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Revenue

How Crain Communications uses pricing research to grow revenue

Veebha Mehta is the CMO at Crain Communications, a diverse business publisher with titles spanning the advertising, healthcare, investment, automotive, and plastics industries. When she assumed this role, she quickly landed on three crucial questions to answer in order to grow the business. However, she certainly couldn’t have anticipated the global pandemic that descended just a few weeks into her tenure. 

As it turned out, these unexpected events only sharpened her focus on the hunt for these answers. Mehta recently shared those revelations with Piano, illustrating the process she went through around research, testing and data.

The full discussion between Veebha and Piano’s SVP of Strategy, Michael Silberman is available as part of our Piano Academy webinar series, Maximizing Acquisition: Perfecting Pricing and Promotions. We’ve distilled the highlights here. 

1. How to effectively leverage a discount program?

An early observation Mehta made upon joining Crain was how extensively the publisher used heavy discounts to build subscription velocity. It’s common for publishers to offer low introductory rates or even free trials to bring in new users. However, without the right pricing strategy, customer churn and conversion can become detrimental. 

During the Covid-19 pandemic, publishers reported a resilience in subscriptions as more people turned to digital outlets for news coverage. This presented a surfeit of new users up for grabs and discounts are an effective way to bring these potential new readers into the fold. Using a combination of price research and live price testing, Crain ran a promotional program to drive up their subscriptions. 

Significantly, they discovered that many of their trusted products were priced far below what consumers were willing to pay. This data empowered Crain to adjust prices in order to meet revenue targets, as well as experiment with trial offers to attract and retain new subscribers.

2. How to balance revenue and circulation?

Pricing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Changes to pricing and promotions naturally impact  readership. Tactics such as gating certain content behind a paywall, raising or changing pricing structures, or even shortening trial periods can positively impact revenue. However, they can also reduce a publication’s reach. 

During radical changes like the Covid-19 pandemic, longtime readers’ priorities and price sensitivity may shift. Publishers must account for that and be willing to adapt their strategies.

Crain Communications is developing a more sophisticated understanding of what people are willing to pay for each of its products. This would lead to creating a distinct pricing and offer strategy for each brand. 

In particular Mehta says Crain found that it was valuable to decouple its print and digital pricing. Price testing for Crain’s Chicago Business — a weekly business outlet with both a print and digital edition — showed that while both the print and digital editions were highly trusted within the market, demand for digital was higher than for print.

Prior to this analysis, the pricing was similar for both outlets. These crucial data points helped Crain adjust pricing for its digital edition in order to fully monetize that untapped demand. It also allowed them to prioritize further demand for digital subscriptions. This resulted in more digital revenue share, and a 39% overall conversion rate on subscription offerings.

3. Driving conversions through content and pricing

Finally, Mehta wanted all of Crain’s publications to focus on driving new subscriber conversions through a combination of innovative content strategy and smart pricing rather than relying on deep discounts. Using pricing research and testing, Crain was able to more clearly understand the pricing psychology of their core consumers. They also discovered the content that they most valued and use those insights to develop a conversion focused content strategy. 

Price research on some of Crain’s flagship business products showed a delta between what the publisher was charging and what its customers were willing to pay. It also revealed a need for specific content. This insight allowed Crain to optimize its promotional efforts toward the content that readers valued most. By locking specific articles and creating premium verticals, Crain was able to communicate that value of specific content and drive higher rates of conversion on its most valued content. 

Intimate knowledge of a specific audience is at the heart of publisher’s offerings. But without a complete view of an audience’s pricing psychology, as well as their willingness to pay for information, the data is simply incomplete. Harnessing the power of price testing and research can help even the most sophisticated publishers better understand their audience and serve them the content that will drive them to convert at a higher price point. 

Advertising | Revenue

By prioritizing context and understanding over “attention,” Vox Media is poised for growth

Dave Constantino, Senior Director, Client Development of Oracle Data Cloud talks to Edwin Wong, SVP of Insights & Innovation at Vox Media about how strategy and tech power advertiser flexibility, immersive content, and emerging formats.

DC: Vox Media is seen as a trusted resource for its clients, from being a strategic partner to a thought leader. What are the short and long-term opportunities that you see for the advertising industry to transform and connect brands and publishers more closely to consumers? 

EW: As a modern media company, we help brands reach audiences wherever they are – across nearly every platform including TV and streaming, podcasting and digital. In the short-term, we are focused on offering brands flexibility, which continues to be a major priority for every advertiser at this moment. Long-term, we are modernizing the ways brands can work with us on brand building across the modern platforms where audiences are.

In long-term planning, we are putting greater emphasis in areas with strong growth in consumer engagement and areas where we can broaden the opportunity for marketers to work with us. This can be seen across the growth of our podcast network and our investment in our ad marketplace.

We’re excited about the opportunity in podcasting. The medium represents a shift from quick feed-based media experiences. It gives listeners a chance to lean in, connect, and immerse themselves around a subject. In fact, we found that 74% of listeners believe podcasts provide content not available elsewhere.

Investment in local journalism also presents a significant opportunity for marketers looking to reach local audiences at a national scale. We found that 38% of local news site visitors do not visit any national news sites. This means a large audience is not being reached by brands who only advertise on national news properties.

The study also found that a localized version of an ad (i.e. creative that included the name of the city) in a locally relevant environment performs significantly better compared to a non-localized creative on a national news site. In fact, almost every brand metric we measured was significantly higher among those who viewed this localized experience compared to viewers of a national news site. There’s a real opportunity there for brands to reach audiences and support local media. 

DC: Brand safety has been top-of-mind for brands long before the woes of 2020; how do you see advertisers navigate this shift from brand safety to suitability?

EW: News around the pandemic, the much-needed rise of awareness around systemic racism and climate change have caused the definition for what is considered “brand safe” to evolve along with our current reality. Early on, brands cautiously steered clear from any association with news and stories around the pandemic. We also saw brand safety go past its intended solution when ads were blocked on the home pages of Vox, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal around coronavirus content.

We are also seeing a shift in advertisers reassessing how their actions and their marketing budgets reflect their values as a company. More than ever, employees and customers are holding companies accountable for following through on the values they are communicating to the world. Every company needs to take into account how they are allocating their resources, whether its advertising budgets or team resources. 

To reach a place where brands feel safer spending on the open web, part of the solution will be for publishers, like Vox Media, to build opportunities for advertisers to align themselves with quality, trusted content. Publishers should be focused on solutions where brands aren’t being forced to sacrifice quality or brand safety for scale.

Another part will be to help our partners understand how and when our audiences want to hear from brands. In fact, this year we learned 86% of our audience strongly believes that making great products is no longer enough. Brands also need to make society better.

I believe that, in the last decade, we celebrated the entertainment and engagement of the feed. The next will be more about the understanding, activation, and change from the stories we report and tell each other.

We must recalibrate what brand safety looks like in this new context.

