← AdExchanger
Loading summary
Transcript56 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast.
- [00:15]
B
Devoted to examining the issues and trends.
- [00:18]
C
In advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you. This episode is brought to you by the Weather Company. You likely know them best for the Weather channel app and weather.com or as the world's most accurate forecaster. But for marketers, they're a powerhouse of scale, reaching over 330 million people every month. They're proving that when you lead with trust and precision, you don't just reach an audience, you move them.
- [00:55]
A
Foreign.
- [01:01]
B
And welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks. I'm Anthony Vargas, senior editor for Ad Exchanger, filling in for our usual host, Alison Schiff. Appreciate you tuning in. In case you haven't noticed, it's a tough time to be working in publisher monetization Pubs are seeing their referral traffic crater due to the increasing popularity of generative AI Search People Inc. Says its sites have lost 50% of their Google traffic in the past two years, and data from Shardbeat shows that Google search referrals were down 33% last year. But publishers aren't just feeling the pressure on search, they're also reacting to the ongoing flight to quality in programmatic advertising. After years of dealing with obfuscated supply chains hiding less than desirable inventory, buyers are pushing back and demanding that pubs prove the quality of their media. We're also seeing major demand side players like the Trade Desk work more directly with the sell side while taking shots at the sell side partners that have traditionally helped publishers boost their revenue. Joining us today to discuss these issues and more is Kurt Donnell, CEO of publisher monetization network freestar. Kurt, thanks for joining the pod. Absolutely.
- [02:06]
A
And thanks so much for having me, man. Looking forward to it.
- [02:09]
B
Awesome. Before we dig in though, a few reminders. Convergint TV World, brought to you by Ad Exchanger and the Chief Marketer Network, will be taking place March 5 to 6 in New York City. We'll be covering everything you need to know about the world of online video and streaming and omnichannel opportunities for reaching consumers across video touchpoints. And don't forget to save the date for our revamped programmatic AI event taking place in Las Vegas from May 18th to the 20th. So don't forget to sign up for both and we'll see you there. All right, Kurt, let's kick it off here. So we usually like to start Ad Exchanger talks off with a fun question, and this one requires some setup, so bear with me a bit. So publisher monetization networks like Freestar do a lot of business with bigger pubs, obviously, but they're commonly associated with the smaller long tail pubs. And the example you often hear cited here is recipe sites. So given that association, I wanted to ask, are you much of a cook and if so, where do you get your recipe ideas?
- [03:11]
A
I like to cook. I am not much of a cook. I've got two kids that play four sports between them, so I'm far more of an Uber driver than a chef these days. Days I used to spend a lot more time when they were younger, particularly out on the grill. I got a big green egg and I love to smoke and do various things. A little more cooking outside and, you know, make the sides indoors as well, but sadly not as much. Where do I get my recipes? Probably the recipe sites that, that you're referencing historically. There's some pretty good big green egg forums too that I would read back in the day. But mainly, man, I'm just running around picking up kids, just grabbing something at a nearby restaurant.
- [03:48]
B
Yeah, I hear that. So let's kind of get to the matter at hand now. A bunch of what we're going to be discussing today has to do with some of the harsh rhetoric you often see directed at publisher monetization platforms or ad networks like Free Star. So as someone who's been kind of like covering the ad tech industry for a little under five years now, I've always found it remarkable how people in the industry almost use the phrase ad network as if it's kind of like a Slurpee or like a shorthand for like all the bad things that they don't like on the sell side of the industry. Why do you think ad networks got such a bad reputation? And should we maybe rethink that, given, you know, with all the monetization challenges facing pubs today?
- [04:30]
A
Absolutely. I actually do think it has changed in the last, I don't know, even four or five years that you're referencing and that you've been doing this. I guess I'm OG Ad Network guy. I was back at SHE Media before it was sold to Penske. And that definitely was a bad word back then. You didn't want to be called a network. I've now been at Freestar for over seven years. At the beginning of my time, it was a bad thing. I think there was a realization that publishers just can't do this on their own. Even more so in the last couple years, the larger publishers comscore 100 pubs need help. There's so much fragmentation of the tools to do this right. It takes all Obviously the management, the demand and identity and compliance and on and on down the road that it's just not feasible for people to do that. I genuinely do think there was a little bit of a shift Too when the SSPs were the aggregator of supply and weren't necessarily the biggest fans of our model and then realized that we were actually their best partners because we gave them scale, we gave them a technical resource. On the other side, we tried to care for some tough parts of the account management of all of these hundreds and thousands of publishers across the world. And so I think maybe the buy side changed their tune a little bit because we were more friendly to them, we were valuable, and they got hopefully better inventory from us versus having to go chase down a bunch of things. So I think there has been an evolution, I don't think necessarily that made it up to the advertiser and agency world as much until the last few years. I got to give Chris at Jounce credit. While I don't know if Sales House is the exact right word for it that I would have picked, it does have its roots, particularly in Europe, on that. And he very kindly has been extolling the value we provide, which is sophistication, that sort of steel of approval. We are very proud of the flight quality things we've done. You referenced that earlier of if you're coming to us, you know, it's been through a vetting process. You know, there's not going to be shady games played. You know, it's going to be a good audience, not mfa, any of those things. So I think what flipped from MFA sites, for instance, would jump from place to place to place because they could use somebody else's seat, kind of rinse their bad inventory. We're already doing that vetting. So I think it at this point has become more of a seal of approval to some extent than hiding. And I think that's an immediate change and I hope that's being recognized further up the chain.
