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When AI Meets Media Quality
00:48:52
From one perspective, publishers are up a creek thanks to the rise of generative AI search; the impact on discoverability and traffic is palpable. But that doesn't mean publishers can’t adapt and find new ways to make money, says Mediavine CRO...
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- [00:00]
Amanda Martin
Foreign.
- [00:13]
Alison Schiff
Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you.
- [00:26]
Sarah Sluice
Today's episode is sponsored by Philo Ads. Philo Ads is built for brands that want premium connected TV placements without the premium price tag. With highly engaged audiences on fan favorite Networks like Discovery, TV One, MTV, A&E, Own, Lifetime and more, Philo Ads delivers a CTV experience that gets results. Kick off your next campaign with Philo Ads today @ ads Philo TV.
- [01:02]
Alison Schiff
I'm Alison Schiff and this is Ad Exchanger Talks. Thanks for listening and or watching. My guest this week is Madan Bharawaj, the founder of M Squared, which is a measurement startup focused on advanced marketing attribution solutions for marketers. Their approach is built on the notion that no single attribution methodology fits every business, so there's no such thing as a one size fits all solution to attribution. We'll talk about what that means from a practical perspective and we'll touch on some of the spicier topics like whether brands can actually trust the measurement they get from Google and Meta. But first, it's time to get your tickets to Programmatic IO New York, taking place in New York City, of course. And cool news. Madan will be speaking, so if you want to get smart about attribution, you should snag your spot. Pro Gu is September 29th and 30th and podcast listeners get 25% off their ticket when they use the code PODCRUSH P O D C R U S H all one word and all in caps. See you there. I'm Allison Schiff and this is Talks Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast where we talk about ad exchangery things. My guest this week is Amanda Martin, CRO of mediavine, which helps publishers monetize and build sustainable businesses. And so the plight of publishers in relation to the rise of generative AI is the very, very top of mind. And that's our topic this week. There's a heck of a lot to say, so I'll get right into it, but in a sec, because first we've got an event coming up and attending it is one way for you to support your hopefully favorite adtech trade pub. You can get your tickets now to programmatic I.O. new York, taking place in New York City on September 29th and 30th. The agenda will be fire. Just saying. Podcast listeners get 25% off their ticket when they use the code PODCRUSH. That's P O D C R U S h All One word and all in caps. See you there. Hey, Amanda, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:03]
Amanda Martin
Thanks for having me.
- [03:05]
Alison Schiff
All right, so lay it on me. What is one thing about you that not a lot of other people already know?
- [03:12]
Amanda Martin
One thing that not a lot of people already know. I think one thing people don't know about me is that I'm not born and raised Rhode Islander. And Even though my LinkedIn says New York, I reside in Rhode island and have a great ad tech career from this small ocean state. And during COVID few people joined me in the ocean state versus the city. But I have been able to stay near the ocean this entire time, which is a little hidden truth about me.
- [03:43]
Alison Schiff
I did not know that. I thought you lived in New York. So color me surprised.
- [03:50]
Amanda Martin
It's the benefits of remote work.
- [03:53]
Alison Schiff
I mean, I'm working remotely from my apartment and hopefully it's not too untidy behind me as a background because I'm in the midst of moving from Queens to Manhattan and moving is the the worst thing ever. So I can't wait to be finished with it.
- [04:07]
Amanda Martin
Great.
- [04:08]
Alison Schiff
So for people who aren't familiar, I want to talk about what exactly mediavine is and also why you move there from the buy side. It's been a little while now, so this isn't a brand new move, but you spent nearly eight years at Goodway Group and we spoke many times during that time. Goodway is an independent digital marketing agency. You were in a bunch of executive strategy and corporate development roles, and then you moved to mediavine a couple of years ago, first as the SVP of monetization and business strategy, and now you're the CRO. But yeah, like what, what is mediavine? What precipitated the move over to the sell side? And do people like, understand what mediavine's business is when you explain?
