← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
Understanding the Media Publishing Landscape
00:27:16
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A
The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
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From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising. Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.
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A
Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that used technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech podcast. Benjamin Shapiro.
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B
18% 18% is the increase in programmatic advertising revenue. Last year, according to PwC1, 34.8 billion of programmatic revenue was generated in 2024 alone. The programmatic market is booming. Publishers are drowning in complexity. Privacy regulations shift monthly and the biggest players are consolidating their buying power and squeezing out the competition. So how can publishers navigate the new reality of digital advertising? I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Amanda Martin, the Chief Revenue Officer at mediavine, the largest independent ad management firm in the US that helps publishers maximize revenue through advanced monetization and data solutions. And today Amanda will reveal which strategies are actually working for publishers and how to future proof your monetization stack in 2025. Amanda, welcome to the Martech Podcast.
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C
Thanks for having me.
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B
Excited to have you on the show. Excited to talk a little bit about programmatic media and publishers, how we all make money, the cash flowing through the advertising ecosystem. Let's start off with with the obviously changing landscape, artificial intelligence is coming online. There's always a turf war between DSPs and SSPs. Let's talk a little bit about the publishers first. Why are publishers slow to adapt to the changing infrastructure in the advertising landscape?
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C
I think it's an excellent question. I'm not sure that I would categorize publishers as being slow. I would say they're methodical. And a lot of the changes and the ever fast paced scenario that we live in is that there's a lot of things to do and there's not as much capital behind the publisher's ability to do it. And so a lot of the times. It's a, let me see what I have to do versus what everyone is asking me to do. So I, I don't want to say that they're slow. I think they're methodical. I think they are picking their battles and trying to wait some of those battles out. But that obviously creates friction in any marketplace when the buyers are pushing for change. Innovation, adoption.
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B
Slow, methodical, potato, platonical. Come on. There's this difference in how we think about artificial intelligence and I need to adopt it now. I need to move to AI first. I gotta change everything. My go to market's different. And right when we get down to revenue, when we get to the bottom of the funnel, how we actually make money through content, people are like, eh, eff it, then it's not broken. Why am I changing anything? Explain. The landscape is changing, how is it changing? And then why are we not sort of embracing running towards the newer technologies?
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C
Well, one, I think it's scary, let's be honest. I think number two is that a lot of people's roles exist for the foundation and a structure that's been existing in our space for the past decade. And so adopting technology that may replace or adjust or shift someone's role at a company is, is a scary thing to ask someone to do. I think the fear is that yield is impacted and that the threat of trying something new may come at the expense of revenue. But I also think that there's just a lot of fluff around AI right now. There's a lot of conversations about companies claiming that they're doing amazing things with AI. And in the reality, the efficiency and revenue gains haven't really come to fruition if you're trying to do everything. And so I think publishers need to pick some battles and choose to take risks in a few calculated spots. They can't be left behind, but they also can't keep up with every headline and every opportunity that's being presented as like the next coming.
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B
Tell me a little bit about what has changed. Right. I think of Programmatic in sort of the most layman's terms of like, I've got a website or let's go back to the blogging days. I've got a hole in my blog and somebody puts a, you know, banner ad in the middle of it and I get paid for it. Obviously there's cctv, cctv, ctv, podcasts, videos, all sorts of other channels where we're using Programmatic to do not only media buying, but publishers are making money. What is the, the fundamental shift that is happening in the landscape.
- [05:45]
C
I think the fundamental shift is there is a higher scrutiny and a higher level of efficiency that buyers are becoming incredibly focused on driving in their programmatic spend. Programmatic could be seen in the past as a little bit of an easy button and a scale play. And now so much has shifted into programmatic pipes that the strategy's coming in. And I think the just the technology, the technical know how of the buy side has increased dramatically over the past three to five years. How they're assessing what they're buying, what they're saying is good versus what is bad, is expanding. It's not just do you hit a viewability threshold and is your site brand safe by a screenshot test? It's the ad experience. It, it's the time on site, it's the content that's surrounding the advertisements, it's the engagement, the attention metrics that are coming out. So it's just getting far more complex on how to be the inventory that a buyer wants. And because audio podcasts, digital out of home CTV has entered the equation, there's a lot more options vying for the same dollars that were going mainly to the web and display and online video to begin with.
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B
Okay, so what I'm hearing you say is the dumb money is gone and now the channel mix has expanded and so it's not, you know, my layman's explanation of programmatic of like the hole in my blog right now we're talking about digital billboards and my television and the equivalent of radio. Like that's all running through programmatic. And we have got more sophisticated in the buying side to understand not only is it showing up and is it safe, but is it actually working?