- [06:44]
B
And a big part of addressing some of those kind of buy side concerns and bad feelings that have persisted over the years when it comes to, like you alluded to, some of the shady things that used to happen on the sell side has to do with just like increasing and promoting transparency throughout the programmatic supply chain. And you wrote a column for Ad Exchanger in December where you called for radical transparency on all sides of the ecosystem and you sketched out some ideas for industry priorities that could increase transparency, such as auction audits, better targeting and measurement infrastructure, stuff like that. I Feel like we're already starting to see some movement here even early in this year. So what are some recent developments or transparency initiatives that you've been encouraged to see?
- [07:29]
A
Yeah, I think what the MRC is doing on the auction transparency initiative, we got to figure out. I think there's some elements of that that still need to shake through in terms of exactly how those things are audited. And is every single element of that kind of the right approach? Does it go too far in certain places? But the fact that the buy side and the sell side are coming together and leaning in on this. I was on an IAB Programmatic Governance Council call the other day. It was one of the first where I've really seen all of the impacted parties involved. We just. There's been a lot on the supply side. The buy side is typically ended kind of ssp, DSP layer, but not getting up to the agencies. And they're involved now, and I think we've got the right conversations going. A little bit of quid pro quo would be nice in that we on the supply side could use some help of finding the bad actors on the buy side where we're not chasing spam ads. And in return, you know, we should be given transparency. On the freestar side, we've always passed tids and those things. We think it's the right thing to do, but I think it's that working together element that hadn't changed before. There still is, I think, a belief that there's a finite pie and we're not playing something that can change and expand over time. That conversation even happened the other day. I tend to believe in playing the long game a little bit more and that the fight's not between me and the trade desk. For instance, the supply side and the buy side keep getting pitted if you're on LinkedIn or whatever, like we're against each other. I think the real fight is the open Internet versus social and open Internet to a lesser extent, versus ctv. And until we start acting as a more unified open Internet supply chain and providing that transparency, the ease of buying, showing the roas, all of those things collectively, I think it's going to be tough and we're going to see dollars go someplace that's easier to buy in. I don't think Facebook has better traffic than we have on our quality sites, but they get a lot more revenue than we do, despite some of the challenges there. So I think we got to fix the systemic issues if we ever want to be taken seriously in that world, because it's easy to say, ah, it's fraudulent, whatever, I'm just going to skip that one. And we got to fix that glitch. So grateful to see the progress being made. How and why we got there maybe isn't the best and most efficient path, but I'm glad the conversations are at least happening now.
- [09:40]
B
And yeah, we'll come back to like the MRC auction transparency initiative and a little, a little bit later. But first, like you kind of alluded to there in your response, bringing up some of the stuff around like tids or tids and you know, some of the LinkedIn back and forth, the jumping off point for that column you wrote was that industry back and forth at the end of the year that was really kind of prompted by that dust up between the trade desk and pre bid over pre bid disabling universal transaction IDs or TIDs in its auction wrapper. Now Prebid has since walked that back and given pubs the ability to turn universal tids back on, but the move prompted the trade desk to go to market with its own forked version of the pre bid wrapper called Openeds that requires universal tids. So do you think the whole TID dust up at the end of last year was ultimately a good thing for the industry? And who came out on top of that situation? Are we basically just kind of back to Square1 on TIDS with none of the underlying concerns about information asymmetry between the buy and sell side being addressed?
- [10:45]
A
I think, and it was kind of what I alluded to earlier, maybe the path to get where we are right now wasn't the best one to get there. Did we have to go through all that back and forth and get as much airtime on maybe some of your prior podcasts or LinkedIn or whatever that is around that dust up? Maybe not. If we're looking at where we landed and we're having the conversations up to the agency level right now in hold, cos that probably is a good thing. The supply side should be talking to the ultimate buyers and all the people involved. So not the path I would have taken to get there. But I think it's a good thing that we are there as it relates to transaction IDs specifically. It's hard to argue that we shouldn't know what one auction is. Bid duplication does drive value in certain ways. There's good reasons for that in some instances. But kind of multi format is one CTV specifically like inside of a pod you have to fill X number of seconds so you need to call 6 second ads and 15s and 30s and 60s and piecing that together on desktop, mobile, web, we can run different formats and slots. Like, I don't think anybody would argue that's necessarily a bad thing. If you're sending the same ad request with different attributes and purposely like stuffing IDs, I think that's a problem. So things we need to do is like clean up the nefarious elements of it, but keep the things that matter. And there is unique demand across different sources. I can't send things through one SSP, even if they're connected to all the DSPs, because SSPs have unique demand as well. So I'm going to miss out on x percent of their unique demand if I only pick 4ssps and 4d. So there's reason to sort of fan things out. But fraudulently duplicating things unfortunately stains the industry. And talked to several people about this this week. It's unfortunately also baked into our pricing right now. Like, that is why CPMs are a buck, two bucks, three bucks for whatever it is, is. There's some X number baked into that because of the performance and whatever that is. And if we clean that up, you know, there's actually a chance for CPMs to go up as well. So I think ultimately it's a good thing to drive the transparency and better alignment between the buy and the sell sides because it's ultimately going to drive better outcomes for everybody.
