Media Briefing: Overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit, September 2024 edition

Publishers did not mince words about Google when they gathered during the Digiday Publishing Summit’s town hall on Monday.

The first topic that was addressed during the closed door session — which is conducted under Chatham House rules to give participants anonymity in exchange for candor — was what Google’s antitrust trial could mean for the digital advertising space and Google’s plan to offload the responsibility of third-party cookie deprecation to its Chrome users.

By and large, publishers expressed frustration at having little to no control when Google’s whims have ripple effects across the whole digital advertising and search industries, given how significant of a share their ad business has on market.

See what publishers had to say about the technology giant.  

What happens if Google’s ad business gets the ax

“It’s not like you can undo the last decade of technology implementations and everything about the marketplace. So not to be glib about it, but everybody here is facing the same undulations, and we’re talking about a large player in the marketplace, but it doesn’t change the systemic problems of publishing and monetization.”

“​Even if there are many changes, I feel like at least for my publisher, like the short term is [still] probably three-to-five years, and I don’t see any of these changes happening [before] that point.”

“I don’t really care what happens with GAM [Google Ad Manager]. I want to see other people come up and build new products and fundamentally, that would be the ideal for me.” 

“I think once you sever it from all of the other Google products, that market share shrinks significantly, and then you just have new products coming on, so it just becomes a less important product. And I’m OK with that.”

“Google Analytics and a whole suite of products are so interconnected, and you don’t know how [the] utilization of each of those plays into your ability to monetize your information. That’s kind of a big point that I want to watch if there is a breakout of some kind.”  

The myriad problems with Google’s ad server 

“I was reading the response from [Google], and it said something like, ‘People come to us because we have the best product.’ And I literally found myself laughing out loud.”

Digiday: “What makes it not the best product?” 

“Where to begin…” 

• “The self dealing is annoying … but that leads to better monetization sometimes the fact that they’ve set it up so that you have to kind of take it or leave it. You can’t actually just choose to optimize against it. You have to just blanketly accept it, that they’re going to take whatever inventory they want if you want these features.”

• “We do a lot of [cost-per-click]. That’s just atrociously bad and like they refuse to acknowledge that it is.” 

• “They reserve the right to tell you how to set things up in their own ad server. It just offends me a little bit, and by a little bit, I mean a lot.” 

“I don’t feel at all like we’re customers. In one sense, it’s almost like they’re the pipe dictator that every time they want to upgrade or change, and you have to really change things to match their algorithm if you want to be found.”

The publisher perspective on Google’s opt-in cookie plan

“It kind of feels like Apple ATT again, right? Like it’s just going to happen, and the idea that the cookiepocalypse is coming is just changing to by design instead of by the minute.” 

“Safari hasn’t been worth anything in years, and I don’t see how people can be optimistic that Chrome’s going to be worth anything more than Safari was.” 

“I think Google is in a no-lose situation. How they weigh their options [for opt-in third-party cookies versus it being posed to users as an opt-out of cookies] will depend on how they think that will be perceived from regulatory spending. That would be my guess.” 

“I don’t think anyone that’s been working on this [over] the last three years … [are] just going to stop … so hopefully we’re ready on the other side.” 

Maintenance mode with publisher provide signals (PPS) 

“We’re in maintenance mode right now … We haven’t been able to see any sort of true reporting that shows that it’s making a difference.” 

“It kind of goes hand-in-hand with [Google’s] issues with transparency. We want to know if these [signals] are working. But they’re like, ‘Well, we can’t tell you, because that’ll give you an advantage from all the other publishers.’ So that’s why we’re in maintenance mode. We just set it and forget it now, and we’re not going to invest in it probably until next fiscal.” 

“We were avid testers of PPID [publisher provided identifiers] and PPS when we could actually A/B test it properly, and we saw a negative lift, mostly.” 

“I think it’s more of a nice, shiny object to make publishers feel like they have control [and] give some incremental lift number in GAM. At the end of the day there’s no way to validate it very well.” 

“I still think it’s very important to pass a content signal per the IAB and use a seller-defined audience, but I don’t think there’s ever going to be a way for us to know if it’s actually helping or not. And I think that’s the point.”

“There was all this data that was supposed to come out in July, and they moved the goalpost … Where’s the trust at?” 