- [04:51]
Amanda Martin
Yeah. So I'll start by describing what mediavine is and then I'll kind of explain how my move from the buy side to the sell side happened. So mediavine goes by many names depending on what circle you're in. Some call us a publisher, sales house, some call us an ad monetization partner. At the end of the day, we represent over 17,000 domains across the web that kind of are the mid to long tail who go to us for all their monetization needs. So we control their entire ads Txt file. We do all of their programmatic advertising on their behalf. They focus on content creation, we focus on ad monetization, getting the audiences in front of the brands and really just kind of serving a scale issue for them which is they themselves are not large enough to rep themselves to large holding companies or large brands or, or DSPs or SSPs. But together they are very large and represent a lot of the consumption on the open web. From, you know, the recipe you're cooking for Thanksgiving to the workout that you're looking for on New Year's Eve, to the trip you're planning in Ireland or the do it yourself project that you are doing at your house. So a lot of great lifestyle content, educational content, enthusiast content and basically what makes the open web, you know, exist. But those content creators obviously need to be compensated for the effort they put in in order for that to be their full time job. And so we're happy to support them in that manner and rep them to the industry as a whole and to brands and advertisers. That's how I discovered mediavine. I was on the buy side in different strategy and client strategy roles and corp dev roles. Um, and we were buying a lot of great audience and contextual targeting from mediavine and just understanding the value of diversifying your spend across more than like the top 20 comscore top domains. And so I started to get intrigued by the buy side has a lot of benefits. They carry the purse, they carry the, the demands. They get a lot, a lot of what they want. Um, and I was intrigued by the publisher side which needs a little bit more representation. I liked the idea of supporting independent content creators in a different way than platforms support them, you know, like Facebook or TikTok. And so after some conversations just decided that taking my buy side experience to the sell side in the programmatic space was interesting. I also started on the sell side. So I worked for many publishers before I went to Goodway. So a little bit of return to my roots, but with a different twist to it.
- [07:41]
Alison Schiff
I would say the demand side is rather demanding, aren't they?
- [07:46]
Amanda Martin
They do have the purse, so it does make sense and they are representing the advertiser's best interests and so it obviously makes sense. But I think an interesting twist has been that you're seeing a little bit more of a balancing act between publishers and buyers as get closer together over the past few years and that's been something I've enjoyed doing since coming over to the sell side.
- [08:11]
Alison Schiff
Well, as someone who spent all of those years working with advertisers, now you're growing back to your roots on the sell side, but you understand buyers and you also understand sellers and have a purview into the needs of Publishers. So what do buyers not get about publishers and what do publishers not get about buyers? Because I think that buyers often don't realize like how much of a revenue crunch publishers are under. And like publishers don't totally appreciate how much buyers really want control and transparency. There are all of these disconnects between advertisers and publishers that lead to all this friction and mistrust that we write about constantly at Ad Exchanger.
- [08:48]
Amanda Martin
Yeah, I think one of my biggest misconceptions when I was on the buy side was how much control publishers truly are enabled to have in our ecosystem and how much they kind of have to go with the flow and react versus demand. And then I think on the other side of things, I think publishers didn't really necessarily or don't necessarily conceptualize the challenges that the demand side has that agencies and even in house traders and buyers have in the sense of meeting KPIs driving return on investment, working within the budgets that they're given, and reaching that audience that they want. And so a lot of times, while a publisher is really focused on the quality of their content, an advertiser is really focused on their ability to get in front of the right audience. And so when they're both talking audiences, I think we're on the same page when we're talking about, do you value my content? Do you have the right audience? I think that's where you can have some disconnects on value exchange and what each are getting out of each other. So I think they're both likely to work well together if they actually understand that the goals they have sometimes align and sometimes don't align.
- [10:10]
Alison Schiff
I want to segue into AI because we can't talk about publishers and any of the challenges that they're going through without talking about how AI is basically changing everything. And there was this very interesting study that Raptive, one of mediavine's main competitors, released pretty recently. It found that reader trust drops sharply when people believe that content is AI generated, even if it isn't. Just the belief that content is AI generated is enough to make people feel cynical about it and dubious. But I mean, that drop in confidence doesn't just affect how readers view content, but also how they perceive the ads around it. Of course, and like ads that run in AI generated content, I think are considered less premium at this point, less trustworthy, and it's worse if it's not disclosed. So, I mean, there's so much to talk about with AI, but I, I first just want to know if that's Something you're seeing play out with your publishers.
