3 takeaways from the Prebid Summit: Compliance whiplash, a Google-less offering and publishers leaning on log-ins

For publishers, the past year has seen a flurry of regulatory activity across the adtech space from the data privacy laws sweeping U.S. states to the upcoming ruling for the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Google.

At Prebid’s annual summit, publishers grappled with the challenge of how to react in a timely fashion to all the change within their industry, with some industry leaders raising questions about how to adapt.

“Every time there is some regulation passed or some regulation that is enforceable, within six months, there’s something new we have to deal with in the industry,” said Tony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, in a fireside chat with Mike Racic, president of Prebid.

Publishers are hyper aware of the need to adopt new solutions to effectively monetize their content. Gannett, Mediavine and Raptive, as well as industry communities like IAB Tech Lab, reflected on strategies to gather more first-party data while complying with regulation, and how to balance both commitments.

Regulation whiplash?

Katsur emphasized the need for the industry to pay attention to compliance while maintaining its forward momentum. His fear is that the industry takes time to comply and with every new regulation, progress is delayed. With Google walking back on its decision to sunset cookies, for instance, he said there has been hesitation with implementing identity solutions, with many on hiatus.

“[The government] is watching how the industry is attempting to self-regulate,” Katsur said, pointing to his recurring meetings with regulators in Washington, D.C. “Compliance is critical, unless we want government to continue to hyper-regulate the industry. […] If we wait, all the innovation that could have happened this year will be lost.”

Gannett/USA Today Network is one publisher that has been watching the outcome of the Google antitrust closely. Ahead of Katsur’s talk, Jeff Burkett, VP of product and display media at Gannett/USA Today Network, said that all the Google litigation has created indecision around its identity strategy efforts. “That has definitely given us some pause as to who we can partner with based on who’s suing who,” he said. “So you have to test, but more and more details come up every day.”

Life without GAM?

Amid the ongoing Google antitrust trials, one media publisher is paving the way for small publishers to pivot away from the Google Ad Manager (GAM).

At the beginning of the year, Mediavine launched Journey — a new ad management platform for smaller publishers that see under 10,000 sessions a month — as a competitive offering that gives them access to Mediavine’s first-party data and identity solutions.

As Amanda Martin, chief revenue officer at Mediavine, explained in a keynote speech during the Prebid Summit, Journey creates a platform outside of Google-controlled solutions, offering an option for small publishers that didn’t really exist before, when they were either “either you’re going to AdSense or a partner who relies on AdSense pretty heavily for that offering.”

Martin said the initial idea wasn’t to launch Journey without Google Ad Manager. Instead, in order to scale the platform among small publishers, the company had no choice but to step away from Google, due to the manual and technical requirements GAM sets. “We started to venture to see, could we do this ourselves and still have a competitive ad offering?”

Over the past year, Martin said Journey has brought on 3,500 small publishers and is finding a decrease in discrepancies, competitive CPMs and revenue per mille, and a quicker path to scale. It also accomplishes a space where GAM has to bid against others and ends the need to run a second auction, speeding up page- load rates. Plus,. Martin said Journey can deliver “all the reporting publishers aren’t able to get with GAM.”

“There’s the hope we can do this for all publishers,” she added.

Getting the logins

Just as consumer privacy is at the forefront of publishers’ minds, so, too, are identity and gathering the first-party data that will keep their sites monetizable for the long term.

Publishers are finding crafty ways to get consumers to log -in and come back for more content. As Gannett/USA Today’s Burkett said: A paywall can only go so far. The audience segment who signs in with a real email and continues to come back will be the segment that is the most loyal, and should make up the largest piece of traffic, he said. Gannett, he added, is even debating restoring reader comments — which it ended in February 2023 for most of its news sites — to build up that community factor.

“You never know what Google is going to do — you can never control any of that stuff,” said Burkett. “If you can get people to log in, you can at least control that piece.”

Patrick McCann, SVP of research at Raptive, said one thing that helps with logins is the increasing ubiquity of single-sign-on solutions like Google’s One Click and The Trade Desk’s OpenPass. “People are more comfortable than expected in terms of identity,” he said, pointing to the fact that Raptive’s percentage of authenticated audiences is much higher than the 5% it was seeing two years ago.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.