DC: What do we need to get done in what’s left of 2020? And what do we prioritize in early 2021 to ensure that we are moving the industry forward?

EW: It’s time to redefine the concept of contextual targeting and how we use first party data. Vox Media has always believed that the context and engagement of content can be a strong signal when it comes to audience targeting. This is a key part of driving the industry forward. On the data and audience privacy side, 2021 will have wide implications of how we use data when engaging our consumers.   

When quality content is matched with people’s passions and interests, it creates a much richer picture of who the audience is, why they are there and what motivates them. When we do this right, we no longer base contextual targeting on just the individual, an individual action, or an individual piece of content, but on what our platforms deliver for the audience holistically. It changes the retroactive perspective of targeting and makes context targeting future-facing.

Compared to behavioral targeting, we also found contextual ads are also more inclusive. We recently worked with a client recently to reach Small Business owners across the U.S. We found that with personalized behavioral ad targeting, only 27% of the impressions reached women. But when we optimized with contextual targeting, 40% of the impressions reached women. What percentage of small business owners in the U.S. are women? 38%.

DC: Our industry values scale, clicks, views, but what about impact, connections, and loyalty? Can you talk to the sweet spot of setting a strategy that enables you to find audiences and earn their attention?

EW: We prioritize perspective, context, and understanding over “attention.”

Our networks have made strong impact, connections and built loyalty with audiences across a number of platforms, covering nearly every topic. We’ve put a focus on growing our consumer revenue lines of business, across subscriptions and commerce. And we’ve seen New York Magazine and The Strategist have record months this year and Vox launched a successful contributions program. These are all built on audience loyalty and trust.

Industry-Research | Revenue

How to combat ad fraud spikes during the holiday season

The holiday shopping season was once a time of packed stores and crowded gallerias. These days, people are much more likely to stay home and do their shopping from the comfort of their couches. In particular, IAS found that this year, nearly all holiday shopping will be online, specifically on ecommerce and retail sites. So, while audiences watch nostalgic holiday movies, they’ll also be on their phones researching gifts to purchase for their loved ones. 

Unfortunately, consumers aren’t the only ones online — fraudsters also have their sights set on holiday traffic. Invalid traffic (IVT), which includes malicious fraud as well as general non-human activity, has the potential to steal valuable impressions. Since it looks like Cyber Monday will become Cyber Season, publishers should optimize their inventory to both support marketers and thwart fraudsters. 

Unwrapping holiday ad fraud

Shopping online offers a convenience that brick and mortar stores lack: information. In their search for the perfect gift, IAS found that consumers turn to search engines, review sites, and online advertisements. Consumers look to advertisements for guidance, and are most interested in ads they see on well-known and respected sites. IAS research shows that retail sites are especially prone to fraud, witnessing spikes around popular shopping dates like Cyber Monday.

At the same time, holiday season campaigns tend to be short and sweet, only meant to appear in consumers’ feeds for a few months. Longer campaigns give advertisers more time to review and optimize campaign performance. However, during this time, advertisers rely on premium inventory to achieve the ambitious KPIs associated with holiday campaigns. This puts additional pressure on digital publishers to optimize their inventory to minimize risk and maximize performance.

Putting fraudsters on the naughty list

A recent survey of U.S. consumers found that 51% of respondents plan to start their holiday shopping earlier this year. To mitigate fraudulent activity, publishers should also prepare early by optimizing their inventory. Bots can be given instructions to visit premium sites, pick up desirable cookies, and then visit fraudulent sites to monetize. In order to protect the value of their inventory, here are some key reminders for publishers looking to prepare for the holiday season. 

Make a list and check it twice 

✓ Figure out where site traffic originates 

  • The first step in identifying fraud is recognizing where traffic originates. For example, traffic that is sourced from a supplier has a higher possibility of attracting fraudulent bot traffic. Suitable ad environments are powerful, and transparency helps to build a strong relationship between publisher and advertiser. 

✓ Confirm how visitors are attracted

  • If traffic is sourced, there is a higher possibility of fraudulent bot activity. If most traffic comes from data centers, rather than residential or corporate networks, publishers should confirm that there are no software tools being run in those data centers that hit their website. Running tools that drive traffic may result in invalid traffic per industry group standards.

✓ Not all invalid traffic is malicious

  • Some cybersecurity, testing, and analytics solutions employ methods that can trigger fraud detection models from ad verification vendors. For example, some bots are designed to crawl the internet and gather information or generate simulations. Publishers should work with their ad verification vendors to further analyze their inventory and consider adding known data center IPs to an exclusion list. 

Happy holidays

In order to protect the value of their inventory, the publisher needs to analyze traffic patterns and optimize their content appropriately. 

In conclusion, the web is rife with invalid traffic. Some traffic — consumers, crawlers, etc — is such a helpful gift to marketers that it should with a bow. However, there’s a great deal of malicious invalid traffic, the lumps of coal in the industry’s stockings. Such activity on publisher pages can threaten the trusted relationship you’ve built with your advertising partners and cost you real dollars. 

The holiday shopping season is right around the corner, and safe inventory is the best gift to give to your partners. If you’ve detected invalid traffic on your site, then it’s likely that your advertiser partners have too. No need to ring the alarm just yet though. Being proactive and well-informed can go a long way toward ensuring that you and your advertisers present a unified front against fraud.

Industry-Research | Revenue

Publishers show digital growth amidst pandemic closures and consolidations

Digital subscriptions have helped shape a stronger business for publishers. FIPP’s latest Global Digital Subscriptions Snapshot (Q3 2020) shows that subscriptions are serving to support publishers during the pandemic. In fact, research by Press Gazette reports that during the Covid-19 crisis the largest newspaper groups in the US and UK gained more than one million new digital subscriptions. Not only are large publishers faring well but smaller, regional and specialist brands are also showing record subscriptions.

Despite positive performances in digital subscriptions, Covid-19 brings with it challenges to the industry. Zenith Media expects a 9% decline in internet ad spend this year. The agency estimates a 6% recovery in 2021, driven by the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics.

On a global front, the middle east and Africa will be hardest hit with a 20% decline in advertising revenue. Western Europe anticipates a 15% decline and Latin American a 13% decline in ad spend. The Asia Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe markets are estimated to decline by 8%, respectively. North America expects to register the smallest decline (7%) due to the large spend on political advertising this year.

