MDGID, a native advertising network, is moving its US headquarters from New York City to Santa Monica - and expects to double monthly revenue by doing so. The company is moving to be closer to key sports, entertainment and lifestyle clients and will build its team up to 30 employees working in Santa Monica by mid-2015.
Founded in 2008, MGID delivers more than 1 billion targeted native ad impressions daily through about 3,000 publishers. The native advertising platform promotes products, services and content for its clients through bottom of article preview images and headlines.
MGID’s content syndication network looks similar to that of Taboola or Gravity. Gravity, also a Santa Monica-based company, was acquired by AOL in January 2014 for $83 million. With MGID’s network, readers click bottom-of-article images and are taken to an off-site landing page. It creates contextually relevant native advertisements by dividing its network into sub-networks like Gaming and Sports or Lifestyle and Entertainment.
In addition to syndicating content, MGID uses its bottom-of-the-article space to advertise products and services. Typically, these advertisements look like e-commerce sales.
According to Comscore, the advertising network reaches 160 million people monthly. 33 percent of the networks’ traffic comes from North America, 32 percent comes from Europe, 20 percent comes from Asia, with the rest of traffic spread throughout the United States. The company’s international headquarters is in Kiev, Ukraine.
With more and more content being published on the Internet per day, contextual advertising and content distribution is becoming increasingly valuable. Banner advertisement performance has been declining for years, as readers are choosing to ignore advertisements. Paid and contextual content syndication is one way publishers are working to stand out from the sea of content. To capture audience attention advertisers are turning to less interruptive and more engaging means to promote their products, services and content.
“Lifestyle advertisers are beginning to understand that the old ways of doing things do not resonate with today’s audiences,” said COO Sergey Denisenko in a statement. “Website visitors respond to content only if it is tailored specifically to their interests. Irrelevant ads are a turn off. Our customers want content their website visitors will be genuinely interested in.”
Los Angeles is developing a cottage industry for advertising engagement with companies like, Gravity, a content syndication network, Nativo, a programmatic advertising platform, True[x] Media, an interactive advertising platform, and MGID.
