In what could only be described as a Hail Mary pass, Google has agreed to cough up $250 million over five years to fund journalism and AI research in California. This deal was announced with much fanfare, and some might say a dash of self-congratulation. But before we start throwing confetti, let’s take a closer look at what’s really going on here.

The Big (and Not So Big) Picture

On the surface, this deal looks like a lifeline for local journalism. California’s newsrooms have been on life support for years, hemorrhaging jobs and revenue as the digital era reshaped the media landscape. The fund, administered by UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, promises to inject much-needed cash into these struggling institutions. 

It helps Google paint itself as the savior of the free press while avoiding a dreaded “link tax” that could have forced the tech giant to pay publishers for linking to their content. This brings to mind California’s Journalism Preservation Act, which proposed to make Big Tech pay for news.

But here’s the kicker: $250 million over five years sounds like a lot until you consider that Google’s ad empire rakes in over $200 billion annually. To put it bluntly, this deal is a drop in the ocean for Google — a PR move dressed up as corporate responsibility.

Why It Matters: The Real Cost of Free News

For years, publishers have watched in horror as their ad revenues dried up while Google and Meta (Facebook’s parent company) turned into digital juggernauts. The relationship between tech platforms and news publishers has always been lopsided. Publishers create the content that drives traffic, but the platforms get the lion’s share of the ad dollars. This new deal doesn’t change that dynamic; it merely delays the inevitable. 

The idea of a “link tax” has been gaining traction globally, with Australia and Canada leading the charge. In those countries, Google and Meta were initially resistant, but eventually, they caved — well, sort of. In Australia, Google opted to pay selected publishers, while Meta briefly blocked news altogether before returning to the table. In Canada, Google agreed to pay $74 million annually to keep news content in its search results, while Meta decided to go the nuclear route and block news links entirely. The global push for Big Tech to pay for news mirrors what’s happening in California.

Google’s deal with the state allows the tech behemoth to avoid the more stringent regulations that would have come with the now-shelved CJPA. The CJPA would have forced Google and other tech giants to hand percentages of their ad revenue over to news publishers. Instead, we get a voluntary fund that’s easier for Google to swallow and far less beneficial for the publishers who need it most. The CJPA could have significantly shifted the balance of power, much like similar legislation in other regions.

The AI Angle: A Trojan Horse?

Then there’s the $62.5 million earmarked for AI research. Let’s not kid ourselves — this deal might seem like a bonus, but it’s worth asking whether it is really about saving journalism. Could it be more about Google bolstering its AI capabilities under the guise of public good?  While the idea of using AI to solve “real world problems” sounds noble, including AI funding in this deal is more about securing Google’s future dominance than helping the news industry.

As Google continues refining its AI-driven search features — like its Search Generative Experience — publishers are experiencing a decrease in traffic from organic search results, directly impacting their revenue. The rise of AI in search is reshaping the landscape, with AI-powered engines like Perplexity.ai offering revenue-sharing models that starkly contrast Google’s approach. 

Google’s move to include AI in this deal is less about journalism and more about maintaining its dominance in the search market. As Scott Messer recently pointed out in his analysis of Google’s latest SEO shake-ups, Google is playing a different game altogether. The company is not optimizing for sending traffic to publishers; instead, it’s focusing on maximizing its ad revenues, often at the expense of the very content creators it claims to support.

Critics, including journalists and labor unions, have called out the deal for what it really is: a backroom agreement that benefits Google far more than it does the struggling newsrooms of California. The Media Guild of the West, representing journalists in Southern California, Arizona, and Texas, was notably excluded from the negotiations, leading them to denounce the agreement as a “shakedown.” This isn’t the first time Google has been suspected of using its financial might to navigate legislative pressures.

Connecting the Dots: What Publishers Need to Know

For publishers, this deal is a double-edged sword. On one hand, any funding is better than none, especially in an industry that’s been in a death spiral for years. On the other hand, this deal sets a dangerous precedent. By allowing Google to dictate the terms of its support for journalism, California has effectively ceded control to a tech giant with little incentive to change the status quo.

Publishers should be wary of becoming too dependent on these kinds of deals. The digital landscape is shifting rapidly, and while Google’s money might keep some newsrooms afloat for now, it won’t fix the underlying issues that have led to the decline of local journalism. With AI companies like Perplexity.ai and OpenAI entering the scene with revenue-sharing models, publishers might need to start exploring these alternative sources of revenue to stay afloat — or, maybe not. The real solutions could lean more towards finding sustainable business models that don’t rely on the whims of Silicon Valley.

The Bottom Line: Google Wins Again

So, what’s the takeaway? Google has once again managed to sidestep regulation while presenting itself as a benefactor of the public good. The $250 million might help some newsrooms in the short term, but it does little to address long-term challenges. This deal is more of a Band-Aid than a cure.

