Reclaiming revenue: Why publishers must take control of their data

After eight years leading revenue strategy for independent publishers like Salon and Snopes, I’ve witnessed firsthand how the digital advertising landscape continuously evolves, presenting both challenges and opportunities for those funded by it. The opportunities at hand excite me — I see a clear path forward for publishers to succeed in this dynamic ecosystem — but it requires a fundamental shift in how we approach ad tech at the page level.

The cacophony around curation at the end of 2024 marked a critical inflection point in the application of external data to programmatic transactions. The buzzy coverage in the trades around the concept, which describes how ad tech vendors might use data to select and organize their media, nudged publishers to think about how their supply is sold. While software solutions have matured significantly since programmatic’s inception, publishers have struggled to speak to the inefficiencies of their individual scale. A revenue operator’s understandable response to this predicament was often to accept the offerings of data providers, ID solutions or otherwise, to unlock additional consideration (and competition) for their media. However, doing so with a preexisting complexity of redundant supply paths and authorized resellers often translated to more commercial opportunity being given away by publishers than measurable benefit was returned to them. In today’s market, the common approach of sending all available data to all potential recipients typically no longer ensures publishers’ best outcomes.

What publishers increasingly need is the ability to harness their first-party data while maintaining control over the application of that data in the bidstream. This isn’t just about having access to directional analytics of what happened during a given auction for an impression (a sad reality of business intelligence suites currently available). The evolution for media owners is to become educated consumers of supply-landscape data, published by independent analysts like Jounce Media and Sincera, and to equip themselves with tools that allow them to act on those insights, improve their inventory value, and drive long-term revenue sustainability for their businesses. 

Through my experiences turning around web publications that were losing money month over month, I learned that the success of an outlet can’t be secured with short-term cash splashes — not at the expense of return readership, advertiser trust, and supply quality. 

The promise of programmatic advertising is that, when done right, it provides a scalable system to efficiently and profitably monetize audience attention, connecting the right advertisers to the right consumers and funding quality content. Being passive about the data signals advertisers transact on to accomplish this phenomenon has led to boom times for data brokers, but a concurrent shuttering of far too many sources of information, entertainment and unique perspectives on the open internet. What excites me most about joining Aditude as the VP of strategy this year is getting this right, at magnitudes of scale beyond individual domains, and positively contributing to a trend reversal for independent and local news outlets across the country. Recapturing the margins extracted by parties between buyer and media owner, as emphasized in ANA Transparency Reporting, can make all the difference here.

The adoption of ads.txt files and sellers.json entries helped ensure supply chain transparency, but these on their own do not provide anyone with observability into supply chain activity. A reseller entry at www.salon.com/ads.txt authorizes another company to make parallel and simultaneous offers to buyers for Salon’s advertising inventory; it does not in any way limit the scope of that competition. Despite frequent promises of specific deal-based demand, bidstream data aggregated from multiple demand-side platforms (DSPs) uniquely and demonstratively shows how these parties will also offer impression opportunities to the open market, creating incremental queries-per-second challenges and confusion for buyers, and diluting the value of direct supply-side platform connections held by the publisher or their managed service provider. 

This lack of transparency and reduction of agency is particularly problematic as we navigate major industry shifts like the migration of direct deal spend into the DSP. Programmatic pipes will likely become increasingly more valuable and lucrative to have, but only by aggregating and analyzing data observed at the buyer’s end of a programmatic marketplace will publishers be able to make more informed decisions about how they sell their media, from pricing to supply path strategy. 

Consider the luxury handbag market: Louis Vuitton operates its own retail locations, and otherwise authorizes no more than a handful of Selective Retailing Maisons around the globe to sell their goods. This allows for control and ownership of brand perception, pricing regulation and forecastable profits to LVMH. Open-market programmatic impression opportunities come with no such promise of “appellation d’origine contrôlée.” The future of digital publishing depends on solutions that will allow publishers to fully understand the scope of representation of their supply in the market, and to be able to limit it as much as necessary to ensure their own success. 

As we look ahead, those publishers that embrace data intelligence will thrive. The information exists to make this possible — now it’s about putting it in the hands of publishers in a way that empowers rather than overwhelms them, and enables them to make operating decisions with confidence. It’s about reimagining how publishers interact with their ad stack, how they receive data that can drive better partnership decisions and, ultimately, better outcomes. This is the future we’re building for at Aditude, and I’m honored to be part of that transformation.

This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.