- [12:56]
B
And like you kind of alluded to, you know, like SSPs have like a big role to play in terms of just like, you know, helping publishers maximize their yield, helping a publisher, ad networks to, you know, serve best, serve their clients as well. But that being said, you know, like, some of those things can kind of go a little bit too far. Like I remember, like in a previous conversation we had last year, you told me that Freestar had seen like an SSP partner reselling some of its inventory up to 10 to 20 times. And like, those are the kinds of things that like the industry really kind of sees as like egregious, where it's like just such rampant reselling. And as a result of that kind of environment around reselling, during the whole back and forth about tids, it felt like the trade desk was really more openly taking shots against who it appears to think are the bad actors on the sell side. And related to that, we also had the trade desk making it clear last year that it's a new buying platform. COCAI deprioritizes supply paths that include SSPs because the Trade Desk considers SSPs to fundamentally be resellers, even if publishers designate the SSPs as their direct supply paths. And, you know, this isn't really something that the Trade Desk has said explicitly, but like, in conversations that I've had with buy side sources around those like, discussions, some felt that like, the same criticism could arguably extend to ad networks like Free Star, since in most cases you guys are selling media you don't own necessarily. So what do you kind of think of like these attempts to paint anyone who's like, not strictly speaking a publisher as a reseller? Does that kind of like obfuscate, like, the real challenges with reselling from like, the broader picture of like, you know, the, the need for publishers to maximize yield? And is this kind of focus on resellers going to improve relations between the two sides of the supply chain?
- [14:42]
A
I mean, the distinction I would draw there is that we exclusively represent the supply and you can't get it elsewhere. And the publishers, many of them will be out of business if we didn't exist. Like, there's not that many big publishers in the world that can do this on a sophisticated level in house at this point in time, as I alluded to earlier, there's 50 different things you've got to do. The amount of fragmentation even inside of things like identity, for instance, to do that, well, it takes a team of people to manage all of the different things, optimize those things. How are you continuously keeping your tech stack up to date? How are you maintaining compliance across the world? All of these things? What is that small publisher that's very, very deep in their thing and built, whether it's a casual game or a sports site or whatever that is. Like, are they going to have a team of five to ten people managing that? There's no chance. And so if that is the way you play the game, they wouldn't exist otherwise. And I think it's better for all of us to have this information in the world where we can go discover great things or play the casual game that we like, or go deep on some subject of ours. So I guess I would turn it on its head a little bit. Is it better that you've got somebody that can do this at scale, get the economies of scale to do it efficiently, effectively, frankly. Better for the buy side too, so they don't have to sort through, you know, 10,000 sites. Chris again back at Johns. He's got his 100 bellwethers that represent, you know, a vast majority of the supply. I think that's a sign of an efficient market, not an inefficient market. If I had to say that, obviously slightly biased given where I sit in this chain, but I'd rather have the people in business than and work with a Free Star or my competitors as well. Like there's across the world half a dozen really scaled versions of what we do. But I think they serve a purpose because the publishers can't do it.
- [16:20]
B
And I think it's also worth noting here that last April Freestar told Ad Exchanger that the Trade Desk's open Path was one of your top performing demand sources. So it definitely doesn't seem like empirically at least, the Trade desk is penalizing Freestar in the same way that it has been SSPs. Last April you told me that your pubs were seeing three times higher fill rates and 27% more revenue from the Trade Desk buyers. So has any of that changed since the Trade Desk ramped up its rhetoric against resellers last year? Or is it only kind of improved? What can you kind of tell us there?
- [16:54]
A
Yeah, I think it's fairly public knowledge at this point that more dollars are flowing through the open path pipes than they were before. I think more people are opted in via Coke to that. I also don't think that's surprising if you think about any business model inside of ad tech or otherwise. When scale happens and markets mature, vertical integration occurs. Like that's going to happen anywhere Netflix to begin with. I mean think about that. It was a content mailing out, whatever, now it's the biggest content creator in the world at this point in time and they vertically integrated everything. This happens in any market and it's actually a sign of maturity. It's happened in automotive manufacturing and into everything. So the people that act surprised that the DSPS would want to work with publishers. It seems sort of strange to me just looking at this from a a broader market perspective. Of course that's going to happen. It happens in every market. And whether it's good, bad or ugly, we can argue that. But you typically want to take middlemen's out of supply chains. There's the study, I always say, but like the missing 15 cents out of every programmatic dollar, that happens because there's too many people in the middle. So I don't think it's ultimately a bad thing. Should the power only, you know, land in Google, Trade Desk, Yahoo and Amazon? Probably not, no. There still needs to be other people involved. And at the same time we've seen SSPs go further upchain to the buy side. So there's an equilibrium happening here. Does it look the same as it did three years ago? No. Should it look the same as it is right now in three years from now? No. And that stuff's going to keep changing. So I think it's a natural market playing out that's pretty typical in any industry.
