About.com Taps Colbert As CRO

Continuing to reshape its management structure, About.com on Tuesday named Brian Colbert as its first ever Chief Revenue Officer.
 
In this newly created role, Colbert will be expected to lead all sales efforts for the company, including premium and programmatic sales, ad ops, sales development and yield management.
 
Colbert most recently served as vice president of mobile advertising sales at Pandora, where he is credited with helping to shape the company’s mobile monetization strategy.
 
Colbert said innovation and industry outreach are critical to About.com’s success. “The challenge is repositioning and updating our brand/product and also helping the ad marketplace understand the unique dynamics of how users find and engage with our content,” he said on Tuesday. “We truly believe there are unique ways for advertisers to target and engage our users.”
 
“Long-term, [our] focus over the next six to 12 months will be working closely with our product team to develop new native ad formats that further leverage our unique user experience, understanding how programmatic can be an additional revenue driver for the site, and partnering with our clients on research studies that further validate the ROI our platform provides,” Colbert explained.
 
Colbert’s appointment is part of a larger restructuring effort at About.com, which named Scott Kim as its new COO, as well as Alex Ellerson as senior vice president of content, this summer.

Streamlining its assets, The New York Times Co. sold About.com to Barry Diller's IAC/InteractiveCorp for $300 million last year.

For its money, IAC got one of the biggest networks of “expert” content online, which, as of July, boasted more than 86 million monthly unique users. Yet, like IAC’s Ask.com, About.com runs the risk of being labeled a “content farm” if it can’t keep its offerings up to par.

Prior to Pandora, Colbert was the senior director of mobile advertising sales and strategy at ESPN. Before ESPN, Colbert held senior roles in the music space at MTV and Music Choice.
1 comment about "About.com Taps Colbert As CRO".
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  1. Jacob Chang from American Express, October 23, 2013 at 3:31 p.m.

    Pandora had a user base of around 200 million on July 31, 2013 – a big jump from the 80 million users who used its services in June 2011. But Apple has recently launched iTunes Radio and it will pose a direct challenge to Pandora’s dominance and iTunes Radio attracted more than 11 million trial users within the first five days of its launch according to http://goo.gl/3w31N3,
    But still its quite hard to decide either to invest in Pandora’s stock or not, because Apple’s recently launched iTunes Radio has posed a direct challenge to Pandora’s dominance and iTunes Radio attracted more than 11 million trial users within the first five days of its launch.

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