The Open Web is Under Attack

Summary

Next in Media – Episode Summary: "The Open Web is Under Attack"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Next in Media
• Host: Mike Shields
• Description: Exploring the transformative changes in media, marketing, and advertising driven by technology and data, featuring conversations with leading industry figures.
• Episode: The Open Web is Under Attack
• Release Date: April 22, 2025

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of Next in Media, host Mike Shields engages in an in-depth conversation with Mark McCollum, the Chief Innovation Officer at Raptive. Raptive stands as a significant player in the open web landscape, supporting over 6,000 small to midsize web publishers. The discussion centers around the existential threats facing the open web, primarily driven by Google's evolving search algorithms and the rise of AI-powered search tools.

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Understanding Raptive and Its Mission

Mark McCollum begins by elucidating Raptive's role in the media ecosystem. Raptive is a unique media company dedicated to empowering content creators who produce for the open web. With a network encompassing approximately 6,000 creators, Raptive aids them in monetizing their content, expanding their audiences, growing email newsletters, and crafting compelling stories. McCollum highlights the company's impressive reach of around 225 million monthly unique visitors, positioning Raptive as a top-tier network in categories such as food, family, and lifestyle.

Mark McCollum [02:12]: "We are top 10 on comscore. We're number one on big categories like food, family, lifestyle and yeah, that's us."

Raptive primarily collaborates with publishers who were traditionally known as bloggers, though many are increasingly diversifying into video content. The company supports a wide range of creators, from those generating 50,000 monthly page views to others earning millions, emphasizing that most within their network make a living through their online endeavors.

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The Impact of Google's Search Updates

The conversation shifts to the crux of the episode: the challenges posed by Google's search algorithm changes, specifically the “helpful content updates.” McCollum explains that Google has intensified its efforts to prioritize content that is most relevant and useful to users, frequently updating its algorithms to achieve this goal.

Mark McCollum [07:27]: "They are promoting content that's coming from publishers that have more scale and higher, therefore in many cases stronger reputation. And what that means is there are others who lose out on that who are kind of smaller content creators, including many in the Raptive network."

As a result, smaller and midsize publishers are experiencing a significant decline in search traffic, with estimates suggesting a potential loss of up to 25%. This shift favors larger, more established publishers, thereby exacerbating the fragmentation problem within the Connected TV (CTV) landscape.

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AI-Powered Search: A Double-Edged Sword

Mike Shields probes deeper into the ramifications of AI-driven search models. McCollum articulates that Google's move towards AI mode signifies a transition from traditional search to "answer engineering," where responses are generated directly within the search platform, reducing the necessity for users to visit external websites.

Mark McCollum [10:00]: "Google's shifting its model from being a search engine to being an answer engineering and is endeavoring to provide answers to search queries directly in Google and thereby limiting the need for users to click out to the open web."

This approach poses two major issues:

1. Copyright Infringement: Google's AI repurposes and restates copyrighted content without compensating the original creators.
2. Traffic Reduction: Publishers lose significant portions of their search traffic, threatening their sustainability.

Moreover, even when publishers' content does appear in AI-generated responses, the lack of proper attribution and occasional inaccuracies diminish the effectiveness of driving traffic back to the original sites.

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Publishing Community's Response and Legislative Hurdles

Shields inquires about the publishing industry's potential responses to these challenges, including legal actions and lobbying efforts. McCollum acknowledges the varietal approaches, noting that while some major players like The New York Times have sued entities like OpenAI, Raptive has not engaged in similar legal battles.

Mark McCollum [17:36]: "We don't have a lot of optimism that in the current administration, with the current priorities that a legislative solution."

McCollum expresses skepticism about the immediate prospects of legislative remedies, highlighting the sluggish and complex nature of governmental processes. He also underscores the necessity for collective action among publishers to fortify their position against such dominant tech platforms.

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Advertising in a Shifting Landscape

Despite the challenges in traffic, Raptive reports robust demand from advertisers. McCollum reveals that Q1 marked the strongest quarter ever for Raptive, with advertisers showing heightened interest in associating with authentic creators and lifestyle content.

