Hi Jurriaan, thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. You’ve been in your new role for a while now and it would be great to get to know you a little better and understand your vision for Azerion’s publisher services going forward.
Can you tell us a little about your career at Azerion to date?
Sure, I have been with Azerion pretty much since the start. I have deep roots in gaming and a lot of experience in creating and publishing engaging content for users. In fact, I founded Youda Games and brought the Social Card Games portfolio into the group. Since then I have been managing our Premium Games segment which includes destination sites in metaverse gaming and social casinos. My focus during that time was on bringing new companies onto the Azerion platform and optimising their performance through the monetisation of their content. It was a natural step for me to move onto the monetisation of our content partners and, since late last year, I have been Chief Publishing Officer for the Azerion Group and a member of the Executive Committee.
It sounds like Azerion is putting some weight behind its publisher strategy, can you share your vision around this?
Absolutely, publishers and the audiences with which they engage are at the heart of the Azerion platform. At Azerion, we help publishers to have a higher return on their digital assets. Offering a wide variety of products that generate more revenue and optimise costs. We provide the solutions they need to maximize their success.
We are constantly increasing our offering for publishers, naturally this is on multiple Ad formats where we are strong innovators, such as Audio, DOOH and CTV. As well as areas where we have a strong history like Video and Native.
We recently launched Azerion Multicloud to decrease costs and improve stability and we have put in place investment solutions for Publishers to accelerate their growth and work together on the basis of a strategic partnership. We are also exploring Fast Payment solutions to help our Publisher partners manage their cashflow and operational expenditures and we’ve invested in the growth of our Full Monetisation solution to take some of the strain of revenue generation off the shoulders of our partners and enable them to create more engaging content.
That’s very encouraging, thank you for those insights. What’s next for Azerion and your publisher partners?
As I mentioned, we have always been keen on operating our own content with our Gaming Portfolio and with our fan engagement platform, Fanzone – look out for some new announcements about this soon. Thanks to this we understand the importance of a rich, varied and independent selection of content available on the open web so we strive to enable this in every market in which we are present. For example, last year we took a 26% stake in Eniro, a Nordics directory publisher focused on SMBs in that region. We have worked with them to move their advertising platform onto a more scalable cloud-based infrastructure and we have brought in our sales and operations team to streamline revenue generation for them.
More recently we joined up with Produpress, a Belgian publisher and media platform specializing in automotive-focused websites and magazines.
This strategic partnership positions Azerion alongside one of the leaders in automotive content and advertising in Belgium while enhancing its premium offering in the mobility sector.
Produpress is renowned for its high-quality editorial content and its ability to reach a broad and engaged automotive audience through platforms such as Le Moniteur Automobile, AutoGids, and Miles, as well as through partnerships with entities like AutoScout24, Autoworld, and the Brussels Auto Show.
This sector expertise aligns perfectly with Azerion’s vision of delivering comprehensive and effective advertising solutions for the benefit of local publishers and partners, increasing its local inventory by 22.5 million pageviews per month within an automotive context.
By combining Produpress’s editorial expertise with Azerion’s innovative digital solutions, this deal paves the way for a unique offering. Advertisers will benefit from enhanced visibility through high-performance cross-media campaigns that blend premium content with precise targeting.
Look out for more exciting news like this as we build out our strategy to provide the solutions publishers need to maximize their success.