A Quick and Easy Guide for Publishers to Solve the Adtech Conundrum (or at least a start)

We all know that adtech sucks. Despite the best of intentions (on the behalf of some at least) consumers are being cluster-bombed by the minute with annoying, sometimes shitty ads in apps, sites, blogs, social and news feeds, and now even on their connected devices. The content glut clogs up the pipes and impacts mobile web performance making the whole experience a buggy mess. Ad Blockers are loving it and growing in use, brands are frustrated and beginning to revolt, agencies are being squeezed and left holding the bag, creatives are wondering what their next job will be and at the end is a frustrated user who is forced to pay a toll by viewing five pop-up offers from an army of food brands and a crawling :30 video pre-roll message about car insurance just to read a breaking news story about Trump’s latest tweetfest. And to top it off, the news sucks, too. It's a sad state of affairs. And the levy is going to break in about 6-12 months.

Until then - and long after - publishers do not realize that they are sitting on top of the solution to this whole mess.  And it's staring them right in the face.

Lets first unpack this whole enchilada:  People want to read and watch stuff. Lots of stuff. Stupid stuff, smart stuff, entertaining stuff, sexy stuff, financial stuff - you get it. And they always will. The more stuff publishers produce, the more they consume. There’s no limit to the appetite of the modern consumer. One quick viewing of Pewdiepie is evidence enough.  

As such, people flock to publisher’s sites to consume this stuff. All day, all night, everywhere they go. When they do, they leave fingerprints about themselves. Publishers know how many times users come to their sites, what pages they read, what content they prefer, what time they show up, how long they linger around, etc.

Publishers cannot serve their stuff for free. They have to keep the lights on, pay their staff, buy more ping pong balls and cleaning products - and make a profit.  So, they allow advertisers to serve these annoying, irrelevant ads to their users to pay for letting joe public the benefit of getting this great entertainment for free. It's basically a fair exchange. I watch your annoying advertisers messages so I can read your claptrap and watch your videos.  Fine. All good. Most of the population inherently understands and respects the financial exchange aspect of the content consumption food chain - but its sort of gotten out of hand.

The hunger, demand, voraciousness for the incredible profitability of this online advertising eco-bonanza has created a technical spaghetti junction of ad serving, content supply, data targeting, viewability tagging, user-data building, bot scraping, re-targeting gobbledygook and has made the experience of consuming online news a game of tetris for consumers.  

What’s missing from the current model is that the most important and valuable currency in this entire ecosystem is the user’s data - it's like the fuel for the engine - and without it, the whole machine literally stops. Yet, the user gets the shittiest deal out of every player.  Sure, I know, I know, users get to read and watch all of this great stuff for free. I don’t slight that for a second - nor does the average news consumer. But the user’s data is being whored around an entire flea market of sellers, buyers, re-sellers, re-packagers and brokers. And because the system we created is not really focused on the user, the user experience is embarrassing. Imagine if we really put the user first? They would participate more, watch more ads and behave in a cooperative and generous manner. Today, users do whatever they can to avoid any dialogue with brands and zip away at the mere sight of a vertical page take over unit.  It's a broken model.

What Publishers can do is simple:

1. Identify the users who touch your site in some consistent and repeatable pattern.
2. Send them an email, or throw up a custom page that says:  “Hi. We see you really like our content. Thanks!  We want to apologize for the shitty advertising experience we have been somewhat forced to deliver to you. We need to pay the bills and our people to continue delivering such great content.  So we have to serve these ads. But, here are a few other ways we can partner in this whole thing:  
3. Option 1:  Pay us for our content.  Give us $8 bucks a month (or something like that), and you will get an ad-free experience.  Simple. Done.
4. Option 2: Ok, so you don’t want to pay us for the content, no problem. Sell us your data. That’s right. Sell it to us. We will pay YOU $20 per month for your PII. Your data is important. You are important.  And so is your loyalty. Then you can tell us exactly the kind of ads, services, products and even brands that you want to hear about, and we will show you alot FEWER and alot BETTER and more personalized, relevant ads that you will LIKE all while earning some extra clams from your data. We will NEVER sell it to anyone else. We will simply use it to make sure our Ad partners know what type of ads make the best sense for you. And they will pay us ALOT more for our ad inventory because we now know alot more about you. We can even put that $ in an account that you can use toward purchasing stuff from our ad partners if you want. And even better, we’ve started this whole big consortium of other publishers (see the list below) that you may like who are also willing to do the same thing, and we can share that data with all of them and they will offer you the same great deal. Now you don’t have to watch shitty ads at all anymore. Because we all got together to solve this problem for YOU.  
5. Option 3: Don’t change a thing. Keep tolerating these currently shitty ads. But you can’t use an ad blocker anymore.

It can be done, and some workable and modified version of this is the eventual future.  Let's all make it happen sooner or later.