As the dust settles, it’s clear that Google got the better end of this bargain. By agreeing to a voluntary fund, the tech giant has avoided the much larger financial obligations that would have come with the CJPA. Meanwhile, California’s newsrooms are left to grapple with an uncertain future, their fate still largely in the hands of the very platforms profiting from their decline. 

In the end, this deal is a stark reminder of the power imbalance between tech platforms and the news industry. Until that changes, we’re likely to see more deals like this — ones that look good on paper but ultimately fail to address the real issues at play.

The post Google’s $250 Million ‘Gift’ to California News – Is It Really a Gift or Just a Clever Tax Dodge? appeared first on AdMonsters.

Is Google Search broken? Definitely not, and that’s the wrong question to ask.

Two weeks ago, a beleaguered product review site, HouseFresh, dropped an update about their battle, and frustration with Google Search and the state of SEO competition overall. Similarly, SEO experts like Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe have been documenting the rollercoaster of the latest algorithm updates that have walloped publishers across the board.

We are all used to competition and tough days, but it is impossible to prepare for the agony of a foundational shift. The speed of change is accelerating, so it may be helpful to climb a bit higher on the mountain and gain some perspective. Here are my takeaways:

1. Don’t hate the player, hate the game 
2. Unless the player is Google (They’re playing a different game) 
3. Play a different game

And that’s the hardest part. Everything that publishers have held holy about traffic is suddenly upside down. The traffic walls are closing in, and few exit routes are available.

Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game

For most of us, the rules of the traffic game are set by the search and social platform giants. We spent countless hours obsessing over the Facebook and Google Search “guidelines” to find exploitable advantages. When the preferences of these benefactors shifted whimsically, publishers were quick to adapt, pivot, or die.

Publishers learned early that building empires on borrowed traffic was risky, but compared to social media’s turbulence, Google felt like a predictable bedfellow. Conquering search was hard but meaningful. It was an artful dance of scaling quality content, or at least being of enough quality to win a coveted first position on a search results page. It was one of the few areas in digital publishing where your “library” held a residual value.

We live in a relatively free capitalistic society, and as such, anyone is allowed to enter the ring and play the game. Kudos to my publisher comrades for finding that angle, that wedge, that thing that made your scale possible. Perhaps we were jealous of those gains, but we were never mad at you for doing them.

As Brian Morrissey so eloquently put it, everything in media is a “racket.”  The pursuit of traffic is a hustle, and the monetization of that traffic is a racket. It’s survival of the fittest, but fitness is subjective to the rules of the game.

Desperate for success and strong on the scent of promised pageviews, publishers doubled down on perilous traffic games. Some flourished in influencer videos, native articles, social games, or long-tail SEO. Some ended in a bang, but many are bleeding out from a thousand paper cuts. Yet, scores of publishers find a way to carry on.

This publisher resiliency, however, comes at the price of polluting our resources. The distribution platforms (search, social, reader apps) are curators of content, responsible for delivering its customers an experience far from the garbage of the web. But we can’t have nice things, and we tilted these platforms beyond their intended capabilities. So did we break Google Search? Not really, but kinda.

The Pandemic broke Google Search. The recent SEO content explosion and resulting chaos were a perfect storm that Google wasn’t ready for. The surge in online shopping meant the world needed a gazillion more “best of” articles, and every gadget needed a review. Simultaneously, scaled SEO tools were being democratized, enabling just about anyone to find the right topics and keywords for expansion or attacking competitors. Throw in some zero-interest financing, AI-powered content generation, SEO-threadbois and a social-traffic squeeze, and you get an unmitigated overgrowth of…crap.

Google Is Playing a Different Game

The Tsunami of Crap, however, is part of a much larger weather pattern known as “the Enshittification.” By that logic, Google’s prerogative to dominate the ads business may summon its demise. The internet’s recent pivot to SEO ushered in hundreds of high-powered competitors of varying quality to the SERP battles. Content volume was metastasizing at unfathomable rates, and it was harming the utility of Google’s search results. Searchers resorted to manually adding “in Reddit” to queries or leaving Google entirely and using non-Google AI chatbots. I don’t think Google panics very often, but I’m pretty sure someone said, “I think we have a problem.”

In typical fashion, the Google Search team rolled out a steady barrage of ranking algorithm updates. They prioritized Reddit and Quora posts and other pre-filtered sources like Instagram and Twitter. Google launched Search Generative Experience(SGE) to stem the tide and flex some anti-competitive muscles. In their latest rounds of updates, Google handed out the dreaded manual action to publishers, a certain death knell for most.

Unphased, Google marches forward, as if this were all part of the plan. Amidst the chaos, the revenue teams were busy carving up the SERP page. Ads, SGE, and more ads.