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C
Correct.
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B
All right, so tell me a little bit about the other side of the landscape where I think of it as the open web versus the walled gardens. Your Googles and meta of the worlds. Who's winning over publishers right now? Is it going to everything else or is it I'm just going to give my money to Google and Facebook?
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C
I think the key is that Google and Facebook and the walled gardens in general have created a really great easy button and, and a really great insulated machine that produces results and reports out results in a really kind of clean and easy to understand way. Buyers definitely lean that way. Just look at how budgets are allocated across a, a digital spend across programmatic versus open versus closed walled gardens. You're going to see more dollars going to the same spaces. But publishers win because at the end of the day you, you hit A point of diminishing return. You can't just keep pumping more and more and more money into the same platform or the same network or the same website and expect to get the ROI that you need to produce for the brand or agency you're working for. And so I think while the open Internet creates opportunity, scale optionality, the walled gardens create consistent return on ad spend, consistent reporting that pays the, you know, the dividends that they're looking for. And so it's a battle of attention more so from the buyer's decisioning than it is from actual readers and visitors because they're spread out pretty evenly across the two. The open Internet tends to actually outpower the walled gardens when it comes to like share voice and attention span, but the budgets do not get allocated in that same way.
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B
It's funny because as you're describing why the Facebook and meta ad platforms are so powerful, a big portion of it is because they show how much they've worked, right? It's, it's, there's a level of certainty which is like, here is my target. How many times did you hit it? But stop me if you've heard this one. Meta or Google take credit for everything, right? Every conversion they say that they are the ones that drove it because everybody uses the platforms and they have some sort of a view through metric. So somebody's been exposed to an ad, whether it was actually what was driving it. How much of this is the shell game between Google and meta? Just saying, look, we can drop a pixel or expose everyone to some sort of an ad because they're all on our platforms. So when there's a conversion, we're going to raise our hand and say we did that and how much of it actually is the reporting is just that much better. So there's more certainty.
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C
I was on the buy side for eight years and I will say that if you get a report that tells you the story that you want to see, at the end of the day, it does a lot. And it's really hard to move money away from that report, even if you question the validity of that report or the credit it's taking. I sometimes think that the best performance players in the space are just the best people at telling folks how good they are at it. And I would say that the open web or the non walled gardens, I try to shy away from the open web since it's expanded so dramatically across all the different verticals. But they're really good at putting proof to their own pudding. And we have some things we could Learn in that regard how much more.
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B
Reporting feature rich is the Googles and the metas of the worlds compared to, you know, what I would say is programmatic, but I mean, the open web, like, I haven't done a ton of programmatic advertising recently enough to be dangerous, but I always am. Like, I cannot tell what is actually performing. How much farther behind is programmatic relative to Google and Meta now, as opposed to where they were like a year or two ago?
- [11:38]
C
I don't know that we're any further behind. I think the same challenge we chase, we face a challenge that they do not face, which is our success is tied to multiple platforms, multiple media outlets, multiple reporting dashboards. Their success is tied to one platform, one reporting output. And so there's not the complexity to tie the narrative together and the story together. And so at the end of the day, I have found that the easy button normally wins. And so the programmatic space is trying to do a better job of fulfilling that kind of easy button. Full printout, full reality of what you're driving. But it does take a lot of sophistication and I will say I'm impressed to see more of that knowledge and sophistication transfer over to the buy side where it was kind of all powered on the sell side to begin with. I think DSPs are doing a better job of advocating for their ad spend, and I think they truly are seeing themselves competing with the walled gardens as opposed to competing with themselves. I think you hear that narrative and people kind of balk at it or question it. But the reality is when a brand is making a decision on where to put budgets, they are not necessarily focusing as much on is it Trade Desk or is it Amazon or is it Google they're focused on? Is it Facebook? Is you know, is it TikTok? Is it programmatic? And so the fight's the very beginning of the decision making.
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B
I hear you, but I think what the actual like, logic going through the the buyer's head is, I'm going to run a campaign in Meta and I'm going to run one in the open web. And Meta's saying, I've got a $4 cost per acquisition. The open web is saying, I have a $12 cost per acquisition. The $4 cost per acquisition is going to help me keep my job. And it might be that Meta is taking credit or Google or, you know, whichever walled garden you're talking about is taking credit for what the actual open web spend is doing. But the $4 CPA makes me look good. So I'm going to just invest into this. Part of it is. And that's the fundamental problem with, like that you mentioned. It's you've got multiple dashboards and multiple platforms that you're trying to weave data together to get this picture of what's actually working. And so it's harder to be like, yep, we get credit for all of that. On the flip side, I want to talk a little bit about the revenue strategies. When you're a publisher and you're starting to think about, well, where should I open up my inventory? Should I be putting the hole in the website or my digital billboard? Should I be offering it to a walled garden? Should I be offering it to Programmatic Advertising? Tell me which revenue strategies are actually working for publishers these days?
