Rewarding publishers should be essential, not optional
It’s time to hand power back to the publishers if they’re to stand a chance against the powerful platform players, writes Alicia Navarro, CEO of Skimlinks.
From the outside, the publisher has traditionally been painted by the advertising continent as the least innovative of the media cohort. Agencies and advertisers have to be at the vanguard of what works for the brand – their bottom line depends upon it – and publishers are there to provide the “stage” for the innovation to happen.
Or are they? The digital innovation going on in the publishing world is incredible to see – as we know, working with them on a daily basis.
The majority of enterprise scale publishers we work with – and many of the mid and smaller size too – are pumping time, money and effort into understanding their audiences and what propels them to move through the digital world.
Look at BuzzFeed – Jonah Peretti just gave an interview discussing his goal not to just report the news and generate traffic, but to create an impact among its readers. As these publishers embark on their various missions and simultaneously go through the trials of understanding what generates its revenue – whether native is the way to go, whether clickbait is still the answer some of the time – it’s learning an awful lot about what its readers are into.
The rules are as clear as ever for publishers: understand your audience, and create compelling content that appeals to them. When it comes down to it though, we sometimes underestimate the huge role that publications play in influencing what appeals to their readers, and to what extent that content itself drives consumer decision-making.
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For advertisers, the value of any publisher is in its audience, and as the automated trading of audiences become standardised, publishers are in a rush to understand how they can benefit from this way of marketing to their users – which has quickly become the ‘norm’.
A number of interesting questions arise for publishers: what if one of my readers buys something from an e-commerce site, because they read a piece of content on my site? Is something that far up the funnel tracked? Is there an incentive for me to create commerce-related content? Will I get rewarded for creating desire even if I don’t create immediate purchases?
Currently, this is a grey area. While it is common practice to use post-impression tracking on ads and attribution software to determine the role various advertisements played on the path to conversion, this isn’t at all easy or common for the role that editorial content plays. Which seems crazy, because clearly editorial content has a more influential impact on purchase intent than advertisements.
The measurability of advertising has arrived at a stage where agencies funnel money into what delivers clicks.”
When it comes to measuring impact, publishers know that their original, house-style content is the most captivating way to engage their audience. They know this to be true because they’ve been receiving real-time feedback from readers on things like quality of articles, tone, length, formats, and so on, for as long as they’ve been in business.
The fine art of creating digital content that people want to read – and which drives an intent to purchase – is something that has not yet been harnessed for marketing purposes. Or at least purposes that benefit everyone in the loop.
The measurability of advertising has arrived at a stage where agencies funnel money into what delivers clicks, simply because it is measurable – but the holes in that logic are unmistakable.
For this reason we decided to get our cohort of 55,000 publishers together to contribute audience data to a co-operative, in a move that gives brands and agencies access to over 1.3 billion unique users and powerful predictive modelling. It will ensure that all publishers get rewarded automatically for their contribution to sold segments.
The idea is to hand back power to the publishers, so that they stand a chance up against the powerful platform players.
By helping publishers to successfully leverage commerce-related content and capturing 15 billion intent signals daily across the content web, including the products and brands users are reading about, clicking on and buying – advertisers are able to build a better picture of who is interested in and/or about to buy those products across the entire purchase funnel.
Once we start the process of adequately recompensing publishers for their contribution to audience data – and give them insights back as to what content worked and what didn’t on their websites – then we’ll start to see the tides shift towards some really innovative native editorial content, and some e-commerce journeys that really start to make sense for the end user too.