Recent research from DCN shows that major tech platforms have brought very little in the way of revenues to publishers. Distributed content from Google and Facebook only amounts to five percent of the total average digital revenue for publishers. So how can the platforms turn that around and improve on those numbers? By helping drive subscriptions and conversions for paid products.
Last June, I called out Facebook and Google on this very point. Driving subscriptions would be a win for publishers who need more revenues, and for the tech platforms which need a way to build trust, support the news ecosystem and generate positive press in these times of bots, misinformation and election meddling.
The good news is that both Facebook and Google are now taking clear steps to help drive subscriptions for publishers. Facebook will take a 0% cut on subscriptions they drive through their app on Android and Apple devices, while launching a new Local News Subscription Accelerator. And Google has upped the ante with plans to help publishers identify potential subscribers by sharing more data. The bad news is that there is a long road ahead to making these initiatives work.
Facebook Makes Peace with Apple, Launches Accelerator
Facebook’s News Feed tweaks — most recently, to downgrade publishers’ posts in favor of content from friends and family — have long influenced the kinds of stories Facebook users see. Because people are used to the free-flowing nature of news in the Facebook News Feed, the social giant had been loath to introduce friction.
But after mounting criticism, Facebook has been developing ways to drive subscriptions from its app. And best of all, its support for paywalls will not include taking a cut of revenues from publishers. Instead, Facebook will show users five free articles and then direct them to the paywall on the publishers’ site. That means 100% of subscription revenue goes to publishers – and they get to keep all the data about users as well.
It wasn’t an easy task to pull off on iOS, because Apple is notoriously stubborn about waiving the 30% “Apple tax” it takes from any monetary transactions in apps. But after some tough-knuckled negotiation, Facebook’s Campbell Brown announced at the Code Media confab that Apple caved in and would waive the fee.
Not only that, but Facebook also recently announced a Local News Subscription Accelerator with 12 metro dailies getting training support for a three-month trial. It’s nice that the social giant is putting $3 million into the effort, and partnering with the Lenfest Institute. The big question is whether that work will scale to help more publishers.
Google Leading the Way So Far
While Facebook has made a lot of progress lately, Google, in comparison, has been more consistently friendly to publishers: At the recent Digital News Initiative summit in Amsterdam, for example, Google announced it would help identify which kinds of users would be attracted to which publications. The company also said it would ease the process of subscribing within Google. It also plans offer users a tailored search experience based on their subscriptions. This push to support subscriptions is one that Google has been working on for over a year. At the International Paid Content Summit in Berlin, publishers also touted Google’s efforts in distributing digital subscriptions. A survey among summit participants revealed Google shows much more “cooperative behavior” than Facebook.
Google also recently surpassed Facebook as the internet’s top referral source for publishers, a status that takes on significance for both Google and publishers given Facebook’s decision to de-emphasize news. A friendlier Google in the midst of News Feed shifts can help offset what publishers might lose with Facebook’s algorithmic changes. Coupled with access to Google’s coveted data insights — which publishers want and Google controls — working the publisher-Google relationship is indeed enticing for both parties. If Google wants to win favor with publishers, now is as good a time as ever.
Sharing the Wealth
Ultimately, though, whether Google or Facebook will do better in driving subscriptions is not as important for publishers as whether the two will really commit to the process. Because Facebook and Google together account for such a huge chunk of the attention for internet users, publishers must stay focused on working with both of them, along with other players like Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn.
It’s surely a positive that both Facebook and Google are taking big steps in driving subscriptions, and perhaps their rivalry could help push them even more. And while they surely dominate in online advertising, it’s incumbent upon them to make sure the news ecosystem is healthy and thriving. If digital ads are getting sucked up by the duopoly and subscriptions are becoming an important source of revenues for publishers (both for-profit and non-profit), then publishers will need to insist on better data, better leads, and a transparent funnel that helps them survive and thrive.
Publishers are rethinking their editorial practices and diversifying revenue streams to become less dependent on advertising or foundation funding. They (especially digitally native publishers) are implementing mixed revenue approaches, which include advertising, corporate underwriting, foundation funding, article syndication, events, affiliate programs, merchandise, and book sales revenue. The newly released report, Guide to Audience Revenue and Engagement from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, provides insights on strategies for building audience revenue and engagement.