FIPP Q3 findings:                                            

News publishers’ subscription growth

  • The Athletic reports 1 million subscribers as of September 2020. Unfortunately, with only a few new subscribers in Q1 2020 and cancellation of live sporting events, the company laid off approximately 8% of its staff. In addition, there were pay cuts across the company to offset expenses.
  • Caixin Media in Beijing grew subscriptions by 70%, adding 210,000 new subscribers for a total of 510,000 this year. It’s the first media company in China to place all of its content behind a hard paywall.
  • Dow Jones reports that digital revenue now accounts for 71% of total revenue, up from 63% compared to the same time period last year. Total subscriptions, across print and digital products, is at 3.8 million, driven by a 28% increase in digital subscriptions. Interestingly, 2.2 million of the Wall Street Journal’s 3 million subscriptions are digital-only. Across the entire Dow Jones group, digital subscriptions account for 67% of subscription revenues.
  • Gannett is centering their business around digital transformation. To date they are close to one million paid digital subscribers.
  • The New York Times’s added 669,000 new digital subscriptions in 2Q 2020 for a total 5.7 million digital subscriber. In fact, for the first time ever, digital revenue now exceeds its print revenue. Overall, the company’s operating profit of $52.1 million is down 6.2% compared to same time period one year ago.

Magazine closures

  • South Africa magazine closures:
    • Associated Media – company closure
    • Caxton – selling off 80 titles
    • Media 24 – closed 2 of 5 titles
  • UK magazine closures:
    • Immediate Media – closed 11 titles
    • Bauer Media UK – closed 10 titles
    • Broadly – exited New Zealand, closed 8 titles and consolidated with Australian Mercury Capital
    • PLC – closed 6 titles
    • T1 media was acquired by Future

Streaming growth

  • Netflix consistently delivers content with new productions and licensing deals to the consumer market. As of Q2 2020, there are a 193 million subscribers globally.
  • Amazon Prime Video, part of Amazon Prime, is very successful in the SVOD market. Subscribers reached 150 million globally.  The company does not break out Prime Video from Amazon Prime. The company does not provide details on active users of Prime Video. However, the Kantar Entertainment on Demand Report offers a third-party analysis SVOD users. The Kantar Q2 2020 analysis shows that Amazon Prime Video subscriptions account for 23% of all SVOD subscriptions. That marks a 14% increase from the prior quarter. 
  • China’s merger discussions between Tencent Holdings and iQIYI could establish the world’s largest streaming service with more than 231 million paying subscribers.
  • Disney+ is exceeding all expectation with currently has more than 60.5 million subscribers.
  • Apple TV+ claims 10 million subscribers. However, many subscribers are part of a 1-year free trial offer because they are users of the hardware. Further, Bloomberg estimates that about half of Apple TV+ subscribers never used the service.

The coronavirus’ impact on the advertising industry further strained publisher revenues and forced several to close their doors and others to consolidate. The pandemic also showcased the consumers’ need for trusted news and entertainment content. This need feeds into the relationship of publisher and consumer. Its why consumers value the content and are willing to pay for it.

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives | Revenue

How machine learning improves header bidding

If you have worked in the digital space in the past few years, you’ve likely encountered the term Machine Learning (ML) in some context. For those of us who aren’t tech experts, this buzzword may be a little daunting. However, these technologies are actually widely used across industries including digital advertising.

So, what exactly is Machine Learning? To explain that, let’s take a step back and talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI describes a computer program’s ability to conduct a task that would normally require human intelligence, such as drawing conclusions based on data or recognizing patterns in a dataset. Machine learning is a step above this. A subset of AI, ML is the ability of programs to “learn” and self-improve as they get more data. This allows them to make more accurate decisions and predictions over time. This greatly reduces the human input required in performing crucial tasks.

How is machine learning positively impacting header bidding

Many publishers across the world rely on header bidding as the most efficient way to boost programmatic revenue. However, the technique in itself has undergone significant advancements. Initially, the majority of publishers used client-side header bidding to maximize yield through multiple demand partners. But it had its own challenges such as latency. 

Then, server-side header bidding arrived. It helped publishers combat latency issues but had its own shortcomings. Publishers now use a combination of both, which is generally known as hybrid header bidding. 

Among all of these advancements, one thing has remained constant: the use of machine learning in improving header bidding for all publishers. Therefore, the future of header bidding relies on how well technology companies can incorporate ML into improving header bidding tech. This will ultimately yield a robust solution that does not require any workarounds for its peripheral issues. 

Impact of machine learning on header bidding dynamics

Automatic selection of demand partners

One of the key challenges that publishers dealt with before heading bidding was a lack of control over demand partners. That is key to optimizing revenue. Without knowledge of demand partners, the entire system would lack critical transparency. 

Through the use of ML in header bidding, publishers get access to multiple demand partners. In fact, the selection process ois automatic, while simultaneously providing maximum yield. This massively benefits publishers as it saves them time for other activities while ensuring a consistent increase in revenue.

Timeout management 

For every publisher, managing timeouts is a tricky process. Timeouts can often result in lost revenue and publishers need to spend some time troubleshooting. However, ML has completely altered the game. Publishers can now use managed heading bidding solutions that utilize machine learning to fine-tune timeout settings in a way that maximizes yield but reduces latency.

Server-side header bidding

Server-side header bidding was introduced to reduce the latency issues associated with client-side header bidding. Instead of a user’s browser, the auction takes place on a server. Many publishers have gravitated towards a combination of client-side header bidding and this to get the maximum out of their investment. 

The credit however, goes to ML for helping the ad tech industry in advancing this technology. Machine learning helps in tracking deal performances through automated systems. All this is done in real-time with multiple demand partners in place.

Price floor optimization

Another added advantage with using ML in header bidding is optimizations of price floors. As mentioned above, ML is what makes algorithms smart. With a consistent tracking of data, patterns, trends, demand partners, ad requests, and related factors, ML can help in automated price floor optimization. Over time, this can considerably improve header bidding performance. 

Why machine learning is here to stay and scale

ML capacity to learn and improve is uncapped. This means that with time, as the programs amass and go through more data, their predictions will only become sharper, quicker, and more accurate. While ML may not replace humans anytime soon, these tools can definitely help marketing teams free up time to focus on high-level strategy, instead of repetitive data analytics.

Advertisers across the world are already witnessing increasing returns on their ad spends, thanks to ML-based optimization of everything from creatives, targeting, and bid values. However, advertisers are not the only ones who stand to benefit from the adoption of ML tools. Publishers typically receive a percentage of the revenue (through CPM, CPC or other models) and more effective advertising campaigns mean a chunk of a larger pie for publishers. 

However, publishers can by no means afford to be merely passive bystanders in the ML revolution. Thanks to the data at their disposal, advertisers, today, have a clearer picture of how, where and when their ads work best. In contextual advertising, for instance, publishers need to continually create content. However, they must also evolve based on their audience’s changing consumption patterns. This requires knowing your target audience deeply, and often working with advertisers to create a synergistic experience for the audience. Publishers, too, can leverage ML solutions for layout optimization to create greater value for advertisers, and by extension for their own platforms.

Overall, AI and ML tools offer an opportunity for all parties involved in advertising technology. Early adopters of these solutions will likely see the best outcomes and returns, and given that these tools are based on the premise of self-improvement over time, it is likely that those who adopt a wait-and-watch approach will face an uphill task of catching up.