Google is playing a fundamentally different game than everyone else in Search. Without a doubt, Google’s top prize is its “Google Ads” products. They are optimizing for their outcomes, which explicitly do not include sending traffic to publishers.

If you think that Google is optimizing for making revenue on your GAM account, think again. In 2023, Google pulled in 56.9% of its ad revenue ($175 BILLION) from “Google Search & Other,” and only 10.2% of revenue ($31 billion) from the Network.

They gained $12.6 billion in Search revenue YoY, and only lost $1.5 billion in the Google Network. Google footnotes that the “The overall growth [in Search & other revenue] was driven by interrelated factors including increases in search queries resulting from growth in user adoption and usage on mobile devices; growth in advertiser spending; and improvements we have made in ad formats and delivery.” (emphasis mine)

Got that last part? You’re not going crazy. Total search queries are up, traffic to publishers is down, and Search revenue is up. Google is here for the ads, their own ads.

Google Ad’s job is to sell products and take credit for it. Google will fight relentlessly to disintermediate anything that stands between a user and the product Google is promoting on behalf of a paying client. Generative AI searches will do this very well, as the service will synthesize myriad sources (including Reddit) to return a sourceless result and a well-placed carousel of ads. Raptive posits that SGE will cost creators  $2B in revenue,  and others predict traffic losses of 10%-25% and higher by 2026. 

In a recent interview on Bloomberg Originals, Google CEO Sundar Pichai discusses the shift in search and answers if Google Search is broken. Spoiler alert: he doesn’t think it’s broken but he does acknowledge that the AI boom created a glut of content and it’s Google’s responsibility to provide users with a quality experience.

Play a Different Game

It’s not about digital web publishers. Consumers are Google’s customers, and advertisers are their clients – everyone else is just expendable. HouseFresh is right about many things, especially that “Google doesn’t owe HouseFresh traffic.” Despite all that publishers, content creators and the general public have given to Google (ahem, structured data), Google doesn’t owe any of us anything.

A media company’s mission is to create and monetize their intellectual property. Under that lens, there is so much possibility, but it all starts with good IP and a plan. Endurance comes from adaptability. And that’s the hardest part.

It’s not easy to just uproot your business and find a new game to play, let alone be successful at it. Not everyone can be a direct traffic destination, and not everyone has the momentum to upstart a newsletter business. Sure, there are successful media companies that found a different game at their inception, but it’s unreasonable to expect that everyone can find a new niche.

I am truly empathetic for brands that will not survive, and I know that journalism, fair democracy, and so much more are at stake here. The internet is forever, but how it works will always change. But humans crave information and diversion, and thus media will endure.

As creators, we must always look forward and anticipate change. Make unforeseen pivots a planned part of the business plan. We must make investments based on their future return value, not based on justifying the sunk costs of our past. Let it go.

It’s time to take a long look out on the horizon and start to chart your new course. It’s out there for us, but we must work hard to find it. Godspeed to all.

The post Surviving the SEO Shake-Up: Publishers vs. Google’s New Game appeared first on AdMonsters.

It’s almost the most wonderful time of the year, and marketing strategies are heating up as paid media campaigns begin to feel the pinch of rising bid costs. Simultaneously, the groundwork laid in content published in early fall begins to bear fruit as it gains significant traction in search engine rankings through improved SEO. These audience insights poise businesses to take action and make the most of this crucial season. 

This time is the opportune moment for brands to assess the performance of their existing campaigns and identify areas for improvement and optimization. It’s also time to lay the foundation for highly targeted and compelling holiday-focused promotions to capture consumers’ attention during this festive season.

Address Rising CPMs

As we continue navigating through the holiday season, the surging bid costs of advertising campaigns demand our attention. The ramifications of not addressing these rising CPMs can be profound. It may strain your marketing budget, potentially restricting your capacity to reach your target audiences effectively. By proactively tackling the challenge of escalating CPMs, your holiday campaigns can maintain cost-effectiveness, ensuring that every marketing dollar is well-spent.

One effective strategy for addressing rising CPMs is to expand geographic targeting. This approach enables your campaign to venture into markets or regions with untapped potential. By diversifying your advertising reach, you can offset the adverse impact of heightened competition and soaring CPMs in specific markets. 

It’s also essential to ensure that you’re refining your campaign demographics as you go along. This involves narrowing down and fine-tuning your target audience based on specific demographic characteristics, ensuring that your marketing efforts resonate with the right people at the right time.

Additionally, take into account the power of A/B testing. Experimenting with ad variations, content, or messaging allows you to identify what resonates most effectively with your target audience, enhancing the efficiency of your holiday campaigns and optimizing your advertising spend.