To win a share of consumers’ valuable attention and money, paid news products (whether supported thorough subscriptions or member donations) must be vital to the subscriber. They must also clearly represent an editorial mandate they support.
The Tow Center identifies key strategies to support the develop of direct audience revenue:
Offer a unique perspective as a publisher. Readers become members when they want to be part of a unique community and access a valued news brand.
Clearly express your mission to accurately reflect the values you provide the world and your member community.
Identify activities and programs that are interesting, valuable and useful to retain members
Develop a strong editorial engagement with readers.
Build and monitor the steps in the audience revenue program conversion approach: research, expose and attract, engage and deepen, convert, and sustain.
Research (to learn about prospective member needs)
User experience research
Segmentation: reach different audience groups strategically
Expose and attract:
Increasing reach through social media
Increasing reach through in-person community events and conferences
Engage and deepen:
Editorial engagement
Article pages and site structure
Email newsletters
Using events to engage readers
Convert:
Campaign structure
Managing data infrastructure
User data effectiveness
Giving and asking frequency
Sustain:
Recognizing and thanking members
Engaging and sustaining members
Engage your audience through your journalism, face-to-face interactions, product design and email newsletters. Each is a great way to build a loyal and engaged audience.
Importantly, when developing editorial products, it’s important to ask what do people want (desirability), can we make what they want (feasibility), and can we make what they want successfully (viability).
Further, developing audience segments based on user research and site analytics is important in understanding the different reader experiences. It’s critical to maximize the individual user segment experiences to ensure each is fully engaged.
Overall, online news consumers aren’t used to paying to support publishers. However, this transition is evolving. That’s why it’s important to establish a series of interactions to engage individuals to help shift the occasional reader into a paying supporter.
Think of it like products in a supermarket. Content companies with mobile apps are locked in a fight for two incredibly scarce resources: consumer attention and shelf space. Unfortunately, on the digital shelves of the app store, discovery is the bottleneck. Consumers can’t download apps they don’t know exist in the first place. (And how can they in a market where the number of apps submitted to the Apple App Store in the month of January alone topped 500 submissions daily?)
To rise above the noise, and drive app installs in the process, app owners compete for a top-notch spot in search results. Smart companies are winning the battle with App Store Optimization (ASO) by tweaking keywords, icons and other assets to make sure their app store landing converts. It takes dedication and budget to get ASO right, which is why companies that succeed and boost downloads in one country or store are leaving money on the table if they don’t publish their apps in more places.
But before you go global with your app, double-check that you have mastered more than the ASO basics. The checklist is much longer than it was just a year ago because ASO has evolved, expanding beyond the app store presence and deeper into the funnel. Looking back, the first wave of ASO was a lot like the early days of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Companies could score quick wins by hacking Google algorithms or focusing on “long tail” keywords. Moving forward targeting “killer” keywords is not enough. ASO is morphing into what I call AMO (App Marketing Optimization) and ready for a rethink.
Rethinking ASO
ASO/AMO tops the agenda at every stage of the app lifecycle. But it’s never a case of set-it-and-forget-it. It requires app owners to monitor and manage a laundry list of elements that starts with keywords and ends with compelling video clips. It’s an ongoing effort, but the pay-off is massive organic growth that every app owner can afford to tap for their app. The key is to take the right steps in the right order.
It all starts with testing, refreshing and optimizing all of the moving parts of your app (titles, descriptions, icons, screenshots, videos, and reviews) on a regular basis. Once you have the processes in place to achieve positive results for your app at home, it’s time to take your app abroad.
Mobile Games companies need little convincing. They were pioneers in aligning app elements, visuals and gameplay with the preferences of a global audience. Consider Candy Crush, a blockbuster app with audiences in nearly 200 countries thanks to a look-and-feel that is a match with local tastes and trends. Now other categories of apps, notably those in the Entertainment category, are following a similar blueprint to attract and acquire more users.