- [11:12]
Amanda Martin
That dynamic, I mean, AI is definitely the topic of conversation that consumes most of the publishing space right now in the sense of how do you use it, how do you protect yourself against it? Is it a tool, is it a foe? You know, like, how are you actually operating in this new world where how people discover content is changing dramatically and rapidly and then how content creation is changing dramatically? I agree. We believe that content should be human generated and it should be aided by, by tools like AI. We feel like there is a trust, a quality, a premier piece to content creation that comes from true content creators that put their heart and soul and effort and work behind ensuring that it's right. I think journalists have felt like this a really long time, and I think now open web content creators are feeling that as well. And so it doesn't surprise me that audiences would mistrust something if they perceived it not to be human created. I think what's interesting is what do they perceive to be human created and what do they perceive not to be human created? And that's kind of the fine line our content creators have to walk along. And our position is use AI to aid you, not to replace the human in the equation and the quality and premierness that a human adds to the equation. So it's definitely something that we're pushing to support. How do our pubs exist in a world with AI? And how do platforms like Google and Pinterest and Facebook appropriately police their platforms that send traffic to the sources of information that are either created by AI or humans? And how are they optioning towards the quality versus the quantity? So I think it's a multi tier issue, I would say, and opportunity. And it's one that comes with a lot of like, oh, this is cool. And then a lot of like, ooh, this is scary. And so for our content creators, they really put their work and their life behind the quality of their work. If AI aids them, it probably does something in an efficiency way as opposed to replacing it from a content creation. I don't think anyone wants an AI agent to create a recipe for them that has the wrong ingredients in it. And I also want someone who's better at cooking than me to test that recipe multiple times before I'm doing it for Thanksgiving dinner. So I think it's something that we'll watch and work out. Our goal is to advocate for our publishers. Again, we represent 17,000 domains. We want to advocate for them to get fairly compensated by AI agents to not be replaced by AI content and for the ecosystem to start to determine how to rearrange the value proposition for the open web.
- [14:15]
Alison Schiff
Also, we would eventually end up with this like Ouroboro. Right? Like a snake eating its own tail. If you publish AI generated content without human intervention, because it's ingesting a lot of human generated content, but then at a certain point it's just redigested and reconstituted and redigested until you have something that is English but doesn't feel right. It's the uncanny valley of words.
- [14:46]
Amanda Martin
Yeah, the. The human content that's created and shared on the open web is the essence of the open web. And if that gets eroded, we will have less trust in the open web, which is the exact opposite of what we want to see. I think the study that that Raptive put out is a great indicator that consumers are showing a preference to human generated content and they value it. And my hope is that advertisers will understand that they also have to value it in order for there to be a difference in scale of what you pay for human generated content versus what you pay for AI generated content. Sometimes the open web is seen as a place for scale and for low cost reach. And I think this is the time for us to kind of push for quality over quantity. And human generated is definitely the path forward for that approach.
- [15:43]
Alison Schiff
What is mediavine's position on AI generated content? Do you allow sites that have AI generated content into your network? How do you know whether they do?
- [15:53]
Amanda Martin
Yeah, so for us, we want human content creators. We don't want to stop a human content creator from the efficiencies of technology advances, but we definitely want to balance that with. There is a human at the center of the content they're putting out. And we have a lot of different qualifiers. It's not easy. AI is an ever changing, ever advancing opportunity and experience. And so for us, it's really, we have a great MQ team, a marketplace quality team that's constantly evaluating the sites that apply, but also the sites that are within our network. And for us it's really, does it pass that audience expectation of quality content? And has the use of AI eroded that? And that's kind of where we make that line in the sand call. We definitely want to support small businesses or large businesses that create content as livelihood. And that's kind of what we focus on. It is harder than it was four or five years ago to determine what is human generated and what is AI generated. But there's some good tells and that's what we Use through our marketplace quality team to decipher what is premium quality content that gets into our network and what is not.
- [17:13]
Alison Schiff
When I see an EM dash, like a ton of EM dashes, I'm like ah, perplexity. Somewhat used perplexity.
- [17:20]
Amanda Martin
And there are definitely some tells.
- [17:23]
Alison Schiff
Have you ever, well, not you personally, but has mediavine ever kicked any publishers out of the of the network for excessive use of AI to produce content or for trying to like monetize low quality AI content or like undisclosed AI content? Like what does a publisher have to do or not do to get booted from the network from an AI perspective?
