Complete Story
04/09/2018
Rethinking display advertising
As media brands try to figure out their long-term monetization strategies, which may include paywalls, micropayments or alliances, many still heavily rely on display advertising, mainly programmatic.
In many cases, however, publishers’ digital advertising revenues are declining in lockstep with user attention toward display.
This highlights how unbalanced the programmatic space has become. Publishers – a critical element of the programmatic ecosystem – are being strangled by the way the ecosystem has evolved and is managed.
In today’s programmatic space, advertisers are fed up with a general lack of transparency. Ad tech and media agencies are the middlemen without any relationship with users and their data, yet many eat a big part of the value generated by publishers through high fees (transparent and not), rebates charged along the chain and data leakage, which severely damages media brands and their audiences. At the same time, users are turning their backs on display advertising and engaging less.
All of this begs the question: Is including programmatic display advertising as a core revenue opportunity still a wise strategy for media brands?