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C
I think the revenue strategy is definitely from the programmatic space. When it comes to monetizing your owned and operated property. I think the attention fight is across the social platforms, across how you're driving people to your owned and operated experience because you have the most opportunity to monetize your content within your own four walls. I think the challenge is you have to be everywhere else in order to drive people to those four walls. And AI is the thing that is disrupting that discovery the most. So for me, the, the battle between walled gardens and Programmatic for a publisher is attention, not necessarily ad monetization. Once they get someone to their site, we know how to create the right monetization strategy and we know how to make the most out of that visit. The challenge today is getting the person to the site.
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B
Yeah, that's interesting because I was thinking you're going down the path of saying, well, if you sell direct, you're going to get more money and Programmatic will help you fill, you know, help you sell all of your inventory. That's always been the dynamic for me. You know, thinking about podcast advertising is if I want to go out and sell it, I could sell it for 10x what I would on a Programmatic exchange our inventory. But do I actually want to go out and do I want ads that are somebody else's ads in my podcast? That's always been the trade off. And you're saying that the issue is actually driving the traffic right now. The problem isn't that, hey, how do I figure out who the buyers are? It's the traffic is going away. That has to be an AI thing, am I right?
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C
Absolutely correct. How consumers are discovering content is wildly different generationally, and then AI only multiplies that difference.
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B
Yeah, so we talk about this all the time with the brand focus work that we do on the podcast, which is your SEO strategy is dying, but your content is still useful. You just need to make sure that the LLMs are digesting it and prioritizing you. So now we went from bots crawling for SEO to AEO or GEO or whatever EO we're calling it. How is it affecting the programmatic landscape? There are no more clicks, there are no more site visits, there is no more people coming to the site. So the revenue is gone. Is it that simple?
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C
I think at the bottom line that's the pain that's felt is like less traffic equals less opportunity to monetize. I think the larger challenge is you don't have the ability to be one of many. You have to have your own brand, you have to have your own established audiences in order for AI to acknowledge your validity as a trusted source and as what they're going to put forward. It's a double edged sword. AI is discovering you and scraping you, but they're not sending traffic back to you. So it really is kind of a protect your assets but then also push to change that narrative. Do they pay me to scrape my site or do they pay me just to show my content and push traffic to me? I think we have a lot of, of innovation to come in that space. I think that the, the double edged sword is content has never been more accessed with the innovation of AI, yet the folks creating that content have never been in more of a conundrum of how they actually stand up that business.
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B
I was reading yesterday, I think it was Yahoo and Reddit and a few other large entities are getting together and essentially saying you have to pay us to crawl our content. And now they're essentially creating a standard that's trying to extract revenue from the AI crawlers. Right. And giving the revenue back to the publishers. How do you think that whole turf war is going to shake out? Is chat, GPT and OpenAI going to start paying a fraction of a penny every time they crawl and extract content from a website? Is it when they're quoting a website? Walk me through the dynamic there between an LLM and a publisher.
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C
So what's interesting is that you outlined actually a few different monetization strategies that you could pay to crawl, you could pay to show results, you could pay to send someone through like a pay per click type situation. There's a lot of different kind of proposed commercial structures at scale, they don't exist yet. But the key is that publishers have to hold the key to Their content in order to have that marketplace have to exist. The reason why LLMs have become so popular and have grown so quickly and so many of them are popping up every single day is that there is no barrier to entry to get the content. And so if publishers work together to create that barrier of entry, a marketplace will be created just like Google created in order to send traffic in order to get the results they needed. It was a win win. Right now there isn't a win win on both sides, but I think a commercial model is definitely on the horizon. We're just only seeing that really be successful at the really top tier publishers who have that kind of demand naturally because of their brand recognition. So access will be the key for publishers to control who can and who can't. And do you pay me in order to get access to my content or do you send me traffic? It's a trade off.
