Programmatic used to be an all-you-can-eat cookie buffet.
Now, however, programmatic is embracing quality, as curated deals take off and made-for-advertising websites shutter.
We discuss these interlocking trends on this week’s podcast.
First, we talk about the rise of curated deals.
The loss of cookies has prompted ad tech intermediaries to bundle inventory in different ways. Some group together audiences using publisher first-party data, while others bundle premium publishers or contextual categories. Our senior editor Anthony Vargas walks us through the different flavors of curation – and the reason for the trend’s momentum. Because the rise of curation isn’t just about the loss of cookies – it’s an even more bespoke version of supply path optimization.
Then we turn to a herd of made-for-advertising websites run by Content IQ, including Boredom Therapy and Honest to Paws, that met their end this month. Ad tech company Perion shut down Content IQ, which it acquired for $73 million in 2020, in May. Content IQ’s website, and the MFA sites it operated, disappeared shortly after Sincera exposed it was monetizing clickbait by setting up subdomains on more reputable publishers’ websites.
There’s an intriguing point of connection between open web curation and the made-for-advertising cleanup.
In its last earnings call, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green reframed his vision for the DSP as enabling buying on the “premium internet,” instead of the “open internet.” And Sincera made the find about Content IQ when it was doing a project for The Trade Desk to investigate traffic anomalies among subdomains owned by the same publisher.
Turns out, narrowing in on the best and eliminating the worst are two sides of the same coin.
