Multicultural publishers aren’t just competing for ad dollars anymore. They’re under pressure to grow and scale their audience to remain competitive in an increasingly selective marketplace.
Shrinking referral traffic and cooling diversity budgets have combined to squeeze a category that once saw a surge in brand investment. To adapt, some publishers are turning to tools like AdGrid’s Audience Accelerator to activate first-party audiences across channels.
AdGrid, the publisher audience extension platform, designed the tool to help publishers activate first-party data by growing and packaging their audiences beyond their owned-and-operated properties and into channels like CTV, digital audio and the open web.
Tools like this could help multicultural publishers fulfill RFP requirements, which have been slowly drying up over the last couple of years.
For publishers like Q Digital, which operates a network of LGBTQ-focused sites, including Queerty and LGBTQ Nation, and AURN, a radio network reaching multicultural audiences across thousands of stations, the challenge is how to maintain relevance and revenue when scale is harder to prove and buyers want more from fewer partners.
The reach problem
Referral traffic from platforms like Facebook has dried up, while zero-click search is limiting how often users land on publisher sites. These changes are shrinking overall reach and reshaping how publishers show up in media plans.
“Everybody is maybe a fifth of where they were three or four years ago in reach,” said Justin Barton, CEO of AdGrid Media. “If no one’s clicking from search and Facebook referrals are gone, you’re hollowed out.”
As reach declines, so does RFP eligibility. Publishers that once could fulfill a large share of a campaign may now only qualify for a fraction.
“In the past, they could only respond to $200,000 of a $500,000 RFP,” Barton said. “Now they can go after the full thing, but only if they can check every box.”
Those boxes increasingly include channels like CTV and digital audio – fast-growing areas that are costly and complex to build from scratch, especially for niche publishers.
At the same time, investment in multicultural media remains inconsistent. Advertisers have historically allocated around 2% of budgets to these audiences, with only modest recent gains, said Chesley Maddox-Dorsey, CEO of AURN.
Even when RFPs do come through, expectations have shifted. “We’re doing less upper funnel and more lower funnel than we used to,” said Justin Garrett, CRO at Q Digital.
From owned audiences to extended reach
To close the gap, publishers are turning to first-party data to better understand their audiences and find them elsewhere. That’s where Audience Accelerator comes in.
The model is relatively straightforward. Publishers collect signals such as device IDs, IP addresses, and contextual behavior from their sites or apps. Audience Accelerator then helps turn that data into audience segments based on interests and activates those segments across other channels like CTV, digital audio and display.
“You’re getting the exact person that comes to your site and just finding them somewhere else,” Barton said.
For Q Digital, that meant expanding beyond its owned-and-operated LGBTQ properties to reach users across the open web. Working with AdGrid, the publisher built sub-affinity segments tied to passion points like entertainment, travel and sports, then used Audience Accelerator to target those audiences beyond its core footprint.
That shift unlocked something Q Digital hadn’t achieved at scale before.
“The biggest aha moment has been the ability to layer targeting while still achieving scale,” Garrett said.
For AURN, the opportunity looks slightly different. Right now, AURN still relies on Nielsen for its audience demographic data, paying a premium for panel estimates that boil millions of listeners down into a few broad demographic segments.
Audience Accelerator is helping bridge that gap by enabling AURN to capture more granular data through its digital extensions, such as podcasts and streaming, and then activate those audiences programmatically.
“We went from aggregate approximations to discrete data,” Maddox-Dorsey said. “Now we can go to a ZIP code or a block. That’s new for us.”
That level of granularity opens the door to new types of advertisers and more flexible campaign structures, especially for brands without national-scale budgets. AURN can now package its Black and Hispanic audiences as anonymized segments, enabling programmatic buying without explicitly labeling campaigns as multicultural.
By connecting digital signals from podcasts, FAST, and AVOD back to linear radio, AURN is replacing broad-panel-based insights with event-level data. Maddox-Dorsey believes this approach could help recover multicultural ad budgets lost to traditional RFPs.
The trade-offs
Audience extension tools like Audience Accelerator offer a path to scale, but they come with trade-offs.
One of the biggest concerns is the ad tech tax. Many platforms that enable audience targeting and curation take significant cuts of media spend, even sometimes up to 50%, said Barton. “We’re trying to avoid taxing publishers to death,” he said.
That makes efficiency and control critical. Publishers need clarity on where margins are lost and how many intermediaries sit between them and the advertiser.
Brand alignment is another consideration, particularly for multicultural publishers whose audiences have strong expectations for how brands show up. “It’s important for brands to show up authentically,” said Garrett. Even as some advertisers have pulled back on DEI commitments, audience sentiment has held steady.
“Seven out of 10 users said they would still support brands advertising in LGBTQ media,” he said.
For AURN, these tools also introduce a different kind of flexibility by lowering barriers for both publishers and advertisers. Instead of going through big holding-company agencies to buy a national radio network, smaller advertisers can tap into AURN’s audience as targeted podcast, CTV, or digital audio segments. They are priced higher, but offer more efficient CPMs and are scoped to specific markets or ZIP codes.
“We can now work with challenger brands,” said Chesley Maddox-Dorsey. “They don’t need a multimillion-dollar budget to work with us.”
Expanding beyond owned audiences won’t solve every challenge facing multicultural publishers. RFP volume may remain uneven, and competition for ad dollars isn’t getting any easier. But tools like Audience Accelerator are changing how publishers package and sell their audiences.
“The more detailed data you have, the better off you are,” Maddox-Dorsey said.
For publishers trying to regain footing, that may be the difference between being considered and being left out entirely.
