Google’s DoubleClick announced today the ability to include video with both mobile and desktop native ads. This is important considering that more than half of all ad queries on DoubleClick’s publisher platform are on mobile.
“With the addition of video to our native ads solution, publishers can now capture premium video advertising budgets on their non-video content,” said Jonathan Bellack, DoubleClick’s Director of Product Management of Publisher Platforms.
Chris Quinn, Head of Commercial Operations at Kijiji, which is a subsidiary of eBay, commented on their tests with native ad video:
“The [DoubleClick] native video templates — content and app-install — enable Kijiji to give our advertisers an alternative to banner and static native. We were excited about the ability to run assets seamlessly without embedded video players, which will hopefully give us a jumpstart in the video space. Testing has just begun across our iOS app, and we look forward to seeing positive results and potentially incorporating into our greater offering in 2017.”
DoubleClick Extends Exchange Bidding to Mobile
DoubleClick has also expanded the beta of Exchange Bidding to include mobile apps.
“Exchange Bidding helps publishers maximize demand for every impression by letting them put multiple exchanges into competition in real time without adding any new client-side code,” said Quinn. “Since we announced it earlier this year, the number of participating publishers has grown 4x, the number of exchange partners has doubled, and we’ve moved the product from alpha into closed beta in the US.”
Christian Sieweke, Senior Product Manager at Smaato, commented on their use of Exchange Bidding:
“By integrating directly with DoubleClick for Publishers, Smaato can compete in real time for ad impressions based on price and priority, in parallel with other exchanges. We’re delighted to be an early participant in Exchange Bidding and look forward to expanding this solution to all of our partners.”
DoubleClick Extends Dynamic Ad Insertion To VOD
They also announced that they were extending Dynamic Ad Insertion to video on demand (VOD). Dynamic Ad Insertion delivers seamless, personalized ad experiences to all screens, especially TV.
“Publishers like A+E Networks are now inserting relevant, highly targeted ads into both long- and short-form VOD content across all devices, and delivering personalized ads while eliminating common pain points like buffering,” noted Bellack. “This feature will be capable of serving both direct-sold and programmatic campaigns – in both cases delivering smarter, data-driven ads that perform better.”
“Ad-pocalypse Now? I Think Not!” exclaimed Steve Chester, Director of Data and Industry Programmes at the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB UK). Adblocking is the cause of huge headaches for internet publishers, gaming companies and advertisers.
It’s a huge problem and many in the industry think that it’s immoral, illegal, anti free speech and is killing journalism. Some also point to one positive that was spawned by adblocking, making sites leaner and more enjoyable to the consumer. Adblocking has forced publishers and advertisers, however unfairly, to own up to their own faults.
This report is designed to bring perspective to the rise of adblockers and how they are impacting the internet ecosystem and what the future is likely to bring.
Some in the industry are exasperated that we continue to let adblockers have such a negative impact on publishing and advertising.
“The reason it has to happen is just like video didn’t kill the radio star and just like Netflix hasn’t killed live TV and just like Napster never killed music, adblocking will not be allowed to kill journalism,” stated Anna Hickey, Managing Director Maxus UK at the 2016 Shift conference. “Journalism is too important to us culturally and economically and we all have our part to play in making sure that it survives.”
“Why did we lose track of user experience?” asks IAB President Randall Rothenberg. “For much of the past decade, the digital ad industry, aided and abetted by venture capitalists with no long-term stake in the viability of media and marketing businesses, have been in a headlong rush to subvert industry standards, hoping they can own the single business model that can lock in proprietary advantage and lock out competitors in the $600 billion global ad industry.”
As Much as 40% of Ads Are Blocked
“Where is it heading and will it actually be more of a storm in a teacup when we look back on this or is it the beginning of a major reform of the advertising ecosystem?” asked Rufus Olins, CEO at Newsworks, a UK based marketing body for national newspapers. “Adblocking is a key topic for this industry and it continues to develop as an issue not just in the UK but around the world.”
A March 2016 IAB/YouGov study on the state of ad blocking in the U.K. shows that 22% of British adults currently use adblocking software, up from 18% in their Oct. 2015 study. According to “The Cost of Ad Blocking” 2015 report by PageFair and Adobe (PDF), 16% of the US online population blocked ads during Q2 2015, which is just slightly less than in the UK, and at this point in August 2016 is likely the same or higher than the UK.
An IAB study in 2014 paints a much grimmer picture, concluding that over a third of US users, and 41% of Millennials, had installed ad-blocking software. The main reason people was a concern that advertising could infect their computers or smartphones with viruses. However, more than two-thirds also believed that advertising slowed interrupted their online experience and slowed them down.