- [17:43]
Amanda Martin
Yeah. So like many marketplace quality teams, we don't like to publish exactly what the lines in the sand are so everyone can race to them. But I will say we reevaluate our network on a regular basis and we do make decisions on if someone can stay in our network based on hitting those quality standards. And we have had to make those tough calls in the past. We always offer the opportunity for someone to appeal a call that we make based on what we see versus maybe how they see it. And we find that the good actors who are creating human generated content and maybe using an AI tool are easy to get right back on the right path of creating it within our standards. And those that are creating quantity over quality and there's really no human behind it tend not to appeal the termination, but it is ever changing. A site that's in our network needs to be reevaluated on a regular basis. So our MQ team not only evaluates who's coming in the door, but who's already in the network.
- [18:46]
Alison Schiff
I do imagine though that if you have a low quality site and they get dinged or booted and they don't want to work with you, they don't want to work with you because they'll just like spin up another site maybe and like try to get in another way. It just feels like a. It's going to be a lot of work and it's going to just get more and more challenging and you probably will have to hire more media quality people and maybe use AI to try and find AI generated stuff. Which is the great irony.
- [19:15]
Amanda Martin
I will say that it's one of, I think the value props though that that publisher sales houses brings to the ecosystem which is now that AI is generating content. Yes, the World Wide Web is a bigger place. It's physically. You can physically spin up more domains using a than ever before. But if you're working with publisher sales houses who are Vetting and reviewing and holding publishers to a standard. You know that you're going through a vetting process that maybe a DSP or SSP isn't going through. And so you're not just opening up your risk to the entire open Internet, you're opening it up to a curated set of, of the open web. So I see it as a challenge, but also an opportunity for publisher sales houses to help secure where the premium quality, long form and like long tail of the open Internet is for buyers to reach their audiences. And the key is if an advertiser can get performance on a site and audiences get the content they want on a site, that it's usually a nice, you know, win, win situation for everybody. But I think quality is going to be a new definition and I do think advertiser performance will be a large driver of is a site quality enough? Whether there's an AI component to it or not? It will really be about is there a human on the other end of that site reading it and interacting with that advertisement?
- [20:53]
Alison Schiff
Since we're talking about media quality and before we take a quick break, I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up made for advertising websites, which nobody could stop talking about a couple of years ago and last year and now like no one mentions it at all. So why don't people talk about it anymore? Is it a solved problem?
- [21:11]
Amanda Martin
I would say it's an addressed problem. I don't think any situation in tech where there's money, there will be, there will be fraud. I think it is an older problem. I think the web's more sophisticated now. I think made for advertising was a way to hijack ad spend. I think now sites are choosing to do it in different ways from, from different technological advances. The one thing I will say is I think advertising experience and advertising experience, quality is more of the buzzword right now. And it's something that we're constantly working on with the buy side of what is the ad experience on the page? What is the reader engagement? What is the performance? That seems to be the shift we've shifted away from made for advertising as the topic of discussion to more of a Does this site and the way the ads are set up on this site drive the performance that advertisers are looking for when they place budgets?
- [22:14]
Alison Schiff
It seems like a higher bar, like a better thing to shoot for.
- [22:18]
Amanda Martin
Because definitely a higher bar and definitely something that holds all publishers responsible, not just are you made for advertising or are you not? I think we've Raised the bar. And that's why Made for advertising isn't the headline anymore.
- [22:32]
Alison Schiff
All right, well, we're going to take a quick break, and we're just going to keep talking about publishers and AI because there's so much to say, so stick with us.
- [22:40]
Amanda Martin
Sounds great.
- [22:54]
Sarah Sluice
I'm Sarah Sluice, executive editor of Ad Exchanger and Admonsters, and I have with me here Reid Barker, who is the head of advertising for Philo. Welcome, Reid.
- [23:04]
Reid Barker
Hey, thanks for having me.
- [23:06]
Sarah Sluice
So let's start by telling us a little bit about who watches Philo. Why do users come to your service and who is the audience?
- [23:15]
Amanda Martin
Yeah.
- [23:15]
Reid Barker
So Philo is a streaming service that has the linear channels from the cable, entertainment and lifestyle networks you've known and loved, from Warner Brothers, Discovery, Paramount Global, Hallmark A and E plus, the entire AMC plus library. So with that entertainment and lifestyle focus, that means our audience is primarily women. We see them watching it on the biggest screen in the house, and active users are watching linear television more than three hours a day.
- [23:43]
Sarah Sluice
So we know that you're different on the audience side. Let's talk a little bit about the tech, the programmatic pieces that our viewers love. Agency buyers are flooded with CTV options, fast networks. So tell us what differentiates Philo on the ad side?
