On August 4th, LiveRamp and Digiday’s webinar, “How Publishers Are Monetizing Addressable Inventory,” kicked off with the results of the State of the Industry report presented by Jason White, Senior Vice President and Head of Publishers at LiveRamp, and Mindi Chahal, Head of Content at Digiday. Following the survey results, Jason and Mindi were joined by Chris Pirrone, General Manager at USA TODAY Sports Media Group, and Paul Bannister, Chief Strategy Officer at CafeMedia, for a lively discussion about the opportunities and solutions for the industry to monetize people-based inventory.
Here are a few of the insights shared:
This shows that Safari, Firefox, and Google’s movements, alongside increasingly tighter regulation and government scrutiny, have prompted action to increase first-party audiences, with a large number of publishers only starting this year.
The survey shows some diversification of revenue, post-cookie—towards subscriptions—and contextual—moving away from open programmatic and events. However, most publishers are leaning heavily into driving authentications in the form of increasing subscriber numbers. Still, they recognize that direct advertiser relations and strategies like PMP are valuable and compose crucial pieces of a successful authentication strategy.
Identity was a topic that the panel discussed in detail and concluded that being able to provide an ID and a cross-platform people-based approach is key for publishers. They’ll get more revenue because advertisers will have visibility into performance across all platforms, and can finally give publishers the credit they deserve, which is a game-changer.
Equally, if not more important, publishers need to concern themselves with user engagement and content quality to build their first-party audiences. Providing content people love that keeps them engaged and coming back to consume more will drive additional authentications and therefore a larger addressable audience.
For more in-depth data and analysis of the impact of diminishing third-party cookies on publishers’ revenue mix, download the full report.