Summary
- Header Bidding adoption increased by 1.2% among the US publishers in Q2 and 72% of the client-side wrappers are using Prebid – Kevel
- Digital video ad spend has surpassed TV for the first time in Canada. The double-digit growth of the format will continue for the coming two years.
- Facebook’s plan to launch Instagram for children has caused a lot of concerns. It can result in changes to COPPA, the children’s privacy law.
- Bloomberg found the best potential subscribers by analyzing its podcast audience. The publisher is using the insights to draw more customers.
- Oracle and Blockgraph are the latest to join UID 2.0. While Oracle will help in targeting users with multiple emails, Blockgraph will enable targeting on TV.
Latest Adtech Trends for Publishers
State of Header Bidding
Kevel has updated its header bidding tracker, let’s see what’s the status for this quarter:
- Header Bidding adoption among the US publishers went from 65.9% in Q1 to 66.7% in Q2.
- The adoption among the top 10K US sites increased by 1.8%. In Q1, 17.1% of sites used header bidding, whereas the percentage changed to 17.4% in Q2.
- 72% of the client-side wrappers are using Prebid.
- Amazon, Xandr, and Index Exchange retain their positions as top bidders in Q2.
Digital Video hits a Milestone in Canada
eMarketer reports that digital video has surpassed TV in ad spending for the first time in Canada. When eMarketer started tracking the market a decade ago, the digital video had less than 25% share. The growth is accelerated by the pandemic as this event was not expected to take place before 2023. The double-digit growth of the format will continue for the next two years.
It’s noteworthy that 85% of the ad spend goes to mobile video ads delivered on social media platforms.
Upcoming COPPA Changes
The recent news about Facebook’s plans to launch Instagram for children has started a wave of concerns among privacy advocates. The attorney generals of more than 40 US states have even asked the company to drop the project. Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, has brought a bipartisan bill to update the privacy law for the children in the country.
The proposed update can expand the age range of the children under the scope of the law. Consent from minors as well as their parents can be made mandatory in some cases. The amount of information available to ad tech vendors can be limited and ads targeted at children can be banned.
The proposal can create a Youth Privacy and Marketing Division at the Federal Trade Commission which will address children’s privacy and marketing aimed at them. The companies would have to provide ways to eliminate the personal information supplied by children.
Causes of concerns:
There are many reasons for people to worry about Facebook’s plan. The company has a history of mismanagement of its users’ information. An app full of kids and their info can become the most convenient way for child groomers to find their targets. The kids on the app wouldn’t understand how their data will be used, making them even more susceptible to manipulations.
Strategies from Top Publishers
Bloomberg earns a major part of its revenue from paid subscriptions. But, maintaining a consistent inflow of subscribers is a bit difficult because the subscription plans are pretty expensive. Paying $35/month or $420/year is not easy for everyone. So, the company has to keep looking for new mediums to find paying customers.
Currently, Bloomberg is prospecting users who have displayed interest in the publisher’s free content. The publisher runs a popular podcast dedicated to financial topics. Its listeners doubled in the past year.
So, Bloomberg surveyed the listeners to better understand its audience. It found out that 76% of the listeners are non-subscribers, 43% work in finance, and 37% of them were in their early to mid-career. Given the demographics, there’s a great chance that many of the free listeners are ideal to become the paid subscribers of the company.
After gaining the insights, the publisher launched a suite of subscriber-exclusive content aimed at the non-subscribers. The content includes a weekly newsletter and a daily blog. The podcast will help the publisher in spreading the word among the listeners. The conversion rate can be expected to be high as the listeners are already interested in the content. At the same time, the added content will be a pleasant surprise for the existing subscribers.
Takeaway:
Understanding your audience always delivers great results. It is helping Bloomberg to get new subscribers even with higher than normal subscription prices. Do you know your audience so well? If not, what can you do to understand them? If yes, how are you using the information to increase your revenue?
Oracle and Blockgraph join UID 2.0
Oracle and Blockgraph are the latest companies to embrace UID 2.0. Oracle will help marketers to match their third-party data with the UID. It’ll be easier for them to find users with multiple email addresses. DSP platforms like The Trade Desk can be used to activate the combined IDs against the consented audience. Oracle believes that third-party data will continue to play a central role in the company’s identity graph.
Blockgraph is taking up UID to deliver targeted ads across convergent TV platforms. The advertisers will be able to use their first-party and third-party data sets for programmatic buying. The consent mechanism is still a work in progress.
“It’s a direct match without intermediaries involved in the process, so each data owner is protected and able to hold onto their data”
– Jason Manningham, CEO, Blockgraph
Chart of the Week
It’s been just a few days since FLoC went live in Prebid, and there are already more than 1300 publishers supporting Google’s way of serving targeted ads.
– Source
Moments that Matter
CEO Dennis Buchheim Exits The IAB Tech Lab At A Time Of Turmoil For Online Identity – AdExchanger.
ATT Opt-In Rates: The Picture So Far And The Ugly Truth Behind Why The Numbers Vary So Widely – AdExchanger.
Aftershock: What the industry looks like After Apple’s privacy update – Digital Content Next.
How Publishers Can Win Back Ad Revenue From Big Tech – AdExchanger.
At Automatad, we help publishers to monetize better without hampering the user experience. Our products are live across hundreds of publishers, earning them incremental ad revenue with every passing second. You can request a free audit to get an estimated revenue uplift today.