Mark McCollum [22:02]: "Advertisers really like being associated with authentic creators and the lifestyle content that tends to be associated with them in the Raptive network."

This dichotomy—facing reduced traffic yet increasing advertising investment—stems from the high-quality, engaged audiences that Raptive's network offers. McCollum points out that traffic from sources other than Google, such as direct entries, Pinterest, and email newsletters, often yields better performance metrics for advertisers.

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Leveraging AI for Enhanced Advertising Solutions

To counterbalance the diminishing search traffic, Raptive is harnessing AI to innovate its advertising offerings. The introduction of Raptive Intelligence and Mindshare Targeting enables the analysis of millions of content pieces to generate detailed audience profiles based on tone, mindset, and context. This sophisticated targeting mechanism allows advertisers to effectively reach specific audience segments, enhancing the value proposition for brands.

Mark McCollum [25:00]: "We can combine that with data from all of our visits and page views and where we're getting engagement time on site ad impressions to build like really rich audience profiles that then creates mindset Personas that we can use with our advertisers in their targeting."

By employing AI-driven insights, Raptive ensures that advertisers can target the right people at the right time, fostering a symbiotic relationship where creators, advertisers, and the platform itself benefit.

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Adapting to Privacy Changes and Alternative Identifiers

Shields brings up the ongoing turmoil surrounding cookies and privacy regulations. McCollum explains that Raptive proactively invested in their own identity solution, thereby reducing dependency on third-party cookies and Google's Privacy Sandbox initiatives.

Mark McCollum [26:44]: "We build our own identity solution that we think is best in class and only available for Raptive creators. And that has, has really broken our dependency on whether or not Google's going to do anything with, with the third party cookies."

This strategic move ensures that Raptive can maintain robust data capabilities, crucial for effective targeting and monetization in a privacy-conscious digital landscape.

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Supporting Creators Through Diversification

The discussion concludes with McCollum emphasizing the importance of audience diversification for creators. Raptive assists publishers in expanding their presence across various platforms such as YouTube, Pinterest, and email newsletters, recognizing that multi-platform engagement is vital for sustained growth and resilience against algorithmic shifts.

Mark McCollum [27:43]: "They already are. Yeah. And we're helping them do that. So it's part of our business strategy to help them grow their audience on any platform because that all ultimately drives back to their overall monetization."

By fostering a diverse online presence, Raptive helps its creators mitigate the risks associated with reliance on any single traffic source, thereby ensuring long-term viability.

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Conclusion

Mark McCollum's insights paint a sobering picture of the current state of the open web, grappling with the dual challenges of dominating search algorithms and the disruptive potential of AI-driven search models. However, Raptive's proactive strategies—ranging from AI-enhanced advertising solutions to robust identity management and multi-platform support—demonstrate a resilient approach to navigating these turbulent times. For creators and publishers, the episode underscores the imperative of adaptability and innovation to thrive in an ever-evolving digital ecosystem.

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Notable Quotes:

• Mark McCollum [07:27]: "We want to be promoting website links that are most helpful to the users based on their intent and their search as well as the content on the website."
• Mark McCollum [10:00]: "Google's shifting its model from being a search engine to being an answer engineering..."
• Mark McCollum [22:02]: "Advertisers really like being associated with authentic creators and the lifestyle content..."
• Mark McCollum [26:44]: "We build our own identity solution that we think is best in class..."

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Relevant Resources:

• Raptive's Official Website: raptive.com
• One Audience Alliance by Elemental TV: elementaltv.com/1audiencealliance

For more insights and updates on the evolving media landscape, subscribe to Next in Media and stay tuned for future episodes.