Localization differs from internationalization
But before you embark on a strategy to take your app global, know the difference between localization and internationalization. Think of internationalization as table stakes. It encompasses what you need to adapt your app to different languages, regions and cultures to reach a global market. Your focus in this stage is on the basics: changing time, dates, region format, and other aspects of your app to fit with your target markets and audience.
Localization goes deeper. It starts with translating the language of the app and other elements (keywords, description, and even the name of the app) to be a tight fit with your target audience. If you plan to engage in commerce, be sure to adapt your app to local regulations and payment methods to avoid any legal battles further down the line.
Clearly, localization is not a job you want to leave to Google translator. Amateur efforts rarely pay dividends, and literal translations can do your app brand more harm than good. (Case in point: KFC’s famous finger lickin’ good motto for its fried chicken is a notable example of a bad translation. In Chinese, it urged consumers to bite their fingers off.) It’s also important to resist the temptation to localize every aspect of your app from the get-go just because you can. It pays to pace yourself.
If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, or the countries to target, then start with your app name and keywords and localize these assets for popular countries or languages. As a rule, use your organic app installs as a guide. Pinpointing countries where your app is taking off allows you to prioritize your efforts, starting with keywords. Use tools to check traffic volume for specific keywords and bake the best (yet most relevant) keywords into your app assets. If you see a bump up in your app downloads, then take it as a sure sign you can move on to localize other assets, such as the app description, followed by other marketing collateral including screenshots.
Cater to local cultures
From here on, industry literature tells us localization is just a matter of “wash, rinse, repeat” for every additional country or app store on your list. But is it really that simple? In a word: no.
An effective strategy to go global with your content goes beyond the pure “science” of ASO/AMO to the “art” of understanding how addressing individual cultural preferences and nuances. Pay close attention to other aspects of your app—such as colors, images and user interface—to build a loyal audience for your content.
Do your homework and use common sense.
Primary design considerations:
UI: Does your audience read left to right or right to left? Or is it vertical? Make sure you factor in how the text and images are read. And make doubly sure the use of directional icons in your app are logical and genuinely helpful. It impacts engagement and dictates how users will interact with their device, especially as they swipe left—or right—depending on the app and activity.
IMAGES & CONTENT: Brush up on ethnology (or hire someone with those skills). Adapt the ethnicity of your visual elements to local culture and pay special attention to skin, hair, and eye color. It’s a no-brainer that Asians or Indians might be wary of buying into localized content that displays blonde-haired, blue-eyed models, presenters, or families. Rethink the obvious icons and idioms. Sure, using a piggy bank icon as a metaphor for saving money works well in North America and much of Europe, but it’s a miss in most Middle Eastern countries.
COLOR: First impressions count, and different colors resonate with different cultures. For example, Japanese players like subtlety and pale, softer colors and shades. Chinese users, on the other hand, prefer vivid, strong and bright colors like red and orange. The mobile games industry learned this the hard way, so deep-dive into posts and publications (such as Pocketgamer.biz) where they share their tips and tricks.
From images to music, be prepared to adapt every aspect of your app to match your target markets.
Pay attention to the political spectrum
Done properly, localization engages your audience with content that resonates because it respects their local customs and cultures, not just language. Significantly, the same rules apply to your choice in app marketing and advertising messages and ad creatives. Sure, it’s a must when you take your app global. But the surprise success of SmartNews, the news app that delivers the top trending stories downloaded by over 25 million readers in over 100 countries, suggests the same approach can boost results and user loyalty in your home market as well.
In the case of SmartNews, it started with the realization that readers in North America were divided by political parties but united around one goal: the desire to access to real news, not fake news. “The most effective way to show we understood our audience and their concerns was to adapt our marketing to appeal to all sides,” Fabien-Pierre Nicolas, Head of Global Growth at SmartNews, told me in a recent podcast interview.
SmartNews bet on a simple creative capable of delivering a powerful message that would appeal to a broad political spectrum of users.