- [18:29]
B
And at the pre bid summer in October, the Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green got on stage and said he's really sick of the buy side versus sell side tribalism that goes on in a lot of like media coverage and discussions amongst like industry thought leaders. But he said that if the industry insists on an us versus them framing then it should focus on the divide between and I'm quoting here, quality publishers who are taking home less than they should be and publishers that are taking home more than they should. Now some sources that I spoke to at Prebit Summit said they felt that this was like a thinly veiled shot at long tail publisher ad networks. But then some of the other sources that I talked to said it could have been a shot at SSPs or it could have been a shot at walled gardens. You know, you wrote in your column that and you said before that the real us versus them should be the open web versus the walled gardens and social media and CTV mainly who are increasingly kind of gobbling up the web share of ad revenue. So do you think like, you know, fundamentally you're on the same page with Jeff Green here or do you think that like there's been this kind of like effort to sort of exploit like the divides on the sell side among the sell side community to maybe try and carve out some like margin opportunities there?
- [19:47]
A
I think there's nuances to that question. I think historically before MFA was somewhat cleaned up a couple years ago, the MFA sites were sucking up a lot of dollars that should not have been going there and should have gone to quality journalism. To be clear, I don't represent long tail sites. We represent mid sized to enterprise publishers including like many legitimate comscore top 100 type publishers. So we're in a bit of different bone. I don't want to toss mud here. People do different things. I will say we have seen unfortunately and Mike from Sincere has brought it up that you duplication can be a yield strategy. Unfortunately and I think that's what Jeff is talking about is the more you duplicate, whether that's mfa, you flood the zone, more things are going to get through. It can lead to shifts in how spend goes and we can argue whether that's good or Bad, that's how we play the game or not. But it probably doesn't put dollars into where the real journalistic dollars are going necessarily at the same time. Like it doesn't mean that people shouldn't write blogs and be able to make a living from that too. So I'm tossed up about that. I believe in journalism. I think it's important particularly in an AI world which further sort of perpetuates an echo chamber or one opinion. I think it's important for people to have discovery, people to find things that journalism is paid for. We have a really strong news vertical and so that one's near and dear to my heart. And I particularly think that one's important for a functioning society globally and everything. And those folks getting their fair share of the pie is important. They've gotten hurt certainly on the traffic side of things. If they're getting inordinately hurt because of called gamesmanship, whatever it is, playing the rules of the game as they may be right now, that kind of sucks. So if that's what Jeff is alluding to there, you know, I can't say that's not a, a bad take. Like we should be paying our real journalists. I think that's important.
- [21:41]
B
And then also just kind of related to like all this like you know, the pre bid dust up at the end of last year. Another kind of just thing that has emerged in the feedback that we get at Ad Exchanger quite a bit whenever we're covering anything like you know, publisher focused or like pre bid focused, there are like sources express concerns that companies like freestar, Raptive, mediavine, etcetera Exert too much control over publisher focused industry groups like Prebid. And as a result these groups are losing sight of what really matters to independent publishers. Do you think this is a fair criticism?
- [22:15]
A
I think it's an interesting point. Certainly we are represented on the board and we're involved but we also again have the resources to go do the work to help push the things forward. And if we don't do it, who's going to? I do think making sure there's enough voices that represent independent publishers, even smaller publishers on things like pre bid are great, but it's a matter of time, energy and effort. Who's going to do it? I think it's important that the publishers have a voice in all this and it's not just SSPs or DSPs or the buy side making the rules. So I think it's important. I don't think anybody represents more publishers than the three companies you named there. And so we probably have the best view of what matters there. Is it the right amount? Is it too much? I don't know. We've certainly gotten more involved the last couple years and it's been helpful, eye opening and everything. And we provide a slightly different perspective than the other companies you mentioned because we do represent the larger brands, the APs and Reuters of the world. That's a little bit different than the longer tail sites. So I think it's a good dialogue to have. I think the TID dust up got everybody thinking and how should this be running a little bit differently potentially in the future? So ultimately it's important the pubs are represented and I don't know, again, maybe I'm going to a practical answer to a question that's meant to be philosophical but who else is going to do it? There are big brands though involved in pre bid, big independent publishers. So I think it's a mix and people just need to step up and if they don't like something, do something like see something, say something, get involved. If you don't like it.
- [23:45]
B
Yeah, that's an excellent takeaway. So we'll take a quick break here for our sponsors. When we come back, Kurt and I will talk more about new efforts to promote programmatic transparency, how Freestar is dealing with Gen search and its impacts on publisher referral traffic and how pubs are fighting AI with AI. Stay with us.
- [24:17]
A
Foreign.
- [24:21]
C
Hey there. I'm Alison Schiff, Managing editor of Ad Exchanger and I have with me here Adrienne Beck, head of marketing insights and analytics at the Weather company where she focuses on the development and application of consumer and customer insights for marketing and advertising as well as understanding weather's impact on consumer behaviors. So Adrian, your team at the Weather company, which includes the Weather Channel digital platforms, recently completed some first of its kind research called Wired for Weather. What can you tell us about it?