- [24:01]
Reid Barker
You know, the big conversation is all around dollars moving from direct linear to programmatic. And Philo's been programmatic from the start. That means we've been in programmatic advertising more than seven years. That means we understand that programmatic is not just a machine talking to machine that you plug in a pipe. It's about really understanding what goes on there. So we feel ourselves are really have a lot of expertise in this area. That means that we need to have the best signals both for identity as well as context, the most transparency, and really listen to the buyer so that we can say yes to what they need to fulfill their KPIs.
- [24:38]
Sarah Sluice
Great answer. Reid, you and I were both at can. What are some of the trends and innovations you saw there that are exciting you in the CPV space?
- [24:48]
Reid Barker
Yeah, I've been around innovative ad products forever and seeing some of the things like pause ads, interactive ads, suddenly becoming standardized in a way that makes them available via programmatic channels is just, it's great to see they're actually finally going to get adopte. And the other thing is just everyone's talking about mergers, sell offs, spin offs, and I feel like I'm a Jack Nicholson at a Lakers game with the front row seat of what's happening and in addition to actually just watching, I'm also on the field. So it's amazing and amazingly terrifying all at the same time.
- [25:21]
Sarah Sluice
Well said, Reid. I couldn't say it better. Thank you for joining us on the podcast.
- [25:26]
Reid Barker
Thank you.
- [25:41]
Alison Schiff
All right, we're back and we've been talking a lot about how publishers use or don't use or have to think about using AI. But how do you use AI in your life and for your work? Personally, if you don't mind sharing.
- [25:55]
Amanda Martin
Yeah, I think I'm definitely on more of the millennial train of or Gen X train. I don't know which generation I technically fall within anymore, by the way.
- [26:05]
Alison Schiff
Amanda, just as a side point, I. So I'm 42, I'm a geriatric millennial. That's a actual term. So offensive.
- [26:14]
Amanda Martin
So offensive. But wherever I fall, I'm definitely not on the younger side. So I would say it's changing how I discover how I seek information. For me, AI is like operational efficiency. It is how do you do something smarter, not harder. But I will say that what I'm watching happen is that it is changing how generational users experience the open web, experience content exploration. They are not Google searching as much as we were. They are not going with a specific, specific question. It's more open ended, it's more conversational and it changes even as I look at my children who are across two different generations. I think ultimately we're at a place where content creation isn't different, but how people find the content you create is going to be dramatically different. So I think we go from a place of searching to discovering. I think the platforms we use have started that trend and I think AI just plays right into that. And so I think about how do I get to a recipe or how do I get to a piece of content or an editorial piece? It's just a different path and it's a new path. So it hasn't been worked out that much. So I would say my discovery has changed the most in how, I guess navigate with AI.
- [27:48]
Alison Schiff
I agree. I use AI and I've said this before on this podcast to look up stuff that I already know, but I want it summarized like, really quickly for me. So like, I want seven bullet points about like friction, reasons for friction between buyers and sellers. Just list them out for me. Like that's just handy to have. I don't like looking up stuff I don't already know because I'm worried that it's going to lie to me.
- [28:14]
Amanda Martin
Yeah. And I think the way I look at it is as a leader at a company, I can't assume the way I use it is the way that everyone else uses it. And so my assumption is that we just have to watch how users get to our sites, learn from that and then learn. Just like we learned how to navigate with search, we will learn to navigate with AI, we have learned to navigate with audio prompts. I think it's just an ever changing world of how people feel comfortable consuming and then what they feel comfortable consuming from those sources.
- [28:50]
Alison Schiff
Well, you just used a phrase when people come to a site or how people come to a site. I do wonder if we're on our way to a world where people don't come to sites. I mean, I don't love the narrative about publishers always struggling, they're always in dire straits. But like, it is a really tough time to be a publisher right now because things are changing so extremely fast and because of generative AI, search behavior is shifting. And I see it in myself, I see it in my own habits. And I do wonder if we're hurtling really fast toward a world where you just ask perplexity or chatgpt, like what the news is and then there's some scraping and that's it. You never end up on the site because you get the information you need. Some people will always read long form. Some people want to like dig in. They my boyfriend still gets a physical Wall Street Journal delivered every single day and sits in his chair and reads it with coffee. But, you know, he's the exception.