A review of app data and demographics revealed that the SmartNews audience was a mirror of American society. “Our readers are mostly between the ages of 35-65, and they range from liberal to moderate conservative in their politics,” Nicolas explained. An effective campaign would have to be objective and emotive. Nicolas, recently named a Mobile Hero for his user acquisition approach and accomplishments, went to work and immediately rejected flashy images and trendy buzzwords. Instead, he worked with his team to develop a simple creative capable of delivering a powerful message.
The approach worked, boosting usage and earning the app positive reviews. Nicolas says the results are still coming in and a focus group will provide the inside track on audience and brand impact. In the meantime, internal data shows the focus on eliminating the filter bubble has allowed SmartNews to increase app appeal to both genders at all levels of society and across the complete political spectrum.
You’ve invested time and resource to make your app a hit at home, and it makes business sense to take your app to global in order to maximize exposure. Yes, that starts off with mastering the fundamentals of global and local design considerations to adapt your app to your audience. But we all know that designing a terrific app is not enough given the glut of products in the market and the increasing consumer requirement for apps that are aligned with local tastes and trends. Discovery is a critical component of conversion, but apps have to strike a chord. Moving from simple App Store Optimization to an effective global app marketing strategy will help you maximize your investment so that your app will be popular with audiences everywhere.
Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. Full disclosure: She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.
Facebook’s recent newsfeed algorithm changes have left publishers with a lot of questions. Many who relied heavily on Facebook and other third-party distribution sites find themselves needing to look elsewhere. Now these publishers are focusing on building stronger on-site communities and finding other distribution platforms that are more publisher-friendly. They’re wondering about Facebook’s decision, how they will be affected, and what they should do next.
Since the algorithm change, here are some of the most common questions I’ve encountered in talks with publishers:
Why did Facebook make the decision to de-prioritize publisher content in its Feed?
As many entrepreneurs are, I see Mark Zuckerberg as someone who takes his business personally. While I don’t think he’d act against his own best interests, I do think his decision in some ways was a reaction to the polarization that the news can create. This way, Facebook is not choosing a side, or subjectively deciding which news is ‘appropriate’ and ‘real.’ It looks like they’re disengaging.
Are there specific ad formats/publisher inventory you believe will be hurt the most by Facebook’s decision?
It’s not so much about ad format, in my opinion. Facebook’s big appeal to publishers was the benefit of strong audience development and the convenience of content distribution. These will be the main things that disrupt publishers the most. Facebook actively courted publishers for years on end, promising them audience and shared revenue. This shift could be quite the loss for the publishers who relied heavily on the platform for audience development.
What 2-3 platforms could rise up to support publishers in the absence of Facebook?
I believe that Snapchat and Twitter both have the potential to benefit from Facebook’s shift. That being said, Snapchat is certainly the platform that will benefit the most. Their publisher-focused Discover Channels are central to the platform. Especially with the most recent interface update, Discover Channels are positioned in a way that is meant to drive as much user traffic as possible. Snapchat has certainly jumped into the lead role in providing a solution to publishers who were thrown off by Facebook’s changes. They are a publisher-friendly platform on the market right now.
Should publishers forget about third-party distribution and refocus on building engagement/audience on-site?
Publishers are always working to build on-site audiences. But of course, that’s much easier said than done. These third-party distribution platforms—like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat—help identify and grab that audience, making it easier to build those communities back on-site. The issue for some publishers is that they become too comfortable with third-party platforms and, in turn, rely too heavily on them. There will always be a happy medium for both, though, as third parties remain a great tool for audience engagement and content distribution.
Facebook’s shift has certainly stirred up some uncertainty among publishers, regarding whether or not third-party distribution platforms are a reliable tool, and if the risk outweighs the rewards. These publishers will ultimately find comfort in the publisher-friendly models of other third parties, specifically Snapchat—but they will also invest more time and resources into building core communities on-site.
The digital media business is finally making the shift from attention to user engagement. We see users as individuals rather than sets of eyeballs and focus on winning hearts and minds. This is a huge, ultimately positive change that will produce a much healthier media ecosystem. But it’s not going to be easy. It requires new technology, new marketing and product skills, and most importantly a change in mindset from content-first to customer-first. That means moving away from some very entrenched habits.