40% THINK They’re Using an Ad Blocker, 26% Actually Are
According to a July 2016 IAB report, “Ad Blocking: Who Blocks Ads, Why and How to Win Them Back” (PDF), the actual number of consumers blocking ads is 26%. Many people think they are using adblock software when they are simply blocking popups.
This recent IAB report says that most adblock users are men 18-34 years old and that these same men make up the 15% of smart phone users that block ads.
Of consumers not blocking ads, 20% are past adblockers that were motivated by publishers who are blocking their content from them. The study also found that 17% of users not blocking ads may do so in the future.
So, why do people block ads? The study concluded the obvious, that consumers using ad blockers, want uninterrupted, quick browsing and a streamlined user experience. There is a perception that sites are easier to navigate without ads. This is also true for mobile phone users with adblockers.
The most annoying ads; Ads that block content, long video ads before short videos, ads that follow down the page as the user scrolls and auto-start ads. The main difference between people who use adblockers and those that don’t is that they are simply less tolerant of ads.
Adblocking Costs $12.1 Billion Now and by 2020 it will be $27 Billion
According to The Drum News adblocking will cost US publishers $12.1 billion in lost display ad revenues. Optimal.com predicts that this will is 23.8% of total earnings.
A new study from Juniper Research estimates that online publishers will lose over $27 billion by 2020, which will account for almost 10% of the total digital advertising market.
Is Adblocking Stealing?
Rufus Olins hosted a session on adblocking at the 2016 Shift Conference in London. The session looked at where adblocking would be in 5 years and how it would impact online publishing and advertising and whether or not adblocking would put us all out of a job, as Piers North put it.
North equates adblocking to literally stealing, the same as someone breaking into his house and taking property. “As we speak there are tens of thousands of people coming into our properties and consuming our content and there is no value exchange, absolutely none,” said North. “Should I be worried about that? Can I do anything about it? Is it worth me doing anything about it?”
“Adblocking continues to grow and if we do nothing about it, it will continue eating into our audiences and therefore taking away revenues from publishers and also take away audience from agencies and brands,” North said.
Adblockers Are Profiteers Holding Us For Ransom
“Adblocking has reached a tipping point,” said Hickey. “We know this because, bizarrely enough, adblocking was featured in an episode of South Park recently, which is very odd. Adblocking is literally being written about in hundreds and thousands of articles, but the thing that i think is not being spoken about enough is the truth behind this trend. The truth is that adblocking is really a bunch of profiteers that are holding our industry for ransom.”
“What’s actually going on is they are going into our publishers and demanding a significant proportion of their revenues in order to be included in a white list,” she said. “It simply is not acceptable. The reality is that if you play that scenario out of the next 4-5 years, it causes the death of journalism, because journalism is funded by advertising.”
“Most important, the publishers are starting to take action already,” says Hickey. “They are starting to deal with adblocking in a way that suites their audience. What I believe will happen next and is absolutely critical, is that the publishing industry will come together and act collectively to tackle the racketeers. Probably it will get legal quite soon which means it will get messy before it gets better.”
“Many of their business models are undoubtedly illegal,” says Rothenberg. “Already, Shine’s model of ISP-level ad-blocking has been cited by regulators as a probable violation of net neutrality principles.”
Is adblocking really about censorship? “This is why I hate the ad-block profiteers,” Randall Rothenberg told the audience at the opening keynote of the 2016 IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Rothenberg is President & CEO at Interactive Advertising Bureau. “Now, you may be aware of a kerfuffle that began about 10 days ago, when an unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes at a for-profit German company called AdBlock-Plus took to the digisphere to complain over and over that IAB had “disinvited” them to this convention. That, of course, is as much a lie as the others they routinely try to tell the world.”
Rothenberg continued. “We had never invited them in the first place. They registered for this event online. When we found out, we cancelled the registration and reversed their credit card billing. Why? For the simple reason that they are stealing from publishers, subverting freedom of the press, operating a business model predicated on censorship of content, and ultimately forcing consumers to pay more money for less – and less diverse – information.”
“AdBlock-Plus is: an old-fashioned extortion racket, gussied up in the flowery but false language of contemporary consumerism,” says Rothenberg. ”
“I’m far from the first person to notice this,” he said. “Writing up an interview with AdBlock-Plus’s leaders more than two years ago in Salon, Andrew Leonardsaid: “It still sounds to me like something that bears more than a passing resemblance to a protection racket. Pay up, or we’ll break your windows! Pay up, or millions of Adblock Plus users will never see any of your ads.”
“Surveys repeatedly show that upwards of 75% of consumers prefer ad-supported Internet sites where the content is free over ad-free sites where they would pay fees for content,” Rothenberg said. “Fewer than 10% of consumers want to pay for content. By driving digital publishers, including some of the most prestigious news organizations in the world, to impose fees on consumers in order to continue to support their business and content-development objectives, the ad-block profiteers are subverting the will of consumers.”