About the author

Ankit is the CEO and Co-Founder of AdPushup, a leading technology company which helps web publishers and e-commerce companies accelerate their revenue growth. At AdPushup, he has led the product development, market strategy, and business development efforts, which has allowed the company to scale to 4 billion+ monthly impressions for over 300 publishers worldwide.

Innovation | Revenue

Five tips for running (much) better online events

This year, we’ve all swapped physical conferences for online ones. Socializing over tiny sandwiches and buffet lines has been replaced by what feels a bit like one long Zoom call.

However, thanks to Covid-19 (if you will), I’ve been able to participate in more events than ever now that they are online. Some have been great, and some have been truly awful. Of course, pretty much all of us are figuring this out in real time. So, here are five tips for creating online events your target attendee might not just sign up for, but actually enjoy.

Choose a platform wisely

If you are launching a virtual event, choosing a platform is likely going to be one of the most significant decisions you make. When selecting or updating your platform choice, involve your target participants. Get a focus group together to demonstrate the available options. Explore the pros and cons collaboratively, so you can settle on one that will make people like them more likely to sign up.

There are certainly plenty of options. Eight months ago, most of us would have balked at a Zoom call. Now, there are dozens of online platforms to choose from, and they’re all rapidly iterating.

Virtual events in virtual reality

You might try a VR platforms like Mozilla Hubs, which was used to deliver IEEEVR back in March. You could also take a look at VFairs , which created a physical convention center last month for The Photography and Video Show. They went all in on the digital replica model, including a foyer (image above), exhibition hall, main stage, workshop rooms, and an in-platform chat facility for networking.

VR platforms might suit you if your participants are tech-savvy enough to learn a new platform quickly, and keen to be immersed in a long-form event and take. But if your ideal attendee only has a spare hour or two and/or doesn’t want to learn a new digital interface, that’s not going to work.

Webinars evolve

At the other end of the complexity scale are webinar platforms like Zoom and Google Meet. Most of us are familiar with them (or have gotten familiar this year). Therefore, you can reasonably expect attendees to jump straight into the proceedings without spending too much time learning the interface.

Webinar platforms can work for time-poor attendees. However, they don’t offer much in the way of networking tools. If that’s important to your audience, you may need a third-party tool like Telegram or Slack to keep them happy.

Conferences that have taken this approach include Splice Beta. They ran dozens of one-hour events throughout September using Google Meet. They also set up a Telegram group for off-site networking during and after the conference period.

Meet in the middle

Platforms that offer a middle way between real-life replication and a webinar include HopIn and EventsAir. They have better interactivity tools. However, they typically take longer for your events team and attendees to learn to use and navigate. If you up your game in terms of platform, you’ll need to be prepared to offer sufficient guidance and tech support for attendees before and during the event.

That was a sacrifice worth making for Audiocraft, a day-long Australian podcast festival held in July. According to organizer Jess O’Callaghan, “There are those accidental encounters at physical conferences. You’re just eating a sandwich with someone you’ve never talked to before, and all of a sudden you have a connection that leads to something new and exciting. Offering that online was essential for our attendees”.

HopIn allowed Audiocraft participants to direct-message each other. They could create their own meetups during conference breaks and attend three-minute speed-networking sessions. To make the event a seamless experience, O’Callaghan’s team spent hours on rehearsals. They used HopIn for staff meetings to ensure everyone was comfortable with the interface. They also appointed “virtual ambassadors” to help field participant questions on the day.

Success is in the details

This attention to detail is essential, according to David Meerman Scott, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Fanocracy. Scott has spoken at more than two dozen virtual events around the world since March. Unfortunately, he says, many virtual events are “mind-numbingly awful”.

“People are using the old-school webinar approach. It’s a big set of slides with a voice track over it, and a tiny thumbnail of someone at their kitchen table,” he says. “The other thing that’s happening is people are trying to recreate an in-person event and put it online. That is essentially televising a keynote, like a TED talk. Why would someone pay or persevere through a TED talk that’s not just 12 minutes, but 45?”

Scott has just published Standout Virtual Events, co-authored with Digital Content Next editor and event organizer Michelle Manafy. The book is packed with recommendations for designing events, considerations for choosing a platform, ideas for audience interactivity, and pricing strategies.

Critically, the book also offers tips to help speakers deliver their best on the day. “As an event organizer, you have to take charge of the quality of the event. You simply cannot assume the speaker is going to be able to pull it off without your help,” Scott says.

Define and measure your impact

Razlan Manjaji has led the events team at the South China Morning Post for the past year. Under his leadership, the team of 12 has gone from running one virtual event a month to one every week, with revenue targets for most of them. “That was a leap of faith for us, because it was four times our previous workload,” he says.

It’s involved more than faith, though. Manjaji sets KPIs for every event, and gives each event a net score based on attendee satisfaction. The Post uses Bizzabo, a platform that allows users to track performance on key metrics.

SCMP’s KPIs include overall sign-ups as well as the percentage of attendees that meet a sponsor’s desired demographics. They also measure actual turn-out on the day and how long attendees spend on the event platform. They also track well as whether they interact with the content and each other during the event. And, of course, they are keeping a close eye on revenue generation.

For events aimed at new audiences, like the Digital Transformation Series for tech leaders, Manjaji takes a pilot-and-scale approach. He works with supportive brands like Microsoft to sponsor a test event before turning it into an ongoing project.

Not everything has worked well, or indeed at all. An attempt to return to live events in June with a kindergarten showcase aimed at young parents was “a disaster,” according to Manjaji. But the learnings are being ploughed into a second education-focused conference later this month.

“It’s a learning time for everyone, and there will be more mistakes than usual. But the point is that we’re moving in the right direction, and I feel very encouraged by that fact,” he says.

Don’t forget the long tail

Yes, you can put the whole conference on YouTube for free. Or you can make it available as a recording for a set price. But is that the best value you can have from that content, given the time, energy and money you’ve put into making it perfect?

I’ve been really impressed  by SRCCON, which ran online in July. Some of that content was repurposed into Watch Parties a few weeks later. A small selection has been made permanently public, which is an innovative way of attracting new audiences to your brand, long after you’ve turned off the computer at the end of your next event.

Embrace experimentation

My last tip is to stop wishing for a return to the “old normal.” For however long social distancing is with us, and it could be years, offline meetings will be risky to run and tough to make profitable. Of course we miss the camaraderie of physical conferences. It’s a chance to see old friends and have those accidental meetings that help drive new projects and business. But this is no time for nostalgia. It’s a time for brave experimentation in the online space to reach and leverage new audiences for your brand.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Why publishers need to push back on platform-specific “cookie-less” solutions

With the imminent demise of third-party cookies in Chrome, and other browsers blocking them already, everyone is talking about “cookie-less” solutions. But what exactly are “cookie-less” solutions? And how will they help – or hurt – publishers?

For the most part, when someone says they have built a “cookie-less” solution, they mean that they don’t rely on third-party cookies. Instead, they use first party cookies or locally store some bit of information they can use later to identify the user.