Evolving Organic Social Efforts

Enhancing your organic social efforts during holiday campaigns is crucial to any successful marketing strategy. To effectively engage with your audience during the festive season, diversify your content calendar by meticulously planning and scheduling various content types, topics, and formats. By doing so, your brand can keep the holiday conversation fresh and captivating, offering your audience a dynamic experience.

This approach ensures that your social media presence doesn’t become monotonous or predictable but instead remains engaging and tailored to the interests and desires of your audience.

User-generated content (UGC) can be particularly pivotal during the holiday season. Why? Because during this time, consumers seek genuine connections and recommendations from their peers. UGC is a testament to your brand’s authenticity and trustworthiness, as it involves customers sharing their real experiences and testimonials. It’s far more convincing than brand-generated content, especially when potential customers make holiday purchasing decisions. 

Leveraging UGC creates an emotional connection between your brand and your audience. This connection can be especially compelling during the holiday season as consumers seek authentic and relatable content to guide their choices. By tapping into the enthusiasm and advocacy of your customer base, you can effectively amplify your holiday campaigns and foster more profound, lasting relationships with your audience.

Revamp Email Marketing

Revamping your email marketing strategy is necessary during the holiday season when inboxes are overflowing with promotional messages. First, personalized messages elevate emails beyond simply addressing recipients by name.

This approach entails a deeper understanding of your audience. By leveraging data insights, you can segment your email list and tailor your messaging to connect with individual preferences and behaviors. This personal touch increases engagement and fosters a sense of connection and trust between your brand and your customers.

Incorporating attention-grabbing practices is also important. Holiday marketing is competitive, and your emails must stand out in a crowded inbox. Begin with captivating email subject lines that pique curiosity and immediately convey the value of your message. Visual appeal, storytelling, and emotionally engaging content play a significant role in holding your audience’s attention, leveraging emotions like joy and nostalgia that are particularly potent during the holidays. 

Furthermore, by encouraging social sharing and including social sharing buttons in your holiday email campaigns, you can turn your subscribers into brand advocates, extending your reach and influence through their networks. Revamping your email marketing with personalized messages and attention-grabbing practices ensures that consumers see your messages and deeply resonate with them. 

Implement Impactful Website Changes

Elevating your website during the holiday season is a strategic move, empowering your business to improve user experiences substantially, driving sales growth, and leaving a lasting impact on customers.

One way to do this is by optimizing your website’s load times. Sluggish websites can dissuade visitors and negatively impact conversions. Swift load times not only enhance the user experience but also contribute to improved search rankings and heightened conversion rates, demonstrating that your website can handle the surge in holiday traffic.

Streamlining navigation is another critical element to help enhance your target audience’s web experience. By making it easier for visitors to explore your website, find relevant products or information, and ultimately make purchases, you impact critical metrics like bounce rates, session duration, and conversion rates. A user-friendly, intuitive navigation structure is a gift that keeps giving to your customers and your bottom line.

Integrating essential features for your holiday campaign can be a game-changer. Simplifying the checkout process with guest options and diverse payment methods, utilizing widgets for customer reviews, updating return and shipping policies for clarity, and enabling wishlist functionality all enhance user engagement and retargeting opportunities. These features improve the overall shopping experience and provide your customers with added convenience and confidence, ultimately leading to a more prosperous and rewarding holiday campaign.

From optimizing load times to streamlining navigation and implementing essential features like simplified checkouts and social proof, every element of your holiday campaign plays a crucial role in capturing the hearts and wallets of consumers.

As we step into this season of giving, remember that providing a seamless, personalized, and engaging user experience is not just a strategy but a gift to your customers. By embracing these strategies and features, your brand can stand out, creating lasting connections.

The post Mastering the Holiday Marketing Frenzy: Strategies for Success appeared first on AdMonsters.

As the digital world embraces AI’s power, publishers can harness this technology to their advantage. To shed light on this transformative landscape, we turn to David DiAngelo, VP of Global Marketplace Development at Emodo, Ericsson’s ad tech division. 

DiAngelo contends that the ongoing AI race is reshaping the power balance in search, potentially disrupting the search advertising industry and influencing publishers’ traffic sources. In the following Q&A, he imparts invaluable insights and recommendations for publishers navigating the AI revolution and successfully preserving and growing their revenue streams.

Andrew Byrd: How has this wave of generative AI impacted the digital media industry and its advertising model?

David DiAngelo: The current wave of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and DALL-E, has created significant public interest due to their ability to provide complete and efficient answers. This could disrupt the digital media industry and the advertising model that supports it. 

Traditional search engines, like Google, have historically delivered search results through a list of links, including sponsored links. Generative AI, on the other hand, offers a more streamlined and user-friendly experience by providing comprehensive responses. 