Transcript

[Mike Shields]

Collaboration is a new competition. The One Audience alliance by Elemental TV unites premium publishers to tackle CTV's biggest challenge, fragmentation. By collaborating over AI powered audience insights and inventory, we're creating an ecosystem where advertisers win, publishers thrive and audiences stay engaged. Join the movement redefining [e-mail] 1audiencealliance that's E L E M E N T a l t v.com Oneaud I e n C E A A L L I A N C E this week on NEXT in Media, I spoke with Mark McCollum. He's the chief Innovation officer at Raptive, which represents thousands of small to midsize web publishers. So basically Mark and his team are on the front lines on the supposed battle for the future of the open web. He and I had a frank conversation about what sites are really facing out there as AI search becomes more prominent. Google changes the rules at time to time and brands just aren't sure what is safe anymore. It's a fascinating topic. So let's get started. Foreign welcome to NEXT to Media. I'm Mike Shields. My guest this week is Mark McCollum. He is the chief Innovation officer at Raptive. Hey Mark, how's it going? Thanks for being here.

[Mark McCollum]

Hello. Happy, happy to be here. Thanks for having me psyched to talk.

[Mike Shields]

To you because you are in the middle of a lot of interesting you are. You are here to represent the open web. If you didn't know that, I think it's probably good if you're deep in the industry, you know Raptive, but maybe not everybody does. So tell people what Raptive is.

[Mark McCollum]

Yeah, happy to. So we're a media company. We're a unique media company because we work with content creators who create content for the open web. As you mentioned, we have about 6,000 content creators in our network and we work with them to help them grow their business through monetization, helping them grow their audience, helping them grow their email newsletters, helping them tell their stories. We have a reach of around 225 million monthly uniques. We are top 10 on comscore. We're number one on big categories like food, family, lifestyle and yeah, that's us.

[Mike Shields]

And when you say creators, I think some people's minds are going to go to YouTubers. Are we talking mostly text publishers or not necessarily.

[Mark McCollum]

We're talking publishers who create content for the open web. And a lot of that is text. Right? A lot of that is writing posts and articles.

[Mike Shields]

Oh, abroad text.

[Mark McCollum]

Just what used to be often called bloggers.

[Mike Shields]

Right.

[Mark McCollum]

That's that's, that's been our core creator profile. But more and more those same creators are creating video content for their website or for, for other channels. So we don't look at it as they're mult there.

[Mike Shields]

There are multi and. And again, it's hard to generalize. You know, a lot you got partners are they are most of them. You would think of the blogger doing this in their spare time. Are most of these people making a living doing this is it range?

[Mark McCollum]

They're certainly a range, but yes, most of them make a living and many of them make a very nice living.

[Mike Shields]

Like this is their life or this is their, their career for sure.

[Mark McCollum]

On the low end, we take creators into our network that have about 50,000 monthly page views. Oh yeah. Which is still, you know, some, some level of momentum. And at that level it may be something that they're building up.

[Mike Shields]

You're not just having a, you know, one post here or there. You're, you're serious about this?

[Mark McCollum]

Absolutely. At the high end, we have creators that make millions of dollars.

[Mike Shields]

Okay. And then the obvious question I guess is why does a publisher have a chief innovation officer? Because you think of. It's unfair that like, you know, publishers are, they're not tech companies necessarily unnov. They're not. They're going to, they're not innovative. They, they kind of use the tools in the market and that's that. What. What do you do there?

[Mark McCollum]

Yeah, well, it's no secret to you or any of your listeners, I'm sure that media is in the midst of incredible disruption, has been and continues to be probably more than any other industry. In light of that, I think any media company with the scale of raptive should obviously be thinking about how to innovate to serve the creators or publishers that are part of the network as well as the audience and the advertisers. So we think it's, it's central to how we serve the market. So I spend most of my time really listening to the market. So that means spending time with our creators, our enterprise publishers, advertisers, and seeking to understand the audience that all of them serve. And then based on that, trying to find the best ways that we can efficiently differentiate in terms of how we serve our creators, in terms of like.

[Mike Shields]

What tools you should build, what ads you should promote, those like data you.

