Opt Out is helping publishers monetise an increasingly privacy-conscious audience
The Media Leader Interview
Opt Out’s operations chief Linda Worp discusses how more online users are hitting “reject all” on data trackers, why this is a blind spot for publishers and what Opt Out is doing to support them.
When you visit a website, how often do you hit “reject all” on the consent banner that pops up?
If you do, you’re part of a growing cohort who is currently estimated to total between one-fourth and one-third of online users.
For digital publishers and the advertisers interested in their ad inventory, that amounts to a huge segment of the audience who becomes effectively unreachable through standard digital programmatic advertising.
“The privacy awareness for users is rising,” says Linda Worp, chief operating officer at Opt Out Advertising. “Every opportunity they get to reject advertising via cookies or identifiers and the use of personal data, they will do that.”
Opt Out, a Dutch company founded in 2021 to address post-GDPR changes to digital advertising, has in the past year expanded into the UK, striking deals with The Guardian, Immediate Media and The Telegraph within the past 12 months.
The Media Leader can also reveal that Reuters has signed as a future partner and Opt Out is actively seeking partnerships with additional publishers.
Opt Out offers a solution that allows publishers to provide privacy-safe advertising to users who have opted out of consenting to data-tracking on websites — an increasingly common occurrence since the UK Information Commissioner’s Office ruled at the start of the year that “reject all” must be as prominent an option for users as “accept all” on publisher websites.
Speaking to The Media Leader from her office in Amsterdam, Worp explains that since GDPR and subsequent data privacy regulations were implemented, “publishers were in trouble because the complete advertising revenue on consentless inventory was gone”.
She adds: “That’s why publishers [try] to get as many consents as possible so they can keep their old-fashioned way of working with big American ad technologies.”
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‘Consent has become a commodity’
For publishers, when a user clicks “reject all”, they are typically unable to serve that user programmatic ads, which typically make up the majority of publishers’ advertising business.
The downward pressure on revenues has caused publishers to increasingly consider a “consent or pay” model, whereby they force readers to either click “accept all” or pay for a subscription to access content.
As of September, six of the top 50 UK news websites have adopted this “consent or pay” model, including News UK’s The Times and The Sun, Reach’s Mirror and Express, as well as The Independent and MailOnline.
But as Worp stresses, just because consumers have hit “reject all” does not mean that they are “saying no to ads”. If they felt that strongly, she reasons, they’d simply install an ad blocker on their browser. Instead, what users are saying is they merely don’t want their personal data used for advertising purposes.
She notes that, while numerous cookie alternatives have been developed in recent years following industry desire to move beyond third-party trackers, explicit consent from users is still needed for most of these alternatives.
Hence the development of Opt Out, which publishers can use to serve ads to users who hit “reject all”.
At its 2023 upfronts, The Guardian touted its partnership with Opt Out, through which it developed its Guardian Light solution. The news brand claimed at the time that Guardian Light was the first of its kind to be launched by a publisher in the UK.
Katherine Le Ruez, The Guardian‘s director of digital, wrote: “The way online advertising is delivered is changing. At The Guardian, we want to embrace that change with new technologies that respect our readers’ choices, deliver a great user experience, while putting the very best ad creatives next to our award-winning journalism. And, crucially, do so in a way that delivers on our advertisers’ objectives.”
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Mario Lamaa, director of revenue operations at Immediate Media, told The Media Leader that Opt Out’s perspective “aligns very closely with our purpose of bringing joy to our users, built on trust”.
He continued: “Consumers are becoming increasingly privacy-aware and unfortunately consent has become a commodity in the programmatic space. This is partly driven by specific limitations and lack of investment in technology that can monetise consentless inventory and Opt Out are striving to push the boundaries in this space”.
Lamaa added that he believes the market “has changed quite quickly since Opt Out first came out with their proposition”, with consent-or-pay models becoming more tempting for publishers.
“This hasn’t really helped the demand side lean in to this inventory as the volume of consented users has increased in some areas,” said Lamaa. “However, there are still very many unconsented users who are really valuable to advertisers as they are under-exposed and therefore potentially very receptive to ads.”
Privacy, UX and sustainability go hand in hand
Despite the lack of data-tracking, Worp says Opt Out’s ads remain highly relevant to users by serving those based on contextual signals, such as the text of an article, or other external triggers, like time-based or weather-based targeting.
From a measurement perspective, Worp admits that Opt Out is unable to provide many classic performance metrics due to its inability, by design, to track users around the web, making attribution a challenge to measure. However, she says brand-lift studies have revealed highly positive results for clients and click-through rates have been two to three times higher than average online campaigns.
Worp says publishers have been enthusiastic about Opt Out, with most saying they “really need it”, as they respect the choices their users make about privacy, but still need to make revenue from ads to support journalism and other content creation.
“What [publishers] say is: we want to be the privacy-first focused and we want to make sure our full audience is available to the advertiser,” says Worp. “Because, from the publisher perspective, they are missing out on certain revenue when they don’t tap into the consentless inventory. And for advertisers, it is a loss in audience.”
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There are also additional benefits, argues Worp. These include quicker page loads due to lessened ad clutter and improved sustainability metrics, since fewer ads are being served than usual. Both lead to better experiences for users as well as advertisers, she says, because ads show up quicker and only one demand-side platform is called.
“It is a unique audience segment to tap into, because the results show it is valuable,” Worp explains.
She adds that, despite quick work to shore up partnerships with several top publishers in the past year, onboarding more requires getting publishers comfortable with a new normal and helping them prove to clients that the solution works.
“For publishers, it is a big shift and a big challenge,” Worp says. “Because you need to convince advertisers to try that first campaign and look at the results and get the proof that it should be a standard procedure in every campaign.”