This shift in user behavior will likely have profound implications for the search advertising business, as users may no longer need to click multiple links to find the information they seek. Consequently, this could render search a less reliable source of traffic for publishers, affecting their revenue streams.

AB: Will AI disrupt the power balance in search, and if so, how? 

DD: Yes, AI is poised to disrupt the power balance in search. AI search offers users greater efficiency and complete answers, which could diminish the reliance on traditional search results with sponsored links. This could lead to a significant shift in the advertising model as users are less incentivized to explore more profound search results and visit multiple sites, affecting publishers’ monetizable traffic.

AB: How can publishers offset potential traffic loss and preserve monetization in light of AI’s impact on search?

DD: To offset potential traffic loss and maintain monetization in the face of AI’s impact on search, publishers should embrace other generative AI tools. These tools offer several advantages, including strengthening revenue channels, streamlining workflow processes, and ultimately increasing overall revenue. For instance, publishers can employ generative AI to automate content creation, enhancing the efficiency of editorial procedures.

Additionally, publishers can explore AI-powered personalization to provide tailored content recommendations to users, increasing engagement and ad revenue opportunities. Furthermore, publishers should consider partnerships with AI-powered technology providers to develop custom solutions that address their specific needs, ensuring they remain competitive.

AB: How do premium publishers view new AI technology, and what are some examples of their innovative use of AI?

DD: Premium publishers generally have a favorable view of new AI technology because they have the resources to innovate and test AI tools. 

Some premium publishers, like Expedia, Duolingo, Forbes, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg, have already explored AI’s applications for content generation. For example, Expedia uses AI to generate hotel recommendations, while Duolingo provides AI explanations for paying subscribers.

AB: How do smaller, long-tail publishers differ in their ability to adopt AI, and what challenges do they face?

DD: Smaller, long-tail publishers often face challenges in adopting AI due to limited research and development resources and a lack of tech vendor support. This can particularly impact niche sites that rely on search discovery for traffic. AI-generated content, like customized itineraries, can reduce the need for broad audience targeting, posing a threat to publishers dependent on search-driven traffic rather than name recognition or SEO expertise. 

AB: What strategies can publishers implement to adapt to the changing landscape of AI and search?

DD: Publishers should adopt a proactive approach to navigate the changing landscape of AI and search in order to to secure their revenue streams.  

One effective strategy is to leverage their growing influence within the industry. Publisher task forces and trade groups can advocate for AI chat providers to pay fees for crawling their pages, thus creating additional revenue sources. Moreover, publishers can collaborate with tech partners to implement AI-driven solutions that provide a competitive edge. 

They should also consider diversifying their revenue streams by exploring sponsored content initiatives and embracing AI-optimized dynamic ad formats, which can boost campaign performance and help offset any potential revenue loss resulting from changes in user behavior.

AB: How can AI be seen as an opportunity rather than a threat for publishers in the long term?

DD: Publishers should view AI as an opportunity rather than a threat for publishers in the long term. By embracing AI technologies, publishers can enhance their capabilities in various areas. For instance, AI can improve user experiences by providing personalized content recommendations, increasing user engagement and ad revenue. 

Additionally, AI can streamline editorial workflows, reducing manual labor and operational costs. Publishers can also explore new revenue channels through sponsored content initiatives that align with user interests. Furthermore, AI-optimized dynamic ad formats can significantly enhance campaign performance, leading to higher CPMs and compensating for potential traffic loss. AI offers publishers the tools they need to thrive and remain competitive.

The post How Can Publishers Unlock AI Opportunities to Preserve Revenue and Drive Growth? appeared first on AdMonsters.

But from the outside, looking in, it seems she was always destined to end up right where she is today.

Ironically, her first job was interning at her uncle’s advertising business, learning the ropes, which made becoming a CBO what she calls “a natural fit.” During our discussion, she reminisced about messing around with nonexistent desktop publishing applications like PageMaker and Quark when she was a young girl.

In college, Bracegirdle experimented with various mass media majors. She eventually married, moved abroad, and changed her major to teaching, receiving a degree in Social Sciences. While this may seem far-fetched from where she is in her career today, Mediavine prides itself on teaching its publisher customers how to achieve their business goals, earn more from every session and page view, and keep their audiences engaged.

Along her career journey, influential female bosses believed in her and encouraged her in moments of self-doubt. Amber takes great pride in her empathetic leadership approach, which she greatly attributes to those strong female leaders who molded her into an executive who uplifts her employees.

Early Days

Yakira Young: After college, what was your career experience like?

Amber Bracegirdle: Shortly after college, I worked in customer service at Travelocity, which was a great lesson for how we wanted to do customer service at Mediavine. 

