Publishers

Publishers, such as The Arena Group, are now partnering directly with brand safety solution providers to lower their block rates for direct-sold inventory.

American City Business Journals earns about 90% of its revenue from direct sales. So it is looking to invest in technology that can streamline its direct business as much as possible.

While cookies are still in play, publishers are using first-party data products to draw business from advertisers eager to test cookie alternatives, even as ad spending retracts due to persistent fears of an upcoming recession. Here’s a snapshot of how Vox Media, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Trusted Media Brands evolved their first-party data strategy in 2022 and their plans for the coming year.

UK-based publisher LADbible Group is testing post-cookie alternatives and building its contextual targeting capabilities. But the social-first publisher has yet to be convinced that any of these alternatives will be a truly viable replacement for the much-maligned – and yet still widely used – third-party cookie.

The most commonly cited rationale for publisher staffing cuts has been marketers’ hesitance to spend on advertising amid persistent economic uncertainty. But publishers’ latest pivot to video and increased competition among digital channels is also likely to blame.

Thanks to signal loss, recession fears and the “ad tech tax,” publishers of all sizes are seeing their ad revenue suffer. But the problem is more pronounced among local news publishers, many of which were barely getting by before platform privacy changes roiled the digital advertising industry. The Local Media Consortium (LMC) shares how it’s helping its members mitigate these headwinds.

As BuzzFeed struggles with advertiser uncertainty and a drop in user engagement, it reported flat Q3 ad revenue. Advertising revenue was $50 million, matching last year’s Q3. Ad revenue growth decelerated compared to Q2, “driven by ongoing price compression and uncertainty around consumer demand,” said BuzzFeed CFO Felicia DellaFortuna.

Turns out 2022 was a bad year to merge two large media companies into one massive media company. Both Dotdash and Meredith experienced headwinds throughout the year. Traffic was soft compared with the rise in consumption during the pandemic, and the digital advertising market was unexpectedly weak. And next year isn’t looking rosy.

SmartNews uses the first-party data it gathers from its users to create more intelligent content recommendations and serve more relevant ads. It’s also investing in its own ad stack so it can activate its first-party data by creating contextual audience segments that it can sell programmatically on the open web and as part of its new direct sales offering.

Axios eclipsed its overall 2021 revenue as of Q3 this year thanks to its expansion of local-news-focused newsletters. It also added display banners to its onsite inventory in September and launched its Axios Pro paid subscription in February. The long-term goal is for Axios to have about 50% of its revenue come from ads and the other half from subscriptions.

The New York Times’s subscription-focused strategy seems to be paying off amid a downturn in ad revenue. The Times reported 8% YoY revenue growth for Q3 2022, “with subscription revenue growth more than making up for a slight decline in overall advertising,” said President and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien.

Bloomberg Media just turned off third-party ads on its site. But as it shuts the door to open-market programmatic, Bloomberg is opening a first-party data advertising platform. The business media giant described the change as part of a broader evolution in how online advertising works. “The reason we chose to make this investment is because […]

Publishers covet business from big brands, but working with small to mid-size businesses (SMBs) can be a major source of revenue growth. That’s why Reddit is shoring up its ad offering for SMB and mid-market clients by improving its onboarding process and launching an advertising API.

With a recession looming and even more signal loss on the way, publishers need to experiment to find the best mix of revenue-generating solutions and approaches. Bloomberg’s Julia Beizer, Blavity’s Jeff Nelson and Dotdash Meredith’s Daniel Papalia offered insights into their revenue strategies at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O event in New York City.

My Code, a publisher network that specializes in multicultural media, manages display and video inventory across nearly 800 sites under its umbrella. Because of the complexity of programmatic sales across such a diverse portfolio of sites, including a mix of owned and third-party clients, My Code has relied on PubMatic’s OpenWrap unified bidding solution for the past two years.

US political ad spending is exploding in the runup to the 2022 midterm elections, with an estimated $8 billion to $13 billion up for grabs this election cycle. But, while CTV and streaming video are seeing an infusion of political ad cash this year, local news publishers aren’t seeing a dramatic change in their bottom lines.

