For publishers, digital advertising is a lot like playing craps, says Justin Wohl, VP of strategy at publisher tech platform Aditude.
Just like at the craps table, the programmatic ecosystem is filled with noise from hangers-on shouting suggestions for new, risky bets publishers should take, Wohl says, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. But pubs need to tune out the noise and stick to the strategy they brought to the table.
These days, publishers are facing plenty of headwinds beyond their control, from dwindling referral traffic to ongoing buy-side concerns about media quality. But, Wohl says, it’s always a good game plan to focus on the fundamentals: how to grow your audience and how to extract the most yield from monetizing that audience.
Wohl has been banging that drum for years as a publisher-side thought leader who’s had success running monetization for Salon, Snopes and TV Tropes. He says he joined Aditude in December because of the opportunity to bring the yield optimization insights he’s learned to a wider pool of publishers.
Publishers will need all the help they can get navigating today’s changing ecosystem.
Take the curation craze reshaping the supply chain, for example. Curation is an evolving market, Wohl says, and the rules for how curated deals work are being written in real time. With that in mind, he says, the publisher’s best bet is to prioritize high-quality media so it can take advantage of any curation opportunities that arise.
Also in this episode: Wohl weighs in on the industry’s holding pattern when it comes to third-party cookie deprecation and whether publishers can depend on the courts to get relief from their reliance on Google.
He also calls out the threat posed by generative AI “no-click” search and whether the industry is rethinking the value of paid traffic given referral drop-offs from search and social.
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