I got into fraud analysis and loved it. Many people would ask if fraud at Travelocity was just people getting free vacations when it was actually fighting child trafficking, drug trafficking, and human trafficking in general. It was such a fascinating, analytical job, and I adored it, and it allowed me to see the world. I got to work at our UK offices, German offices, and the San Antonio office. But the most impactful thing about working at Travelocity was my boss.

Becoming an Empathetic Leader

YY: How did this boss impact you? Was she also a woman?

AB: Her name is Sheila Korte, and she taught me how to be an empathetic leader and turn mistakes into learning opportunities. She taught me that the people who don’t make mistakes are those who don’t make any moves. Everything she taught me about management along the way boiled down to first, we must always be kind.

She is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, and every day I continue to try and make her proud with how I manage my people and how we work with our customers. I grew tremendously under her leadership. Whenever I felt unsure of myself, she pushed me forward and said, “you can do this.” And that’s how I manage my people, and it’s how we talk to our customers.

Halfway through my time at Travelocity, we changed CEOs, and our CEO became a woman named Michelle Peluso. Today, she’s in the C-suite at CVS, and Michelle is a genius who, with friends, created a website called Site59 that would make deals with hotels in New York City for the inventory they hadn’t sold. She made contracts with hotels so she could sell their unsold daily inventory for less than the walk-in rate.

When Travelocity purchased Site59, Michelle was made CEO of Travelocity simultaneously. Despite dealing with thousands of employees, she was approachable and always kind. I could email her, and I’d have a response in 30 minutes full of ideas and action items for how to solve the problem at hand. That’s the kind of leader you want to be. You want to ensure you’re lifting up the people who work for you because all ships rise when you do that.

Managing Work-life Balance

YY: What is your experience managing work-life balance as a C-suite executive and mother of two? How do you prioritize your time and responsibilities, and what strategies have you found most effective for maintaining a healthy balance between work and family life?

AB: My work-life balance has gotten better over the years. We started Food Fanatic, the site I founded with Eric Hochberger, Stephen Marsi, and Matt Richenthal when I was seven months pregnant with my first son, Evan when I came to work for them full-time. Mediavine hiring me at seven months pregnant says a lot about the three of them and their willingness to buck trends. 

I was pregnant with Will when the ad management part started to take off. My work-life balance was rough for the first few months of my kids’ lives; outside of bathing and eating, I worked all day with childcare in hand. But now that we’ve got such great people and so many on the team, I’m better able to balance things. I can take a vacation and know I have nothing to worry about back at “the office” – otherwise known as Slack. My family just returned from a week-long vacation in Florida, and I didn’t stress once about the lack of internet access. I can also volunteer at my kids’ school, which I just did this morning. I have much more time for things like that. 

Over the summer, I took Fridays off completely. It’s important to claim your time. Work-life balance comes down to boundaries, and you’re the person that sets them. And it took me a long time to realize that. 

It’s hard when it’s exciting, and it’s your startup. My advice to anyone considering starting a company is to be intentional about setting boundaries for your personal life because you don’t think about it when you’re excited about what you’re doing.

It can lead you to burnout and lead to your family not feeling like they’re as important as the company. I had to step back on that because my kids thought work was more important than they were at one point, and I had to fix it. So that’s why I show up for things like field day or their field trips. They each have one a year, and I show up for those because they must know how important they are to me.

YY: The Pandemic has helped shift the work-life balance amongst many people and helped people realize that family is more important than work.

AB: I agree. At Mediavine, it got harder because we’ve always been remote. So for us, it was business as usual, and then everyone in the world was online, so our application volume went through the roof because we had sites that were only three months old suddenly reaching out to join because their traffic was at our threshold. We realized we were spending more time on applications that would never be approved than on the customers needing our help moving the needle on their own businesses. The quickest way to shift that focus back to the people that need us most was to raise our threshold. It was a hard decision, but ultimately one that served the people that already trust us with their livelihood the best.

I had to homeschool my kids on top of everything for longer than most people because I have a kiddo with a heart condition. So I homeschooled for two-and-a-half years and juggled everything at Mediavine. The marketing and communications team, led by Jenny Guy, started putting out roughly four times as much content, and we had, I think, four people on the team at that time. Growing that team has been a huge priority because moving everything online became a huge lift. We were used to meeting our customers at events and conferences worldwide, and suddenly that went away.

It brought home some hard truths for many of us at Mediavine about making those boundaries around work and family because suddenly, there was more work than we knew what to do with, and we couldn’t hire fast enough. It made us realize that we had to draw those boundaries, or it would never be a balance.

Mediavine’s Launch Into Ad Management

YY: Can you tell me more about how Mediavine was created by accident? I’m curious to know how a chance occurrence led to the development of your company and what steps you took to turn that accident into a successful business venture.

AB: I jokingly say accident because this all started with a single friend asking for our help with the new tech Eric had built for our four sites. Then more friends asked, and suddenly we had more friends than we knew what to do with! Once we decided that we were going to open the floodgates and work with people we didn’t know personally, we made some very intentional decisions. 