The Bad News is AdBlock-Plus is Not Alone
IAB President Randall Rothenberg noted that for-profit adblockers have become the “darlings of the venture capital industry and angel investors” and include otherwise mainstream advertising technology and publishing companies.
There’s Shine, an Israeli startup that sells adblocking software for mobile phone networks so that they can block ads at the network level. Shine is backed by Horizons Ventures which backed Spotify and Facebook.
Then there’s Brave, that was launched by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich. Rothenberg says that “his business model not only strips advertisements from publishers’ pages – it replaces them with his own for-profit ads.”
“The ad-block profiteers are building for-profit companies whose business models are premised on impeding the movement of commercial, political, and public-service communication between and among producers and consumers,” says Rothenberg. “They offer to lift their toll gates for those wealthy enough to pay them off, or who submit to their demands that they constrict their freedom of speech to fit the shackles of their revenue schemes.”
Can Consumers Be Persuaded to Stop Using Adblockers?
Can adblocking kill the free internet? “It’s inconceivable, I think, that we would simply just allow this threat from adblocking to continue without actually having a strategy,” says IAB UK’s Steve Chester. “It’s something which we will have to develop. I don’t underestimate that it’s potentially an existential threat.”
The IAB study looked at how many people would turn off adblocking if requested to by a site as a condition to view content. Of those that are using adblocking software, 64% have seen notices on a website requesting that they turn off their adblocker. Over half (54%) said that they would sometimes temporarily switch off the software if it was the only way to access the content. For 18-24 year olds, 73% are willing to turn off adblocking.
The IAB study showed that 20% of people who have tried an adblocker no longer use one. The main reason is because of changing to a new device but the second most popular reason, not being able to access content, gives hope to publishers and advertisers that they can eventually change the mindset of people.
“The IAB believes that an ad funded internet is essential for providing revenue to publishers so they can continue to make their content, services and applications widely available at little, or no cost,” stated IAB UK’s CEO, Guy Phillipson. “We believe ad blocking undermines this approach and could mean consumers have to pay for content they currently get for free.”
“Part of the solution to tackle adblocking lies in making consumers more aware of the consequences, which seems like it’s starting to filter through,” Phillipson added. “If they realize it means they can’t access content or that to do so requires paying for it, then they might stop using ad blockers. It requires reinforcing this “trade-off” message – ads help to fund the content they enjoy for free.”
“More and more publishers are initiating what IAB calls “detection-notice-choice-and constraint” regimes,” says Rothenberg. “They are installing scripts that enable them to see when consumers coming to their sites have ad-blockers installed; they are providing notice to consumers about that and about publishers’ business models, which largely require advertising to support otherwise free content.”
“They are offering consumers choices – to turn off their ad-blockers, to pay a subscription fee, or another alternative,” he added. “And absent one of those choices, the publishers are constraining consumers’ access to content, reinforcing the immense value of what they deliver.”
Less Ads Would Be Blocked if Ads Weren’t So Annoying
The IAB study found that 45% of people would be less likely to use an adblocker if ads didn’t interfere with a page. In other words, people are tired of bloated Flash ads or sites that block content with popups or interstitials and the use of adblockers are simply a logical response to them. If there were less ads, 29% would be motivated to not use an adblocker and 12% would consider this if the ads were more relevant.
Adblocking has had some positive impacts on publishing by motivating publishers to stop serving annoying ads like pop-ups and interstitials. “We are organically moving towards formats that are more acceptable,” Piers North, the Strategic Director of Trinity Mirror Solutions told the Shift audience. “Yet having said that, if you look at the mobile experience, in-specials and pop-ups have had a resurgence. Adblocking is accelerating the need for us to get our house in order to make sure that the ad experience is as good as possible.” He noted that pop-ups and interstitials are a short-term play and that if you continue to do that you are going to kill your audience.
A Better Ad Experience
“If you provide website visitors with choice, and that’s what we advocate at the IAB and that’s where we see the industry going,” North said. “We’ve created the idea of lean standards or lean ads which are much leaner. We are looking to create a charter around that, so we are asking businesses, no matter where you sit, the buy side, sell side, intermediary to sign onto this charter as best practices.”
“LEAN stands for advertising and ad operations that are light, encrypted, AdChoices-supporting, and non-invasive,” says Rothenberg. “We believe LEAN will be as important to the future of the digital advertising industry as the first IAB Universal Ad Package was to its creation.”
Rothenberg says the the IAB intends to make LEAN the foundation of their activities for the foreseeable future. “And among our very first goals is introducing a public LEAN scoring system by which all publishers, all advertisers, and all agencies will be able to measure their activities against rational, reasonable, and consumer-friendly performance benchmarks,” he said.