There are obvious challenges with using first party cookies or local storage compared to third party cookies. Notably, that they aren’t accessible across domains. Therefore, identifying a user from one site to the next is not possible without additional technology or signals.

However, the benefit is that all browsers currently still allow them to be set with JavaScript. (Though, in some cases, set with shorter TTLs). For our purpose here, and to keep things focused, let’s make the false assumption that any platform offering a cookie-less solution can successfully and accurately connect these first party cookies across domains at scale.

First parties and risk

So, if third party cookies are essentially dead and first party cookies can work as a viable replacement, this sounds perfect. Well: Not exactly.

Any identity provider that can read and write a first-party cookie to store their own identifier, also has access to all of the publisher’s own cookies. (With the exception of HTTP cookies with HttpOnly properly set). They also have access to any other first-party cookies set by any other technologies (ad tech or otherwise) on the page.

There are three problems with this level of exposure:

  1. Data from first-party cookies could be leaked to other platforms who are incorrectly reading first-party cookies that they did not set.
  2. Platforms can overwrite the publisher’s own first-party cookies or the first-party cookie of another platform, causing issues.
  3. Cookies set by the publisher and all platforms writing first-party cookies are included in HTTP requests to the publisher’s servers. Cookies can become so large that the browser starts to limit them. (~4kb is the limit in most browsers.) Or they will cause network latency and increase consumers’ bandwidth usage.

Too many cookies

If there were only a handful of identity providers being used by the publisher, these may not pose too much of a risk. The publisher could properly audit the code and manage the cookie space accordingly.

Unfortunately, there are already 15-20 different companies offering identity solutions using first-party cookies. Standards have not been established. And that  means it is open season for identity providers to manage first-party cookies as they wish. Yes, even though these cookies are supposed to belong to the publisher.

Prebid.js is the exception. It employs a standard implementation for identity providers to read/write cookies and publishers have control over the name of the first-party party cookie used by default. But even here, several of the modules handle cookie naming, reading, and writing on their own.

Check your IDs

This leads to the question: Why do we have so many “identity providers”? Are they all doing something unique and special? Some are. But many are just ad tech companies “offering a first-party cookie solution.” Unfortunately, these solutions are simply a means to an end for platforms to get their own ID in the bid stream to make it usable for themselves.

This may seem necessary and feasible today. But what happens when every ad tech platform decides they need their own ID in the bidstream? Publishers would need to support hundreds of IDs on their page. SSPs would need to pass these IDs to DSPs. And Data Platforms and DSPs would need to be able to ingest and understand all of these IDs. Beyond just these technical challenges, having this many IDs poses significant privacy challenges, like we have today with 3P cookies. And it certainly does not move the industry in the right direction for consumers.

Shared solutions

At ID5, we believe there are identity providers that deserve to be on publisher pages and in the bidstream: those that are providing a shared ID for all platforms to use. However, vendors that are creating “cookie-less” solutions simply to power their own platform should instead use these shared IDs as a currency to transact across platforms while using their own ID for internal purposes and building their own graph.

Publishers need to push back on any platform-specific “cookie-less solutions.” They are not beneficial to the industry and are causing confusion and technical challenges. Shared ID solutions improve technical efficiencies and provide a common language to communicate about users across platforms. They also allow the various platforms in our industry to focus on what they do best. Identity should be a commodity and not a differentiator and should be handled by companies who focus solely on providing shared identity solutions.

Advertising | Revenue

Deceptive landing pages: Why ad security must look beyond the creative

In 2020, yet another vector of attack has deployed by scammers, fraudsters and other bad actors to harm the digital advertising ecoystem. For years, we’ve been on guard against malicious code hidden in ad creative, ready to deploy without the user’s knowledge. However, in this latest wave of attacks, the user is lured to a dangerous landing page by willingly clicking on a deceptive ad. Once on that page, the user gets hit with a phishing scam, a fraudulent product offer, or a prompt to download malware.

Evasive tactics

Just last year, discussions about ad quality, the industry’s attention was largely – and rightfully – focused on auto-redirects. But as the COVID pandemic spread, bad actors quietly ramped up efforts to evade ad security tech by enticing users to willingly click on bad ads.

Publishers have seen an onslaught of ads for questionable health-related products, and products bearing fake celebrity endorsements. With publisher CPMs falling, those bad actors were able to buy the inventory. With a large, anxious captive online audience, they were able to convince many users to click through to pages where they would be vulnerable to scams and malware.

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For publishers, this scenario underscores the security and QA importance of inspecting not only the ad creative, but the landing page it leads to. To keep users safe, publishers need closer analysis of what awaits the user after the click. If you can recognize a fraudulent or otherwise unsafe landing page, you can flag the creative itself as a potential risk.

Powers of deception

Let’s get back to how this current wave of attacks plays on the user’s mindset. Deceptive ads are a long-running problem in the digital advertising ecosystem. These ads may show a celebrity’s name, a deceptive product description, or even a message that appears legit. And in many cases, the landing page keeps up the ruse.

Deceptive ads often lead to deceptive sites. Unfortunately, many of these are counterfeits of actual premium sites. Bad actors rely on borrowed prestige, copying the design and branding of well-known, premium media outlets. These bad actors also create counterfeit landing pages for sites relevant to different geographical regions and different interests. This, in turn, allows them to target their attacks.

Revenue problems

Those attacks often come in the form of phishing scams and cryptocurrency schemes. They also frequently offer fraudulent or low-quality products (including unregulated supplements or medications) and malware downloads. This is a great risk to the security of the user’s devices, personal information and wallet.

It’s also a risk to the publisher’s wallet. Users will conclude the publisher hosting the deceptive ad has condoned that ad, its buyer, and its buyer’s landing page. And then they will avoid the site that led them down this path, depriving the publisher of its ability to monetize future sessions.

If the user believes the counterfeit site they’ve landed on is the real site of a premium publisher, that user may even lose faith in the counterfeited publisher. Both publishers appear untrustworthy, and the only party to blame is the bad actor.

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Tricks of the trade

Detecting deceptive landing pages is a complicated proposition, though. In large part, this is because malvertisers will often use cloaking methods to obfuscate the ad’s content and landing page content. They’ll send a dummy creative to the publisher, with the landing page URL hidden somewhere in the code. The ad will appear legit to a scanner, and the code will swap in the malicious creative (with the hidden URL that will open when the user clicks) as the publisher page loads. Cloaking utilizes layers of deception that are designed to evade creative scanning technology, and that are too complicated to be routinely detected manually.

Cloaking is a preferred method of many of today’s most dangerous malvertisers and scammers. The method evades scanners because it can differentiate environments where there is a human user, and where there is a non-human user (that is, a scanner or a bot). Then it shows different content to each. To stop cloaked attacks, publishers need technology that can detect the real (hidden) URL and inspect the landing page. And, because the creative is flipped as the page loads, that technology must be automated and must function well in real time.