- [29:45]
Amanda Martin
To each their own. I mean, I think, I think the key is while I think we are moving towards a place where you can assume that would happen, I think we have to realize that the content has to exist in order for AI to give you the answer and the content has to be accessible. And so for me, I'm a little less pessimistic about it and a little bit more. We have to figure out the economics of how there is fair trade for the content someone creates and the use of that content on another platform. And if you don't have to get to the site, then how does that content creator get compensated? And if you can't create a commercial model, not pushing someone to their site or sending someone to their site, then I think those platforms or those agents are going to have to get people to go to those sites in order to have the content, to showcase them in a snippet or in a summary. And so I think it's a place we just haven't figured out yet. I'm, I'm optimistic because I think it serves publishers to be optimistic because I think AI is only showing that people seek out content and they want more of it and not everything needs to be in a six second video. So I think that's actually a really good sign for written content. But I also think that we haven't figured out the value proposition. I think a publisher who creates content needs to be compensated for it. And whether that is on the ads that get served next to it or on the AI agent compensating them for using it and having access to it. I think that's what's really interesting. When we look at some of the work that IAB is kicking off around LLMs and permissioning, those are the things we're supporting for our publishers. Those are the rooms that we're in having conversations about how does this value prop work. And I think just like CTV learned, you get to advertising a lot faster than you think you're going to get to advertising because that is how you get paid for the things that people want and aren't willing to pay a price for. And so while these subscription models are great, I think AI agents are going to get to the same place that publishers got to, that CTV providers got to, which is advertising helps supplement the cost of creating content. And I think we're just in the very early steps of that process and we'll have to figure out those commercial models in order for AI companies to be viable. It's extremely expensive to provide those very helpful agents. And I don't know if AI agents want everyone to stay on their place or if they do want to send them to the source in order to help them balance their own costs.
- [32:34]
Alison Schiff
That's an interesting perspective. I haven't heard someone say that. Right. I mean, of course I know that it's very pricey to continually process all of these queries, but that there might an incentive because of how pricey it is to get people off of the agent and back onto the site.
- [32:52]
Amanda Martin
Yeah. And I think we live in a world right now where some people search, some people go to an AI agent. And so publishers have to live in both worlds right now. And that's a lot of effort and cost to live in both worlds. That's what we try to help our pubs with is how do you appeal to the discovery mechanisms of the past and present with the present and the future at the same time. And so I think we're just in the infancy of that. And I think collaboration will be the key. I Always think collaboration is the key. I know it's like a, you know, nuanced thing, but relationships tend to solve these difficult problems.
- [33:32]
Alison Schiff
Well, speaking of difficult problems, traffic declines among publishers. That is a massive challenge. I mean, is there anything you can share about what you've seen among your publishers, like how much it varies by vertical? Is it mostly Google's AI mode now that's that's messing with it versus maybe like the smaller ish LLMs Perplexity, not the chatgpt is small, but it's small compared to Google.
- [33:59]
Amanda Martin
Yeah, I think we're definitely seeing traffic declines across our publisher set. They're not uniform. There's definitely a publisher to publisher situation at hand. Some publishers were diversified and didn't lean on Google search as heavily as other publishers receive traffic from Google search. And so some of it is how many eggs you had in certain baskets and how you're impacted by it. Different verticals have definitely been hit in different ways. I think what we've learned is in the past there was a space and AI makes us feel this way, that there's room for hundreds of thousands of sites doing similar things. And I think what we're seeing is that there's going to be the premium quality that rises to the top, that these platforms and searches and AI agents tend to lean into and favor. And I think advertisers and buyers will do the same. And so we're working with our publishers to just try to be on the right side of, of the premium line when it comes to the content they create. I will say that it is hard to pinpoint exactly if it's an AI overview that's that's robbing someone of traffic, or if it's the algorithm changes that have happened over time. I think it's very situational. But holistically we are seeing a decline in Google search traffic in general across the mid to long tail of the Internet. And I know large publishers are seeing the same thing. Different verticals, different domains, see different results. It is definitely a concern. We're also seeing growth in some different areas. On who's referring? I think what we're seeing is we're seeing a decline on search before we're seeing any opportunity for new players to compensate because of the scale that search has had for so long. So it is definitely one of the largest challenges. Traffic is definitely the thing keeping our publishers up at night for sure.