[Mark McCollum]

Should, and how to serve them. Like our, our value proposition to creators once upon a time was join our network and we'll help you make more money. And we really, you know, built this business on the back of, of programmatic advertising that has since evolved through a broad set of advertising services, including Direct. But we also realized that what creators often need is a partner who can help them really grow their business. And that means growing their audience, figuring out how to help them run their business.

[Mike Shields]

Not just an ad network, but not just developments.

[Mark McCollum]

So that's what I spent most of my time focused on. When we talk about innovation, those are the areas of focus that we prioritize.

[Mike Shields]

Interesting. Okay, so you know where I'm going with this. There's been a lot of, you know, scary headlines or dire predictions about just, you know, the open web in general. It's trouble that's doomed. Maybe we should kind of break down like what that means. There's a lot been going in the last couple years and they're all different pieces. Look, I guess we could start with what's been going on with. There's the Google search change that's happening. There's like the privacy sandbox cookie delay stuff. And then we can get into AI Everyone's. We have to get to that. But talk about something like what is going on with Google search, like the helpful update that people may or may not know.

[Mark McCollum]

Yeah, well, I mean all, all of the things you mentioned are related to each other, but, but we can definitely start with search because it's critically important to nearly every creator and publisher and over the last two decades has become the primary source of traffic across the open web.

[Mike Shields]

For a time it was social and that really has changed.

[Mark McCollum]

It has. And you know, across the raptive network, probably about 58% of traffic into our 6,000 websites comes from Google. So it's important to, to all of these individual content creators. It's important to our business and it's important to most big media companies who have a large presence on the open web. And you're right, Mike, it's definitely been an area of change and disruption really over time, but certainly over the last couple of years. You mentioned the helpful content updates. Google has always routinely done periodic algorithm updates to make sure that it's continuing to promote and reward the sites that have the most relevance and usefulness to its users. It's begun doing that on a more frequent basis and doing it in a way that's driving more change than in the past through what they've called their helpful content updates. And the goals of that are something that I think most of us will be aligned to. We want to be promoting website links that are most helpful to the users based on their intent and their search as well as the content on the website.

[Mike Shields]

You're not, you're not in their head. But do you. What is your understanding of what was. What's bought like this very much to me reminds me of the demand media era where Google was. They didn't like that. They didn't love the idea that publishers were sort of playing the search or gaming it and create and building a business off of content that they felt was not that high quality or not worthy of an advertiser's time or user's time. Is this a similar dynamic? What are they worried about when they try and make these helpful updates?

[Mark McCollum]

Well, you're right, I'm not in their head. So I don't know what, what they've said publicly and what, you know, what we've kind of seen in the market is that they are promoting content that's coming from publishers that have more scale and higher, therefore in many cases stronger reputation. And what that means is there are others who lose out on that who are kind of smaller content creators, including many in the raptive network. Now, like we said at the beginning of the conversation, we have a broad range, including some who are relatively big and they have continued to see strong traffic. But certainly throughout our network we've seen some of the midsize and smaller sites really be hit hard.

[Mike Shields]

And why again I keep interrupting. I'm sorry. I can understand if Google is trying to use this kind of thing to root out made for advertising sites or AI slop, why hit. I would think they want to champion publishers with real audiences. Right. Is this an unintended consequence or they really want to root out like small publishers for some reason?

[Mark McCollum]

It's hard to know. I agree with you that that should be their intention. That's not what we see. The other thing that that's happened through these helpful content updates is pretty obvious promotion of forums, most prominently Reddit.

[Mike Shields]

Reddit, Right, right. If you Reddit is all over your search results these days, that started with.

[Mark McCollum]

The helpful content updates and that is has definitely taken search traffic away from publishers who, who create original content outside of the forums. Reddit as, as you may know, did a big deal with Google about a year ago to make their content available for AI. That was around the same time that Google started promoting Reddit content in the search results. It's hard to know what may have driven that, but that's something we've seen. You bring this up though, and it's interesting to talk about the helpful content updates, but really that's like scratching the surface when it comes to search and the changes in search and our real concern is around what Google is doing with AI.

