Category: In the News

Flighthouse’s followings on Snapchat (more than 288,000 followers) and YouTube (435,000 subscribers) pale in comparison to its TikTok base, but unlike TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube operate monetization programs in which Flighthouse is able to receive a cut of the revenue from ads sold against its videos. 

SongPsych, which debuted on TikTik last spring and has 730,000 followers, similarly took that leap from TikTok to YouTube in November. The music-centric outlet relies on TikTok for revenue. The money it received through TikTok’s Instructive Accelerator Program is SongPsych’s primary funding at the moment, and it has also sold sponsorship deals on TikTok, including one with Def Jam Recordings earlier this month. Nonetheless, the property made its push to YouTube because the Google-owned digital video platform has a “strong and mature monetization structure,” said Peter Conforti, founder of Good Content, which publishes SongPsych. 

“We are really trying to diversify the outlets while still trying to grow our core TikTok page such that we are able to accumulate better sponsorships over time,” Conforti said.

However, expanding from TikTok to YouTube is not so straightforward as cross-posting content. The SongPsych team is currently testing a bunch of different formats on YouTube because the same format that the team “nailed” on TikTok isn’t as successful on YouTube, Conforti said. Its YouTube channel has less than 7,000 subscribers.

“It’s very tough to pull an audience from one platform to another,” Conforti said. “To get people to watch on both, you need to do something different on each platform — content may not translate perfectly.”

Conversely, it can be easier to pull an audience initially on TikTok than on more established platforms like YouTube. Conforti and James Cadwallader, chief creative officer of Kyra Media, which launched its first TikTok brand in January, touted the discoverability on TikTok in comparison to other social media platforms. “You can go viral at any given point. The same does not apply to Instagram or YouTube,” Cadwallader said. “For a new publication starting out fresh, TikTok made a lot of sense to us,” Conforti added.

When media publishers launch a new brand, they might “find success in being narrow and focusing on a niche target audience, with specific content, on a single social media platform like TikTok,” said Jessica Liu, senior analyst at research company Forrester. “For others, that approach might not work.”

5-Minute Recycle found that launching on TikTok can initially work better than launching on YouTube. The outlet first debuted on YouTube in 2019, but struggled to attract an audience. It then relaunched on TikTok in March 2020 after seeing that videos on reusing and recycling items were doing well on the platform. “It’s a great place to build new media brands,” said Michael Boccacino, director of content partnerships at The Soul Publishing, which runs 5-Minute Recycle. It now has 8 million followers on TikTok and more than 6 million subscribers on YouTube.

A brand is not a business, though. 5-Minute Recycle has made money on TikTok through the platform’s IAP initiative (two other The Soul Publishing properties are part of the program’s latest round), but 5-Minute Recycle has not signed any brand deals for TikTok exclusively. That makes operating across other platforms important for improving The Soul Publishing’s pitch to sell advertisers on branded content, which can be cross-published across platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. In addition to its 6 million-plus subscribers on YouTube, 5-Minute Recycle has attracted more than 60,000 followers on Snapchat after launching on the mobile platform in January 2021.

Not all TikTok-native publishers are quite so quick to move beyond the platform that earned them their audience. Kyra Media launched fashion outlet Rag Report exclusively on TikTok and has garnered 464,000 followers as well as a sponsor. On Apr. 16, the company signed its first brand deal with clothing company Diesel. It’s a “sizable deal,” said Cadwallader.

Despite Rag Report’s success in securing a sponsor, media outlets with footprints spanning multiple platforms stand a better shot of attracting advertisers. “More touch points will have a bigger campaign impact than one touch point on one platform,” said Clair Bergam, associate media director at Media Kitchen. 

“I’m not sure I would recommend running a 30-second video in a creator-led, TikTok-only channel,” Bergam added. “But if it’s integrated into a series, with a dedicated TikTok following, it could work either as a standalone test to see how that platform works for you or part of a larger integrated buy.”

For now, there’s no data to quantify the impact of these auto-generated burner email services, but publishers say they create just one more problem that could disrupt their goals of garnering genuine personal information for their own first-party data purposes or enabling the email matches that identity technologies need to work. 

“When you start to introduce these types of apps, you end up with the same softness, that same churn that cookies always had,” said an exec at a large news publisher who asked not to be named. Third-party cookies — which are in their last throes of life before Google disables them in its Chrome browser by January 2022 — were “always inconsistent” said the executive, but, “This is further exacerbating that because it’s not even identifying people consistently.” At this point, however, it’s not clear that many publishers are actively addressing potential problems that might arise from auto-email generators.

For years data brokers and consultancies have used email addresses as a key piece of information to match a digital identity to an offline one, potentially unlocking information that builds an even more detailed picture of someone. That concept has evolved to form the foundation of many of the technologies marketed today as replacements for third-party cookies. But if one side of the equation provides a bogus email address, identity tech reliant upon matches of encrypted emails is stuck searching for the keys. (To learn the basics of how identity technologies use emails, watch Digiday’s explainer video.)