“LEAN is the basis for a sustainable advertising ecosystem. We firmly believe that a combination of LEAN advertising and media, and publisher implementation of detection-notice-choice-and-constraint, will limit the impact of ad-blocking.”
“We want to actually give people a choice at the point of access,” says North. “You can come into this property and have a range of choices. It might be pay for this content, accept the ad experience, but it will be a better ad experience, or it might be some other form of payment like micro-payments or even a survey in exchange for access to content.”
“I think in 5 years ad blocking will continue to exist, but it will be on the fringes because we will have gotten our house in order, delivering a great ad experience and giving people choice,” he said. “I also think that we will move more toward native advertising in order to avoid adblockers. Remember, adblocking doesn’t kill all forms of advertising.”
“As agencies we are already taking significant steps to add value back into that consumer journey,” Hickey said. “Let’s face it, things like programmatic, launched a few years ago, some of it was done really badly, so we understand that younger people have had really bad advertising journeys and were incredibly annoying. Really good agencies are getting really good at adding value back into that whole journey and also getting much better at the nuts and bolts behind it.”
“The major driving force behind adoption of blockers is because users feel that advertisements are intrusive and detrimental to the user experience,” says Sam Barker, an analyst for Juniper Research and author of the May 2016 study ‘Digital Advertisers Vs the Ad Blockers’. “To make the browsing experience user friendly, advertisers need to find ways to serve ads that do not obstruct the objective of the user. Ad formats such as interstitials and pop-up ads are seen as very intrusive but, on the other hand, native advertisements work very well.”
Adblocking is a Brutal Countermeasure
“I’m not to make any predictions about adblocking, and nor should you, at least not with confidence,” says Ian Lesley, author and brand strategist at the Shift adblocking session. “Ten years ago everyone knew that TV advertising was dead and DVR’s meant that ad skipping was about to become the norm.”
“Skip to 2016, last years spend on interactive TV broke the $5 billion barrier for the first time,” said Lesley. “The question is why didn’t we see this coming or rather why didn’t we see it not coming? Simple, we fixated on the technology and we forgot about the human.”
“TV or print ads don’t take much time,” he said. “They don’t require anyone to think or make a choice or do anything. The cost of ignoring them is zero and when they are good, they are really good. Forgetting about the human is a perennial problem. Five years ago everybody knew that digital data meant that we could send people relevant information instead of this terrible flimflam called brand image. Clever us. Lucky consumers.”
“What’s the reality? Humans care about all sorts of things, but most of them most of the time do not care about brands,” stated Lesley. “I know it’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s why the dream of interactivity, engagement and brand conversations has all but died and it’s why people will reach for the ad blockers if the ads continue to be so insanely annoying.”
“Here’s another thing about humans, they make terrible predictions,” commented Lesley. “I’ve almost given up on prediction but not quite. I will predict that unless online advertising changes its form radically in the next five years humans are going to send it the way of interactive TV.”
“The point is that adblocking is an equal and opposite reaction to the brutally bad nature of online advertising,” says Lesley. “This is not a platform that has found its form. There was a moment when TV advertising discovered that you could do stuff with a 30 second ad that was really great and entertaining. People found ways to make that a very rich experience. That hasn’t happened yet with online advertising.”
“The experience of online ads is not pleasant and it actually gets in the way of them enjoying what they want to enjoy,” Lesley said. “So there is a distinct possibility that they will reach for a brutal countermeasure. Unless we get better at doing online advertising, creating things that people enjoy or at least can passively disregard and passively absorb when they want to then I’m afraid the adblockers will march on.”
At least 419 million people (22% of the world’s 1.9bn smartphone users) are blocking ads on the mobile web.
Both mobile web and in-app ads can now be blocked.
As of March 2016 an estimated 408 million people are actively using mobile adblocking browsers (i.e., a mobile browser that blocks ads by default).
As of March 2016 there are 159 million users of mobile adblocking browsers in China, 122 million in India, and 38 million in Indonesia.
As of March 2016 in Europe and North America there were 14 million monthly active users of mobile adblocking browsers.
A further 4.9 million content blocking and in-app adblocking apps were downloaded from the app stores in Europe and North America since September 2014.
“Although consumer adoption of mobile level ad blockers is lower than the desktop market, Juniper Research believes that adoption is set to witness a sizable increase,” said Juniper Research analyst Sam Barker. “Drivers of this include Apples inclusion of ad blocking compatibility with Safari and increasing consumer awareness.”
He adds, that much like desktop browsers, mobile ad blockers are not able to block all types of advertising:
Internet Search and Display Adverts will be blocked, however like the desktop space, native adverts are not able to be blocked.
Video Display Adverts are able to be blocked, except if the video is channelled through a mobile application.
The possibility of blocking in-app advertising has been explored, however when speaking to players in the market many feel the practice to be morally unethical or the technical challenges too costly.