- [36:01]
Alison Schiff
And does mediavine advise publishers in the network to take a certain action to deal with scraping? Like what do you tell publishers to do, should they block it? I mean, you brought up Cloudflare and what they're doing is quite interesting. But if a publisher comes to you and says, like, what do I do about scraping, what do you say?
- [36:23]
Amanda Martin
I think it's a value proposition, you know, decision. Is that AI scraper on your site benefiting you or not benefiting you in the sense of like, are they sending you traffic, which then again is a monetization opportunity, or are they compensating you? At this time, we're not seeing the existence of an AI scraper on a site having, you know, like, if you turn it off or you turn it on, you see a dramatic difference in traffic. But we think that changes over time. So it's something that we're constantly evaluating. So things like what Cloudflare is doing with a pay to crawl concept that they've brought to the market, we are supporting our publishers and exploring if it works for their domain and if it's something that they feel helps them. We feel like what we're driving towards in our advisement is are you compensated in via advertising and traffic or via commercial relationship? And those are things you have to explore. And not all scrapers are created equal. And we're just not really at the scale point that our pubs are necessarily tracking enough traffic from AI agents to really kind of discern where that value proposition is. So it's, it's one of those hard things where we'll advise them on a situational case by case basis. But we're, we're revisiting those answers daily, weekly, sometimes hourly, in the sense of how quickly things are changing.
- [37:57]
Alison Schiff
So we brought up Cloudflare a couple of times, but just in case people don't know, although if they're listening to this podcast, I'm sure they know what Cloudflare is doing. But Cloudflare is blocking all AI bots and crawlers from accessing content on the sites that it serves by default and introducing a pay per crawl model so that sites can get compensated every time an AI company wants to access their content. Do you, I mean, do you think that'll be enough? Like, what do you think of that as an initiative?
- [38:26]
Amanda Martin
One, I applaud them for taking a stance on behalf of the publishers that, that they work with. Two, I think it's early days, so we're not sure if the commercial model is viable. And we've seen other situations where companies have explored commercial relevancy and have failed to get there and been able to do it. I think Cloudflare is giving publishers options. They are defaulting some of their users in by default and then you can turn it off if you're not interested and then in some of their paid offerings that you have to turn it on. I think giving publishers options is what I'm applauding them for doing. I think it's too early to tell, but I think it's definitely worthwhile because the access to the content is where that knowledge has been taken and going from that source seems like a viable option to explore and something we are supporting and advocating for our publishers to explore for themselves. And each domain obviously makes their own specific decision on what works or doesn't work for them. And so I just like that Cloudflare is giving publishers optionality in that as well.
- [39:39]
Alison Schiff
I do like it too, but I'm of a cynical turn of mind. And so the reason why I was asking that question is because I was reading this, you have digital newsletter recently and I'll just, I'll quote it because they, they put it quite well like bravo to Cloudflare for trying to help publishers recoup some revenue and open up a new revenue stream. But this whole thing feels like slapping a band aid on a gunshot wound. Publishers are still stuck choosing between crappy options. One, block AI crawlers and become completely invisible, although that might be a little dramatic. Two, let the AI bots crawl for free and watch traffic disappear. Or three, charge a few bucks and still watch traffic disappear. Option three is probably the least of all evils and it's a very pessimistic point of view. And you've already described yourself as an optimist, but it is hard not to agree with that assessment. It does feel like realism as opposed to pessimism.
- [40:36]
Amanda Martin
Yeah. I think believing that we can quickly solve a new commercial model like Programmatic didn't happen overnight. It took a long time. I think ultimately there are different things that have to try and succeed or fail in order for us to figure out what the path forward looks like. So that that's kind of my support. I don't blindly, you know, I'm not blind optimism but at the same time I look at the situation as it can't go unresolved and it can't go unmitigated because as it stands today, we're just accepting a foregone fate that will not the open well will collapse upon itself. And so I don't think that serves AI as much as either. You know what I mean? I don't think it serves pubs or AI in that sense.
- [41:25]
Alison Schiff
Yeah, and something you were saying before, during the first half made me think of what I'm about to say, which is, right, AI is a tool. Is it friend or foe? Will it help? Will it destroy? It's kind of like fire, right? I mean, fire can destroy and it's also a tool. It can keep you warm, but it could burn down your house. Like, you do need to reckon with it and understand how to control it and use it for what it's good for.