[Mike Shields]

So let's get into that because you've, you know, there's a general, the, the, the general thinking of AI search is going to change. The, the, the era of a million links to I'm going to get an answer or a couple of links, but it's going to be much harder for the third page of results to show up anymore. And that's, you know, publishers have been either fighting this or cutting checks to Google. There was a story in Axios, I think it was last week, about how AI searches are up for publishers, but not, they're not making up for the loss in traffic. So are you seeing among your publishers, are they freaking out? Is this a problem? What's going on?

[Mark McCollum]

Yes, it's a problem. It's absolutely a problem. And it's one of several problems. I mean if you look at what Google has implemented in AI overviews and what they have in their experimentation labs, which is called AI mode, both of them like very clearly suggest that Google's shifting its model from being a search engine to being an answer engineering and is endeavoring to provide answers to search queries directly in Google and thereby limiting the need for users to click out to the open web. That's problematic for a few reasons. I'll start just with the fundamental challenge, which is copyright infringement. They are taking copyrighted content that has been originally produced and copyrighted by the individual publishers and creators out on the open web and they're repurposing it and restating it for their own commercial purpose and in doing so cutting the producer of that copyrighted content, their creators and publishers, completely out of any commercial opportunity related to their work that they published. So that in and of itself is entirely problematic.

[Mike Shields]

Programmatic problematic.

[Mark McCollum]

Yes, problematic. But beyond that is creating and has the opportunity to create even more havoc for publishers of all sizes and particularly those that are kind of mid and small who really losing 25% or more of their search traffic would put them out of business.

[Mike Shields]

That's not good for anybody. But that's brutal if you're a mid sized publisher. Small.

[Mark McCollum]

Exactly. And then the bigger ones face the same type of challenge I mentioned, 25%. We've done a bunch of analysis because we have 6,000 websites in our network. We have probably the best data set of anybody in terms of how traffic's flowing on the Internet. And as we see these changes come through, we can see the impacts. And our early analysis suggested if AI overviews fully rolled out, it would impact about 25% of search traffic to the open web would just be obliterated.

[Mike Shields]

Putting aside, I'm assuming most of your publishers are not in the news business, so like maybe putting that aside, is it hitting anyone in particular? Like is it killing the food blogger? But fine for travel or is it, or is it hurting everybody?

[Mark McCollum]

It's hurting everybody. You mentioned travel. That is probably the worst hit industry at this point, but we're seeing a hit travel, gaming, sports, family, music, any kind of like evergreen or lifestyle content that you know is very suitable for an AI response. The challenge of course practically is you have the AI response which in many cases will just satisfy what the user was looking for, even if it is copy infringement. And then secondly is just the lack of attribution or accurate attribution. So even with the AI response, sometimes they'll list links, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they list the wrong links. And if the user decides to click out, it's certainly at a much lower frequency than they did before.

[Mike Shields]

So even if one of your publishers does make it into the answer in some, some respect, it can be wrong. Or not, not, not even that. It's not even that helpful.

[Mark McCollum]

That's right. Or you know, we, we see cases where they'll show an AI response that is verbatim quoting one of our creators, but then the attribution link is actually going out to is wrong. Okay, so, so you know that they have some more to do to, to continue to refine the product. And you know, I'm sure some of these challenge will be challenges will be cleaned up over time. But what's obvious is that fundamentally Google is looking to keep more and more of their users inside of Google's platform rather than sending them out to the open web.

[Mike Shields]

I'm going to come back to Google in one sec, but are you, this is. I'm going to ask several naive questions because you said Google is like 58% of traffic. It's really important. Are you seeing the same kind of AI impact on Bing or are you seeing any kind of, you know, from chat GDP or the Chinese one deep sea. Are you seeing any, any upside? Like are other sources coming on stronger or.

[Mark McCollum]

No, no. And if you think about all of their business models are around answering the question, it's the same.

[Mike Shields]

Yeah, it's the same problem.

