatix says Stories for Publishers comes with editorial tools to minimize the need for additional resources and is integrated with Connatix’s video advertising and distribution platform.