Security solutions

Deceptive landing pages, hiding behind tantalizing ads, should be a top security concern for any legitimate, quality publisher with an engaged audience. But bad landing pages can be detected — allowing the creative to be blocked before the page loads — using existing technology. However, that technology must be sophisticated enough to analyze the landing page and the creative in real time. This needs to happen before it can reach the user, harm them, and deter them from returning to, and monetizing, the publisher’s site.

To be effective, the tech must first be able to analyze the ad creative for patterns that indicate malicious activity, including cloaked code. The tech then must be able to analyze the text and images on the landing page in question. It must be able to recognize signals that indicate fraudulent activity and security risks. And, again, it must be able to do so in real time.  

In today’s complex digital media reality, publishers cannot simply take a defensive and reactive stance on ad security and quality. They must act aggressively and proactively. They must take the fight to the bad actors’ landing pages. And the industry has the tools to do so safely and effectively.

Featured Post | Innovation | Revenue

Insight killed the video star: The role of video in premium subscriptions

It doesn’t seem so long ago that premium video was the great hope for publishers. Newspapers including The Daily Telegraph were investing heavily in building up their video teams, only to have the ground fall away from underneath them when platforms changed the terms of agreements. The result? Newspapers cut their losses and jettisoned the teams around which they had so recently built their strategies.

Premium video now finds itself in a bit of a limbo. It is no longer the star of most publishers’ offerings (save for a few examples). And it has taken a back seat when it comes to the marketing of news paywalls. Instead, insight and access are the new tentpoles of subscriptions. That’s never been more clear than when the Telegraph, fresh from abandoning its video unit, launched an out of home ad campaign heralding its unfettered access to Westminster.

The Athletic has taken a similar approach. The sports analysis site, which has outperformed during Covid, has emphasized the access its journalists have with athletes (and the access its subscribers get with the journalists). Crucially, The Athletic has eschewed video for the most part. The company does create or licensing video. However, it does not view it as central to its value proposition, as this interview with its president and cofounder Adam Hansmann demonstrates:

“According to Hansmann, the industry’s sense of news, often based on daily newspaper deadlines rather than what readers will pay for, is outdated. ‘The modern fan already knows what happened in a game, whether it be from Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. They’ve seen the highlights a million times on the internet’”.

Short and social

Hansmann’s nod to the popularity social video is telling. Mobile video is still far and away the largest growth market for the medium. That’s especially true in markets like China, where short-form video dominates any growth charts. Users spent a total of nearly 600 million hours per day watching short-form videos on mobile in April 2019. That’s more than in any other category.

Additionally, premium video is expensive to produce and the ROI is less clear-cut than for the mass-produced videos on YouTube. As Vanita Kohli-Khandekar explains: “Because [ad-supported] video is free, platforms will do anything to get eyeballs. But subscription-supported programming (usually) is well-researched, written and produced – whether in entertainment or news.”

So, the bottom has dropped out of the video advertising market on platforms. Short-form video is the new normal. And even sports-based digital publications don’t feel the need to make premium video part-and-parcel of their offering. Is it now time to call “cut” on the concept of premium news video at newspapers?

Not news

News publishers do license footage and social video to accompany breaking news. However, the reality is that, unless premium video is a newspaper’s key focus, it just doesn’t make sense for them to invest in strictly news-centric video. For one thing, news video has a shorter tail than other types of video. For another, given that individual papers have a far smaller footprint than other platforms, it’s unlikely that they can attract enough eyeballs to compete with viewers on, say, YouTube.

That is, in part, why publishers like Joe (and its current affairs-based YouTube spinoff PoliticsJOE) choose to produce vox-pops and simple interviews. Frankly, they suit the ad-based platforms better. Even The Financial Times, which does produce longer form videos, typically hews close to the interview-led format on its in-house videos. This format entails a relatively low investment in terms of time and editing, despite looking extremely professional. However, they don’t match the level of production quality of traditional broadcasters or OTT entertainment services.

Head of audio and video for The Evening Standard Chris Stone said: “When a breaking news event happens there is obviously massive spikes in traffic, and everybody’s very interested in this one thing that’s happening. And so, it’s actually quite easy to serve video to that audience, because there’s people out there that are looking for that right then. But it tends to be a shorter tail. And that spike will disappear very quickly. And then you’ll be on to the next thing.”

The lifestyle lifecycle

Instead, he argues that lifestyle video content is the way forward for newspapers. It has a longer lifespan and greater opportunity for commercial partnerships.

Paul Newman is brand director for Future Plc’s home interest titles. Speaking about its own “pivot to video” with the Real Homes Show, he notes that: “Real Homes Show… has been a huge success since we launched it last April. We generated hundreds of thousands of views of the show. It’s proved incredibly popular with commercial partners.”

“I think the important thing is just to start with a good solid business plan, and to understand why you’re creating video, rather than just creating video because you think you should, or because somebody in senior management thinks, ‘Oh we haven’t gotten the video content, maybe we should get on with creating some.’”

The success of lifestyle content in attracting users to sign up for a subscription has already been clearly demonstrated by The New York Times, whose Cooking app is frequently cited as a reason for paying. It is, unsurprisingly, heavily based around video.

Similarly, major lifestyle publications have made their archive of health and fitness videos available as part and parcel of their memberships. The reality, then, is that while video is still a good investment for newspapers for driving subscriptions, oftentimes news video is not.

Marketing medium

So, does that mean that there is no opportunity for newspapers around news video? Not at all. Just look at the success of Vox’s Explained series on Netflix. It delivers an awful lot of value to the parent brand in other ways that aren’t primarily monetary. At the time of Explained’s launch, Vox’s editor-at-large Ezra Klein stated that “… the Vox team did think about the overall Netflix audience, which is much bigger than Vox’s. But not as much about whether those people were watching on phones or tablets or other devices.”

Newspapers also recognize that video consumption habits are different among their key demographics. Consumption is growing across the board. However, it is effectively the primary means of media consumption among younger audiences. The Guardian, which hit one million subscribers on its YouTube channel last year, is keenly aware that those younger audiences are the key to its future.

One million subscribers may not sound like a lot on YouTube. It is considerably smaller than many individual’s channels, and any ad revenue it generates is likely to barely cover production costs, if at all. That, after all, is why many larger (non-media) YouTube channels operate Patreon or donation models as well.

The longer-form explainer news videos that The Guardian produces and makes available for free is effectively the best form of brand marketing possible. It hits audiences where they typically spend their time and can be used as a lure to drive interest back to the paper’s own membership scheme. More than that, as audiences shift to seeing YouTube as a primary source of news, it helps demonstrate that the brand can be trusted above all the conspiracy and polarized videos that typify the platform.