[Mark McCollum]

Even if usage is shifting from Google to ChatGPT or Google whatever. Yeah, or whatever. Those platforms are also built around keeping the user inside their platform. And listen, they all have, or most of them have links to websites. And we see traffic come through those smaller platforms or those emerging platforms, but it's tiny for us. Like less than 0.2% of our overall traffic is coming through these emerging AI platforms. I don't think that correlates to usage. I think usage is actually much higher. But those platforms by design are not meant to send traffic out to the Internet the way Google search.

[Mike Shields]

That's not what they. Google was built to do that. That's what it is. Yeah. Or that's what it was for 20 years. Okay, a couple more stupid questions. So, you know, every publisher's had different reactions like the Times has sued OpenAI. Right. Others or others have made deals. Reddit cut them a check. Are you in that any sort of position to either take them to court, pay them, which seems like it's not the right way this should work, but it's that seem work for Reddit or you know, some other kind of alternative like do you have any leverage or financial wherewithal to do that kind of thing?

[Mark McCollum]

Yeah, I mean you, you kind of just ran through the, the options or, or, or most of the options. You know, start by just saying like Google has not done any deals with any publishers outside of Reddit. And while the terms of that deal are not disclosed, I don't think it was Reddit paying Google as you suggested. I think Google is paying Reddit a licensing fee for their content. That's our understanding, but we don't know for sure. Some of the other platforms have done deals with publishing companies, but Google has not only read it as far as, as far as we know, based on our experience talking to them, they don't seem willing to entertain doing that more broadly. So that's that option. The lawsuit option, as you mentioned, is certainly one to consider. And there are some big players like you mentioned who are actively doing that or through our knowledge exploring doing that. And for us, it's fair to say, like all options like that should be on the table. There's pros and cons to a big lawsuit and then the third kind of path for remedy, something that might be handed down by the government.

[Mike Shields]

That was my next question. Can you. It's very ironic we're talking about this in the middle of Google potentially getting broken up.

[Mark McCollum]

That's right.

[Mike Shields]

For other alleged abuses of the publishing community. So can you appeal to lawmakers? Will that take 20 years to have any fruit like what is, what's going on here?

[Mark McCollum]

We spent, the raptive leadership team spent a good bit of time in D.C. last year exploring this both with legislators and, and regulators. And it's no surprise to you or anyone listening to this podcast. I'm sure that the, the climate in D.C. is, has shifted quite a bit since last year and is also, you know, focused on other priorities right now. Fair to say so, you know, we, we don't have a lot of optimism that in the, the current administration, with the current priorities that a legislative solution.

[Mike Shields]

What about the states? Can you, can you go to California and make a big stink about this? Does that kind of thing work?

[Mark McCollum]

Certainly all of that can be on the table and it's all, you know, things that take time, energy, focus, and is kind of best done when there's multiple publishers who are aligned and making the same asks together.

[Mike Shields]

So, okay, so there's all these big, you know, existential threats where you're in a very negative tone. You know, there was, you know, when Google first became really important, all of a sudden you had this rise of this SEO business cottage industry. Is there anything similar? Can you do stuff to your sites to make sure you become the answer in these, in these newer engines? Is that a fool's errand? Like what can you do to.

[Mark McCollum]

I don't think it's a fool's errand, but it's certainly not something that's understood with the same level of sophistication as SEO is these days. But you know, our understanding and we have an awesome SEO team at Raptive, I think the best in the business. And as they look at it, and as we look at it, what seems to be true is that the same principles that drive success in, in the search algorithms tend to drive success in the AI. And that is authentic content that's high quality from a trusted source with high authority that's been produced recently.

[Mike Shields]

User experience, links out, those kind of things matter.

[Mark McCollum]

All of that. I mean, the user experience on the site matters less because the, you know, Google's not sending you to the site, right?

[Mike Shields]

It doesn't matter. Yeah, it's true. Why does that matter if you're not.