The first 20 years of the consumer internet, especially in media, have been almost entirely about aggregating audience. Sites seek to attract millions, often tens of millions, occasionally hundreds of millions of people, with all those eyeballs “looking” at billions of banner ads. That focus on big, unidentified, often undifferentiated audiences made it possible for media companies to take the existing ad models—based mostly on audience size—and adapt them pretty easily to digital. Yes, there were significant creative and technical challenges in making that shift—learning to create digital stories and to sell and serve digital ads. But fundamentally the model itself didn’t change much.
The relationship with the audience was still largely a one-way, anonymous relationship, despite the new ability to engage directly, to measure behavior and to learn more about that audience. Most media companies were shortsighted, opting to avoid friction-inducing roadblocks like registration in order to maximize unique visitors, pageviews and ad impressions, missing a chance to develop a direct relationship with readers.
The end result: massive harvesting of user data, ad-cluttered sites powered by the ad tech Lumascape, “recommended for you” widgets, ad fraud, and ultimately unhappy, ad blocking users.
But simply launching a paywall, adding affiliate links or announcing an event series isn’t enough (hello, Buzzfeed). That’s just throwing new revenue streams up against the digital wall like spaghetti. There are four essential elements required for success in the new user-engagement era of digital media: customer knowledge, product strategy, enabling technology and marketing skill.
Let’s dig into each in turn.
Customer knowledge
In the attention era, media companies didn’t need to change their fundamental model. We could still follow an editor-first content strategy—writing about what editors thought was important or interesting. And the ad tech revenue stream didn’t require any understanding of who was reading beyond some basic demographics. Yes, there were audience analytics, paying attention to SEO trends and later social traffic. But the starting point was always what WE thought was interesting. We didn’t truly know our customers. In the user engagement era, understanding the reader (or viewer) has to come first. Whom are we serving? What can we learn about them? What do they need to live their lives, do their jobs or be entertained? Then we can apply editorial and product creativity to serve, surprise and delight them with great products and stories they didn’t know they wanted.
Product strategy
Once you know your customer, developing the right product to serve them takes more than creativity. It also requires focus, experimentation and iteration. In product management terms, it’s “finding product-market fit.” Focus means keeping your eye on the customer you’ve identified when deciding what product ideas to pursue and rejecting ideas that aren’t a fit for those customers. Experimentation and iteration go hand-in-hand. Buildenough of the product to test it with your customers (or at least a few of them), see what works and what doesn’t, and iterate to make changes and improve the product. This method will apply across multiple dimensions of product and business decisions—from editorial and product focus, to features, to pricing. It’s also an ongoing process, continuing even after achieving success.
Technology
While there has been a massive investment over the past 20 years in ad tech, there’s been relatively little investment in software and services to understand and engage with users as individuals, to measure behaviors like loyalty and conversion to repeat usage. Driving user engagement and powering consumer-paid content requires a robust technology platform that provides measurement and reporting, customer messaging, content gating rules, entitlements, and payment processing. Moving forward, machine learning will be a powerful tool for anticipating which users are most likely to become loyal and ultimately willing to pay.
Marketing skill
It’s become conventional wisdom among media business observers that—through his often disparaging tweets—President Donald Trump deserves a lot of credit for the recent success driving subscriptions at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media companies. The follow-up question is often “What happens when the ‘Trump bump’ fades?” Piano’s CEO, Trevor Kaufman, points out that’s a pretty limiting way to look at it. No one asks, “Will consumers pay for Nike shoes?” the way media pundits ask “Will people pay for journalism?”
The problem is that most media companies don’t know how to think like product marketers. They generally don’t have the skills in house, haven’t got the tools available and aren’t building marketing into their business plans and P&Ls. So, once you understand your customer, create a compelling product they’re willing to pay for and have the technology support. The last element to put in place is the ongoing marketing plan to drive customers through the engagement funnel. Then Google and Facebook transform from behemoths with the power to slash your audience and destroy your business into just another channel for marketing your product.