“In comparison to the desktop space, the mobile ad blocking market is still fairly nascent,” said Barker. “Since the announcement from Apple in September 2015 that iOS’s native browser would be able to support ad blocking applications there has been a rise in the number of users adopting the technology.
Sites are Fighting Back Against Adblockers
Forbes has taken an aggressive approach to adblocking, revealing that of those blocked, 44% of them turned off their ad blockers in order to access their content. Forbes is continuing to test other strategies including a version of the IAB Lean Ads concept.
According to Digiday, Slate has been using messaging to try and persuade users to turn off ad blockers and to sign up for their premium low ad content plans.
Wired says that 20% of their traffic comes from people using adblockers and in response to that they have restricted access to those using them. They offer 2 options to site visitors with adblockers:
You can simply add WIRED.com to your ad blocker’s whitelist, so you view ads. When you do, we will keep the ads as “polite” as we can, and you will only see standard display advertising.
You can subscribe to a brand-new Ad-Free version of WIRED.com. For $1 a week, you will get complete access to our content, with no display advertising or ad tracking.
Bloomberg has taken a different approach, cleaning up their site and adding more white space. “Everyone’s screaming and yelling, so let’s not scream and yell — let’s do the opposite,” Chris Briseno, digital creative director at Bloomberg LP, told Digiday.
Native advertising, sponsored content or branded news (all the same) is booming and with some online publishers it’s now their main source of revenue.
It’s important to note that native advertisingis notcontent marketing. Content marketing is a content strategy by brands where typically, they own the content, such as their blogs or content on a product website. Native advertising is sponsored content, more typically created by the publisher to be in alignment with an audience that the advertiser wants to reach. I think where the confusion happens is when an advertiser creates biased and conversion oriented content that is placed on websites for a fee. To me, that’s content marketing more than native advertising because content marketing has evolved to be measured by conversions, while native advertising looks at other metrics.
Fractl and Moz conducted a survey of more than 30 content marketing agencies and obtained cost data from more than 600 digital publishers and determined that “content marketing has a better overall return on investment.”
“Readers are necessarily less engaged with advertising vs. editorial content, and metrics show lower share rates, lower engagement rates, lower view counts, etc. in most cases,” said Kelsey Libert, partner and vp of marketing at Fractl. “You can’t simply push through a mediocre, thinly veiled advertorial. Content marketing puts the brand and the consumer on equal footing, and in the process necessitates the brand elevate the content they are creating. When done correctly, the result is a true match between brand and content consumer, where the content created has true value, and spreads based on the merit of the content. Through this, content can enjoy true virality in a way that is nearly impossible with Native ads.”
“The fact that people find it necessary to pit one form against the other is a little bemusing,” said Cas McCullough, Founder at Writally PTY LTD, in a comment on Adweek. “When used together, good content and native ads are very powerful. On their own they don’t get the same ROI. Our case studies prove this consistently, so we’ll stick with an integrated approach.”
Sites such a Buzzfeed and Vice have built their entire business model around native advertising. Slate says that it now relies on native advertising for nearly 50% of its revenue. According to Digiday Slate trained its 10-person sales team on a its new native ad product called Slate Custom, and also hired Jim Lehnhoff, the former head of Gawker Media’s native advertising strategy. The goal with Slate Custom is to make native ads that are aligned to Slate’s “edtorial DNA.”
“The differences between five years ago and now, in client expectations, are enormous,” said Keith Hernandez, the president of Slate, in a New York Times article on native. “Creating something that’s delightful and that’ll make someone stop and click and share…that’s really hard. But doing the easy thing is not fun.”
The Atlantic’s Hayley Romer, their Publisher, expects “native campaigns to drive 70 percent of its ad revenue this year, up from 60 percent in 2015.”
“We know that our audience is engaging really deeply with our native content on our site,” she was quoted as saying in a NiemanLab article.
The 2016 Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, the largest study of its kind, based on more than 50,000 people in 26 countries, was released recently (PDF) and shows the rise of sponsored content. Here’s a chart from the Report:
The report noted that with existing models of online advertising increasingly broken, publishers have been trying alternatives such as “branded and sponsored content.” Sponsored content still has numerous legal and political obstacles, with labeling “sponsored” still an area of confusion. Geographically, the US and Canada are most accepting, while Germany and Korea branded content faces tremendous consumer confusion and resistance.
The New York Times has created a 100-person native ad unit, T Brand Studio, in a huge push for native advertising revenue. The Times is openly declaring “sponsored content to be an important part of their strategy.”.
The motivation for publishers in looking for a new monetization model for their digital properties is the continued weakness of online display advertising.