[Mark McCollum]

Going there and things like that. But what we believe right now, based on kind of the limited data set that we have over the last year, you know, creators and publishers who produce high quality content are the most likely to show up in those AI responses. But again, the showing up in the AI response doesn't mean the same thing because an AI response is lucrative from multiple sources put back together in kind of Google's own language. And then, you know, there may or may not be attribution links.

[Mike Shields]

It doesn't equal traffic, which equals revenue. Or it has historically.

[Mark McCollum]

That's, that's exactly right.

[Mike Shields]

Okay, so all this being said, what, what's kind of going on with advertising? You know, it's, it's an interesting time. The digital media, Digital advertising is still growing. A nice clip. Let's put aside the crazy tariff moment we're in if we can. But you know, there is this feeling like, okay, do brands care about the open web? Are they going to keep funneling money there? You know, but then there's hopeful signs like, well, if the, if we bring retail media to the table or data or to the table or all these new identifiers, maybe there's, there's, there's a way to kind of keep monetization rolling. So that's a lot of, a lot of questions. What's kind of the state of advertising amidst this traffic? Haircut, are you, are your publishers struggling? Are they doing okay? What's going on?

[Mark McCollum]

So definitely putting the, the, the terror. Yeah. Into the world conversation aside, because I do think that's going to introduce a new variable. But if it's, it's so new, it's, it's hard to know exactly how that's going to play out. So let's put that aside. As you said, we're seeing very strong demand from advertisers. Probably the, the strongest we've ever seen on, on our direct sales side. You know, we just had our strongest quarter ever in Q1. We are, our, our team is actively closing campaigns for, for Q2 and, and beyond. Advertisers really like being associated with authentic creators and, and the lifestyle content that tends to be associated with them in, in the raptive network. So why.

[Mike Shields]

So that, that, that makes so sense to me. Other than this, it seems contradictory to this stuff we all just talked about like, oh, you're losing traffic. It's a bad. Why, why are, why are you, other than you have a great sales team and, or you're a great content. Why is this. Why are brands coming to you more? What's working?

[Mark McCollum]

Well, I think you, the risk that we spent the last 10, 15 minutes talking about certainly impact traffic and therefore from an advertiser's perspective, it potentially impacts the reach of a campaign.

[Mike Shields]

Yeah, you look, you look smaller at top score. You have a few impressions. Right.

[Mark McCollum]

It doesn't impact the quality of the content or the impact and performance of advertising when it's on that site. In fact, the traffic that we pull in from other sources outside of Just Google tends to perform for advertisers even better because it's even higher intense. So traffic that's coming in from direct entry or coming in from platforms like Pinterest or email newsletter campaigns and so forth really performs for our advertisers. The other thing that we spend a lot of time trying to understand just given the focus of our business is the value of open web advertising versus social. And in particular when we think about creators you mentioned earlier, oftentimes people think about YouTubers and while that's certainly true, but we found, we did a survey study last year with Nielsen, 58% of people who are 18 to 34 feel a stronger connection to a creator that they follow on the open web than to their real life friends. So that that to us indicated that.

[Mike Shields]

I think that's positive unless that means.

[Mark McCollum]

Don'T have good friends, assuming their real life friends are good friends. 50% of our survey respondents said they found open web creators more inspiring, uplifting, useful and trusted than social. So like we're seeing, we're getting that type of response from the market and advertisers are responding to it. We also have, we talked about AI as it relates to traffic and the risk to our business, but we're also using AI to drive value in the business and in particular in our advertiser offerings. In particular, we have recently launched a new product that we call Raptive Intelligence and Mindshare Targeting. And it essentially analyzes all of the content in our network. We have about 5 million unique pieces of content across our network and across each of those pieces of content understands the tone, the mindset, the context of both the creator and the reader when they're engaging in that content. And then we combine that with data from all of our visits and page views and where we're getting engagement time on site ad impressions to build like really rich audience profiles that then creates mindset Personas that we can use with our advertisers in their targeting.

[Mike Shields]

So not just we have a bunch of food lifestyle but we have like we you can quantify a 10 intent or where, where a person is in their funnel journey.

