Publishers Grapple With Ad Tech

What’s the biggest monetization challenge facing digital publishers today? Ad tech, they say. Growing complexities around audience-based ad selling and the emergence of new channels such as mobile and video are making the space increasingly difficult to understand and to navigate.

In the video below, three publishers weigh in on the biggest challenges they currently face.

“It’s really challenging, you have to have a lot of different skill sets to truly understand it,” says The Awl publisher John Shankman. “You have to understand sales, you have to understand technology, you have to understand content. To get a wholistic picture is really difficult,” he added.

Todd Sawicki, chief revenue officer of the Cheezburger Network expressed similar views. It’s no longer just a case of worrying about a display ad technology stack, he said. Publishers now have to consider channels such as mobile and video too, while fragmenting technologies on the buy-side further add to the confusion.

Meanwhile ex-Forbes.com CEO and Spanfeller Media Group founder, Jim Spanfeller, suggested ad tech is “helping crap masquerade as quality.” Despite ad tech’s promise, there’s progress that needs to be made before the publishers with worthwhile content and audiences will really benefit, he suggested.


https://digiday.com/?p=9484

More in Media

How The New York Times is using visuals to boost podcast discovery and grow listenership

To grow podcast listenership and help people discover new shows, The New York Times is experimenting with visuals on platforms like YouTube and its own audio app this year.

Media Briefing: Publishers search for new ways to grow (and authenticate) audiences, overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit

“[Advertisers] already pay data providers for data. So why not pay the publisher?”

Research Briefing: Publishers’ revenue sources are top of mind at Digiday Publishing Summit

In this week’s Digiday+ Research Briefing, we examine which revenue streams were top of mind for publishers at the Digiday Publishing Summit, how TikTok is getting even more marketing spend from brands and retailers despite facing a potential U.S. ban, and how Disney is rolling out DRAX Direct, a direct integration with the industry’s largest DSPs, as seen in recent data from Digiday+ Research.