“Display still has a place, but we believe that the digital advertising of the future will be dominated by stories conceived by advertisers, clearly labelled so they can be distinguished from newsroom journalism, but consumed alongside that journalism on their own merits,” said New York Times CEO Mark Thompson in a commentary in the above report. “This is a more compelling and creative vision of digital advertising than conventional digital display, and it requires new skills, talents, and technologies, and substantial fresh investment. Audience scale and global reach will still count, but the audience which publishers will need to find will not be super-light users, the one-and-dones who spend a few seconds on many different sites, but truly engaged readers and viewers who are prepared to devote real time to content of real quality and relevance.”
Thompson is adamant that the editorial and commercial sides must work as one. “Editorial and commercial leaders need to work together on integrated strategies which combine editorial mission and standards, user experience, innovations in data, technology and creative design, and radically new approaches to monetization,” he said. “Not five different strategies, not even ‘aligned’ editorial and commercial strategies, but a single shared way forward.”
Sponsored content does not have to be biased content, but instead can be content that is paid for by an advertiser, because that advertiser wants to reach the type of people that read a particular content subject area.
Interestingly, a study (PDF) by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Edelman in June 2015 uncovered that consumer perceptions of sponsored content isn’t all negative.
Roughly 45% of those seeing sponsored content related to business or entertainment recognized the value-add.
The IAB study says that brand relevance, authority, and trust are the most important factors to driving consumer interest in sponsored content across all media. “Make the ads and product more on target… also give info [on] how to enhance the experience with the latest and best products,” commented one consumer interviewed in the study.
The value (or lack of value) for the advertiser is that the credibility of the site hosting the sponsored content is largely transferred to the advertiser.
Sherrill Mane, formerly of the IAB and currently Head of MAdTech Strategy, and Steve Rubel, Chief Content Strategist for Edelman recommend these steps for publishers that intend to incorporated sponsored content:
Control the experience and be prepared to walk away from advertisers who aren’t relevant/trusted
Encourage aligned brand marketers to work together in a more authoritative manner
Go the distance when it comes to transparency/disclosures
Yahoo dropped a bunch of native advertising stats from Gemini for 2015, particularly in third-party mobile apps.
All Gemini mobile ads are native, while half of its desktop ads are. According to the company, December saw over 200 billion Gemini native ad requests on third party mobile apps, accounting for over half of Gemini’s display impressions.
Yahoo announced the availability of programmatic native ads on the BrightRoll Exchange. Advertisers and publishers have access to bid on native mobile inventory.
“The BrightRoll Exchange is integrated with more than 100 DSPs and enables access to thousands of sites and apps via real-time bidding (RTB),” a spokesperson tells WebProNews.
“Advertisers integrated with the BrightRoll Exchange can now access native inventory from third-party app developers who utilize Yahoo App Publishing, such as Cheetah Mobile, Pinger and WeatherBug, among others,” the spokesperson adds. “They can also continue to access native inventory on Yahoo premium sites and apps using Yahoo Gemini or through Yahoo Gemini API partners.”
The new API aligns with the IAB OpenRTB 2.3 standard, the company notes.
“The prevalence of native ads has skyrocketed, and advertisers and publishers alike are taking notice of its increasing potential,” said Tod Sacerdoti, Vice President of Display and Video Ads at Yahoo. “This new offering through the BrightRoll Exchange combines the power of data and technology to give advertisers even more flexibility to buy native the way they want.”
Advertisers can keep accessing native inventory on Yahoo premium sites and apps via Gemini or through Gemini API partners.
Native ad spend is projected by eMarketer to hit $9 billion (10% of all digital ad spend) by 2018.
Google announced that it is bringing programmatic support native ads and mobile video interstitials to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.
The company announced native formats in DoubleClick for Publishers earlier this year, but now publishers can sell native ads programatically in the open auction and in private marketplaces on the exchange.
It’s available immediately in apps and will roll out for cross-screen native ads over the coming months.
“Along with native ads, we’re also introducing programmatic support for mobile video interstitials in apps on DoubleClick Ad Exchange,” says Jonathan Bellack, director of product management. “Video is key to driving brand impact in the moments that matter, no matter where they occur. With these new immersive, full-screen video ads available programmatically, again in both the open auction and in private marketplaces, publishers can offer their advertising partners a new way to bring engaging brand experiences to users seamlessly, driving advertiser performance and growing publisher revenue. During beta tests, publishers realized gains as high as 30% CPM in interstitial video compared to regular interstitial performance.”
“Together, these innovations help address a strong demand from ad buyers for native and mobile video formats that can be bought programmatically,” he adds.
Twitter Promoted Moments is a new native ad format from the company, which it is going to begin testing with certain partners this weekend.
It didn’t take long for Twitter to turn its recently launched Moments feature into something it can monetize. Moments was only announced on October 6. It’s a feature that curates stories using combinations of tweets, images, videos, Vines, and GIFs.