[Mark McCollum]

People are on certain pages that they tend to be in certain moments of shopping intent or certain moments of mindset that appeal to certain advertisers. And we can only do that because number one the scale of the raptive network which is you got to have.

[Mike Shields]

A lot of data to make that.

[Mark McCollum]

And then secondly the AI tools that we've introduced to be able to do this in what two years ago we could have done and we're doing in some ways, but it was highly manual and was leveraging more like data science versus true AI. And now we're able to leverage AI to do this at scale rapidly and in real time to help advertisers target the right people, right sites at the right time. They're willing to pay a premium for it. So it's a win for our advertisers, it's a win for our creators, and it's a win for raptive.

[Mike Shields]

That's gonna be hard to ask you to sum all this up in one short answer, but. What, what? Given that makes total sense, you're leaning into that.

[Mark McCollum]

What?

[Mike Shields]

How much have you been impacted by the roller coaster of cookies? No cookies and or Google's sandbox supposed solution or these new identities? Are you living and dying to run your business or make a decision for your business on one of one or the other or all of them or not anymore?

[Mark McCollum]

I think a year and a half we would have said yes to that question. And because of all the cookie are they or aren't they? That's been happening over the last couple of years. We invested in our own identity solution and in doing that, you know, you.

[Mike Shields]

Didn'T jump in with like one of the alternative IDs out there necessarily.

[Mark McCollum]

We have, we have partnerships across, across the market and leverage data from, from different industry partners. But we build our own identity solution that we think is best in class and only available for raptive creators. And that has, has really broken our dependency on whether or not Google's going to do anything with, with the third party cookies. So we're, we're feeling that that risk has been mitigated in our business.

[Mike Shields]

Last thing I know we're jumping around quite a bit but you know, given this, the uncertainty we're talking about all these changes. Again, hard to generalize, we have so many different creators. But are you seeing, do you think you're going to see a lot of them? Sh. I'm gonna, I need to have an email newsletter. I need to be much bigger on YouTube. I'm gonna go all in on Pinterest or something versus I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing, which was a traditional blogger thing that is harder to make a living on. I don't know.

[Mark McCollum]

They already are. Yeah. And we're helping them do that. So it's, it's part of our business strategy to help them grow their audience on any platform because that all ultimately drives back to their overall monetization. Right. So yes, they need to diversify, which.

[Mike Shields]

Is not easy for everybody to do.

[Mark McCollum]

Right.

[Mike Shields]

If you're take it from me.

[Mark McCollum]

And by the way, each platform is its own story. We could do a 30 minute episode on each platform here. But you know, Pinterest continues to be a great platform for our creators. I Malik Ducard on your podcast, he's a great friend of Raptive. We collaborate with them to find ways to help creators serve audience. They're also dealing with a lot of AI challenges with the content that's being produced there and we're trying to work with them to help help to remedy that. But Pinterest is a big one. You mentioned email newsletters. We work with creators to help them build out their email newsletters, capture as many subscribers as they can have. The best, most compelling email content that drives really high CPMs when users come directly from a newsletter with, with high intent. We're helping them build their brand across lots of platforms. You mentioned YouTube. We have a team focus only on YouTube at Raptive to help creators build their YouTube networks because we know that helps them build their brand, that helps them build their brand recognition and then that, that flows through to the performance of their websites. So we're.

[Mike Shields]

You just can't escape Google. They're killing you.

[Mark McCollum]

One it's, it's impossible, right, to do all of those things and have it make up for right. 60% of your business. As you know, the average Raptive creator has.

[Mike Shields]

Well, Mark, super fascinating stuff. Thank you so much for your time. Let's, let's talk again down the road because this is going to be an evolving story over time.

[Mark McCollum]

Yeah, thanks for having me.

[Mike Shields]

Thanks again to my guest this week, Raptive's Mark McCollum and my partners at Elemental TV. If you like this week's episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button. We'll see you next time for more with next in Media. Thanks for listening.