- [24:53]
D
We've long known that weather is the biggest external factor influencing daily life. How we feel, what we do, what we buy. We wanted to dig into that and uncover how marketers can use weather data more effectively. So we partnered with the neuroscience firm NeuroInsight to prove improve. How does weather impact our subconscious, which is where 90% of decisions are made and then what does that mean for marketers? We found that weather literally rewires our brains, changing how we process emotion and memory, which are two of the biggest drivers of purchase decisions. Basically you have to feel it and remember it if you're going to buy it. But maybe most interesting for marketers is because of that rewiring power. When brands use weather as a contextual signal, they can improve ROI by 10 to even 20%.
- [25:48]
C
Well, how does weather change our emotion and our memory?
- [25:52]
D
We've uncovered that weather creates distinct but universal mindsets based on brain activity. And that feels like set of weather conditions. So in other words, when it feels cold, regardless of who you are or where you are, our subconscious response is really similar. And because we can predict the weather, we can help predict those mindsets. So an example would be when it feels like the start of a new season. So think about that first spring like day. Coming out of this winter weather we're experiencing now, the memory and engagement parts of our brain are really active. That makes us open to trying new brands and trying new products. We're ready to engage with the the world. We're optimistic and social and creative. We're more likely to start a new health routine and to make impulse purchases. But on the other hand, when it's rainy or snowy, our brains activate in a way that means we're more emotional and sensitive and pragmatic. Still high energy, but in a problem solving mode. So we seek out things that comfort us and remind us of happy memories. That creates a really important role for marketers.
- [27:03]
C
Well, tell me what it actually means for marketers.
- [27:05]
D
Ultimately, brands can use weather data to anticipate these mindsets and deliver more effective campaigns. Our weather targeting solution enables brands to dynamically connect with and influence these weather driven consumer mindsets throughout the digital ecosystem. At any given time, any or all of the four weather driven mindsets that we've identified through the study study could be happening across the country. But weather targeting takes into account that relative nature of weather. At a zip code level, a 40 degree day in Chicago means something very different than it does in Miami. These signals can be always on and that reduces media waste and can boost performance for all marketing channels, whether that's ctv, display, search, audio or others. And that means that brands can easily get their message in front of the right mindset at the right time. If you're curious, check out weathercompany.com thank you, Adrian.
- [28:06]
C
I wish I was in Miami.
- [28:09]
D
Me too.
- [28:10]
C
They're great insights.
- [28:11]
D
Thank you so much.
- [28:30]
B
All right, we're back now. I promise. You know, this will be the last like time I mentioned the trade desk. I feel like we've already kind of talked about them a ton but they have been involved in a couple of like really good like publisher facing media quality transparency initiatives recently that I've Heard a lot of really good feedback on from publishers, including their open EDS auction wrapper as well as OpenSensera and Pub Desk, which are kind of like their publisher facing media quality measurement tools. Now there's been all this kind of discussion around like, oh, is the trade desk getting more involved in the sell side by releasing these kinds of products? The trade desk insists it's still a pure play dsp. The reason it's putting these products out is because it helps publishers to provide inventory that buyers really want and that's ultimately serving the buy side. You can say what you, you know you will about that argument, but you know, that's what the argument is. So leaving that kind of aside, like, do you think like the idea of like, oh, is the trade desk getting more involved on the sell side ultimately matters if publishers are getting benefits from these products that it's offering that are giving them a better idea of what buyers really want out of their media. Out of the media.
- [29:44]
A
I think I go back to the philosophical approach a little bit I mentioned earlier of let's say the Trade desk is a grocery store, right? Don't they want to supply the best products even though they don't go manufacture them? They want to make sure they're getting the best stuff or the locally sourced coffee beans that are sustainable or whatever that is. They have a horse in the race of having good stuff to sell. Whole Foods is going to have particularly good things and certainly cares about their supply chain. It's not a pick on something like a dollar store or something like that. So if you're going to go try to sell things and be seemingly a premium player, you're going to have the best, in this instance, inventory with the best signals and be able to say, you know, it received my stamp of approval. Like, I don't fault somebody for doing that. If you take it out of the context. For some reason ad tech and advertising and media somehow has this idea that like they're owed a business model a little bit. Like even we'll probably guessing it's an ad tech podcast. I'm sure we'll get to AI and AI search and everything here shortly. Like, does Google owe anybody a business model? No, but it felt like that for a while. And does the trade desk necessarily owe anybody a business model because they want to have better supply? It sounds like I'm sucking up. I'm not. I just look at the grocery store analogy. You want the best produce on the shelves, don't you? So how can you get mad about that? Like it Just if you take yourself out of our weird little world, and it's a very small little world of ours, and we, you know, all know each other and we know probably who we're talking about on LinkedIn saying these things like, I want better supply at the grocery store. Shouldn't the buyer? Yeah.
- [31:18]
B
And, you know, in addition to kind of what the trade desk has been doing on media quality measurement, we've also seen, you know, companies like you alluded to, Jounce Media also, Deepsea has been a big player as far as just kind of like building up this sort of cottage industry around media quality measurement. And now we're seeing new startups like Gamera get into the mix, which is also bringing in data about ad performance in addition to media quality. So how are you kind of seeing this media quality measurement movement impacting transparency in the supply chain? How is it benefiting publishers? And is the industry maybe placing too much onus on pubs to clean up their ad experiences using these tools? Or is that where the onus belongs, do you think?
