Commercial Manager

Salary: £60k+ (dependent on experience)

Benefits: Competitive salary and bonuses, private health insurance, Nest pension scheme, competitive holiday allowance, home office equipment and more (UK)

Experience: Minimum three years in a related role

Type: Full-time/flexible working

Location: Remote (but with regular travel to London)

NewsNow is a rare UK-based .com success story: a news organisation using technology to support and promote credible, independent and public interest journalism, via the extremely successful news aggregation and discovery platform NewsNow.co.uk.

Founded in 1997 to democratise and disrupt the market for news, NewsNow has since become a global top 50 news website with millions of loyal users who discover news from thousands of publishers.

We’re now looking for a fully remote Commercial Manager, with strong technical skills and an extensive understanding of online revenue models to oversee and optimise our programmatic advertising and drive commercial diversification into reader funding and other areas, while keeping sight of our mission to support and promote credible, independent and public interest journalism.

The right candidate will:

• Have significant experience and understanding of a range of media revenue models, including programmatic advertising and reader funding, and the mechanisms that drive them.
• Have a deep understanding of the digital advertising ecosystem, including both the technical details and the commercial ramifications of things like ad blocking, cookies and cohorts, GDPR, 1st and 2nd price auctions and CMPs.
• Be intimately familiar with Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager and other commercial platforms like Criteo, Pubmatic, Index Exchange, Xandr and OpenX.
• Be fully conversant with approaches to split-testing and yield optimisation.
• Be experienced in putting together comprehensive comparative reports that provide accessible business intelligence to senior management.
• Be able to develop a deep understanding of all of our key metrics like revenue, impressions, eCPM, requests, CTR and viewability, to spot anomalies within them and investigate their causes.
• Have an understanding of the various mechanisms for reader funding, from donations to membership to subscriptions - and what drives them. 
• Have experience of working on commercial modelling, marketing and messaging for reader funding models in media at every stage of the funnel.
• Possess strong organisational, technical and analytical abilities, twinned with an awareness of technological developments in the wider world.
• Be able to understand how our technology works end-to-end and contribute to its further development in the service of our marketing and commercial goals.
• Have good knowledge of martech tools and technologies and project management tools like Github, Asana or Trello.
• Have great communication skills, be capable of clear and efficient communication via messaging and calls.
• Be able to hold your own in discussions and negotiations with suppliers and partners, remaining sceptical but open-minded and inventive in your approach.
• Understand, or be able to quickly build an understanding of, other potential revenue generating opportunities like classified advertising, affiliate marketing, merchandise, branded content and brand extensions like events. 
• Be able to fully understand NewsNow’s unique offering of news aggregation which supports a healthy news diet through the promotion of credible, independent and public interest journalism.

Responsibilities:

Reporting directly to NewsNow’s Managing Director, you will:

• Take overall responsibility for the levels of revenue coming in from programmatic advertising and optimising and improving upon them.
• Take the lead in driving revenue diversification, particularly into a reader funding model.
• Present key commercial metrics in clear, accurate reports to senior management weekly and monthly and keep up with them on a daily basis. 
• Provide a weekly update to the Managing Director through an online or in-person meeting and to the Board whenever required. 
• Be responsible for communicating the commercial needs of the business to senior members of other departments.  
• Work with the head of the Development team in planning, execution, optimisation implementation and testing of changes to the ad tech stack.
• Work with the head of the Marketing and Product team in reporting, sharing intelligence and developing commercial marketing strategy.
• Check in regularly with supplier account managers and our SSP support teams, ensuring suppliers meet contractual obligations and provide value for money.
• Suggest, research and compare new ad tech suppliers.
• Maintain detailed, but accessible documentation on all commercial and programmatic processes.
• Keep abreast of relevant legal, regulatory, political and technological developments.
• Maintain a knowledge of latest developments and trends within the industry and build good relationships with others in the industry through events and groups. 
• Where needed, find opportunities for training in new technologies and approaches.
• Research and promote the use of best practice in processes and tools within the department.

About NewsNow

NewsNow is a news organisation that uses technology to filter and present news in real time, from thousands of sources, on thousands of topics, to millions of users, 24 hours a day.

NewsNow's site features content on a wide range of subjects, including current affairs, business and entertainment, and we are a go-to destination for football and sports fans. Everything we do is driven by our core mission, to support and promote credible and independent public interest journalism.

We want to change the way people read the news, getting them to adopt a healthy news diet by reading widely outside their comfort zone, and we want to foster and support news that is written in the public interest, by publishers who are free, independent and well-supported.

We believe that news is an essential element of a democratic society, and we want to play a role in making sure it serves that function well. We are a unique fusion of editorial with technology, driven by a desire to provide quality content, and not by a need to mine our users' attention at all costs. Our technology is always at the service of our editorial standards, and not the reverse.

NewsNow is a family-friendly organisation that recognises the importance of a healthy work-life balance and, along with many other benefits, supports this through a flexible working pattern that allows you to choose when you start and finish work.

Our Culture:

• Open: we share and collaborate within and across departments
• Rigorous: We like to be clear about what we're doing, and why. Experimentation and peer-review are in our DNA
• One team, one vision: no office politics
• An appreciative environment: expect to hear 'thanks' a lot
• Room to grow: development of skills and responsibilities is encouraged and rewarded
• Virtual: we are today a fully-remote company with occasional in-person get-togethers
• Family-friendly and flexible: we offer flexible working, and understand sometimes personal needs come first