Moments are curated by both Twitter and select partners like Bleacher Report, Buzzfeed, Entertainment Weekly, Fox News, Getty Images, Mashable, MLB, NASA, New York Times, Vogue and the Washington Post (more in the future).
Twitter users can access and follow specific stories from a new lightning bolt tab. New stories appear throughout the day and are continuously updated and organized by topics like entertainment, sports, etc.
So why not use this format for ads?
“We’re seeing how powerful this experience can be for diving into meaningful narratives — and since Twitter’s inception, brands have told some of the very best stories on the platform,” says Twitter brand strategy manager Bobby Grasberger. “Promoted Moments, like all of our ad products, will look and feel just like all other Moments — except they’ll be authored by a brand and be featured in the Moments guide for 24 hours, with a Promoted badge.”
The first one will come from MGM, Warner Bros, and New Line Cinema for the movie Creed, which will appear on Twitter on Sunday.
“Over the next couple of months, you’ll see more examples from all kinds of brands across many different business verticals,” says Grasberger. “We’re excited to see how fun, informative, and entertaining stories from brands come to life within Moments.”
Native advertising is big business, and it’s only going to grow. By billions and billions.
A recent study from BI Intelligence projects spending on native ads to reach $7.9 billion this year and grow to $21 billion in 2018.
In late 2013, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released its “Native Advertising Playbook,” aimed at serving as a “consistent framework” for for the discussion surrounding native advertising, which is constantly evolving.
At that time, native ad spending was only at $4.7, so that’s how much it’s on the rise. If your’e going to spend on it, you obviously need to think about how to make it effective. An infographic from Sharethrough and Column Five (via MarketingProfs) aims to help you in that department by taking a look at the science behind it.
“In-feed ad unit adoption is growing across publisher sites with different ad unit types introduced and/or retired quickly,” said the IAB’s Susan Borst. “In addition, feed types are also evolving beyond the three main types (content, social and product), to mixed feed types that have variable aesthetics/content which don’t fall clearly into one bucket. But even with these changes over time, it is important that one thing remain the same and that is the need to evaluate the in-feed ads from the consumer perspective to ensure that they remain native, meaning that they are so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer simply feels that they belong.”
They have a helpful infographic on this as well, which you can see here.
Microsoft announced the beta launch of Bing Native Ads, which let advertisers target intent outside of search. According to the company, the strongest intent signals on the web are users’ interests expressed by prior search queries, signals from the content of the experience in which they’re at at any given point, and user actions like looking for products or taking actions on advertiser sites.
Bing’s new native ads make use of all of these and combine them with “naive experiences,” which the company says are relevant and natural. Here are some examples on MSN:
The ads also offers the same targeting or bid boosting functionality that’s already available from Bing Ads. This includes location, device type, time of day, day of week, and site remarketing.
“Bing Native Ads is a native offering optimized for search advertisers,” says Bing’s Raj Kapoor. “Therefore ease of use for search advertisers is a key aspect of the product design. Search advertisers focus their efforts on optimizing the relevance and ROI of their campaigns using search ad platform workflows, interfaces, and reporting. The management and controls for Bing Native Ads are fully integrated with standard Bing Ads workflows, and all the advertiser interfaces, reporting and conversion tracking available from Bing Ads platform are available for Bing Native Ads. This makes it very easy and effortless for search advertisers to take advantage of this native offering and expand their reach targeting user intent.”
“Bing Native Ads are designed to deliver good ROI for advertisers leveraging intent signals & algorithms, and also come with bid modifiers for advertisers to manage their participation in and ROI from native ads,” Kapoor adds.
The ads will display on MSn in the U.S. at first. Presumably they’ll be expanded to other markets later in the year.
Disqus, the blog commenting product that appears on sites all over the Internet (including this one), announced that it’s launching programmatic ad buying for its Sponsored Comments product.
Disqus is now working with WPP’s Xaxis to give the latter’s clients the ability to buy and place these ads across the Disqus network, which again, is all over the place on the web.
“A Sponsored Comment can use all types of media to get the point across, just like any other Disqus comment,” writes David Fleck on the Disqus blog. “But they’re not part of the discussion happening on that page. Comments to the ad are driven to a separate landing page just for that ad. This keeps the core commenting experience uninterrupted and publisher communities just as they were. That’s the best of both worlds. Since those pilots campaigns, we’ve been working on two key things: targeting and brand safety.”
They’re implementing semantic keyword targeting at the discussion level, and targeting against the topics of articles.
“It’s a new way of thinking about targeting and a more effective one I think,” says Fleck. “It sounds simple, but as an advertiser, you want to reach people that are interested in your product. There’s a difference between your hypothetical target audience and your actual product audience. In other words, the difference between what surveys might tell you versus what actual individual consumers are interested in.”
