The Value of Independent Publishers
Learning to Trust the Long Tail
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The Value of Independent Publishers
Our latest Guided Discussion — The Value of the Independent Publisher — brought together the industry’s top minds to consider if websites outside of the top 500 Comscore properties are crucial to unlocking unique audiences or if they should be lumped together as “the Long Tail,” a nebulous place for marketers’ ad spend.
Recorded on November 1, 2023, the panelists included Chris Kane of Jounce Media, Lara Koenig of MiQ, Amanda Martin of Mediavine, and Rocky Moss of DeepSee.io; the discussion aimed to shed light on Made-for-Advertising content — a topic that’s been lurking in industry reports and ad news for months.
Defining The Long Tail
The discussion moderator Jenny Guy opened up the webinar with the question of the hour; how do you define the long tail? And the responses, while varied, concluded that these are sites/publishers unknown to media buyers and marketers.
- Sites without strong name recognition
- Websites outside of the Comscore 500
- Sites a media buyer would never individually inspect
- The last 20% of ad spend is long tail inventory
- Any site that doesn’t get past an inclusion list from a brand or agency
How can brand advertisers trust the sites they don’t know?
“In the long tail, the uniqueness of the content is really important. There are a lot of sites that are now coming up that exist only to sort of repurpose content that exists out there. We really need to find a way to incentivize new and interesting content because I think that’s one of the great sort of promises of independent publishing.”
– Rocky Moss, DeepSee.io
“We have to be good governors of quality supply, so that buyers can have confidence in it. And I think that’s what Mediavine does for independent publishers too because the buy-side does not have the capability to go all the way down long tail. It’s just not feasible.”
– Amanda Martin, Mediavine
Quality content exists beyond household publisher names.
The Future of the Open Web
“The reality is the household name publishers that have a print history are not the future of the web. They’re probably not even the current state of the web. The reality of the web is that when you want to find a chili recipe, you find one on a website you’ve never heard of but it’s a great piece of content. I think media buyers are wrestling with how to find the right barrier to entry so that [they are] reaching into what we’re calling the long tail here [while] also protecting [their] investments from opportunistic publishers.”
– Chris Kane, Jounce Media
The industry needs to work together to define made-for-advertising content and sites
“From the buy-side, the biggest thing that’s been helpful is to actually start to share different lists of what constitutes MFA across the industry…The real value for us came out when we were actually having calls and debating whether certain sites were or were not MFAs because that helps bridge together a stricter definition for us.”
– Lara Koenig, MiQ
Recognize the disproportionate harm MFA has on diverse business owners
“Publishers, to my knowledge, don’t have any good mechanism to understand how different vendors classify the brand safety/suitability of their industry. I’ve [also] heard some concerns that the MFA blocklist may disproportionately harm diverse media businesses and that’s a real concern that needs to be taken seriously. We maintain a list of about 6,000 websites with diverse ownership; 0.2% of the bid requests on those sites we currently classify as MFA. 20% of bid requests on the rest of the web we classify as MFA. At least based on our analysis, diverse media is 100 times less likely to be classified as MFA as the rest of the web.”
– Chris Kane, Jounce Media
How does this impact the future of the internet?
“I want to see independent voices be elevated and be financially rewarded for their efforts. Maybe that means because they’re working with a partner like Mediavine who helps them elevate their high quality website that may be in the long tail. But we’re definitely in sort of an existential place where we’re either going to optimize towards who can create the most sites with the most seemingly accurate information, or who can find a way to help independent publishers monetize their websites in the long term.”
– Rocky Moss, DeepSee.io
“Ideally, in the future, we find a balance of ad experience, consumer opt-in that gives brands [and users] a good feeling all around. I hope publishers feel good because they’re still monetizing their independent, legitimate content that they’ve created.”
– Lara Koenig, MiQ
“Publishers are going to have a really rough go. It’s gonna be really, really hard to be a small, independent media company. And it’s not clear to me what happens there. It’s not clear to me how you solve that as a good market publisher unless you either merge with the big publisher or join a sales house, and those are both pretty unattractive options for mid-market culture. So that’s the one that I’m concerned about. But I would say that raising the barrier to entry by marketers moving to inclusion lists is… a generally healthy thing.”
– Chris Kane, Jounce Media
“I think we have a drive right now in our industry with privacy and regulation that should be teaching our industry to put the consumer and the visitor to the website and to the brand experience first. And my hope, my idealistic world, would be that our industry would start leading with technology advancements for that end consumer versus everybody in the middle and that, if we created really great advertising experiences, the bad actors wouldn’t win and the consumers would.”
– Amanda Martin, Mediavine
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