You can’t have supply path optimization (SPO) without supply chain transparency. The ads.txt version 1.1 update released in April added OWNERDOMAIN and MANAGERDOMAIN variables that allow publishers to label a site’s parent company and the intermediary that is selling a site’s ad inventory. The IAB Tech Lab’s Jill Wittkopp spoke to AdExchanger about how these supply chain transparency tools relate to the industry’s pursuit of SPO.

After two years of lost revenues, travel-focused publishers are eager to maximize a post-pandemic recovery. BoardingArea, a publisher network that includes more than 60 travel blogs, isn’t just banking on a return to normal, said its founder Randy Petersen. After weathering the pandemic, BoardingArea is betting on revenue diversification and a revamped programmatic tech stack for its future growth.

Group Black, a collective that represents 200 Black-owned media publishers, launched in 2021 with a mission to make Black-owned media easier to buy. Now, it’s partnering with Magnite to help scale Black-owned inventory by making more of it available programmatically.

Kevel launched a new set of APIs on Thursday, called Relay, for publishers and their ad tech partners to build their own programmatic stacks. Kevel’s overarching vision is to provide an AWS cloud-like infrastructure to support online advertising. The purpose of Relay, specifically, is to help publishers get more innovative with their programmatic monetization strategy.

New York Times-owned sports publisher The Athletic introduced display ads on its site and in its app on Monday – but don’t expect to be able to buy these ads on the open web. The goal is to make The Athletic profitable within three years.

Chrome Unboxed, which started in 2015 as a YouTube channel for unboxing videos featuring Google’s Chromebook products, is emblematic of the early struggles upstart publishers have in monetizing their content. Its path to ad-supported profitability shows there’s still hope for the little guys in digital media.

The programmatic payment gap is a well-known issue. In the latest OAREX half-year payment report released this week, late payments are back on the rise, although to a lesser degree than in 2020.

Brands and tech vendors can do a lot more to make good on their public promises to support diverse and Black-owned media, says Rhonesha Byng, the CEO and founder of Her Agenda, a digital media platform for millennial women, and co-creator of the Black Owned Media Equity and Sustainability Institute.

What happens when your main monetization partner starts flagging your content as spam? Freecycle turned to header bidding to reduce its reliance on Google AdSense, but the company’s one-person engineering team had trouble managing the header-bidding system and the constant stream of Prebid updates on top of web development duties. So, after a 70% drop in ad revenue, Freecycle handed its digital ad business over to PubWise’s managed service.

The market is not being kind to digital media companies. The nearly 40% drop in BuzzFeed’s stock price on Monday and the decline of its valuation from $1.5 billion when it went public in December to roughly $300 million now is no doubt causing other digital-native publishers to rethink their IPO plans. But any doom and gloom about the long-term viability of digital publishers in public markets is likely overblown.

Cookie deprecation is hanging over the media and advertising industry like a storm cloud. New identity solutions built on first-party data are clearly one solution, but publishers and advertisers differ on whether they’re building their own proprietary solution or a shared shelter that will scale – and explained why at AdMonsters’ Ops conference in New York City.

Jay Glogovsky, vice president of revenue operations and analytics for The New York Times, talked to AdExchanger about how The Times relies on direct partnerships to create a positive ad experience for its readers, why open-web programmatic is the wrong choice for a privacy-centric in-app experience and why publishers should double down on close partnerships rather than worry about who will control the keys to monetization.

Direct-sold inventory is still big business for publishers. But processing insertion orders and campaign reconciliation between buyers and sellers has been an often tedious and mostly manual process. To reduce the strain on its ad ops staff, Vice Media is testing an integration between the sell-side order management platform Boostr and Prisma, Mediaocean’s digital advertising campaign management offering.

Does the rise of the subscription media model signal the end of ad-supported journalism? Not likely. But big-name news outlets like Bloomberg are finding subscriptions offer a more stable revenue source than advertising, said Bloomberg Chief Digital Officer Julia Beizer.