The ultimate vision is a healthy media market based on true relationships with known customers. For publishers, creating products that meaningfully connect with a loyal audience will unlock multiple revenue opportunities—whether consumer-paid products, events, merchandise sales or even advertising based on that real customer connection.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long talked about his company’s goal of “connecting the world.” Clearly, they have succeeded. Families, friends, neighbors, classmates, fans, even employees all around the world connect on Facebook – to the tune of 2.2 billion monthly users at the end of 2017 according to Statista. And more recently, Zuckerberg has attempted to mature this vision with the lofty goal of “building communities.”
But, make no mistake, the platform was also built for advertisers. In exchange for “free” use of the service, people enable Facebook to collect highly personal information about them – information that is used to inform advertising and spread information. As the platform grew in popularity, the tools and information sharing became more innovative – some would even say
When their tools were exploited by foreign agents before and after the 2016 election, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg’s first reaction was denial: “…the idea that fake news on Facebook…influenced the election is a pretty crazy idea.” In hindsight, it’s seems implausible that a company built on data could be so ignorant about the use or abuse of the service. There was evidence that bad actors utilized Facebook to influence the Brexit election just a few months before. Are we to believe that Facebook employees never investigated those activities or considered how the service was being used around elections?
Given that every family has at least one crazy relative posting full time about politics on Facebook, I’m sure there are several teams of Facebook employees dedicated to understanding political discourse on the platform. Yet, ever since it became clear that Russian agents manipulated Facebook to sow discord in the U.S., the company strategy has been mitigation: slow to share data with the public and lawmakers about what happened, slow to roll out changes to prevent future exploitation, slow to take responsibility for what happened on their platform.
Then came Rob Goldman’s epic, Facebook says rogue, tweet storm. Special counsel Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russians for their role in attempting to undermine the 2016 election contains a detailed narrative of how Facebook was manipulated. Goldman’s tweets show that Facebook is STILL in denial. Goldman contends that Russians’ main objective wasn’t to influence the election contrary to Mueller’s indictment and, quite frankly, common sense. 44% of the ads were run before the election. Goldman even admits that the Russian-bought ads were pro-Trump. Worse, Goldman’s defensive tweets focused entirely on advertising, ignoring how foreign actors may have abused other Facebook tools. All of this bluster is intended to deflect blame, muddy the waters and shield Facebook from taking real responsibility (aka liability).
Ironically, Goldman’s tweet confirms that Russian actors used the Facebook platform to sow discord after the Florida high school shooting. Apparently, the solutions that Facebook has rolled out aren’t working to clean up their platform. One wonders whether the solutions were actually intended to appease lawmakers and regulators as opposed to actually solving the problem. We need to maintain the pressure on Facebook to deliver on it’s lofty rhetoric.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Facebook’s first responsibility is to its shareholders, not our democracy. But, with the 2018 elections just around the corner, we need to continue demanding more from the dominant platforms of Facebook, Google and Twitter. At the moment, it seems they’re still playing the PR game when they should be protecting the “community” they have built.
Did you get the letter from Google? Late last summer, Google notified 1,000 website owners that their ads were annoying, misleading, or harmful to the user experience. They were directed to Google’s Ad Experience Report and encouraged to clean up their ads.
This encouragement is now a directive. As of February 15, the latest Chrome version (v64) began to filter all failing ads across every website with a failing status as listed on the Ad Experience Report. Given that Chrome dominates the browser market (60-65%, depending on the source), this news has serious repercussions for ad-supported websites. Never has so much hinged on ad quality.
Defining bad ads
The classification of a bad ad is no longer in the eye of the beholder (or media publisher). Formed in 2016, the Coalition for Better Ads (CBA) researched the acceptable advertising experience of 25,000 consumers in North America and Europe. The result is the Better Ads Standards, released in March 2017.
In a nutshell, 12 ad types regularly annoy consumers and correlate to the adoption of ad blockers: four for desktop and eight for mobile. Google is using the Better Ads Standards to evaluate ads on ad-supported websites. Upon initial review last summer, less than 1% of 100,000 websites contained ads violating the standards.
