Native advertising continues to make substantial inroads across a wide range of publishers; even some previously resistant pubs, like the New York Times, have gotten on board. Their success has prompted rapid migration onto mobile screens as well, providing some hope to mobile publishers and app developers who had until recently struggled to extract meaningful value from their smartphone and tablet inventory.

While the earliest mobile native pioneers have been the largest social networks—Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn organize their content into feeds that lend themselves well to the story-driven native placements we profiled in our eBook on native advertising—other prominent publishers and app developers have also successfully made the leap. 

Considering content marketing's enormous scope—$44 billion according to a comprehensive estimate by the Custom Content Council—it's no surprise that a large range of software and platform solutions have emerged to help scale marketers' workflows. Altimeter Group, a tech research and consulting firm, has just released a report on the landscape of content marketing software vendors that provides context to the various service segments.

The report begins with the premise that platform/tool selection is a difficult proposition. Vendors' offerings are highly differentiated and present a wide range of capabilities that might not be relevant to all marketers' needs. The report's author, Rebecca Lieb, suggests that evolution in the space will drive consolidation and the formation of end-to-end solutions incorporating capabilities from content creation to compliance within the next two years. 

After six years as CEO of Flite, I am thrilled to announce that Giles Goodwin is succeeding me as CEO.  Giles will be responsible for defining Flite's vision, leading our talented team, and working with our top partners and customers to realize the promise of content marketing's future.

First, I want to thank Flite's employees, customers, partners, and investors for allowing me the honor of leading this fine organization. I leave a different and better person for having led Flite.