After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
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Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#2“The fact that we are no longer offering behavioral targeting options in Europe does not seem to be in the way of what advertisers want to do with us,” he said. “The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities. We have not been impacted from a revenue standpoint, and, on the contrary, our digital advertising business continues to grow nicely.”
I wonder if smaller sites could do the same thing or this is only working so well because they're the NYT?
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#3This is the thing the ad industry really didn't want people to discover: what if the behavioural and personalised targeting wasn't actually worth the cost?
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#4The likely process at play here is cutting out the middle man from ad placement.
Before GDPR, a company would have likely contacted an ad agency to target the population that reads the NYT. Ads would then be sold to a pool of websites that included the NYT. After GDPR, this is no longer possible as the individual websites have stopped sharing targeting information with the ad agency. The only solution available to the same company is then to buy directly from the NYT (and maybe a few other big websites) rather than “syndicate” the ads through the agency.
It would be interesting to know how ad placements changed pre/post GDPR and how the ad revenue distribution shifted across different websites.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#5This is the thing the ad industry really didn't want people to discover: what if the behavioural and personalised targeting wasn't actually worth the cost?
I hope that whole industry just dies and the hordes of wasted software engineers can instead be used on something that actually adds value to society.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#6I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none, negligible or even unfavorable to targeted. Sure, NYT is not enough data to be significant, especially when compensating for my confirmation bias, but I would really like to see more sites stop tracking, at least from an ethical standpoint.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#7“The fact that we are no longer offering behavioral targeting options in Europe does not seem to be in the way of what advertisers want to do with us,” he said. “The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities. We have not been impacted from a revenue standpoint, and, on the contrary, our digital advertising business continues to grow nicely.” I wonder if smaller sites could do the same th…
The Times has a large readership and potential ad draw in the E.U. Regulations would have to be ridiculous to make it unprofitable for the Times to abandon Europe. The Los Angeles Times, on the other hand, has few European users. The fixed cost of re-tooling (or, if already in compliance, even just accepting the regulatory risk) would be difficult to justify relative to other potential investments.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#8This is the thing the ad industry really didn't want people to discover: what if the behavioural and personalised targeting wasn't actually worth the cost?
The ad industry mostly already knows that. I would pay $4-6 CPM to run a behavioral campaign that barely filled and rarely performed. It was almost always more efficient to be at $0.75 cpm with simple contextual targeting, ie. publisher reported content category against a tight site list. The data is pretty much shit, and the way its sourced is fully opaque to the advertiser. It was pulling teeth to even find a one-sheet describing most data sources.
Few pubs can afford a direct sales team facing the EU, but I think most publishers would jump at the chance to have direct revenue and pull ad exchanges in a heartbeat. Policing exchanges for malware and junk creative is a full time job publishers shouldn't have to do, but ultimately they are held accountable for whatever the exchanges pushes their way.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#9This is the thing the ad industry really didn't want people to discover: what if the behavioural and personalised targeting wasn't actually worth the cost?
I hope that whole industry just dies and the hordes of wasted software engineers can instead be used on something that actually adds value to society.
And all the other software developers working on things directly and indirectly funded by that industry should what?
Take up knitting?
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#10“The fact that we are no longer offering behavioral targeting options in Europe does not seem to be in the way of what advertisers want to do with us,” he said. “The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities. We have not been impacted from a revenue standpoint, and, on the contrary, our digital advertising business continues to grow nicely.” I wonder if smaller sites could do the same th…
The Times has a large readership and potential ad draw in the E.U. Regulations would have to be ridiculous to make it unprofitable for the Times to abandon Europe. The Los Angeles Times , on the other hand, has few European users. The fixed cost of re-tooling (or, if already in compliance, even just accepting the regulatory risk) would be difficult to justify relative to other potential investments.
It's either a one-time investment, or a permanent loss of a (perhaps small) part of your users.
Perhaps it doesn't make sense for the LA Times, but I'm wondering how large the investment really is and whether or not it would start getting worth it if you look at (say) 3 or 5 year periods.