Publisher Monetization Strategies – Bound Together by Audience
The inevitable march towards audience buying is well underway and has been well underway for quite some time by this point. Yet, across the web, I still see publishers aligning themselves across industry or business verticals: content publishers who are writing male-centric content are huddling together for group inventory plays and so forth. What’s the real problem here? Publishers should be aligning themselves with other publishers whose audiences match, not some perceived and (quite frankly) archaic notion of verticals. The only verticals we should be moving towards are “audience-targeting verticals”. If I am a reference publisher whose audience of Males Aged 18-25 nicely lines up with a content publisher or blog who happens to have a large following in that demographic as well, we should be able to band together and provide our inventory in aggregate supply.
For a while, the problem for most publishers was the lack of functionality and ability to actually provide audience targeting solutions above and beyond simple things like geo-location, browser type, and perhaps some other built-in features that come from ad servers. As ad servers like DFP began to open up custom targeting functionality to their small and medium tier DFP clients, publishers within this range also became exposed to the massive third party data pools that many of the major publishers have been using for quite some time now (think companies like BlueKai, Lotame, eXelate, etc. as audience targeting data providers and large publishers like NYTimes.com).
One key problem for small and medium tier publishers is their inability to attract top dollar or advertisers based on three factors:
- lack of audience targeting capabilities within the ad server;
- lack of publisher brand recognition; and
- lack of traffic volume
As already highlighted above, smaller publishers are now more capable than ever to integrate advanced audience targeting solutions within their ad server. Granted hurdles remain in that the costs of delivery to provide those targeting solutions may be cost-prohibitive for some publishers, but over time these costs should go down as more and more publishers adopt these solutions (costs for data providers should go down as economics of scale occur, thereby creating price competition and forcing the prices publishers have to pay in transmission/delivery fees to the data providers).
The last two points are key and directly related. Since publishers have been aligning themselves on industry verticals, it may have been difficult for publishers who couldn’t neatly fit into a vertical to get top dollar advertisers, thereby effectively making their traffic volume become a hinderance to their ability to gain more money. However, now that publishers have audience targeting solutions, they can come together in a sort of “audience match vertical” whereby any publishers, regardless of type, size or content, can come together and provide a large amount of inventory based on the types of targeting offered. Advertisers win since they get highly targeted placements based on the publisher’s audience targeting capabilities, while publishers win since they are no longer handicapped from the lucrative world of direct premium sales due to a lack of traffic volume or brand recognition. Sure, many of the major advertisers will still care about publisher brand recognition. But I think as those advertisers see a better return per dollar spent by using these audience targeting solutions, they will feel less and less worried as before in name recognition. So long as the publisher’s brand isn’t seriously detrimental, wouldn’t the advertiser want to accurately target the individual and get better ROI?
There are still some challenges that publishers face. Notably, there is still no way for publishers to reach out and connect with other, similar publishers (based on audience targeting) since other publishers may not know the targeting capabilities of a publishers (hint hint Quantcast et. al. you have an incredible opportunity here to match up publishers based on the collective knowledge of audience data from all of those publisher clients you have). This obviously hinders the ability for publishers to offer greater collective inventory together, but its a rather small hurdle to overcome in order to make publisher offerings more successful. Therein lies an opportunity of course, and over time publishers will realize that they can attract premium ad dollars by coming together around their similar audiences.