- [41:52]
Amanda Martin
Yeah. And I think some of the things that we're working on are how do you go beyond Cloudflare, how do you go beyond blocking scrapers? And how do you actually establish real change in the industry? And so those are the things that mediavine is really kind of getting behind. We'll have some things coming out in the near future that kind of help us maybe go beyond some of these Band Aid or Quick Fix appeals. I think we have to do both. I think we have to go big, and I think we also have to try to mitigate risk for our pubs in different, smaller ways. So I think we'll have to do many things in order to maybe not go down the realist path of assuming the fate that AI has brought.
- [42:44]
Alison Schiff
Well, make it not the reality. Right. Because then make your own fate.
- [42:49]
Amanda Martin
Exactly.
- [42:50]
Alison Schiff
We are nearly out of time. I want to change topics totally and briefly touch on the Chrome privacy Sandbox, because I just have got to. Because I have you on. I mean, third party cookie deprecation on Chrome and the privacy sandbox. I feel like they've basically become memes at this point. I mean, all of the back and forth and the strum and drunk and like the columns that were written, the stories I wrote, the back and forth, the podcast, it was such a saga. And you've been pretty vocal about how Google's delays are like proof that Google basically had a categorical inability to collaborate, despite claiming that they want to collaborate. And you have said collaboration is. Is key for everything. So I mean, my question is this, and I've asked this of a lot of people and the answer is usually quite pat. But, like, was all of that third party cookie stuff between January 2020 and April of this year? Oh, my God, such a long time. Was it a monumental waste of time or was it positive? Be honest.
- [43:57]
Amanda Martin
I do not think you can say that some of it wasn't a waste, but I will say that it did drive people to start thinking outside of the signal boxes that we were in. And I think signal loss or deprecation, be it a Cliff, an on, off switch, or just slowly privacy becoming more and more prevalent in the space, whether through regulation or through user options, is a reality. We live in a space where signals are not universal. Cookies have not been universal. Advertisers can't use cookies as a signal across everything. It doesn't work that way. So I think it pushed us out of our comfort zone. I don't know that it pushed everybody out of their comfort zone, but I think for those that took the ride, they started to think about different ways of understanding their audiences, of showcasing their value to the buy side, of exploring what their first party data told them about the audiences that come to their site. And I think that was worthwhile. I will say it could have been a lot shorter and we could have done with a lot less. Pause, start, pause, start. But for me it got us to where we're at. So not a complete loss in the sense of time spent, some loss in effort. But at the end of the day, we didn't just accept a decision and have it come to fruition. So for that I feel like it was a worthy fight in the regard of what needs to happen. But at the end of the day, if cookies are the basis of your future plan, you're still facing an uphill battle.
- [45:50]
Alison Schiff
You're toast. If cookies is your business, you're toast. My last question is zooming out completely. It's a little philosophical. It's my time machine question and I've asked a few people this and I love all the different answers that I get. But putting aside the paradox of time travel, if you could travel to one specific point in history and make one strategic change that could alter the online advertising industry and ad tech for the better and you wouldn't become, you know, your own grandmother or anything like, don't worry about it. When would you travel to and what would you change?
- [46:33]
Amanda Martin
Hmm. I'll, I'll. Because we're, we were talking about cookie deprecation, I think I would go back and change and block the acquisition of DFP and hopefully create a competitive ad serving landscape that programmatic would have charted a course through differently and made more winners and change the variety of the pie. I think that's one of the biggest points where I think it would have been very different if that acquisition hadn't gone through. I don't know that that wouldn't have stopped something else just like it from happening and, and, and king making someone else. But for me, in the current space, for who I represent for the 17,000 publishers, I think that would be the thing that would have the most monumental impact to go back and change.
- [47:42]
Alison Schiff
Maybe somewhere in the multiverse, Google never bought DoubleClick and there is a thriving ad server ecosystem and publishers are frolicking and everything is wonderful.
- [47:55]
Amanda Martin
Who knows? I mean, I have a hard time saying I'd go back and change anything because our world changes so much. I'm not even sure what a change would would impact.
- [48:05]
Alison Schiff
We are our scars.
- [48:07]
Amanda Martin
True.
- [48:08]
Sarah Sluice
Very true.
- [48:08]
Alison Schiff
Thanks Amanda.
- [48:10]
Amanda Martin
Appreciate it.
- [48:19]
Sarah Sluice
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