The top revenue priorities for publishers in Q4 2022 is displaying advertising
Fourth-Quarter Revenue Priorities for Publishers
The publishing industry is gearing up for the new year now that Q4 has arrived. With so many shifts, how do publishers decide what to focus on during the final quarter of 2022?
Digiday found that direct-sold advertisements and subscriptions will be the preferred revenue stream for more than 40 percent of publishers in the next six months. From Q1 to Q3 of 2022, these will be publishers’ primary focus, followed by programmatic ads, video ads, and branded content.
Priorities shifted throughout the survey’s quarterly administrations, which may be attributable to the uncertain economic climate. As of Q3, 43% of publishers preferred programmatic ads, up from 32% in Q1. This meant that branded content fell further and further behind. This demonstrates how publishing companies have diversified their income streams in response to the effects of the economic storms.
Takeaway:
Different priorities generate more or less money, so the five focuses constantly shift the priority list. As economic uncertainty increases, publishing houses must refine their revenue growth strategies. It is also a good time to branch out into new revenue streams.
Earnings from Digital Publications in 2022
The latest DPRI report shows that publishers saw a 12.3% increase in digital publishing revenue to £154.8m in Q2 2022. Display advertising grew to £72.4 million and remained the largest source of income for online publishers. Revenue in the industry rose by 28.6 percent compared to the previous year.
Online video (+7.1%) and subscriptions (+3.5%) were the two most rapidly expanding markets. Despite the challenges of calculating the profitability of a given category, publishers who put in the work stand to benefit.
The economy is in the dumps, so should publishers pursue direct deals?
Everyone knows that direct deals are win-win for everyone involved: advertisers and publishers. They cut out the intermediaries and allow publishers to deal directly with buyers of premium stock. In addition, it promotes openness by clearly outlining the publisher’s expected output in light of the advertiser’s requirements.
Independent publishers have historically struggled to compete with enterprise publishers and paywalls. To counteract this, Digiday reports that as the recession nears, advertisers are showing a growing preference for direct-sold ads from publishers. This year, three-fifths of all money spent on programmatic ads has gone toward purchases made in private and guaranteed marketplaces.
Take Away: Both publishers and advertisers benefit from the direct programmatic deal. When publishers have more control over their ad inventory, they can increase their yield by working with higher-quality advertisers.
Conversely, advertisers have access to this actionable information about publisher website visitors’ actions, which can be used for retargeting campaigns or personalization strategies while reducing wasted ad spending.
Publishers can now get a bigger money cut from their inventory thanks to direct programmatic deals. Publishing profit margins are extremely low, so this is good news. Ad fraud is also a growing concern.
With ads.txt 1.1, the IAB Technology Lab Improves Supply Chain Transparency.
For greater supply chain transparency, the IAB Tech Lab has released an updated version of ads.txt, which publishers can use to identify and verify the authorized resellers of their ad inventory. Where the previous version (ads.txt 1.0) fell short in supply-path optimization, the new update (ads.txt 1.1) rectifies this situation.
The new version improves upon the previous one by adding two variables to the publisher’s OpenRTB (Real-time Bidding) bid request, allowing the publisher to identify the parent company and resellers of a site.
With the addition of the OWNERDOMAIN (for the parent entity) and MANAGERDOMAIN (for resellers) variables in Ads.txt 1.1, advertisers can more easily determine the origin of the ads in question. On the other hand, the update helps publishers increase their ad revenue by increasing openness between buyers and sellers.
Takeaway:
The IAB Tech Lab developed Ads.txt in response to issues with ad fraud and brand safety, but publishers can also use it to safeguard their earnings from third-party resellers. The group created the protocol to stop fraudsters from posing as vendors and driving up costs for advertisers who have no idea where their ads are showing up on the web.
Ads.txt can potentially increase publisher revenue by reducing the cost of serving fraudulent inventory and guaranteeing that they are compensated for every view.
Planned Actions for Publishers
For what reasons is Dailymotion putting so much emphasis on targeted advertisements?
Dailymotion, a video platform and publisher, is all in for contextual advertising due to its humongous treasure trove of first-party data. At the same time, the dispersed AdTech ecosystem searches for an ID solution to target users once third-party cookies disappear.
Dailymotion is its video platform with its video player. First-party data is used to construct sophisticated contextual targeting algorithms. Dailymotion conducts an in-depth analysis of the content of each video by transcribing the audio and conducting a textual analysis, in addition to the video’s metadata, to classify each video into a set of topics according to IAB’s content taxonomy.
This facilitates precise content classification, which in turn improves audience targeting. After determining which categories will add the most value to the inventory for advertisers, the bid request will include them.
Take Away: Contextual advertising guarantees that audiences are exposed to ads that are relevant to them by concentrating on the content rather than the user’s behavior. As publishers no longer rely on cookies or behavioral data, they can increase ad revenue without compromising user privacy. As a result, publishers can now provide their users with ads that are both useful and unobtrusive.
To Attract Advertisers, The Independent
You would think that a news publisher could easily maintain a steady demand from advertisers, given the volume of traffic they receive. But the United Kingdom’s The Independent presents an opposing viewpoint.
Most advertisers are reluctant to place ads in news outlets because they don’t know where those ads will appear, which shifts the spotlight away from the organizations that report on often depressing or negative events.
The Independent intends to prioritize working with advertisers whose values align with their own, given that news publishers cannot avoid publishing news and articles related to social causes.
The lesson is that news organizations can use these same methods to boost their revenue. News publishers can improve their productivity by eliminating potentially-blocking negative keywords and increasing direct programmatic spending.
Advertisements that do not use Cookies
Is an Alternative ID possibly negatively impacting the publisher’s site functionality?
As publishers begin to test various ID solutions in anticipation of a cookie-less future, a pressing worry has emerged: will the proliferation of ID solutions cause their site to become overloaded, negatively impacting ad performance? Possibly.
Digiday reports that many media outlets are worried that an abundance of scripts is causing their sites’ load times and search engine rankings to suffer. As a result, publishers will lose more money than they would have gained from using ID solutions.
Unfortunately, it is not simple for publishers to choose one ID solution over another among the many currently available in the ecosystem. However, there is not enough data to know how these ID solutions affect publisher earnings.
Take Away: A similar issue had arisen before in the AdTech industry when publishers’ websites experienced slow performance because of the integration of too many scripts from SSPs and ad exchanges. Publishers shouldn’t stuff their websites with different ID technologies until a more reliable ID solution emerges. Instead, they should experiment with solutions that provide the best results without negatively impacting website performance.