Stephen Marsi, Matt Richenthal, and Eric Hochberger founded Mediavine as an SEO shop for hire. Then he moved into making their content websites, which led them to need advertising to support those websites and the company. Creating the ad tech was purposeful because we needed it for our own four sites. So that was very purposeful, and my coming to work for them was very intentional. 

We were working on creating a food site because their ad company had told them they needed a lifestyle site. In working with me, I think I was really their first direct and continuous experience with content creators that also had their own web presence, social media, and personal websites. We hired food bloggers to create content for the site we were building together, Food Fanatic, and I introduced Eric to many food bloggers as part of that. 

I was simply consulting until I decided I wanted to leave my fraud analysis work (and work travel) behind to focus on my first baby. I asked the guys if they would consider hiring me full-time, and I’m very grateful they did. As I said before, I came on full-time when I was seven months pregnant. The guys never even questioned that as part of our conversation, something that I think is very special and unique, especially in the tech field. After I came on full-time, our ad company fell apart, and our ad income sort of cut in half overnight. And here we were, supporting four families and an army of contributors.

Great ideas are born out of desperation. Eric was researching programmatic advertising then and thought he could build something beneficial to recoup some of the ad dollars we didn’t see from our ad management company. He started making the first version of our script wrapper, but it was only for our four websites. 

He built the script wrapper focusing on SEO since that’s how we have always focused on growing traffic. Our most prominent site was founded on SEO. If you Google celebrity gossip, one of our sites is the one that owns that top search result and has for years. And it’s one of the main ways that the site got traffic. 

He started out thinking his wrapper would provide a backfill for our main ad company’s inventory, but we quickly started earning more with his header bidding auctions than we were making with them. We decided to sever ties with them and continue to do our own thing. And luckily, The Hollywood Gossip was big enough for us to have seats at the exchanges. In an offhand conversation, I told my best friend, also a food blogger, what we were doing, and she said, well, you know, my ad company sucks too. “Could you guys help me?” That question led to us recently surpassing over 10,000 active sites using Mediavine’s ad management. 

Bloggers always talk to each other, and they always talk in Facebook groups. So, five other people that wrote for Food Fanatic said, “I’d really like you to help me too.” And so, we launched six websites in June 2015. Initially, the idea was that this would be a bonus for people who write for Food Fanatic because we couldn’t pay them a ton for their content but making a little mini ad network made us stronger together. 

We looked at all our experience with different ad companies and said, what’s the 180 of that? And that drove many of our purposeful decisions after we accidentally started an ad company. 

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging at Mediavine

YY: What specific diversity and inclusion initiatives is your company implementing, and how does your role as Chief Brand Officer contribute to these efforts?

AB: From our first efforts at influencer marketing and programmatic advertising, one of the primary directives that we decided on was to make sure that we put diverse voices in front of brands whenever we were doing an influencer campaign. We also work hard to make sure that everyone in a campaign is making an equitable amount of money for their rate of engagement, including increasing their rate when it makes sense for industry trends within the budget. 

In the last few years, SSPS and DSPs came to us looking for the ability to take earmarked budgets and apply them to Black-owned, women-owned, or LGBTQIA+- owned publishers. We moved very quickly to ensure our publishers could self-identify in their dashboards if they wanted to. It provided us with key values we can pass in the ad string and grab those budgets for the publishers that can benefit from them. A huge percentage of those budgets are run through Mediavine pipes, and that’s incredibly important to us. 

You will see us talk about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (DEI&B) a lot more soon under the banner of our corporate responsibility arm, which we call Shine. Shine was launched in 2021, but started as an idea from a travel publisher in 2020, during the height of the pandemic. From a publisher and an ad partner perspective, we have some new initiatives you will hear about shortly. On the People Operations side of our company, we have always focused on making inclusive and diverse hires. Still, it’s been an especially large focus for our Chief People and Culture Officer, Yolanda Evans, to ensure that we are hiring in a way that provides equity to diverse communities. We post our jobs in places where someone might not normally expect us to.

We also have an employee resource group called PRISM, which our People Operations team also runs. PRISM is currently working on bringing in speakers for Women’s History Month. We had several speakers and an employee-led panel about the Black experience in the tech industry and at Mediavine in general, with even a little bit of constructive criticism, which was awesome because there’s always stuff we can do better. So are we behind some diversity efforts? The answer is a resounding yes. 

The post Leading With Empathy, Women’s History Month Q&A With Mediavine Co-founder Amber Bracegirdle appeared first on AdMonsters.

That’s why for publishers, building a strong content taxonomy revolves around quality content and a frictionless user experience. And for advertisers, it’s really not that much different, especially if they want consumers to land on relevant pages once they’ve clicked on one of their ads over on a publisher’s site.

