Pangaea Alliance initiative will give brands access to more than 110 million online readers using programmatic advertising system

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The Guardian, the Financial Times, CNN International, Reuters and the Economist have teamed up to pool their digital advertising space, to fight back against the drain of ad spend to tech giants such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook.

The initiative, called the Pangaea Alliance, will give brands access to more than 110 million online readers using a computerised, or programmatic, advertising system.

“Pangaea’s uniqueness lies in the quality of its partners,” said Tim Gentry, global revenue director of Guardian News & Media, publisher of the Guardian. “We know that trust is the biggest driver of brand advocacy, so we have come together to scale the benefits of advertising within trusted media environments.”

The global online display advertising market, worth an estimated $60bn (£41bn) according to WPP’s Group M, is increasingly becoming dominated by media owners that can offer giant scale to advertisers.

In the UK, Google and Facebook will this year take half of the total digital display advertising market, well over £1bn, according to eMarketer.



Meanwhile, more traditional rivals such as Mail Online, the largest English-language newspaper website in the world, continue to focus heavily on audience growth.



Pangaea’s partners say that the value of the alliance is that it brings together an influential and trusted global audience for advertisers.



“The quality of the Financial Times audience is what our advertisers buy,” said Dominic Good, advertising sales director at the Financial Times. “Pangaea is an exciting initiative that strengthens premium publishers’ proposition by guaranteeing a trusted advertising environment, building significant scale and sharing smart targeting abilities.”

Pangaea will be launched in beta in April, with a full launch expected later this year.



Global audience levels of selected media owners

Facebook: 823 million

Twitter: 178 million

LinkedIn: 173 million

Pangaea: 110 million

Hearst: 93 million

CNN: 89 million

BBC: 80 million

Mail Online: 60 million

New York Times: 44 million

The Guardian: 43 million

Based on unofficial ComScore figures measuring monthly unique visitors (desktop use only)

