Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

‘Death by a thousand paper cuts’: Publishers fret over alternative ID overload hurting site performance

As publishers continue to deal with the demise — or at least diminishment — of the third-party cookie, they are feeling compelled to adopt virtually every identity technology seeking to replace the cookie, but they are increasingly concerned about how overloading their sites with IDs will impact page-load speeds and search rankings, according to publishing executives who attended the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Fla.

“[Site] performance issues is death by a thousand paper cuts. Every single one of those adds up,” said a publishing executive during one of DPS’s closed-door sessions, in which publishers were granted anonymity in exchange for candor.

A further frustration, publishers have yet to see adopting alternative IDs significantly impact their ad revenue. “At a certain point, it becomes the fastest way to make $300 a month: You can set up a deal, do all this tech work and then you sit and stare at the ticker and it slowly moves,” said a second publishing executive.

Publishers’ ID overload concerns echo the issues that media companies dealt with several years ago after cramming code from supply-side platforms and ad exchanges onto their sites in order to sell their ad inventory across as many programmatic marketplaces as possible (or at least practical). The problem then was that the code affected their sites’ performance. The surplus of scripts slowed the speed with which pages loaded, frustrating site visitors and lowering sites’ search engine rankings. Publishers have spent the past few years reducing the amount of programmatic code on their sites in order to improve site performance.

“It’s the same conversation [as publishers needing to remove SSP tags from their pages]. We figured out a way to move that tech debt off of the page. These identity solutions, inherent in their value is to be on page. It’s very similar,” said the second publishing executive.

Compounding matters, publishers are not yet in a position where they feel they can pick out which IDs to support and which they can afford to omit, according to multiple publishing executives. The reason? They are not currently receiving enough information back from the ad tech supply chain to discern how specific identity tech is affecting their ad revenue.

“Regardless of the exchange — you just don’t know the data coming back to a publisher on whether the bid response rates are good values or higher when they see an ID or not. At least we have not gotten that information,” said a third publishing executive.

“In the open exchange, it’s almost like you’re pumping all this information in the app requests, and there’s no one there on the other side waiting for you,” said the second publishing executive.

A fourth publishing executive said they have taken it upon themselves to try to glean the impact of IDs on ad prices. “I had to actually restrict the sending of data in certain environments to make a control. There’s about a 10% lift that’s correlated to the IDs versus the control overall across all inventory,” they said.

Additionally, publishers are being pressed to adopt specific IDs preferred by certain ad tech firms, the executives said. 

“Whether The Trade Desk or Yahoo, to actually work with them you’re going to have to adopt [Yahoo’s] Next-Gen ID or UID [which was originally developed by The Trade Desk] in order for that to happen. So it’s been leveraged a little bit,” said a fifth publishing executive.

So what are publishers to do about this ID overload issue? Will the SSP code cycle simply repeat with publishers adding scripts for all these various IDs in the short term and then down the line working to weed out the ones they no longer need? Maybe. 

Or maybe the awareness that publishers demonstrated during DPS of the potential to repeat past mistakes will help them to avoid them in the future by not only airing their frustrations in the company of their peers but also voicing their concerns with colleagues and taking a harder line with identity tech providers.

“My data colleagues, my revenue colleagues, my technology and first-party data colleagues, they’ll be like, ‘You need this ID.’ And all I hear as a product person is more crap. And there’s an exchange there. There are things that you’re doing negatively impacting your business by having more crap on your website. That will hugely affect user experience, engagement, SEO, and we need to remember what these trade-offs are,” said the first publishing executive.

As the fourth publishing executive suggested to the group during one of DPS’s town hall sessions, “Let’s all as publishers, every time someone says, ‘It’s just one line of script; it’s really lightweight,’ say ‘Fuck off.’”

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As the economy wobbles, advertisers and publishers at the top end of the market go more and more direct

Every downturn, like clockwork, publishers try to remind marketers why they should buy their ads directly from them — or at least as directly as possible. It’s a pitch that goes something like this: if ad dollars are shrinking for marketer x then why not spend more of it with us? At least you know what you’re buying this way. 

This year is no different — except for one thing: the pitch is less romanticized, that is to say less predicated on why advertisers should support journalism, more on the upside for their businesses. 

That seems especially true in programmatic, where publishers appear to be having success pulling more dollars into the deals they have direct control over. In the first half of the year, private marketplaces and programmatic guaranteed accounted for 35% of the total money spent globally on programmatic (including in the open exchange, according to Ebiquity. The year before that percentage was 31%. As ever, demand drives prices. The cost per thousand impressions in these curated deals was up 240% in the first half of the year compared to those prices in the open exchange. The year before that increase was 188%

“There’s a growing recognition among some marketers that it’s better to buy off premium publishers than just from the open web,” said Nick Waters, CEO of media management firm Ebiquity. Or rather, these publishers, armed with first-party data, seem more able to put their best foot forward in pursuit of ad dollars, he continued. 