- [32:00]
A
I think it's a mix. I think it's on. I think the conversations that are happening right now are important. I can only play or win a game when I know the rules are. And for a while you didn't know what the rules were. And so I think the conversations that are happening, some of which I alluded to earlier, up to and including the Holdco agency level, is a good thing. Tell me what you want and I can do that. You know, if, if you need pears versus apples or whatever, like, we'll figure that part out to stick with that analogy a little bit. I think the people in the middle are helping us sort that out. And the signal was missing and it was convoluted and there were so many intermediaries before, it was tough for the buy side to know, or maybe they didn't care as much before or whatever that is. But I think there's more clear demands from the buy side on what they want. Being able to say with some certainty whether it's the trade desk or somebody else, this is what I want and I need to be able to verify that and put the, you know, organic seal of approval on that. Like Whole Foods isn't the organic certifying company. You need somebody. There are companies that do that. Right? You need somebody to say, this is legit. I've done the time to put in the time to audit this and say whatever. Like, I think that's the, the role that those companies play. Should it be a necessary Intermediary, I guess you can argue that, that we should all be, I don't know, so good that we're held to some standard or something. But, you know, it's tough to do that across the thousands and millions of sites out there. So I don't know that it's a bad thing. Working closer with Gamera specifically, we've seen ad spend through certain pipes increase materially because we can say it is specifically this, it's met this standard, it's got the seal of approval and it's working. So if we see more dollars going there and this again goes back to like, what's the fight we're playing? There is at some point a finite advertising pie in the world, right. And it's going to go to certain different channels and we've seen it migrate a little bit. Like, how do we make sure that we get our fair share given the level of attention that the open web has? I think if we can certify our, you know, farm to table organic impressions and they perform better for people, that's probably a good thing in the long run.
- [34:04]
B
And, you know, kind of speaking to, you know, what you kind of alluded to a little bit ago, the idea of, like, not really knowing the rules and how much, you know, better it is for everyone if they really know what the rules are. We brushed earlier on the MRC rolling out a new auction transparency certification with like this, like, kind of like, you know, auditing of like, you know, auction rules and making sure that people are disclosing, you know, the factors that they're weighing in terms of, like, how their programmatic platforms decide, like, who wins the auction and also disclosing any changes to their auction algorithms. So, like, is that degree of transparency what the industry needs and how do we kind of get everybody on board with that?
- [34:45]
A
To be fair, it was published, I think, what, February 6th or something like that. So as the time of recording here, we're of a week out from that and need to have some more conversations of if it is the right mix or not. It was very detailed, which is good. The fact that it's causing conversations and getting the people from both sides coming together. And I know, I keep going back to that, but it's the first time in a while anyways we've gone to that level of depth and it is detailed of specifically what are the fields that need to be and everything. What are the things you need to disclose about every auction you're running? I think any of those conversations are moved toward a better place and whether or not this is what the final sort of standard should be and is it, is it feasible for everybody to do this? I think there's some nuance in the layers. There's so many different auctions that happen in. This is like, do we disclose every ounce of every little thing that happens along the way? Is that even feasible? Do people want that data? Does it because of noise versus signal? I don't know that we need to work through that a little bit more. And I need to frankly talk to the folks at Raptive and a Mediavine who, you know, we're friendly with to understand like, does this feel right, guys? So a little more work there I think needs to be done. But conceptually it's a move in the right direction, as I think I alluded to earlier.
- [36:01]
B
And you know, part of that new MRC certification, like you kind of, you know, alluded to also and like we've kind of been discussing around like these, like, you know, the whole TID debate. There is a couple of provisions that directly impact that part of the new certification Requires publishers and SSPs to include in their bid requests Universal Transaction IDs and also Global Placement IDs which are basically IDs tied to each individual ad slot being auctioned. But, you know, less. You know, everybody accused, you know, the MRC of too much prioritizing the buy side priorities. They also included a reciprocal requirement for the buy side to engage in multi bidding or sending more than one winning bid to the publisher and ssp, which should give sellers more transparency into how much various buyers are willing to bid up for their inventory. So I mean, like, you know, we, like, like you kind of alluded to, maybe it's a little bit too soon to say, like, you know, is this the best approach? Or like, you know, before we kind of dig in more on like the feasibility of sharing all this stuff. But like, do you, are you encouraged by that, like reciprocality between the buy and sell side requirements?
- [37:08]
A
Absolutely. I love that it is a solution that gets us talking. And the multi bid thing is good. And the idea that we as sellers can have some price discovery is important. Like I should be able to list my house on VRBO and Airbnb. That was a good example I heard seen. And like we need price discovery. And I'm not saying there should be one path that goes to one thing. What? No, this is a market with an auction, but there's multiple paths by definition of advertisers, agencies, DSPs, multiple DSPs, multiple SSPs, multiple publishers. Like there is different paths for it to get through. I think multi bid is a very nice solution to that so we can understand things and a quid pro quo that's fair. In that article that I wrote in the sell side, I mean it was just that of help us on the buy side too a little bit in the spirit of transparency. We'll do our part. You do your part, help us get rid of bad ads that we're fighting and things that are breaking out of ad slots and stuff like let's collectively fix all of the problems, not just the one problem. And this feels like a step in the right direction there. I think CTV is an interesting one. Specifically where you might want to send an ad request with slightly different attributes where it does make sense because you're competing with your direct sales team. Right. You might say this is a Show on Peacock vs this is the specific show on Peacock because they're selling that specific show, direct sales into it versus like I can promise you it's a safe environment, but I'm willing to sell this for 20 bucks, 30 versus 30 bucks or something like that. Like there are reasons why you would do different things and maybe have different attributes. So I'm not. What I even said earlier about sending things duplicative times isn't necessarily bad, but the incentives need to be right. And so I think getting those aligned on each side of like hey buyers, what are you trying to understand? We're trying to understand that we're not seeing the same thing 50 different ways, blah blah blah. And on the sell side and we're like what is this really worth? Give me a couple prices. Okay, I can understand where I start to see bid density around a thing that's probably the floor price I should set for this. And there's some real market making. I guess that's not the shenanigans that have necessarily happened.
