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Digiday Sunday

Digiday

发布日期: 2024年6月2日

Digiday: A busy short week. Our coverage of advertising tech and publishers performed very well, especially a piece looking at how The Trade Desk is trying to calm down publishers who flipped out after the ad tech vendor’s CEO Jeff Green recently discussed “the premium internet’ of the future. Other well-read publisher-focused stories included a look at how some are moving to federate their sites and a piece on the implications of The New York Times linking its proprietary attention metric to a recent pact with measurement firm Adelaide. A WTF explainer piece on ‘principal media’ picked up some solid readership as did stories looking at the sharply rising concern among marketers over the conga line of serious snafus by their ad tech partners and that gaming platform Fortnite is having a YouTube moment. – James Cooper

Story highlights

?Seb Joseph , Kayleigh Barber and Ronan Shields teamed up on the week’s most-read piece that looked how The Trade Desk’s recently declared focus on the ‘premium internet’ has publishers on edge about what that shift means for the allocation of advertising dollars and data control. As they reported, ‘The panic started earlier this month when the ad tech vendor’s CEO Jeff Green drew a figurative line down the open web — a realm plagued by poorly targeted ads, fraud and “malvertising” on one side — and what he calls the “premium internet,'' characterized by high-quality ad inventory bolstered by first-party data and user consent on the other. It wasn’t a new claim from Green, but it had definitely been spiced up with a fresh twist — replacing “open internet,” which he’s backed for years, with “premium internet.”

Sara Guaglione reported on the interesting instance of publishers starting the process of federating their web sites. As she reported, ‘At least two digital media companies are exploring the fediverse as a way to take more control over their referral traffic and onsite audience engagement. This comes at a time when walled gardens like Facebook and X are becoming less reliable for driving readers to publishers’ sites.?The Verge and 404 Media are building out new functions that would allow them to distribute posts on their sites and on federated platforms – like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky – at the same time. Replies to those posts on those platforms become comments on their sites.’

Michael Burgi pulled together a well-read WTF explainer piece that unpacked the growing practice of ‘principal media’ which was the focus and title of a recent survey and report by The Association of National Advertising. As he reported, ‘Essentially it’s when an agency (most often a media agency) doesn’t act as an agent but rather as a principal by selling ad inventory it has purchased from a media vendor/publisher to its client and earns some profit margin off of that sale. What has raised the hackles of some in marketing is that the agency does not disclose what it paid to the client — a factor that leads some in the industry to suspect agencies of putting their own interests ahead of their clients.’ Perhaps the best quote comes from the ANA report, in which one respondent to the survey said, “I don’t know if my agency is recommending principal media because it’s the best media for me, or the best media for them.”

Seb had a strong piece that looked at the growing concern among marketers about being embroiled in the growing number of screw ups in the ad tech sector and the measures, some fairly drastic, they are taking to avoid that outcome. As he reported, ‘What began as a panic-induced cull quickly turned into a full-blown supply-path optimization exercise — the kind of shake-up agencies do every so often to make sure they’re partnering with the most reliable and effective suppliers, especially since so many of them are selling the same thing thanks to header bidding.’

Seb (busy man last week), Checked out The New York Times’ move to link its proprietary attention metric and a recent pact with measurement firm Adelaide in an effort to correlate attention to other metrics . As he reported, the partnership with Adelaide, ‘gives the Times access to a suite of tools for measuring attention that have far more reach than its own. These include inventory quality assessment and automated campaign insights, as well as Adelaide’s AU metric, which uses signals like eye-tracking and exposure data to gauge whether readers are paying attention to ads. For now, the focus will be on the AU metric, which will be used in tandem with what the Times has already built, rather than replace it.’

Julia Russell Tabisz had a smart Digiday Research piece that surveyed publishers on the current state of their reliance on programmatic revenue. And somewhat surprisingly, given all the challenges presently facing that market segment (many of which were discussed at length at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit last month), it is still a key business line for them. As she reported, ‘Digiday’s survey found that the vast majority of publishers make money from programmatic ads, and that a good number of them make a significant amount of money from the channel. Eighty-two percent of publisher pros said in the first quarter of this year that they get at least a very small portion of their revenue from programmatic ads.’

Alexander Lee was across a well-read analysis of how the Fortnite ecosystem, a year after a revamping by Epic Games, is having its YouTube moment . As he reported, ‘Over the past year, Epic’s updates to the Fortnite ecosystem have sparked an influx of interest from digital creators into the platform, who have brought with them both their communities and the marketing dollars of the brands looking to reach them. The numbers speak for themselves. In the first year of its new creator economy, Epic paid out?over $320 million?to participating creators.

—The special series of the Digiday weekly podcast by Kayleigh Barber and Kimeko McCoy , that looks at how content creators are building their brands and earning revenue from various major social media platforms, continued its roll out. In the second?edition of the series, Kimeko featured an interview with Ben and Lazara Martin, who turned what started as a part-time, pandemic-induced pregnancy journey into a family social media business. As Kimeko wrote in the intro to the conversation, ‘Since 2020, the couple has racked up nearly 8 million followers across social media, boasting family-friendly content to strike deals with brands like Huggies, Flexcar and Applebee’s.’ Give a listen here