Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

According to a new OpenWeb survey of 1,400 U.S. consumers conducted in partnership with YouGov, while 93% of Americans said they use social media regularly, a whopping 64% viewed communities on social media as unhealthy. Only 36% of Americans found interactions on social media healthy, and 54% said that the overall effect of social media on society has been negative. Half said social media platforms don’t do enough to fight against toxicity, trolls and misinformation. 

The potential for change is dramatic. By using technology to encourage healthy engagement online, companies foster communities that provide information, perspective and belonging. In particular, media properties can host vibrant, healthy communities and collect data to support a sustainable revenue model.

How publishers meet audience demand for online community and thrive

Publishers are a healthy alternative to social media, one with the potential to be much healthier for individuals and society: the conversations and communities in the comments sections hosted by online publications. 

Readers both want and appreciate the communities offered by online publishers. According to OpenWeb’s research, 72% of respondents believe online content creators, like publishers and brands, should host communities. Nine in 10 (91%) reported reading the comments on content creators’ sites when they were available.

The line between comments and content is less stark than content publishers think. The conversation isn’t only for those readers who want to add their voices. Sixty-eight percent of consumers say that they view the comments to understand a story better or to gain another viewpoint, compared to only 32% who report adding their voice as their primary drive. This shows that community is an increasingly indispensable part of a publisher’s core content offering.

With wide swathes of users increasingly alienated by social media, publishers have an imminent opportunity to host healthy communities that encourage positive discourse. This is not just what users want — but what content publishers need.

Third-party cookies are on the way out, social traffic is less reliable than ever, and the demands on users’ attention and time increase exponentially each day. By bringing users back day after day, healthy conversations help insulate publishers from these challenges and generate the first-party data they need to survive in the post-cookie future. It helps them build a future for their business on their own terms.

“Publishers can seize this opportunity, filling that gap by transforming their properties — today, amazing repositories of content — into true community destinations,” said Nadav Shoval, co-founder and CEO at OpenWeb. “That will be a major step toward what users want and what we need as a society: better, healthier community experiences that bring people together.”

Fostering healthy conversations that keep readers coming back 

When it comes to the comments sections, trolls are the elephant in the room. They seem to be everywhere and have become pervasive across social media. But there is a path forward that brings positive, thoughtful conversations to the forefront and catches toxicity before it hits a publisher’s site. 

Companies have developed technologies that allow publications to host communities they can be proud of, that readers enjoy and value, and that generate the first-party data critical to powering a sustainable business model.

In a poll of more than 800,000 readers participating in communities powered by OpenWeb’s 1,000 publishing partners for its aforementioned online communities report, 72% of respondents characterized the online conversation as “healthy” or “neutral.”

High-quality, brand-safe communities are facilitated by pairing proprietary machine learning and artificial intelligence with human moderation. This incentivizes civility by rewarding positive contributors and highlights quality by surfacing the best content and creating community role models. 

The result? Quality conversations attract users and create value; sticky communities show strong engagement and retention; and sustainable revenue emerges from context-relevant, high-value advertising at scale. 

With the proven demand for online communities and dissatisfaction with existing options, it’s truly up to publishers, content creators and brands to create compelling and rewarding experiences that build loyal communities in this unprecedented moment. The tools exist now to start putting these plans into action.

Sponsored by: Openweb 

“Recently, we’ve decided to take a major step in developing a modern digital experience that supports this ‘audience first’ mentality and creates an optimal environment for our trusted brand partners to reach the world’s most influential leaders,” wrote Bloomberg Media CEO Scott Havens in a blog post yesterday (Oct. 24). “We want to create a better ecosystem for our users. Reducing the volume of ads, and the number of ‘ad calls,’ will allow for easier consumption of content, and speed up our platforms.”

The rationale is straightforward enough: win and retain more subscribers by shielding audiences from the low quality ads companies like Taboola run on their site. Or rather, this is straightforward to certain publishers — the kind that aren’t so reliant on advertising that they have to partner with ad tech vendors against their better judgment. They are a rare breed, of course, but they are growing in number. 

“On content recommendation vendors, we’ve built our own product for that,” said the digital director of a publisher in Europe, who spoke to Digiday anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter. “We couldn’t handle the low quality ads anymore so we pushed out third parties.”

These are calculated, rational gambits, clearly. Taboola et al just aren’t as lucrative to some publishers as they once were. The downsides of losing them are minimal as a result. And therein is the crux of the matter. Some of the ad tech intermediaries are very important. But there are plenty others that, in a pretty opaque industry, have found a way to insert themselves and arbitrage. The question for publishers is how do they ensure that those taking their handout are providing value back to the publisher and hopefully to the advertiser — i.e work out whether the vendor is complementary or competitive. 

“We did terminate our cooperation with a brand safety vendor because we wanted to support a company that catered to both sides of the trade, when really it was the buy-side that got all the attention,” said the digital lead at a news publisher on condition of anonymity due to concerns their identity would reveal the name of the ad tech vendor.

Not long ago, this situation would have panned out differently. Ditching a brand safety vendor wasn’t an option. Not back when marketers didn’t trust publishers to provide accurate metrics or brand safety signals. The brand safety vendor was essentially the agent of the advertiser. Now, that leverage has swung back to some publishers — those ones that marketers are increasingly dependent on because they offer curated audiences based on first-party data.

“More quality publishers are aligning their businesses around the fact that the product they sell is media, not the ad slot,” said Alessandro De Zanche, founder of media consultancy ADZ Strategies. “When this happens it changes the dynamics of how publishers work with ad tech vendors. They’re able to have more influence over those companies. It’s almost as if gravity is catching up with some ad tech vendors now that publishers are realizing that the dreams that were sold to them by certain parts of the market will remain just that — dreams

Whatever this realisation looks like for publishers, it won’t lead to full-scale ad tech cull. It’s still a lucrative business at the end of the day. No, what’s really happening is publishers are weeding out the ad tech vendors they can’t control.

To be fair, some have done exactly that over the years. But for everyone else those efforts always seemed to chaff against the harsh realities of running a media business. Better to onboard partners that can help plug those revenue gaps irrespective of the hidden costs that would incur. That’s the way it’s been for publishers. Until now.

The set it and forget days of ad tech are long gone for some publishers. They have to exert more control over their ads businesses because they need to do all they can to show they have a premium audience on which they can layer first-party data. More often than not that’s going to mean managing their exposure to the open marketplace and the vendors that come as part of that.

Here’s an exhaustive, but by no means definitive, list of publishers doing exactly that: French news publisher Le Monde built its own consent management platform last summer and also has a customer data platform for its subscribers that doubles as a data management platform for its advertisers.

Another publishing exec told Digiday they’ve considered locking all their inventory behind their own demand-side platform; Vox Media and Minute Media built their own supply-side platforms earlier this year. DPG Media has its own trading desk; Not to mention The New York Times, Hearst, Business Insider Dotdash to name a few that have cut ties with those ad tech vendors that resell their inventory over the years.