Naming and shaming high-emission publishers misses the forest for the trees
Opinion
Most emissions are found in inefficiencies clogging up the middle of the programmatic supply chain, so penalising publishers won’t actually help drive long-term decarbonisation efforts in the industry.
Outside a privileged few that are funded entirely through subscriptions and direct deals, most publishers live or die at the mercy of programmatic advertising. The recent push to decarbonise the digital supply chain has seen high-emission publishers labelled as “problematic”, with efforts to remove them from auctions to help campaigns hit their CO2 targets.
But is it fair to name and shame publishers when they’re not the ones that hold the real power within the supply chain?
Open web publishers have already been squeezed dry
Digital advertising is a constantly evolving industry, but very few changes ever benefit publishers. Open programmatic disintermediated publishers from the supply chain and commodified their audience data, reshaping the landscape and leading to a race to the bottom for CPMs.
Social platforms have distanced themselves from news content, cutting a significant source of referral traffic, while search traffic rises and falls (but mostly falls) depending on algorithm updates. The latest Google core update saw some sites lose 90% of their search traffic.
Now, Google AI Overview and ChatGPT Search threaten to further suppress traffic, with users given the information they need (assuming the AI hasn’t introduced errors) without having to click away from the search page.
Then there are heavy-handed, blocklist-based brand-safety filters that wipe out revenues for most news content. Even (what ought to be) highly monetisable football coverage can struggle if it uses the word “shot”.
But even if everything in the programmatic chain works as it’s supposed to, only 36% of spend makes it to publishers.
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And now emissions
On top of this, publishers now have carbon emissions to reckon with, with carbon-filtering tools and blocklists that let ad buyers filter the lowest carbon-emitting publishers, leading to some being struck off. While premium publishers have the capital to put behind decarbonisation efforts and the channels to show off their progress, middle-tier and smaller publishers walk a revenue and resource tightrope that leaves little room for reinvestment.
Yes, there are made-for-advertising sites that are pure content mills that will never make an effort to decarbonise, but many high-emission publishers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Smaller publishers — or those hardest hit by declining search and social traffic — need to extract the maximum possible value from each visitor, often with less loyal audiences and a higher dependency on churning traffic.
This often means packing pages with as many ad slots as possible, occupied by energy-intensive ad formats. Even if they want to change, they might be locked into long-term contracts with polluting vendors to get the most cost-effective deal.
Emissions are a secondary concern when survival is at stake.
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Decarbonisation can be a win-win for buyers and sellers
Pursuing exclusionary practices might temporarily help advertisers reduce supply chain emissions in their campaigns, but penalising legitimate publishers won’t help drive long-term decarbonisation.
Now, more than ever, publishers need support: they need more advertising revenues, they need to be able to reinvest to make technical improvements and they need vendors that prioritise carbon-reduction solutions that are also cost-effective.
Focusing on the sell side also misses the forest for the trees. The bulk of potential carbon savings in the programmatic supply chain won’t be realised by cutting out publishers, as most emissions are found in inefficiencies clogging up the middle.
Streamlining the programmatic supply chain is key to carbon-saving practices: the excess of intermediaries; the tens of thousands of supply paths to a single slot of inventory; wasteful bid logic that results in the vast majority of responses failing — these are the prime candidates for cost-effective decarbonisation.
Reducing emissions by carving out inefficiencies from the middle of the chain gives more return on investment to buyers and more revenue to publishers, which can then build on that success to make reductions closer to home. It’s a rare win-win for both ends of the supply chain.
If we focus on the sell side and leave the middle unchanged, the same wasteful practices will continue, pushing the industry commitment to ad net zero further out of reach.
A leaner structure
The good news for publishers is that many of the changes they can make on their end to decarbonise their ad operations can also increase ad revenues.
By implementing automated and scalable machine learning solutions to throttle bidding algorithms and filter ad calls, publishers can optimise their ad revenue streams with minimal resource commitment. These algorithms improve over time as they accumulate data and can be set up to automatically balance carbon reduction with ad performance to align with revenue goals.
A leaner ad infrastructure also results in better page performance, which reduces bounce rates and keeps visitors on site for longer, while also potentially elevating search ranking positions. Deploy these optimisations correctly and they can effectively pay for themselves through improved ad performance and audience retention, and can pave the way to entering “green” private marketplaces to secure incremental revenue from climate-focused buyers.
As publishers feel the pressure of emissions reduction, it’s collaboration — not exclusion — that is needed to secure sustainable progress towards a cleaner digital ecosystem. Lasting decarbonisation gains can be achieved by addressing programmatic inefficiencies and providing publishers the cost-effective solutions they need to thrive as they adapt.
By working towards mutually beneficial solutions rather than marginalisation, both ends of the supply chain can uplift one another towards their climate goals.
Michael Hanbury-Williams is UK managing director at Greenbids