 The anecdotal evidence from publishers backs this up. Commercial execs from The Athletic and Minute Media are going after ad dollars directly, not via independent ad tech vendors. They wouldn’t be making those moves if they thought marketers weren’t interested. The same goes for publisher alliances. And investments from marketers are growing. In some cases, they even seem to be taking what dollars they would’ve spent with Google et al to do it. 

“The size of budgets we’re seeing lined up for our business now compared to two years ago are materially different — they’re proper platform budgets,” said Craig Tuck, chief revenue officer at Ozone Project, a U.K.-based consortium that includes the Guardian and Stylist. “You can never really prove it but the narrative we’re being told by marketers is that some of those larger budgets we’re seeing flow into our business would have normally been spent on the platforms or with ad tech vendors.”

To be fair, these sort of gains are to be expected. Whenever markets are thrown into disarray, there’s usually a flight to quality and scale — the two things premium publishers pride themselves on. That puts a premium on the collective reach (or audiences) these alliances can offer. 

“We’ve been seeing more effort around responsible media buying with trusted publishers,” said a spokesperson for Trustx, a digital advertising alliance that sells inventory belonging to Digital Content Next members. “Trustx has had very strong growth this year and we’ve heard from DCN that direct deals with premium publishers are way up as well.” 

Whatever this shift is, don’t call it transformational. It will take more than some good fortune to reverse all that ails the publisher ads business. The truth is these publishers are the exceptions, not the norm. They’re able to continue to articulate to marketers why they’re “premium” investments at a time when many publishers can’t. But that’s only going to get harder now that the era of scale, volume traffic as the core business model for journalism, has passed. 

Until then, these publishers are focused on trying to make commercial hay out of the fact that ad dollars are being redistributed. The Athletic’s decision to sell ads through direct deals with advertisers rather than through programmatic deals done on the open web is a case in point.

“The reason why the upper tier marketers get out of their programmatic routines to work with us is because of our value and differentiation as a consumer product,” said Sebastian Tomich, chief commercial officer of The Athletic. 

Granted, these dollars are a small part of the market, he continued. But they’re also valuable, and more importantly attainable for the premium sports publisher. After all, there are few places marketers can go to reach hundreds of thousands of sports fans who are willing to pay for long-form content. Well, that’s the gamble anyway. 

“Currently, we are seeing more insertion orders sales (with guaranteed impressions, pre-rolls and products),” said Thomas Lue Lytzen, director of sales and ad tech at one of Denmark’s biggest news publishers Ekstra Bladet. “Programmatic deals are fairly stable, agency marketplaces (like Omnicom Zero and MSupply) are lagging a bit behind. “Actually, we see a bit more open market these days — some agencies pursue a strategy where they both buy via deals/agency marketplace and open market.”

Which is to say that marketers — at least the ones that can afford to buy premium inventory — don’t automatically cut advertising budgets when the economy gets tough. They also rationalize where those dollars go — i.e. wherever they can get safer, contextually relevant and better curated impressions. History proves that time and again. If anything, this crisis creates an opportunity for a handful of publishers, perhaps even an incentive, to evolve and experiment with advertising, in anticipation of more ad dollars shaking out. 

The definition of “direct deals” is unavoidably arbitrary and, invariably means different things to different publishers. There aren’t many in as gilded positions as The Athletic that can afford to cut out the ad tech middle men entirely. Lue Lytzen’s rundown on the prospects of his business made that abundantly clear.

Sometimes, a direct (ish) deal just means fewer hands in the cookie jar. Indeed, there are many premium publishers who still rely on ad tech vendors to make these deals happen — just fewer of them. These are the vendors that are having success ‘convincing’ agencies and advertisers that inventory creation is a job better handled by exchanges. That’s part of a broader effort by exchanges to move inventory curation away from the demand-side platforms, or the ad technologies that actually buy the impressions on behalf of marketers.

“We continue to see an increased interest in deals from both sides of the ecosystem, and there’s been a marked ramp up in deals particularly from media owners,” said Jessica Breslav, chief customer officer at supply-side platform Index Exchange. These “deals are valuable because they allow buyers to leverage their purchasing power to negotiate price and / or priority while providing the ability to target audiences based on the criteria most relevant to the marketer, ” she said.

“Conversely, they let media owners maximize the value of the inventory through agreements with strategic buyers, providing the inventory, content, and targeting the buyer requires.”

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