Wunderkind Success Story: NY Post

Sean Giancola: I am Sean Giancola. I'm the CEO and publisher of the New York Post. I oversee all the commercial operations, both the print side and the digital side of the business. The company mission, I guess, is staying true to the brand. The Post has been around for 200 plus years and it's evolved obviously over time. But I think the voice that we have, the DNA that we have as a New York brand, and I kind of like to say that we're sort of unfiltered and unapologetic in the way we distribute our news and our information. So I think the core is staying true to our brand. I think our readers, I mean, as the business has evolved, obviously when we were pure print product, we really distributed the paper mainly in the New York market. Today we reach a hundred million users across our digital platform, which is really a national business. So I would say our customers run the gamut from our real core New York audience that comes to us for our metro, our sports, and really the news around New York. And then we've got brands like Page Six, which is our celebrity and gossip site. We have Decider, which is our streaming site. So I think we've actually broadened our audience to people that are really engaged with a whole plethora of different kind of content that we produce. Being a paid product, we're looking for monetization all the time, and mostly our monetization is done through advertising and our partners. What I think impressed me about Wunderkind was the ability to create a technology and a product that both enhanced our monetization but didn't interfere with the engagement of the user and the user experience. Our tech stack is pretty diverse. We have direct demand. We have SSP demand, supply side demand, DSP demand. I think Wunderkind is such a unique product that brings monetization in a very unique way, which doesn't really interfere with the other channels that we try to monetize from an advertising standpoint. Every year we continue to increase our revenue. We can continue to expand the exposure of your product on different pages and different sites that we have. So it's expanded the relationship and revenue has grown substantially. The success metrics that we look at when we look at Wunderkind is CPMs and pure revenue. CPMs, especially in a challenging marketplace, particularly over the last couple of years, we've seen substantial growth in the CPMs as well as overall top line revenue. The performance has been excellent. Wunderkind's, this year alone produced over$ 5 million in net revenue to us, so it's been substantial contribution to our revenue model. Yeah, I think when we look at tentpole ideas, like red carpet is a big thing for Page Six. We need partners that are nimble and that can produce great interaction with our users and monetize as we spike in traffic. So sporting events like Super Bowl or the World Series, obviously if the New York teams are in it, these things, we look for partners to really leverage the opportunity when we bring large scale audiences together on the platform. When we're interacting and we're having that user experience, Wunderkind serves a great ad experience in monetizing it at high level. I think the biggest thing that Wunderkind does for us is it complements, like you said earlier, the other verticals that we monetize. So it compliments our open market, our preferred market, our direct sales. And then I think you guys such a unique position in the marketplace that you fill a gap that no one else has. No one else has the technology or the ad units that you guys do, and you guys perform at such a high level with consistency and growth that you guys have been a wonderful partner as the journey. I guess the short answer is no. I think most publishers don't feel comfortable where the position that they're in right now, and I think we need to bring on partners like yourselves. I was actually speaking with some of your colleagues earlier today about how do we increase our known users, and I think it's critical for publishers to have a bounty full of known users that we can leverage for data and attribution. I look forward to partners like Wunderkind to help us create more known users into our ecosphere so that we can actually monetize it.