- [39:15]
B
And yeah, you know, to totally change the topic now, no publisher focused discussion would be complete without addressing the generative AI search elephant in the room. And you recently posted on LinkedIn those numbers that I teed up in the intro from Chartbead that Google search referrals were down 33% globally in 2025. And you also shared that most free star publishers saw traffic drop by 15% in mid 2024. But you also highlighted some initiatives that have resulted in your pubs actually seeing a 5% uptick in their traffic at the end of last year. So what's been working for your publishers? What can you tell us about.
- [39:51]
A
I think it really is vertical Specific to some extent, news publishers have struggled more than others. The long tail has definitely, definitely struggled. If you think about just the of AI, it's very good at aggregating a bunch of things and you brought the recipe sites earlier like it's pretty good at pumpkin pie recipes. I can go find a bunch of those easily. They don't change much, all those things. The sites though that I think continue have had to have value. I do think news is one of them. Like AI is not good at going to cover breaking news, you know, wars or whatever that stuff is. Like you need journalism to do that stuff. I think there's also sites that provide real utility whether and that can be casual games to flight tracking to any number of things but provide a real utility to your audience where people will want to come back either because this is where you type things in. Like I like to read car reviews on edmunds.com we don't work with them but I just like to read car reviews on there. I go to them because it's a trusted source and everybody has their things. They play their casual games on card games IO one of the sites we do represent or they go read their Bible verses on Bible Gateway. Also one of our sites like people go do things on places where they want and if it's a destination that has trust with the audience, ideally you can build a first party relationship with them through newsletters and a host of things. It's going to be more long lasting than what was drive by search traffic to begin with. So I think it's a matter of what are publishers doing to build that connection and that's not easy to do. Andrew Kraft wrote a good part of a good article in his craftisms a couple weeks ago about Sports Illustrated. I'm guessing you don't get Sports Illustrated delivered to your house anymore. I don't get it to my house. I grew up loving it. But everybody knows what Sports Illustrated is and they built a brand around that and affinity. Strong, very strong brand. But they can license that for events, they can license that for merch. They can do all sorts of things with that because they built a brand. I think it's a really good example of what publishers need to do. And it goes back to the point I said earlier of like Google doesn't owe you a business model. I've got to go market Freestar to go sell things. I don't expect somebody else to just give it to me. Brands need to go do that same thing. You got to market and make your customer loyal to you versus someplace else. And there are still recipe sites that are doing incredibly, incredibly well because they built a following through the personal connection. They own that user as a user of XYZ cooking.com like it can be done, but it needs to be done intentionally and thoughtfully if I want a return visitor versus like I'm going to do whatever Google will maybe send me something back from. So I think it's pivoting the model a little bit to the publishers being brands themselves where they can, but just building the hooks. Newsletters, people love them. I love it when you curate things to me and particularly in a world where whether it's social media or AI, it's almost an echo chamber or you just answer that thing. Give me a newsletter that's got something provocative at the end of like God, I would have never seen that before. You're like scratching that itch doing something else for me in my brain that keeps me searching more. And we've lost that in other parts of the world and I think publishers can help fill that gap a little bit.
- [42:52]
B
And yeah, pubs are obviously like, you know, feeling the heat from these new gen AI search tools, but they're also trying to use AI to their advantage. And you know, we've seen a couple of examples of this. You know, they're tailoring their site experience to different audiences. They're using AI to find the ideal places on their pages to put ads. They're creating their own AI based answer engines sourced from their own content. Some are even looking at AI as a way to generate new monetizable content wholesale. What do you think are going to be the winning strategies for how pubs will turn AI to their advantage?
- [43:28]
A
It's a mix of all those. I think smartly using AI and creating content is a good thing, but it still needs an editorial touch. Just tossing AI slop out there is not good. But I'm sure in your work, in my work, we use it to create first drafts of things. I think the world changes from writers to editors in a lot of ways and I think that's smart and efficient and it makes you run your business better.
- [43:48]
B
I think I'll say I, I've never used AI to create a first draft necessarily, but I, I do use it like a ton on like you know, like transcription, different things like that.