Fixing bad ads before they fix you
When it comes down to it, meeting the CBA standards shouldn’t be that difficult, especially if you’re a premium publisher that knows all parties contributing content to the user experience. This knowledge makes it easier to communicate and enforce any policy—be it ad quality, security, data leakage, performance and more—and cease business with those that don’t have your—and, therefore, the user—best interests at heart.
What happens if you chose to ignore the Chrome audience? Your website will be assigned a “failing” status, and if this status remains for more than 30 days, then Chrome will filter all ads running on your website. Therefore, your choice directly affects the website’s ad-based revenue continuity.
Be proactive. Adopt a holistic creative quality assurance approach to continuously assess ads—creative and tags—for compliance with regulatory requirements, company policies and industry practices, like those promoted by CBA. By developing a tactical ad governance structure, you can codify what constitutes an acceptable ad and ensure compliance with multiple industry standards.
Check: What’s your status?
The CBA also announced a self-attested certification program whereby publisher participants pledge to abide by CBA standards. The program is free during the trial period, with an expectation that it will run at least until July when fees will be announced. As of now, Google agrees to not filter ads for any company participating in the CBA program. With the program’s initial steps only requiring registration, self-attestation and no fees, it makes sense for publishers to participate.
Remedy for Bad Ads
Regardless if you register with CBA, all media publishers should verify their status and take steps to remediate offending ad quality as soon as possible.
Initiate verification by selecting “Manage property” and downloading the HTML file to your site. (Note that there are alternative methods such as using your Google Analytics or Tag Manager.)
Once your website is verified, Google will initiate scanning. The process may take some time.
Review your website’s status for both desktop and mobile
Warning or Failing status requires immediate attention
Remediate all ad quality issues, especially those promulgated by CBA through these steps:
Identify the source of the issue
Communicate digital policy requirements, i.e., CBA standards
Demand correction or remove the source from your digital ecosystem
Document your remediation steps in the “Request review” area of the portal
Submit for review by clicking “I fixed this”
As a member of Coalition for Better Ads, The Media Trust has various solutions to address ad quality, from creative policy enforcement, to campaign verification. Whatever your decision, you can achieve ad revenue objectives while delivering a clean and regulatory-compliant user experience. Clearly, a more positive ad experience benefits everyone—publishers, ad/martech and agencies and, most of all, consumers.
It started with a simple hypothesis: The most powerful long-term driver of publishers’ business is reader’s trust, which builds loyalty and habits over time. If a person who reads something today comes back tomorrow for another serving, that would create a sustainable return audience. That audience would consistently contribute to the bottom line and produce much greater returns than simply increasing the number of ads-per-page until the user experience breaks down.
However, over the past few years, most of the industry drifted in the exact opposite direction. Most seek more revenue extraction on each visit, while handing people’s loyalty and habits over to platforms like Facebook. It may have seemed like a logical approach for revenue-strapped publishers. Unfortunately it is also one that carried negative long-term implications, which spawned guaranteed revenue deals with myriad monetization partners, including Outbrain.
When considering guaranteed revenue deals, keep these three topics in mind:
Restrictive Page Layouts. The days of asking a publisher to maintain a static page layout or conform to a certain number of paid placements are over. Always-on testing and optimization are critical tools in publishers’ toolbox. Guarantees prohibit flexibility by locking in page format, design and a specific number of placements. Without flexibility, publishers forgo a core capability to engage their audiences and improved monetization.
Constant Compliance. Slow approval and legal overhead reduce time to deployment, reducing revenue opportunities. In addition, ongoing compliance creates a burden of monitoring, coordination amongst internal teams and strains partner relationships. Ironically, most guarantee deals eventually default to revenue share because compliance is so cumbersome.
Reader First. To deliver on guarantees, publishers have to push the boundaries of recommendation quality. This trade-off can sometimes lead to a lousy reader experience, frustrating editorial teams and creating recommendation blindness. It’s a short-term revenue win but one that can degrade reader trust. This dynamic is one reason we recently launched Sphere, a publisher traffic exchange to promote high-quality editorial content.
Guarantees work in certain cases, but more often than not are an illusion for revenue-strapped publishers because they can undermine the long-term reader relationship. In addition, a lack of flexibility and a heavy compliance process distracts from more value-add and strategic activities.
