A delight for digital publishers, Times Internet’s M360 Suite, is a platform that is designed to help digital publishers with end-to-end solutions.
The platform, that’s backed by the Times Internet leverages its premium ad network ‘Colombia’, to monetize the traffic at its partner publishers. With over 15 billion personalized feeds across content and ads to over 525 Mn+ users across 110 publishers, the Colombia Audience Network has monetized 55% of digital news traffic in India for the last 2 years.
M360 is undoubtedly an affordable and comprehensive solution for Indian publishers as they have seen a 40-60% increase in their operating profits than before.
The young entrepreneur behind this marvelous solution provider, Arjun Satya, Co-Founder- M360, spoke exclusively to Medianews4u on the platform has done till now, especially during the pandemic and how they plan to scale it further to achieve greater success.
Edited excerpts
Tell us about M360 Suite and its mission, vision, and core values.
M360 is an all-in-one platform for digital publishers. Built inside Time Internet, M360 comes equipped with everything needed to run a publishing business – CMS, AdServer, Audience Platform, Mediation Engine, Push Notifications, Newsletters, and Paywalls – under a single login. All of our services leverage our state-of-the-art recommendation engine that gives our publishers the flexibility to create fast-loading websites, personalized newsletters, and push notifications, easily in a seamless manner than on any other traditional platform.
The mission is helping traditional publishing businesses become more entrepreneurial by providing them with a platform to develop multiple revenue streams, growth channels, and user touch-points, all while keep their operating costs low.
Our Vision is to build a global community of entrepreneurial organizations that are looking to grow and own their revenues from their publishing businesses while using the best-in-class platform and services on M360.
Publisher-centricity is the major core value for us in all aspects of our business. We understand that in the ever-evolving digital publishing ecosystem, publishers are looking for a transparent, technologically-advanced, and scalable partner, and we are always striving for that.
What are the need gaps that M360 Suite aims to fill in the market place?
Being a world-class SaaS platform, M360 solves the issues any publisher faces. It helps the publisher develop engaging content through its CMS, grow traffic, and drive personalized ad campaigns thereby increasing effective CPM – with the increase in ad revenue along with reduced engineering and IT costs. The platform is built for providing seamless content and ad rendering experiences, removing unwanted tags or SDKs on the websites, making each advertising slot more effective than traditional CMS systems. Thereby publishers see a lift in page ad yields.
How has the business been doing in times of Covid-19?
M360 is proving to be a great asset for the slowdown during the pandemic. The publishers only have to pay a small subscription fee instead of incurring in-house engineering or IT costs. Publishers on M360 just have to focus on writing engaging content for their users, and everything else is taken care of by the platform. Furthermore, they leverage M360’s engaging ad formats – Banner, Rich Media, Native, Video – to place ads directly sourced by them, giving them full control of their revenues. As a result, our publishers are seeing page CPM lift between 30-160% while their overall costs have dropped by 50-60%.
Is there a case study that you would want to highlight?
Here is an illustrative example of one of our case studies with our regional publisher, who doubled their revenue within a short span of just under 3 months post migrating to M360.
In these unprecedented times, how are you staying ahead of the curve?
The pandemic has led to dwindling advertising spends by advertisers and agencies. Things are even worse on the supply side, where digital publishers relying heavily on 3rd party ad networks have seen reduced fill rate and page CPMs. This has led to lesser revenue while they still have to incur engineering, product, IT, and hosting costs. In the search for revenue, some publishers crowd their websites with all kinds of widgets which leads to bad user experience and lesser search traffic, which further brings down the revenue.
Our objective is to provide digital publishers with a platform that only large companies have resources to build continuously. Every digital publisher onboarded on M360 has equal opportunity to sustain, grow, and compete in their own domains and have faired well even during these unprecedented times.
Where do you see M360 Suite in the near future? What are your growth plans?
M360 will evolve into the go-to platform for any digital publisher globally irrespective of its language, size, or geography.
While India is our primary geography now, we have started some pilots with publishers in SEA region and slowly starting our deployments for a few North American clients as well. Our growth plans are a combination of direct sales and strategic partnerships with key players in the ecosystem.
How is Times Internet helping the company grow?
We are seeing publishers shift from traditional CMS and hosting systems to platforms like M360. Deriving learnings from Times Internet group of publishers, M360 will always be at the bleeding-edge of technological advancements, helping its publishers bring great content and build a loyal user base. Times Internet is at the forefront of all our endeavors and supports us with all the learnings we need, being the biggest digital publisher worldwide.
