Automatic Alerts can be triggered by Flags and/or Keywords and be further restricted by section tags. Emails are triggered automatically to coincide with the start time of the article.

Automatic Ad Placement

Additionally, with this version of Flex Templates, we are happy to announce a new strategy for in-story ad placement, called "automatic ad placement."

Automatic ad placement is available as a new setting under the "Advertising" group in the URL properties panel in the Block Editor.

When this settings is enabled, stories will show one ad after the third paragraph of an article, and then another ad every X number of paragraphs (where X is a number that can be set by the media organization).

This new setting adds a number of new benefits:

• In order to be "Better Ad Standards" compliant, the new "automatic ad placement" setting ensures that there are not too many ads stacked together on really short stories.

• On longer stories, more ads have the capability of being included, thus creating additional revenue opportunities.

• Because the ads can be placed at an ideal mobile-friendly interval, it helps with readership on mobile devices. (We recommend placing ads so they appear once every 2 - 3 viewports on a mobile phone.)

• The existing in-story ads remain, but a new automatic ad spot will be created. This means media organizations don't have to re-assign existing ad spots. They can just add the new "automatic" one. It is an ideal time to look into the TownNews.com iQ program, which offers well-managed programmatic ads.

• The new "automatic" ad spots are lazy-loading - meaning, they do not load until the reader hits that point in the article. This means these new ads will have a high viewability percentage, helping to improve the site's overall viewability score.
  
  
• This new feature will impact all story presentation modes (including default, personality and longform). It can be added on a per-URL basis, so the set up can change on each section if desired. (FLEXBLOX-4487)

CHANGES

We discovered an issue where classified ads were being blocked for site users who have ad blockers enabled. Blockers saw instances of the word, "ad," on classifieds and prevented pages from rendering.  This has been fixed. (FLEXBLOX-4657)

Video assets will no longer pre-load content on pages other than video details pages. This will improve site speed and reduce bandwidth spikes. (FLEXBLOX-4670)

BUG FIXES