News publishers are serious about the quality of their journalism, no matter the medium. As younger people’s consumption habits lean further towards video, then investment in news video is a way to communicate that quality. It just requires publishers to recognize that the return on that investment is unlikely to come quickly or easily. Rather, it will come from a deeper overall relationship with the audience segment on which they will soon depend.

Advertising | Revenue

Reducing subscription churn is critical for advertising revenue

The deluge of advertisement and subscription offerings can lead to rampant reader fatigue. In this digital age, subscription churn presents an ongoing problem for media companies. Benchmarks place the media and entertainment industry near the middle of churn averages, between 5-6%.

So, it’s no surprise churn is a big topic of conversation. However, what is less often discussed is the impact churn reduction strategies have on advertising revenue. Spoiler: Yes, they have a massive impact.

We’ve said before that subscription and advertising-based revenue models are the future of media. Unfortunately, though, some companies continue to underestimate the effect of subscription churn on advertising revenue and overall company value.

Understanding how these revenue models support one another empowers better decision making, presents opportunities for data sharing and cost reduction, and just generally improves performance. It all boils down to leveraging subscriptions data in your advertising sales and prioritizing churn reduction strategies that improve ad performance.

Modern ad sales boosted by solid subscriptions data

Ryan Holmes, Chairman and Co-Founder at HootSuite, points out that the average American consumer has seen a massive increase in daily advertisement exposure. In fact, since the 1970s, “that number has increased by a factor of 10 to upward of 5,000 ads per day.”

Highly engaged audiences are inherently valuable to brands. This is particularly true when compared with risky ad placements on social media, which can end up alongside fake news, or worse. These inundated audiences around the world require far more specialized, contextual advertising to build long-standing relationships with trusted brands.

At Lineup, we’ve long advocated for audience-based ad sales. But where does the best audience data come from? Subscriptions! Thus, when an advertising team can leverage subscriber data, particularly from loyal, long term subscribers, more effective strategies can be employed to target campaigns and better activate key audiences.

Customer data platform, Blue Conic suggests that most brands don’t actually leverage the power of this kind of first-party data to their full advantage: “Less than 5% of marketers say they’ve yet to realize 80% or more of the potential of their first-party data. They include information provided by their audience in some facets of their marketing but have yet to realize the desired ROI from the source.”

Effective churn reduction strategies impact advertising

Applying successful churn reduction strategies obviously benefits the subscription team with stronger retention rates to improve overall revenue growth for a company. However, successful reduction strategies also improve the impact of advertising revenue.

Prioritize personal experiences

Personalized subscriptions and ads are likely to mutually benefit each other. For example, subscriber data that builds stronger reader profiles and return-rates can, in turn, enable advertising teams to offer more insightful contextual targeting to a captive audience.

Successful advertising requires engaged audiences who trust the publisher’s content and return often. The act of subscribing indicates the difference between a casual web visitor and a true, returning, reader. And advertisers are eager to get in front of those eyeballs whenever possible.

In 2019, data management platform Cxense demonstrated this in the global market. Online marketing team members of major Danish advertiser Nordjyske Medier successfully leveraged personalized customer data to increase “click-through rates by 300 percent on average — while digital subscriptions grew by 50 percent in the same period.”

Personalized experiences are critical for turning casual web visitors into subscribers (whether paid or free). They are also essential for turning those subscribers into a fully monetized audience.

Build loyal audiences

If personalized experiences convert visitors to subscribers, the next step is ensuring those new subscribers stick around long enough to impact your bottom line. An individualized customer experience on both ends of subscription and advertising content creates deeper connections with audiences, making them likely to remain loyal to brands in the long term.

A loyal audience base attracts marketers because these kinds of audiences prove to be more responsive. Twenty years ago, many companies did not have the digital resources to so carefully segment, track, and individualize content for key audience groups in a relationship between subscriptions and advertisements.

But now, brands that can leverage cross-functional strategies and shared data insights to their advantage can build even greater loyalty to their high-quality content and ethical, reliable journalism. This approach builds strength across departments within media businesses so that everyone from audience teams to editorial teams has a basic understanding of marketing principles and can contribute meaningfully to the strength of your brand.

The result? Readers transform into brand advocates!

(Of course, systems like Amplio can strengthen brand loyalty by leveraging subscription data to the benefit of interested marketing teams.)

Understand why readers leave

When you understand the reasons readers cancel subscriptions, you’re also more likely to pick up on parallel reasons the same readers don’t interact with ads. It’s time to stop guessing why readers leave and start asking. Like many of the other benefits we’ve discussed so far, taking this integrated approach to discovery can benefit all teams and departments towards achieving collective company goals.

A solid approach to identifying at-risk subscribers is not only a marketing strategy, it’s equally critical for the success of your advertising sales team.

One goal, two revenue streams

Reducing subscription churn empowers you to focus on collecting better data from existing, long-term customers to the distinct benefit of advertising revenue. This approach can move a company from focusing merely on impressions, to actual impact.

Companies that retain more subscribers spend less time and resources strategizing against losses — as many businesses have had to do in the last year. Instead, they will be energized to use those resources for improved subscriptions and visibility to marketers.

Advertising | Revenue

How one botnet evolved its fraud to elude detection and steal revenue

When it comes to cheating advertisers out of their ad spend and stealing revenue from publishers, fraudsters are upping the ante. By monitoring of invalid traffic (IVT) associated with digital advertising, our team tracked an unrelenting, sophisticated operation first publicly reported as 404bot.

By using a broad range of tools, our researchers were able to pinpoint the actual proxy software that had been installed on consumer PCs. This key discovery allowed us to closely track the fraud as it morphed. We found this scheme to be particularly devious for two reasons:

  1. The offending program was typically installed unknowingly through various seemingly safe entry points. (This is (often referred to as a PUP, or potentially unwanted program.) It would then turn the downloader’s computer into a botnet carrying out ad fraud in the background.
  2. Much like software companies roll out bug fixes and updates to their code, the scheme similarly evolved its mechanisms for fraud. Each adjustment was made with the intent to elude detection.

The following is a debrief on the uncovering of the scheme. We outline what tipped us off to foul play. We also discuss the steps we are taking to mitigate the activity and why it’s so important to monitor invalid traffic to protect all sides of the programmatic supply chain.

The deep dive into botnet activity

In mid-2019, our team observed suspicious botnet activity. We spent weeks investigating and tracking various suspicious identifiers surrounding this activity. Finally, we were able to pinpoint a unique signature. We then matched it to a binary of a desktop application called NotToTrack. This free VPN, readily available for any consumer to download, masked itself as software meant to secure the installer’s computer.

Our team was able to obtain the VPN’s actual malware binary. We ran it in our clean room, where we can safely download malware ridden software and de-obfuscate code. This allowed us to:

  • Record its web activity and thus reconstruct the behavior seen in impressions from the relevant time period
  • Validate that it is based on Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF), a popular framework for web based applications that can be used both legitimately and by bots
  • Develop new detection methods based on these observations

The discovery of this VPN and its executable file allowed us to see the full breadth of the operation. What we found was very persistent, targeted ad fraud.

