SODP Dispatch - 28 July 2023

Admiral VRM review, supply side platforms (SSPs) explained, and more tips and news for digital publishers

Author

State of Digital Publishing
July 28, 2023

Happy Friday!

Today, let’s discuss advertising strategies – or, often times, lack thereof – targeting older generations. A recent report from UK independent media agency The Kite Factory found that while over 55s are 2.5 times wealthier than other age groups, they’re also less likely to be targeted by advertisers. Despite more money in the bank and higher discretionary spending, ad spend was mostly aimed at the younger end of the market.

Our managing editor, Andrew Kemp, discusses the subject in his weekly Editor’s Note column:

The best part of any conference, at least to me, is when delegates get to chat amongst themselves and share their “war stories”.

I found myself caught up in one such conversation last year with a publisher whose primary audience consisted of those either in retirement or in the process of doing so. He explained that advertisers refused to pay much attention to his readership demographic, despite their higher disposable incomes.

Now, despite being as far from an expert on the retiree publishing niche as you could imagine, even I could understand that simple logic of targeting people who most likely owned their home outright, didn’t have any dependents and had lots of free time and money to splurge.

I’ll be honest though, I haven’t spent too much time thinking of that subject, except for whenever new articles popped up about digital publishers’ ongoing quest for the next generation of young adults’ acceptance and patronage.

But a growing industry awareness over the underwhelming volume of advertising dollars being poured into campaigns targeting older demographics has brought the subject front and center for me once more.

Given that Baby Boomers and Gen Xers have all the money, the constant pursuit of younger audiences strikes me as an … intriguing strategy. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that being an elder millennial (and not a geriatric millennial as some would opine) has definitely colored my perspective on some issues. But that doesn’t make my point any less true.

The older generations hold most of the world’s wealth and power. A quick look at the average age of newly hired CEOs in the US and we can see that it has been trending upwards since 2005, hitting 54 years in 2018.

FROM STATE OF DIGITAL PUBLISHING

——— SPONSORED ———

ADMIRAL VRM REVIEW FOR 2023

Ad blockers have proliferated rapidly since the first iteration appeared nearly 30 years ago. Nearly 36% of internet users between the ages of 16 and 64 use an ad blocker for some of their online activities.

Given that the average publisher loses around a fifth of their potential ad revenue to such software, according to some industry estimates, media companies can ill afford to turn a blind eye to this issue.

But what are publishers without much in-house technological expertise supposed to do?

Admiral, a visitor relationship management (VRM) company that was founded eight years ago, believes it has the answer to that very question.

Given that major publishers already use Admiral’s VRM platform, think CNBC and the Washington Times, we’ve gone hands on with it to understand how easy and affordable it is for smaller players to begin clawing back some that lost 20% of revenue.

ADVERTISING
WHAT IS A SUPPLY SIDE PLATFORM (SSP)? A GUIDE FOR PUBLISHERS

Of all the online advertising tools and technologies that have emerged, supply-side platforms (SSPs) arguably remain some of the most important for digital publishers.

SSPs, along with demand-side platforms (DSPs) and ad exchanges, have transformed the advertising industry — making it more automated, efficient and data-driven. These key programmatic advertising components have allowed publishers to move from manually selling ad impressions to advertisers to real-time auctions.

Such advancements have seen programmatic display ad spend soar over the last decade, from $3.9 billion in 2012 to an estimated $147.1 billion in 2021. Global programmatic ad spend as a whole, meanwhile, is projected to climb from $418.4 billion in 2021 to $493 billion in 2022.

Join us as we explore what an SSP is, understand how it works, its benefits and drawbacks as well as how it differs from a DSP.

RECOMMENDED NEWSLETTERS

Receive must-read creator economy news. Every. Day. Learn more

Discover how to build, grow, and monetize any digital content with Niche Media Publishing’s weekly newsletter. Learn more

Every Friday, receive the week’s 10 best resources to help you generate more income. Learn more

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

Barry Adams shares some interesting aspects of Googlebot's crawling of news websites that are useful to know when you want to optimise crawl efficiency. Learn more

Connor Gillivan shares his strategy for upgrading sites with SEO ranking #5-20 to #1. Learn more

SEOTesting.com is a neat tool that allows you to set up time-based SEO tests. Learn more

BITE-SIZED INDUSTRY NEWS

TRENDS
Google says 2 billion logged in monthly users are watching YouTube Shorts. Read more

MONETIZATION
Substack announced that writers on its platform have collectively earned more than $1.2 million from reader "pledges," or financial commitments to writers made before they turn their paywalls on. Read more

BUSINESS OF DIGITAL PUBLISHING
The Guardian reports revenue up 3.4% YoY to £264.4M for FY ending March 31, 2023, digital reader revenue grew 7.6%, and digital makes up 70% of total revenue. Read more

AI
Memo: an Insider executive editor updates staff on AI experiments and recommends not using AI tools for quoting facts, data analysis, or getting up-to-date info. Read more

AI
Microsoft expands Bing AI chatbot and AI search copilot features beyond Microsoft Edge and the Bing app to select users on Google Chrome. Read more

BUSINESS OF DIGITAL PUBLISHING
Canada's smaller news outlets, like Cabin Radio, the Northwest Territories' only entirely-online news organization, worry about the Online News Act's impact. Read more