News360 adds native ads to its free publisher analytics

From a News360 video about NativeAI

In February, news discovery platform News360 launched its free NativeAI cloud-based audience analytics platform for app and website publishers.

Now, the company is launching a way to use the analytics for making money, by enabling the targeting of personalized native ads and sponsored content based on NativeAI’s tracking of more than a million unique interests among the publishers’ visitors. By contrast, CEO Roman Karachinsky told me, most other native ad platforms utilize a few hundred categories.

News360 claims that its targeted ads can deliver average click-through rates as high as four percent, compared to a regular average of 0.15 percent.

Karachinsky said that the plan has been to launch NativeAI in phases, although analytics was secondary to monetization.

“Analytics is the cherry on the pie,” he said. “The pie is monetization.”

Here’s a screenshot from NativeAI:

He declined to say how many publishers are currently utilizing NativeAI, except to mention that it is in “small double digits.”

A version of NativeAI is employed by the app-based News360 to target its own ads. Karachinsky noted that the ads for other publishers can be created by those publishers, or they can be native ads/sponsored content from brands News360 works with. In either case, they are delivered by News360’s ad platform.

The native ads are not restricted to the format set by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), he said, so as “to give publishers flexibility.”