Burner emails, trash emails, throwaway emails or temporary emails — whatever the name, Google’s Play store offers at least 60 apps, many of which are free, that generate randomized email addresses and enable email verification. These technologies are promoted to people as ways to reduce unwanted marketing messages or enable a way to register to view content or get discounts without worrying about disseminating a personal or business email address out into the data universe. 

Sites including LifeWire and Wired advise readers to try out apps that generate one-time emails. Apple allows people to hide their email when using its Sign in with Apple feature by sharing an Apple-generated address instead of their actual email address. One of a multitude of tools with similar names, a browser extension for Mozilla’s Firefox browser called Temp Mail lets users of its free version store up to 50 fake emails; a premium version lets them store up to 500 fake emails, a service that could be exploited for fraud if used to mass-produce phony subscription, social media or e-commerce accounts.

Publishers, hoping to generate identifiable first-party data about their audiences and feed identity tech that promise to deliver higher ad revenues, are grappling with whether to put up gates requiring email registration before people can access content. If they do, said Ian Trider, vp of real time bidding platform operations at ad tech firm Centro, “I fully expect lots and lots of users to supply fake information.”

Email quality problems could affect the efficacy of identity tech, said David Spiegel, former vp of digital revenue at the Los Angeles Times who just joined G/O Media as its chief revenue officer. “There are ways very easily to see the cracks in the mirror of this wonderful solution,” he said of email-based identity tech.

“When mobile Apple users don’t opt-in, we don’t attempt to serve these consumers targeted ads. We respect their privacy choice,” said Eliot Dahood, CTO of identity tech firm BritePool. “Consumers who use temporary email addresses want to stay anonymous. Our system operates so that users of temporary email addresses are never served targeted ads.”

However, for publishers, the inherent appeal of identity tech is enabling higher-priced targeted ads based on identity, often derived through email matches. Other identity tech firms that use email addresses to establish identity, including LiveRamp and Zeotap did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The commodification of the email as an identity link

There is little to no available data to gauge the impact of auto-generated burner email services on the viability of identity tech reliant on matching two accurate email addresses or its affect on publishers’ first-party data efforts. However, some publishers and email tech observers foresee a future when burner email tools start to take a toll on the value of email as an identity link.

“Consumers are incentivized to use a machine-generated email since there is no reason to provide a deliverable email address,” said Keith Petri, CEO of Lockr, which offers a service allowing people to organize and provide rules for whether and how they receive emails from companies. “It is still early days, but by [the first quarter of 2022] the data will speak for itself when analyzing registered email accounts and the percentage of new registrants from domains like Burnermail.io, Privaterelay.appleid.com, relay.firefox.com,” he said, suggesting temporary emails created by apps that live on these domains are incorrectly assumed to be valid and therefore representative of “authenticated users.” 

The incentives to create countermeasures allowing people to avoid having to cough up their actual email addresses could increase, an exec from a second large news publisher said. “If emails become a major tracking mechanism, we’re going to see a growth in offering of single-origin emails,” said the exec, suggesting that there are opportunities for companies already offering tools like password managers to create temporary email services to appeal to people frustrated by more and more content gates requiring an email registration. 

“Apple already has that, and there are a few startups with offerings there, and it would be a pretty straightforward thing to offer for a password manager so I assume they will, too. It would be a good and pretty cheap feature for email providers to offer, too, though,” said the exec. The exec said they did not believe email-based identity tech would serve as a lasting approach for advertisers or publishers, in part because they create privacy concerns, but also because they don’t work without genuine email addresses, which could become commodified if temporary email services proliferate.

Poor data quality and subscription fraud enabled by email-based registrations are just what one large media conglomerate that works with CLV Group, a management consultancy that specializes in data and identity, “are trying to avoid,” said CLV’s CEO Neil Joyce. He said his media firm client employs a single sign-on technology that supplies an ID for people, rather than asking them to submit their own email as their login. The company “are very clear about single sign-on being generated by them,” he said. 

A history of email quality and inconsistency

Publishers and advertisers have struggled with other email quality problems before temporary email tools came on the scene, said Spiegel. He said while a potential onslaught of one-and-done emails created by auto-generator tools is “a concern,” they are just as much a risk to publishers as the more classic approach people take to avoid email registration: by creating email accounts specifically for e-commerce or discount signups to catch spam or legitimate but unwanted marketing messages. “Is it any more or less a concern than the idea that people use junk email addresses in the first place?” asked Spiegel. “People have been using spam email addresses a lot longer.”

The risk of collecting poor quality information becomes especially acute when gathering that data might sway people from staying on a website at all, according to the first of the two unnamed news publisher execs. “It’s very expensive and very difficult for publishers to get folks to log in,” this person said. Plus, publishers already have a hard time resolving audience identity when people use a personal email address for one site, but a business account for another, said the exec.

Publishers considering putting up an email gate before people can access content or comment not only run the risk of gathering bunk emails, they could deter people from staying on their sites all together, said Trider, who noted that publishers would need to achieve enough value from logged in users with valid email addresses to counteract the likely audience exodus. 

“I assume the impact on their page views and bounce rate will be extreme,” he said.