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B
Yeah. What I'm hearing is the New York Times is so reputable that an LLM scraping their content basically creates liability. And the New York Times is like, no, you have to pay us to access our content. But benjshap.com and martechpod.com and I hear everything.com, you know, our smaller sites that are our owned properties, like OpenAI is not paying us and to scroll our to to crawl our content. So let's say the Martech podcast as an example. Like we've got 2,000 pages and podcasts all over the place and we do YouTube videos and we have our blog. How do I think about monetization across this multimedia landscape that we're, you know, contributing in knowing that we're a small fish in a ocean?
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C
Yeah. I think ultimately mediavine kind of plays a role in that, which is if you take a lot of small domains that don't have that ability to go straight to OpenAI, you create a network that OpenAI wants access to. We've also seen that once you block them from crawling your site, you actually get a response from them that, oh, we wanted that content, we need access to that content. It competitively disadvantages us to not have it if somebody else has it. And so I think it's the, we gotta lock the door and they have to come knocking for it. If that's gonna be the commercial model or they're gonna have to decide to send traffic. Either one may work in the long run. I just think we're at the infancy of publishers actually gaining those controls or those standards to do something about it. Cloudflare rolled out their pay to crawl the pay to crawl piece hasn't come to fruition yet. It's in an early beta. But the ability to block every single crawler from coming to your site now exists. And so I think it's just the first step of creating doors and barriers that businesses have to walk through. From a monetization standpoint, that seems so.
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B
Inherently risky for the publisher to say, you know what, I'm just going to cut off access to my content because I want to be paid for my content, but without an audience, I don't have anything to sell. And so there's the balance there of take OpenAI and GPT as the example. I'm just going to stop the GPT crawler from going to my website now. You guys can't crawl my site. Well, how are people going to find my content? Like, obviously I have some small audience, but I want it to be bigger and everybody's going to the LLM. So aren't you cutting off your nose to spite your face if you restrict access from LLMs?
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C
I think the key is that we're not at a place where LLMs are funneling traffic at any high velocity, that you're actually cutting off a revenue opportunity. At this point, you're still getting the majority of your traffic from search or from a social media platform or from your own efforts of your brand equity from people revisiting your site or your newsletters. So diversification is really the key. A lot of publishers found themselves in a place where 80% of their traffic came from Google Search. That's not the place you're gonna wanna be at the end of the next year, six, nine months. You wanna be in a place where you have a lot of different traffic sources so that you're not relying on one traffic Source. We're seeing LLMs come in at a small percentage of overall traffic to our network in the sense of who they actually send. If they start sending traffic and we can monetize in the same way that we monetize Google search traffic, we're right back in the same marketplace we live in. The reality is, is that that's not how LLMs function.
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B
Yeah. They don't send the traffic they're sending, deliver the content and people consume it and move on.
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C
Yeah. And so I think the, the marketplace will need to shift. Right now our publishers are sitting in a world where they have. They're in both worlds at the same time. They're in. SEO isn't done. They still live in a world of SEO. Now they're adapting to a World of geo. They're adapting to a world of diversification. It just makes the job a lot harder for publishers.
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B
Do you think there's any possibility for the LLMs to actually be monetized by publishers? Like, is there going to be some sort of an ad driven model? Right. Google, hey, it's, you know, this search crawl. Well, all right. All the links became monetized. Right. They were all paid advertising. Do you see a model for LLMs to start monetizing their services through advertising? Or are we just going to be paying for tokens and subscriptions and access?
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C
I think CTV is a really great example of how this market shapes out. I think you watched a lot of SVOD models come into place and create the infancy of, of their dominance in streaming. And then you watched AVOD become their next phase of scale and ability.
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B
Define SVOD and avod.
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C
So. Oh. So subscription versus advertising. So if you're, if you're a subscription model, everyone's paying to gain access and then once they're in, there's no advertising or minimal advertising. AVOD is, I am purely, you know, living off of advertising as my.
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B
The subscription versus the free tier is essentially what you're talking about.
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C
Yep, exactly. And you've, you've seen the likes of Netflix go from pure subscription to a balance of both. And I think the reality is that advertising is the commerce that we are all playing in. It's the attention economy is paid by the brands that need to get in front of the consumers that they're looking to advertise, looking to reach. I've predicted for a while that there's a world where advertising in some context slowly becomes how LLMs support themselves because the infrastructure of an agent is not one to, to balk at. And while a lot of them have a lot of cash right now, they'll have to create profit in the run at their first five to 10 years in order to cover all those expenses. And so advertising tends to be the place that attention gets monetized.
- [26:38]
B
All right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Amanda Martin, the Chief Revenue Officer at mediavine. If you'd like to contact Amanda, you could find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com or you could visit her company's website, which is mediavine.com if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or Visit us on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed next week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy. Foreign.
- [27:38]
A
Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.