• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, October 29, 2014

Thanks to social news feeds and simpler mobile-friendly layouts, consumers have come to expect never-ending streams of content. Requiring people to scroll back up a page or click anything is increasingly likely to cost their attention.

In response, top publishers and portals are adding infinite-scrolling features to their site designs. To name a few, early adopters include Yahoo.com, Cosmopolitan.com, and Time.com. Ad technology companies are busy figuring out how to best monetize these never-ending content feeds.     

Native ad services provider Sharethrough has just developed a tool for publishers to better control the location and delivery cadence of ad inventory in infinite feeds.

“People have become accustomed to scrolling through endless feeds of content rather than jumping between single pages,” Dan Greenberg, Sharethrough CEO, said Wednesday. “With this shift … we saw an opportunity to build technology that would create net-new revenue for publishers by allowing them to control the frequency and placement of ads within their feeds.” 

The rise of continuous scrolling also challenges the click-through as the industry’s standard monetization metric. As such, Sharethrough has decided to make its inventory available on 100% viewable impressions (vCPM). To reassure advertisers, it is promising to follow the IAB’s vCPM measurement standard that 50% of branded content be viewable for at least one second.

To expand its native ad efforts, Sharethrough recently raised $10 million, including $5 million from British Sky Broadcasting. Jamie West, deputy managing director of Sky Media -- BSkyB’s ad sales unit -- also assumed the position of board observer at Sharethrough, while Sky Media said it planned to offer clients access to Sharethrough’s services.