That’s why it’s really important to weed out issues with old and irrelevant content, broken links, outdated branding, readability, and anything else stopping visitors dead in their tracks. And let’s not forget about Google’s algorithm updates that constantly shift rankings. You want to make sure people can easily search and find the content that’s important to them.

So, why not perform content quality assurance and SEO checks from the start to reduce any worries about the disconnect between your content and conversions?

We chatted with Kevin Bobowski, Chief Marketing Officer, Siteimprove — a SAAS company that creates cloud-based tools and services for website governance and optimization — about ways in which both marketers and publishers can optimize their content for accessibility, improved user experience, and boosted performance. 

Yakira Young: July is Disability Pride Month. Can you elaborate on Siteimprove’s involvement at the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities? Also, Siteimprove has been driving conversations around digital inclusivity; how so, and why is this important?

Kevin Bobowski: Siteimprove is a pioneer and leader in digital accessibility, with inclusivity as part of our platform for over a decade. Our mission is to allow everyone to participate in the digital economy, and we are continuously strengthening this commitment across our offerings and company culture.

As a business, we empower marketing teams to optimize content for specific outcomes — accessibility, user experience, expanded reach, and marketing performance. As a company, we are a truly inclusive workplace, valuing the unique perspectives and skills of those with different abilities. Our accessibility Pledge ensures that the solutions are effective, efficient, engaging, error-tolerant, and easy to learn for users of all abilities.

Recently, we were honored to have our Sustainability Report 2021 in the United Nations Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative. We had a leadership role in the “Building Capacity to Implement Accessibility Policies” event at the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

YY: What are the main benefits for marketers and publishers who use your platform?

 KB: Since 2003, Siteimprove has been empowering marketing and content teams to optimize for accessibility, user experience, and marketing performance so they can expand their brand’s reach, exceed their marketing goals, and work towards a future with purpose. A seamless, engaging UX drives revenue and increases brand loyalty.

Siteimprove offers an all-in-one solution, becoming a true technology partner with the over 7,000 companies we have worked with. Our solutions have proven to deliver a 275% ROI, reduced the average time spent on error detection and content monitoring by 90%, and bolstered traffic significantly through data-driven SEO.

We recently partnered with Merck during a major website relaunch. The company’s ambitious objective was to merge three different websites with over 10,000 pages into one unified estate to strengthen its brand and create one voice. Since the relaunch, with the power of the Siteimprove platform, the Merck team could quadruple traffic and gain deep data-driven insights to inform digital marketing efforts.

YY: What are the processes for marketers and publishers who use the platform?

KB: The connection between Accessibility and SEO is more important than ever before. Building our content with this in mind will enable marketers to capitalize on new content faster with better rankings, more organic traffic, and improved discoverability.

Siteimprove informs marketers about important on-page aspects of both Accessibility and SEO simultaneously to enable them to make better decisions earlier in the content creation process.

Siteimprove’s pre-publish checks enable marketing teams with insights that speed up the content creation process and foster collaboration between multiple writers. Our pre-publish check grants insights into on-page issues. Resulting in better-performing content from the get-go.

 YY: What role does Google’s web vitals play in your process?

KB: Siteimprove offers multiple ways of improving important factors from Google’s web vitals, such as a complete performance area in Siteimprove’s Content Experience that provides a broad range of insights measuring loading performance, visual stability, and load and interactivity.

Our SEO Pre-Publish checks provide 20+ SEO-relevant assessments to ensure a better content and page experience; some are developed explicitly with Google’s web vitals in mind.

Optimized content is becoming even more critical, so offering engaging and high-quality content builds credibility and loyalty with users.

YY: In June, you launched a new solution that ensures error-free content, fully optimized for SEO and accessibility before content is even published. What is the tool, and how does it work?

KB: Our latest solution, Siteimprove Prepublish, allows marketers to deliver error-free, on-brand experiences. Prepublish is available in all the leading DXP’s including Optimizely, Sitecore, Adobe, and others. We have developed innovative solutions such as Accessibility NextGen, Accessibility Checker, and Color-Contrast Checker to complement manual testing to ensure that a user’s first impression is positive. Audiences interact with flawless content the first time, creating a positive user experience.

This solution provides publishers with the data and analytics needed to ensure all website content is error-free, fully optimized for SEO and accessibility, compliant, and aligned with brand standards. Prepublish boosts the quality and performance of a brand’s website content before it even goes live, improving workflows and increasing productivity with measurable time and cost savings.

Optimized content is becoming even more critical, so offering engaging and high-quality content builds credibility and loyalty with users.

The post Content Is King Once Again, So, You Better Get It Right appeared first on AdMonsters.