All ad tech activities, from buying impressions to processing data, require electricity. And it’s estimated that the Internet’s overall environmental impact is around 2%-4% of global carbon emissions, which is on par with the airline industry. But there’s a very real opportunity to ignite real, long-term change that can benefit all stakeholders involved, writes John Goulding, global chief strategy officer at MiQ.
Investment firm North Equity has amassed a portfolio of established media brands like Popular Science, Field & Stream and Saveur with a few new media upstarts mixed in, including The Drive, Task & Purpose, Donut Media and MEL Magazine. In 2021, North Equity launched Recurrent Ventures as its media division. Its CRO, Matt Young, spoke with AdExchanger about Recurrent’s acquisition strategy, its ambitions in CTV and gaming and why the company is prioritizing its private marketplace business to reduce its reliance on open web programmatic.
One of the most overlooked caveats around the shift to first-party assets is that no successful monetization strategy can be built in isolation. A future-facing media monetization strategy must work in two concentrical contexts: within the media owner’s environment itself and within the advertising environment, writes Alessandro De Zanche, audience and data strategy consultant.
Scale. That’s the dirty five-letter word that keeps advertisers and agencies spending their budgets with Google and Meta. Even the largest and most prestigious publishers can’t come close to delivering that kind of scale. But one area where publishers have an advantage over the duopoly is content.
Digital media is undergoing rapid evolution. However, from CTV adoption to industry protocols around user privacy, growth and innovation tend to focus first on advertiser challenges, writes Andrew Smith, SVP of publisher products at DoubleVerify. Publishers need a seat at the table, too, he said, rather than being forced to make do with limited resources and bridge gaps in tech stacks.
Google recently began testing Topics API, the latest part of its Chrome Privacy Sandbox. It’s a significant improvement over FLoC, but it leaks audience information from trustworthy sites and enriches large platforms at the expense of niche or independent sites – especially sites that invest time and skill to cover categories in detail, writes Don Marti, VP of ecosystem innovation at CafeMedia.
For years now, the digital advertising industry has been talking about the premature death of the ad network, writes Omri Argaman, chief growth officer at Zoomd. But there’s a reason why ad networks have survived for so long – they have standardization and massive reach, and are primed to become major growth engines for certain channels (such as in-app and mobile gaming) compared with programmatic exchanges.
Ad exchanges used to be a regular feature of the ad tech landscape. Now? You can hardly find a stand-alone ad exchange because other ad tech players (including SSPs) and ad servers rolled all the exchanges into their service suites. And consolidation is a system in which the best company doesn’t always win, writes Jayson Dubin, CEO of Playwire. Publishers can protect themselves in the midst of disruption by taking a few easy steps.
Google’s decision to delay third-party cookie deprecation until 2023 came the day before Salon CRO Justin Wohl’s wedding. Salon had converted its ad business to an open-web programmatic model a few years earlier, so the brief reprieve from signal loss came as a huge relief and another reason to pop some champagne. Since then, Wohl has been laying the groundwork for effective post-cookie monetization on the open web.
As console gaming evolves, mobile provides a blueprint for solving the challenges around attribution, formatting, targeting and integration in free-to-play (F2P) games. To thrive, subscription-based gaming businesses need other means of monetization, and the F2P model is a viable alternative simply because it opens up many other opportunities for revenue besides in-app purchases.