“That’s where our breakdown with Google is right now. We can’t trust and we’re not getting any solutions to the problems. They’re just kind of gaslighting us, it seems like.” 

Numbers to know

+13%: The percentage growth of average referral traffic from Google Discover increased since January 2023 for 700 U.S. news sites measured by Chartbeat.

54: The number of staffers on The Washington Post’s publishing platform software Arc XP team that were laid off this week, representing a quarter of that stand-alone team. 

10,000: The number of paid subscribers that Vice hopes to get to its relaunched, quarterly print magazine by the end of Q1 2025.

What we’ve covered

How Business Insider’s AI-based paywall strategy increased conversions by 75%:

• AI is being put to the test in publishers’ subscription strategies.
• Business Insider’s smart paywall rolled out in May with the thesis that the technology is better at identifying the articles that are most likely to convert audiences into paid readers. 

Read a recap of the on-stage session with Business Insider’s chief subscriptions officer Katie Friedman here. 

How Hearst Magazines is maintaining signal strength amid the shift from deterministic to probabilistic modeling:

• In July, publishers were faced with reevaluating their post-cookie plans in light of a post-cookie landscape not necessarily being guaranteed. 
• Hearst Magazines was among those publishers, having introduced its first-party targeting tool Aura a month prior.

Hear from Hearst Magazine’s svp of ad products and data, Jen Dorre, here. 

X brings back its transparency report for the first time since 2021: 

• Despite how it looks, X claims to be a community safe zone — and a prime advertising playground — according to its latest transparency report.
• The newly returned report, which outlines how X enforces its policies on illegal, hateful or fraudulent content, revealed that in the first half of 2024, users reported 224,129,805 incidents where they believed those rules were violated.

See how safe – or not – X is for advertisers here. 

TikTok looks to turn search queries into ad dollars with keyword targeting tool

• After months of will-they-won’t-they, TikTok is finally getting serious about turning user searches into ad dollars.
• For now, the ads are only available in the U.S., but TikTok is eyeing a wider rollout in early 2025.

Learn more about TikTok’s new search ads business here.

Legal battle aside, here’s all you need to know about TikTok right now

• Calling 2024 eventful for TikTok would be putting it mildly.
• Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, and Kris Boger, TikTok U.K.’s general manager of global business solutions, share their current overview of TikTok’s business.

Hear from top TikTok execs about the state of the social platform here.

What we’re reading

Koch considers a Forbes acquisition: 

The private equity arm of Koch Inc and one other investor are having discussions about acquiring Forbes, Axios reported. Koch Equity Development (KED) has historically invested in media, including Meredith’s acquisition of Time in 2018 and investing in Getting Imagines in 2019. 

How CEO Erika Badan is using her Barstool experience to rebuild Food52:

Former Barstool CEO Erika Badan is hoping her experience building the digital sports and entertainment media company will transfer to the upscale food publisher Food52, as its recently appointed CEO, Adweek reported. And while the two media companies have similar business models, the audiences, culture and content strategy differ wildly. 

A feud between the founders of tennis magazine Racquet shows the trouble of niche media: 

The indie magazine Racquet is at the center of a dispute between its co-founders, former editor David Shaftel (who was removed from the company last November) and publisher Caitlin Thompson, which has escalated to competing lawsuits, The New York Times reported. What this ongoing match underlies, though, is the position that niche media companies find themselves in as they plot paths to growth. 

The New York Times is adding audio subscriptions to Spotify and Apple: 

Axios reported that the Times is joining other publishers like Vox Media and The Economist and starting to sell subscriptions to their podcasts on streaming platforms Spotify and Apple Podcasts. This means that the archives of “The Daily,” “The Ezra Klein Klein Show,””Modern Love,” and “Hard Fork” will all be subscriber-only starting next month with only the two or three most recent episodes being available to non-subscribed listeners.

TikTok gets out of the music streaming business: 

In July 2023, TikTok tried to compete with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music by launching a music streaming service called TikTok Music, The Wall Street Journal reported. The service was only rolled out in Indonesia, Brazil, Australia, Mexico and Singapore, but TikTok has been at odds with record labels for disrupting the industry and not paying musicians fairly for their music on the app.