Mediavine Builds for the Future and Boosts Revenue with Authenticated Traffic Solution

The Challenge

A cookieless world has been predicted for years but is finally here. Safari and Firefox have both already bid farewell to third-party cookies and Google phased them out in Chrome in January 2024, with the intent to have them deprecated by the end of the year. 

Planning for the demise of cookies, especially with the time frame uncertain, has been stressful for both advertisers and publishers. Any decline in ability to serve ads relevant to readers or measure effectiveness hurts advertisers’ campaign performance and makes investment more difficult to justify. When ads are less efficient in reaching their intended audiences, advertisers bid less for impressions, leading in turn to a significant drop in revenue for publishers. 

Mediavine, the largest independent full-service advertising management company in the United States, monetizes 10,000 publisher partner websites worldwide in addition to its owned and operated properties, seeing over 150 million unique monthly web visitors and serving 17 billion monthly ad impressions. Mediavine is dedicated to building sustainable businesses for content creators, so changes in addressability threatened to hurt not only Mediavine’s business but the small and large businesses, including bloggers in every lifestyle niche, they proudly represent. In fact, the Mediavine team found that CPMs in cookieless Safari were already more than 50% lower than in Chrome.

Mediavine was committed to finding privacy-centric solutions that ensured marketers could continue to connect with their consumers and publisher partners could sustain healthy businesses.

The Solution

In this test, Mediavine leveraged Index Exchange’s integration with LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS), which allows marketers to buy authenticated inventory that does not rely on third-party cookies or mobile identifiers. It is powered instead by RampID, the most durable, privacy-centric identifier for connecting the digital and martech ecosystem. 

With Authenticated Traffic Solution’s people-based audience activation, advertisers are able to identify, reach, and engage with their consumers at scale. ATS provides consumers with increased relevance and privacy, advertisers with improved campaign performance, and publishers with more valuable ad inventory. 

The Results

Mediavine’s partnership with Index Exchange and LiveRamp expanded addressability and improved the profitability of its ad inventory significantly across cookie-restricted browsers globally. Mediavine saw the cost per thousand ad impressions (CPM) increase by 142% for ads using RampID. In other words, advertisers were willing to pay almost 1.5x more for ads that used a people-based identifier.

With this solution, Mediavine found a way to boost ad revenue right away, but also sound reasons for optimism as it planned for the cookieless future. Mediavine could provide its publishers’ readers with the best possible user experience while ensuring that publishers’ ad inventory remained an enduring asset to power continued business growth.