Summary of the bot’s evolution

The VPN front was just one point of entry for the operation’s fraud. It was probably not even the most common distribution vector.

Following the newly discovered evidence, we have found forum complaints that indicate this operation has been underway since as early as November 2016. Based on evidence we’ve gathered, we also believe the origins of this bot are the same as 404bot, a recent fraud scheme made public by another verification provider.

However, our findings reveal that this bot has not ceased its fraudulent activity. And as it attempts to elude detection, it has moved from its initial domain spoofing practice onto other mechanisms.

In the graph, we see the subset of spoofed domains tracked by Integral Ad Science (blue) alongside the rest of the malware-originated activity that Moat has been tracking (orange). Where the domain spoofing ceases (blue activity falls flat), we see the fraudulent impression activity actually has continued as the perpetrators evolved their tactics.

What is the impact that we are seeing?

The question of impact always comes up when discussing the discovery of an ad fraud scheme. This is usually in relation to stolen impressions and ultimately, lost ad spend. But even as we bring the pieces of the puzzle together, the true size of any botnet is hard to measure. So, we caution against assigning too much value to a market impact analysis.

Even more important is how this bot illustrates the ability for these schemes to quickly mutate. So when the conversation turns to impact, we firmly believe it should not be about size, especially as it relates to protecting our clients and doing what is right for the industry. A botnet that is “small” by our measurement today could easily evolve into a much larger threat tomorrow.

What we do know, from the portion of traffic we are able to measure, is that at its peak, this bot was clocking in at around 11 million impressions per day. And, as recently as March, it was still showing activity at just under 2 million impressions.

Further, the nature of how this bot is operating—by targeting the computers of unknowing consumers through shifty mechanisms—is particularly invasive. The distribution of malware can have severe consequences on hardware. The complaints of users who unknowingly downloaded the offending proxy software mention various, flag-raising behavior. For example, at the Bleeping Computer forum a user describes, “I have a bunch of programs running that I did not allow to start… My computer in-turn slows down due to all these programs running their bleep [sic]. Earlier today, I had 3 virus programs scanning my computer. I never downloaded, let alone installed them.”

How to protect your investments from IVT and ad fraud

Unfortunately, ad fraud is a pervasive and pesky byproduct of programmatic advertising. This is thanks to an environment that affords ample anonymity as well as produces a significant amount of profit. Having meaningful data is the first step in enabling us all to ask the right questions about these schemes that will continue to occur.

Moat has numerous methods for detecting various forms of IVT. As we identify and track fraudulent botnets, we use our findings to understand how they evolve. We continuously develop detection mechanisms that can identify and separate bot activity from human. We believe everyone in the ecosystem has a role to play in eliminating ad fraud and addressing IVT. It is through continued collaboration, information sharing, and advancing our technology that will help us build trust and ultimately, stop the cheaters from lining their pockets.

Perspectives | Revenue

Will we make the same mistake with CTV as we did with the web?

It’s a familiar scenario. One of the big ad tech players announces a change and we are all left to interpret what exactly it means. The only certainty is that it will take some effort to understand the full picture, the driving force behind it, and a plan of action. 

As the big players quickly and quietly expanded their walled garden ecosystems, many publishers found themselves left without a key. We all know these big players own most of the market share and also dominate most of the growth as well. By the end of 2020, it’s predicted that nearly 70% of US digital ad dollars will be spent with Amazon, Facebook or Google. 

However, publishers do have options for regaining control, especially when it comes to new growth areas like connected TV (CTV). Even before Covid-19 drove consumers to CTV and streaming in record numbers, 2019 saw a 330% rise in programmatic OTT/CTV ad transactions with CTV market advertising spend in the US valued at $6.94B last year. As you begin to build out your CTV strategy, it’s important to learn from the lessons of the past to avoid making the same mistakes. 

Own your audience relationships 

Distribution and tech partnerships often begin with great promise. When Apple introduced their Newsstand offering, it was positioned as a lucrative way to expand subscriber reach on iOS devices. Once Apple announced they would only allow single issue sales and began acting as an intermediary by keeping the subscriber data collected on their platform, the need for a business model more balanced with publisher needs became evident.

Nothing is more important than your audience and the ability to maintain control over the close audience relationships you cultivate. Effectively identifying these loyal audience segments and estimating user lifetime value is the foundation of a successful strategy. If you’re not working with an independent tech provider, it’s important to consider the potential implications and potential risks of partnering with a competitor or potential competitor and what impact that might have on your audience relationships.

Control and leverage your data

Your data is a key asset in your private garden. Controlling who gets in and what goes out is especially important as GDPR, TCF, and CCPA come into full effect. These changes have immediate impact on your revenue, but also secondary costs from the business model adjustments needed when third-party cookies are disabled.

Niche targeting, personalization, and frequency capping all depend on transparency and insights derived from data. Controlling and fully understanding your data makes it possible to hone your monetization strategy and create innovative opportunities for advertisers. When others have control over your data, it becomes more challenging. 

For example, concerns have been raised around Google’s proposed TURTLEDOVE solution and its less frequent reporting structure. This poses a big challenge around leveraging data to fully optimize and capture revenue. As publisher first-party data becomes increasingly valuable and offers more monetization opportunities, it’s important to consider whether your provider is data neutral or more interested in harvesting your data. 

Control your infrastructure  

Make sure you are the one in charge of all the tech decisions in your private garden. In a technologically nuanced space like CTV look for partners that provide the expertise and infrastructure needed to ensure data protections, but also allow you to maintain control. Be wary of partnering with players who are also competing for your audience’s attention. And ensure that you will have enough flexibility in customization and business rules.

When Google first acquired DoubleClick back in 2008, they promised it would offer publishers more tools, enhanced productivity and additional revenue while freeing up resources to allow publishers to focus more on building and maintaining a web presence. In reality, it was one of the first deals that helped Google establish dominance and affect changes in customization and control that continue to ripple through the entire industry. Again, be very careful with who you let into your private garden. 

Diversify your revenue 

The end of third-party cookies means short-term revenue losses are likely. Many publishers have already begun exploring ways to diversify their revenue streams. Meredith is a great example of strategically embracing data management and ownership. The launch of their Data Studio and e-commerce sites connected back to their brands has helped optimize revenue streams.

Engaging loyal audience segments through registrations and subscriptions is another strategy that many of you have begun to embrace. Build upon existing successes like The New York Times has done with the introduction of their stand alone NY Times Crosswords and NY Times Cooking offerings. This is another avenue for strengthening audience relationships while building more robust first-party data. 

This industry shift towards CTV offers another consideration for diversification. It also provides a prime opportunity to take back control and build your own private garden. Learn from the past in order to make careful choices around who you partner with and how you protect your investments from the start. This will give you the key to your own private garden and bring success in expanding into new growth areas.  

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