As part of the continuing attempts to raise advertising-generated profits at publications, two new trends can now be spotted in the US.

The Financial Times will test a new method to increase the visibility of its website ads.

According to The Drum, this method analyses the amount of time users are exposed to ads and clients can then buy inventory using a currency of ad time rather than ad space. The Financial Times has been working with the New York firm Chartbeat on developing the method and it expects it to launch fully in the fourth quarter.

The result is a system more in step with TV advertising.

“We can now report back to a client and say ‘we served you a thousand ads, and of those, 500 were seen for one-second, 250 were seen for 10 seconds and 250 were seen for 30 seconds,” said Jon Slade, commercial director of digital advertising at the Financial Times. “The next obvious step is to sell blocks of time. This currency is very valuable.”

The method, moreover, will serve as an additional choice for customers who buy advertising space and not as a direct replacement of current methods. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has agreed with the companies on the use of industry-backed viewability metrics as a display ad trading currency.

The IAB defines a viewable display impression as an ad where at least 50 per cent of it loads on to a page and is displayed for at least one-second. In 2012, 1.8 trillion display ads were paid for, but not seen according to The Drum; the new method can improve campaign performance on websites.

Last week, Time Inc, the largest US publisher, began running ads for Verizon Wireless on the cover of two of its major publications — ‘Time’ and ‘Sports Illustrated’. According to Ad Age, the placements were small, but their arrival represented a major disruption in the long-standing tradition that kept ads off from magazine covers.

The ads are very discreet in the subscribers’s label with the name and address, together with the text — ‘For Best Results Use Verizon’. Copies sold at news-stands will have the print ad with the bar code, but there will be no space for the page number.

Even while experiencing serious financial difficulties, publishers were loath to place ads on the cover. They violate the guidelines recommended by the American Society of Magazine Editors, which was created to protect the independence of the editorial.

For Time Inc, the new ad on the cover comes some weeks before its listing on the New York Stock Exchange.