Recent market developments show signs that publishers are beginning to understand the trade-offs between true partnership-based revenue share relationships, where participants work together to improve the overall health of the publisher business. This contrasts with vendor-based, revenue-focused deals that are narrowly defined by extracting highest possible RPM. Guarantee deals will remain relevant for some publishers, but hopefully the industry can make more informed decisions based on the mutual benefits of revenue share relationships.
Americans are watching fewer big live events on TV — as seen in declining viewership of the Super Bowl, Oscars, etc. And you can count the Winter Olympics as another victim of those changing habits. A recent Gallup poll confirmed that lower ratings will likely follow. But Comcast and NBC aren’t letting that get them down. Instead, they are pushing even harder into social media and new platforms.
And it’s not just a way for NBC to increase its social footprint and beat criticism of #NBCFail memes of years past, when viewers were unable to access solid coverage because of tape delays and commercial interruptions. With less people watching linear TV broadcasts, multi-platform viewership on digital and social is likely going up, and NBC is pushing hard into different platforms to stay ahead of the curve. It’s a way to engage advertisers and audiences — especially younger audiences — for the future.
Here’s a look at how NBC and other publishers will take on the Winter Games this year.
NBC Goes All-In on Social
This tweet has already gathered 45,000 retweets and nearly 124,000 likes as of writing:
The tweet from NBC Olympics is just one example of a social strategy that appears to be working: Push content online right away. Research out of the Rio Olympics from 2016 reflected skyrocketing numbers for social viewership, and there was no reason to anticipate those figures would decline.
So, NBC is seizing control over the narrative of the Olympics. It’s broadcasting the games live for the first time, streaming clips on Facebook, posting videos on YouTube and Twitter, and investing heavily in a Snapchat presence that also includes hiring BuzzFeed to produce a daily, Olympics-themed Snapchat Discover channel. NBC and Snapchat struck a partnership — one of several, as NBCUniversal invested $500 million in Snap Inc. when Snap went public last year — to broadcast exclusive content on Snapchat.
That Snap had a solid earnings call right ahead of the Opening Ceremony this year also gives the company an extra boost of recognition. Snap may be suffering the fallout from Instagram and Facebook copying some of its core features, but it has long pitched itself as a “complementary, second-screen platform for live and linear TV,” as Digiday’s Sahil Patel wrote. And that’s a selling point when you think about the ways linear TV habits are changing.
Publishers, Take Note
Alongside NBC’s huge push into social distribution, a few publishers are also engaging audiences in new ways to boost their own metrics down the line. The New York Times, for example, announced a “live messenger experience” with the Times’ deputy sports editor, Sam Manchester, where he’ll be messaging directly with audiences who want a closer, behind-the-scenes, personal take on the Olympics.
With different mediums for consumption — and therefore disparate methods for measuring consumption — Discovery Communications is consolidating data from linear broadcasts, digital platforms, and social media engagement metrics, to get a better picture of who’s tuning in and who is tuning out of watching the Winter Olympics. Discovery has the rights to broadcast the Games across Europe and will share these results with their clients and partners. While no measurement approach is perfect, it’s a huge step to prepare for a future where understanding metrics can make or break an editorial or ad strategy. It’s not a question of whether other publishers will follow suit, but when.
Google’s Plan
What conversation about distribution can take place without acknowledging the influence of large gatekeepers like Google? Google’s search algorithm has long been key in ensuring people can actually find all the content publishers are putting out there. This year, Google is filtering live video, VR video, and YouTube video into its search results. It’ll offer users location-specific updates about a country’s rankings and other top news stories from the Olympics. And subscribers to YouTube TV can stream over 50 hours of live video coverage, including VR content.
Let’s be clear: The efforts in social viewing and highlight reels for the Winter Olympics this year are not a one-off endeavor. Insights gleaned from how it pans out this year will help better cater to multi-platform consumption in the future — not just for the Olympics, but for all content moving online and on social. And as live events lose their luster on linear TV, more publishers will consider ways to move to social viewing while still driving revenues along with attention.
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