• by Sara Guaglione , November 2, 2020

After working together since last fall, Nexstar Digital has expanded its partnership with content discovery platform Revcontent.

Revcontent’s first-party content recommendation display widget has rolled out across all of Nexstar Digital’s local media properties, which consists of 435 sites and apps with news, sports and entertainment content.

Nexstar Digital is the digital arm of television broadcast company Nexstar Media Group.

Previously, Revcontent was leveraged across Nexstar Digital’s legacy sites and apps, according to Lori Tavoularis, senior vice president, digital revenue and operations at Nexstar Digital.

“We had a conservative approach to monetization” at first, she told Publishers Daily. “We gained confidence very quickly, with the product, team and customer service” at Revcontent.

The partnership was ramped up in the first quarter.

Nexstar Digital acquired Tribune Media last fall, and the team waited for its properties’ contracts to end to before rolling out Revcontent’s widget across those sites and apps.

Nexstar Digital uses Revcontent’s customizable widgets to serve and monetize relevant content to the right audience across devices on its properties.

The platform provides real-time insights and analytics to Nexstar Digital’s editorial teams, with data on audience and content consumption behavior.

Revcontent is the first content recommendation partner for Nexstar Digital.  “We have a sensitivity to that kind of partner at our company,” Tavoularis said. “Ad quality is always a concern for premium publishers. This partnership takes up the least amount of real estate, has the best monetization and the best user experience,” she noted.

“Revcontent’s revenue and demand is almost entirely first party — we don’t sell to anyone for demand,” said Richard Marques, who became CEO of Revcontent at the beginning of this year.

Marques says blocking and content control “becomes more cumbersome when you don't have full control and transparency.”

Content on the platform is sold exclusively to first-party advertisers.

Page latency was also a concern for the Nexstar Digital team, Tavoularis said. “Site speed is really important to us.” A faster ad-load speed helps publishers’ pages load faster, creating more opportunities to monetize, Marques said. “Milliseconds matter in this world.”

Tavoularis said Nexstar Digital is continuously working toward “a cleaner supply path for programmatic buying partners.”

“This first-party demand coming through content recommendation is a far easier conversation to have with programmatic ad partners,” she said.

Nexstar Media Group delivers an average of 98 million monthly unique visitors across its digital properties, according to Comscore data cited by the company.