Dive Brief:
- Marketers looking to reach millennials might want to take a look at The Odyssey, a publishing platform targeting that audience.
- The site is geared toward a college-aged readership, and is active in programmatic and native advertising.
- The Odyssey is developing an internal DMP to allow brands to segment purchases and advertisers to, for example, buy "100% share of voice on articles written about trending topics," as Ad Exchanger explains.
Dive Insight:
Joining the ranks of other publishing platforms, the brainchild of Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams, The Odyssey, is specifically reaching out to college-aged millennials and looking to tap into programmatic and native advertising from marketers seeking that audience. The site claims 20 million unique visitors a month for its 360 "communities" and 4,000 writers.
To date, the site has run native ads for Monster energy drinks, Verizon and Schick. Its business model is based on its largely unpaid writers sharing content via social media platforms, accounting for 87% of The Odyssey’s traffic.
CEO and founder Evan Burns said in an Ad Exchanger article, “A lot of these premium publishers have to put 15 to 20% of their budgets into Facebook to get views. Because we have the pulse of what’s going on in communities and understand what resonates with them, we’re able to have them distributed by humans.”