- [43:57]
A
So yeah, I mean maybe a bad example but like I need to write a letter to my whole publisher network or whatever it is and like go find or I'll jot down a few ideas and like am I missing Any key industry trends that would be good to share with a group of publishers as a CEO, whatever like it, it does a good job of. I of course go do a bunch of work to get it, how it really should be tailored to my thing. But it's good at that. Right, so we'll leave. There's that piece. I think it's important more than ever for publishers to capture the audience they have once they get there. And I actually think the AI experiences on publisher sites where they can go deeper on a topic and keep interacting with things is very unique, like DE is doing to some extent. Taboola's got a product on there too. Their deeper dive thing, I think those are fascinating. And what I've heard at least anecdotally is it's increasing time on site materially, you drop somebody in a search box. Partly it's a jarring experience. I'm going from AI where I'm having this nice conversation. I do click the little link, I land on a site and then I'm there. I'm like, okay, I gotta go find the article and I gotta dig through everything. You get me into something where I get the article I want. And then I've got another experience like, would you like to keep learning more? And I can keep having this sort of conversational thing, but I'm now inside of the walls of a trusted source. I think that's going to be an interesting evolution of things over time, but it's going to keep me on site, hopefully more than it was before because I'm more engaged, I'm part of it, but I'm doing it with a source that I really believe in. I think that's going to be really interesting future here. And the other piece of this is like the AI tools are really good and interesting and great at proofreading, but the content and everything that's coming out every day is the raw materials that feeds the machine. And like, if the raw materials get cut off, the machine can be the best it is, but with no raw materials, like it doesn't work down the road. So I think the relationship between publisher and AI companies will change over time. I don't picks up tomorrow, but I do think it happens sometime in the next, hopefully 12 to 18 months in a meaningful way.
- [45:56]
B
And then just like another way that pubs are looking at using AI to their advantage. You know, we recently covered pre bid partnering with aao, the group behind the Ad Context Protocol, to take on development of the software that will power agentic AI on the publisher side. What Are your kind of feelings on how agentic AI will be open for publishers?
- [46:17]
A
I think it's interesting conceptually, but I think a lot of the AI stuff is a little bit of a solution searching for a problem. I think this is a problem that at some point in time needs to be solved. But even the the agent is going to buy it from another agent, you still have to figure out the contract terms between people. So it can potentially automate certain elements of finding audience inside of broader pools or something like that. I just don't know that it's fully baked yet. I think it's something important for us to work through. It'll make it more efficient and hopefully more performant for advertisers, which then raises rates for publishers. Hopefully we've cut out costs and we can just do this whole thing a little bit better. I don't think we're quite there yet. I mean I think it's, there's not a lot of publicly available statistics that say major dollars are running through these things yet. But you got to prepare for it. It's kind of like the AI content licensing. It's not quite there yet. I think we all know it will happen at some point in time and you got to put down the tracks if we ever want to, you know, get the train on them. So I think we're kind of at that stage overall with the all the agent to agent buying. Yeah. So I think we'll see it unfold here soon.
- [47:22]
B
And then to wrap things up, I just wanted to ask you a question just about kind of the current state of Freestar and what you guys have going on. And as a jumping off point for that, there was kind of this famous thing where Freestar was listed at number one on the Inc 5000 top fastest growing US companies. And it would obviously be impossible for any company to stay at the top of a list of fastest growing companies. But like, you know, this past year Freestar was still in the top 5,000, but at number 4,148. So you know, have things slowed down for Freestar? Are you guys still chugging along and what's, what's new for you guys that you want to tease?
- [48:04]
A
For us, things are still growing very nicely. It's a math problem. Like when you're very young and small, it's easy to grow like thousands of percent. That gets a little harder as you scale a business unfortunately. So sadly tailing off. But you know, seven years in a row, that was a pretty good run. Ben. The Inc 5000. So proud of that things do continue to grow and what we're working on right now is sort of a lot of kind of what I've alluded to throughout the conversation today. It's freaking tough for publishers right now. Whether it's traffic or all of the 50 different things that we've said we've got to figure out how do we then manage relationships agentically with the buy side and new MRC standards and identity is still hanging out there as a thing and, and, and, and, and like the role of freestar and something we've prided ourselves on for a long time is we're kind of more than monetization. I've got an in house audience development team that works to consult for these publishers to help them with that. While we can't be lawyers for folks, we certainly can help them kind of work through like what does compliance look like, give them updates and so we'll have actually a pretty good announcement about this in the next week or two but sort of formalizing. Monetization is of course the core of what we do, but it's a lot more than that. We bring solution after solution. We've always been agnostic, best of breed approach. So we want to meet the publisher that need to be met. Like I said, we work with larger and larger publishers who have unique needs and we can plug those in certainly with our own proprietary solutions. But sometimes a partner is going to be better with that and making that all interoperable and being that easy button for publishers is something that we've really done for a while and are continuing to pride ourselves on here going forward.
- [49:37]
B
All right, yeah, so we'll, we'll keep an ear out for the that news next week and stay tuned next week for sure. All right. So yeah, Kurt, this was great. Thanks so much for taking the time to have the discussion for joining the pod and you know, like I said, we'll keep an eye on future development.
- [49:55]
A
Awesome man. Always great to chat. I appreciate you. Foreign.
- [50:09]
C
This episode was sponsored by the Weather Company. From the number one most downloaded weather app to sophisticated enterprise data, they're helping people and businesses build a more resilient privacy. First Future Head over to WeatherCompany.com to learn how their insights can weatherproof your marketing strategy.
- [50:29]
A
Sam.