• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, March 23, 2016

Sharethrough is making it easier for publishers to manage and monetize native advertising. The ad-tech firm, which enables publishers to sell native advertising that appears in-stream or in-feed, on Wednesday said it’s made “Sharethrough Mediation” available to all Sharethrough for Publisher (SFP) customers.

Sharethrough Mediation is a feature of SFP, a native supply-side platform that enables publishers to optimize native ad revenue by using multiple native partners to get the best value for each impression. With the goal of boosting ad revenues, Mediation automates the implementation of multiple ad network tags to direct impressions to the best-performing demand partners.

“Mediation helps publishers optimize and automate their existing revenue opportunities while using fewer internal resources [like the development team] to run their native advertising software stack,” Sharethrough's VP of product, Curt Larson, said via email. While Mediation has been live on more than 70 sites, Sharethrough is now making it available to all customers. Sites that have been using Mediation have seen average daily ad revenue increases of as much as 40%, the company claims. Sites like Rolling Stone, Variety, ABC News and Forbes are all Sharethrough for Publisher customers and will have access to the Mediation.

Larson positioned the function as reducing the amount of work publishers have to do to manage their native-advertising tech stack. Prior to Mediation, publishers had no automatic way to ensure that when an ad was served on their site, the impression was filled at maximum value. Publishers needed to install new code on each page of their sites for each native ad supplier, Larson explained. With the new capability, they only need to run the Sharethrough tag. Before Mediation, publishers also had to download separate revenue information for each demand partner on a daily basis. Now they can perform revenue analysis for all partners within a single view.

In the context of native advertising, Sharethrough’s Mediation technology goes beyond what is traditionally required for management of fixed­-size display ads. Rather than asking the engineering team to install new code on each page with each new native ad network provider, a publisher’s ad operations and product teams can swap in native ad tags within a single self­-serve platform.

Sharethrough worked closely with PMC Entertainment in developing Mediation which is live on its sites which include Hollywood Life, TVLine, BGR, Variety Latino and Variety. “With SFP's Mediation feature, we were able to traffic, manage, and prioritize all of our native demand sources with no development work needed, ultimately resulting in more revenue for PMC Entertainment at diminished technology costs,” stated Brian Levine, PMC’s Director of Monetization.