The past few years have been tumultuous for publishers. The on-again/off-again deprecation of cookies, concerns over MFA sites making programmatic advertising risky, and the rise of generative AI search decimating referral traffic have all posed significant challenges. Despite these hurdles, publishers continue to innovate. As a result, the majority anticipate revenue growth in the coming year.

In July 2024, we surveyed and interviewed publishers to gain insights into their revenue outlook and identify their top opportunities for growth. This report summarizes our findings.

Of course, much has changed since our survey, including Google’s decision to forgo cookie deprecation for the foreseeable future. Still, what’s clear to us is that the talk of cookie deprecation has prompted them to rethink the way they do business and how they can generate revenue.

Key Findings: Direct Deals & Audience Data

• On the whole, revenue will grow. Most respondents (60%) anticipate revenue growth, with 19% expecting significant growth and 41% anticipating moderate growth.
•  2025 will be the year of the direct deal, with 68% of publishers saying it represents their best opportunity for revenue growth.
• Monetizing audience data (50%) and creating new products (46%) are also seen as significant opportunities for growth.
• Looking ahead, 33% plan to leverage audience data, and 23% each consider subscriptions and licensing/syndication as new revenue streams.
• To support these growth plans, 71% of respondents plan to invest in new tools or technologies to ramp up revenue.
• The most invested tools include audience segmentation (65%), identity resolution (50%), and AI-driven/advanced analytics platforms (40%).

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The post Ramping Up Your Revenue: Digital Publishers Reveal Key Growth Strategies appeared first on AdMonsters.

Pending publisher licensing deals with OpenAI aside, one part of the news organization finds generative AI extremely useful, and in some instances, transformative: the Ad Ops team. AdMonsters has interviewed numerous Ad Ops people across several organizations to see if and how they’re using it.

Reshaping Ad Ops With Generative AI

Ad Ops professionals aren’t just dabbling in generative AI; they’re diving in deep and successfully putting it to work to improve their daily jobs and elevate the overall Ad Ops team. It isn’t a surprise that they’ve largely sidestepped the challenges others have faced using generative AI. As tech-savvy people, Ad Ops professionals are well aware of the limitations of all AI and take active steps to mitigate the pitfalls and problems.

This Publisher Pulse looks at:

• • Popular generative AI tools used by Ad Ops team members
  • Ad Ops personas — distinct ways that interviewees use generative AI to elevate their performance or the performance of their teams
  • AI use cases
  • How generative AI will transform the Ad Ops Teams
  • Tips for getting the best results out of AI
  • Sample outputs

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Navigating misinformation and disinformation will be a key challenge this election cycle, driven by widespread availability of sophisticated AI tools. Digital publishers and CTV stakeholders face direct and negative effects on their business, from drops in user engagement to broader societal mistrust.

Ultimately it falls to publishers to serve as the final bastion of defense for their audiences. Publishers must undertake the critical task of determining whether specific advertisers and promoters of sensitive, hot-button issues can be permitted to run ads on their sites and under which conditions, while simultaneously ensuring malicious actors are kept at bay.

This Playbook, created in partnership with GeoEdge, provides a robust framework for an ad quality strategy, essential for setting up robust election advertising guidelines. It delves into the tools available to publishers for increased visibility and control, shedding light on challenges in the upcoming election cycle. 

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The post AdMonsters Playbook: Navigating Political Ads for the 2024 Season appeared first on AdMonsters.

To get a sense of publishers’ plans, for a life without third-party cookies AdMonsters surveyed a mix of national and small, web and mobile publishers about a range of issues.

To see the results and gain insights from The Attention Playbook, created in partnership with Emodo, please enter your business email to download your free copy of The Targeting and Metrics Evolution: Are Publishers Ready for Attention’s Dominance? below!

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• Do bad ads prompt users to leave a news site or app? Do they report those poor experiences to the publisher?
• What is the impact of a bad ad on the consumer’s propensity to return to that site, recommend it to others, or make a purchase on it?
• Do bad ads send users a message that publishers care more about making money than they do about their safety?

To gain that understanding, we surveyed 250 consumers about the impact of a “bad” advertisement on their perceptions of a website or app. We defined a bad ad to survey takers as “any advertisement — including the web page or app that clicking on it brings you to — that you find unpleasant, inappropriate, untruthful, or has some kind of computer virus associated with it.”

Then we talked to publishers to hear their reactions to the data, and also learn some pro tips that we could pass on to our readers.

Enter your email below to download your free copy of How Bad Ads Affect Consumer Perception of Publishers! 

This playbook, created in partnership with GeoEdge, will dive into the results of our survey, highlighting both the challenges and solutions. 

