Award-winning Site VTDigger Uses Ad Management System to Fund More Great Journalism

Finding the stories that powerful people want to hide costs money. VTDigger has come up with a number of ways to fund its award-winning investigative journalism, and its newest approach may benefit other publications, too: Using an ad management system to maximize revenue from programmatic advertising.

Marketing Technology News: Helium 10 Announces New Amazon Advertising Platform – Launches ‘Adtomic’ a Breakthrough Solution for Amazon Sellers Looking to Optimize Advertising Campaigns

Hashtag Labs gave us a simple solution for implementing best-in-class ad-loading infrastructure. It saved the tech department time and money, and pleased the business team by increasing revenue.”

— VTDigger CTO Stacey Peters

A statewide news organization, VTDigger publishes in-depth news reports on matters of public interest, and is the only daily news organization in Vermont that publishes exclusively online. It reaches 700,000 individual readers a month with daily news stories about state government, politics, consumer affairs, business and public policy. In 2020, its coverage won four awards from Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers. When Jim Lehnhoff saw a gap in the publication’s programmatic strategy after becoming VTDigger’s Chief Revenue Officer in August, he asked Hashtag Labs to solve it.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Lauren Weinberg, Global Head of Marketing and Comms at Square

“Finding technologies to help our editorial team is my first priority,” said VTDigger CTO Stacey Peters. “After ensuring that the CMS and other editorial-related tech is where it needs to be, we rarely have enough resources left to focus on the complex (and sometimes wonky!) world of advertising technology. Hashtag Labs gave us a simple solution for implementing best-in-class ad-loading infrastructure. It saved the tech department time and money, and pleased the business team by increasing operational efficiencies and revenue right out of the gate.”

Hashtag Labs brought VTDigger cutting-edge software tools and a leading-edge programmatic strategy. The HTL BID Ad Management System by Hashtag Labs helped bring VTDigger more programmatic revenue in first two weeks of March than the publication had earned during all of 2020.

“It’s exciting to be able to help publishers like VTDigger,” said Hashtag Labs Founder and CEO John Shankman. “We’re gratified to know that our Ad Management System has helped VTDigger gain operational efficiencies and bring in the higher revenue that its exceptional content deserves.”