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Intuitively, we understand that if AdOps had more tools and workflows to share those insights, client-facing teams could have more data-driven conversations with advertisers about campaign performance. This in turn will lead to repeat sales, as well as provide the data needed to recruit other advertisers in their sector.

Additionally, this data would help product teams design premium ad units and ad packages by sector, as well as the right price to charge for them. Once this data is made actionable, there are even more possibilities that we can outline here.

But how widely is contextualized AdOps data shared with sales and ad product teams? Have publishing organizations succeeded in digital transformations, or are they still struggling with silos that ultimately inhibit a more robust monetization strategy?

To answer these questions, we surveyed 136 people who work in digital publishing in an AdOps, sales, revenue, or product function.

Enter your email to download your free copy of AdOps Are Rock Stars. Are Sales Teams Taking Advantage of Their Stardom? below! 

This playbook, created in partnership with DV Publisher Suite, dives into the results of our survey while highlighting publishers’ challenges and providing tips to overcome them.

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It’s not merely a question of finding more advertisers to run campaigns on their sites. Publishers are keenly aware that maximizing revenue is a multi-pronged effort that involves:

• Improving overall programmatic ad quality in order to attract more premium advertisers
• Enabling users to report poor ads and ensuring such issues are addressed
• Streamlining the direct sale asset management process so that fewer problems arise and less manual work is required

But their efforts are often thwarted by a lack of automation within their workflows. 0% of survey respondents said their team’s workflows are fully automated (although 46% said they were “somewhat” automated). This lack of automation leads to revenue strategy decisions that are based on gut feeling rather than data. Publishers sever relationships with SSPs or DSPs rather than fix problems, leading to higher rates of unsold inventory and blindspots throughout the industry.

Enter your email to download your free copy of Opportunities to Drive RevOps Efficiency below! 

This playbook, created in partnership with GeoEdge, will dive into the results of our survey, highlighting both the challenges and solutions. 

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To better understand the extent of the problem, we surveyed 148 publishers about their experiences with clickbait ads on their sites. A key goal is to understand why it occurs and whether or not publishers have the tools they need to eradicate it from their properties.

Our survey found that 69% of publishers report clickbait ads appearing on their sites, despite their best efforts to screen for them.

Enter your email to download your free copy of How Clickbait Ad Scams are Devised & Impact Publishers’ Sites below!

This playbook, created in partnership with GeoEdge, will dive into the results of our survey, highlighting both the challenges and solutions. 

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Many publishers potentially sit on a trove of valuable first-party data, as users are generally willing to sign-up for newsletters and opt-in to data usage, as long as they understand the value they’ll receive in return. The value exchange is best articulated if it is catered to the user’s specific interests.

Sharing data internally allows publishers to create and demonstrate highly personalized value exchanges across all channels. Now more than ever, publishers need to fully harmonize their cross-channel experiences with personalized content for each user.

This led us to ask:

• To what degree do publishers share data internally?
• For what purposes is that data shared internally?
• Are engagement touchpoints as fully harmonized and personalized to the user experience as they could be?
• What role does first-party data play in the publisher’s user

To find out, we surveyed ad operations, marketing and sales team members, chief revenue officers, data scientists, and other personnel within leading digital publishing companies.

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This playbook, created in partnership with Jeeng, will dive into the results of our survey, highlighting both the challenges and opportunities. 

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Digital advertising has undergone radical changes since that first ad, the most significant of which is programmatic. While programmatic has made it easier for publishers to fill impressions, it’s not without challenges.

Programmatic is often a blackbox; publishers have no idea which ads will appear on their sites ahead of time, often because the exchanges themselves don’t know which ads flow through their pipes.

Without transparency and complete control, publishers will continue to contend with scams and other unwanted ads that don’t meet their standards. For many publishers, monetization comes at a cost to quality,  but it doesn’t need to be this way. With the right controls, monetization and quality can be assured.

Beyond those concerns, we wondered how advertising fit in with the experience publishers sought for their audiences. Specifically, we wanted to know:

• Do publishers view advertising as simply a way to monetize inventory, or can it serve as a strategic differentiator for their brands? How can publishers better protect the relationship with their audiences?
• Can they support their brand suitability and strategic goals for advertising via programmatic channels?
• Do they have the controls and tools they need to deliver on their strategic insight?

To find out, we surveyed dozens of publishers across sectors of the publishing industry to assess the existing challenges they face, in terms of brand-suitable ads, and the future they envision for their digital properties.

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This playbook, created in partnership with GeoEdge, will dive into the results of our survey, highlighting both the challenges and opportunities. 

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