The targeting capabilities are interesting, but comment sections aren’t exactly known as a great place to find helpful links to click on. Typically if there’s a link trying to sell you something in the comments of a blog post, it’s spam. This is obviously different, but it’s hard to imagine that many Internet users don’t simply tune out links in blog comments unless they’re specifically relevant to the discussion.
Either way, Disqus says it can target over 1,000 topics, and can easily add new ones to meet brand needs and trends.
Last month, a Yahoo “recommended” content box was spotted on various publisher sites, such as VOX Media’s SB Nation and CBS Interactive’s GameSpot and TV Guide.
On Monday, the company officially announced the launch of the offering. It’s called “Yahoo Recommends,” and is described as a new monetization solution for publishers. It’s part of the Yahoo suite of Publisher Solutions.
“Yahoo Recommends makes it easier for visitors to discover a publisher’s content and integrates an additional native advertising unit onto their site,” says Yahoo in a blog post. “We know first-hand that the combination of personalization and premium content works for users, and we’ve created Yahoo Recommends so advertisers and publishers can put that powerful combination to work too.”
“Powered by Yahoo’s personalization technology, Yahoo Recommends comes in a variety of shapes and sizes to accommodate any site layout on PC or mobile — ensuring a seamless integration with any site and a fluid, relevant, and transparent experience for readers,” the company adds. “Yahoo Recommends also includes a space for clearly labeled sponsored ads. The native format and relevant ads help increase the quality of leads for advertisers. Premium and personalized native ads featured on Yahoo Recommends are served through Yahoo Gemini, Yahoo’s unified mobile search and native ad marketplace. The launch of Yahoo Recommends represents the first time the platform has grown to carry inventory and serve ads beyond Yahoo’s own sites.”
Yahoo Recommends follows a trend in similar offerings from providers like Taboola, Outbrain, and others, which already frequently appear all around the web.
Yahoo has recently seen declines in its display revenue. Perhaps this can help the company offset some of that.
Last year, Yahoo started showing native ads in the form of a “recommended” articles box to users on its own properties. Visitors see several articles in a row with one actual ad, which is marked as sponsored, but is otherwise designed to look like the articles accompanying it.
As AdAge first reported, Yahoo is now offering to place such boxes on other publishers’ sites, and a few already have them implemented. These include VOX Media’s SB Nation and CBS Interactive’s GameSpot and TV Guide. Here’s a look at one from the TV Guide site:
It’s a pretty standard format these days. You already see similar offerings from other providers like Taboola, Outbrain, and others all around the web. Yahoo, which has recently seen declines in its display revenue, is trying to inject some new life into that part of its business.
The boxes are personalized for users. When I see it the box, it says “Powered by Yahoo for Chris.” There’s also a “learn more” link, which takes you to a box that says:
This content was recommended to your by Yahoo’s content personalization technology. We hope you enjoy the content that we recommend. View our privacy policy. Contact us to add Yahoo recommends to your site. Advertise to Yahoo users.
If you click the little icon next to the word “sponsored” you’re taken to a “Why this Ad?” page. That says:
The Web sites you visit work with online advertising companies to provide you with advertising that is as relevant and useful as possible. Personalization may be informed by the content of the Web page you’re visiting; registration information you’ve provided; historical searches or predictions about your interests generated from websites you visit.
Users are also given options to manage their interest-based advertising categories and “explore” browser controls and plug-in tools to set and maintain privacy options.
Yahoo announced on Tuesday that it is extending its Stream Ads internationally with availability in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain and the United Kingdom.
“Last year, we debuted Yahoo Stream Ads as a way to make content discovery even more seamless and effective for our readers — through a brand new native ad format,” the company says. “Native advertising is paving the way for more engaging experiences across Yahoo, and we’re constantly exploring new ways to deliver value for brands, while enhancing the user experience.”
A recent report from eMarketer indicates native advertising has been “flourishing” across social media channels, content portals, news sites, video sharing sites, and streaming services. It gave a great deal of credit to growth in mobile use, which has been a big focus of Yahoo’s.
The company says, “With our new content stream format now available on many of your favorite Yahoo sites and mobile experiences around the world, we’re excited to be rolling out Yahoo Stream Ads to provide more personalized, immersive advertising that complements the design of these pages. This is an exciting step forward and now brands can easily leverage native advertising with massive scale to meet their marketing goals.”
In August, Yahoo started including the ads across Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo TV, Yahoo OMG, Yahoo Games, and Yahoo Mail.
Last week, the company began rolling out new image-rich native ads through Yahoo Gemini.
BIA/Kelsey released its latest U.S. Social Local Media Forecast looking at 2013 – 2018. The firm expects social media ad revenues in the country to grow from $5.1 billion in 2013 to $15 billion in 2018. This would represent a compound annual growth rate of 24%.
According to the report, 2014 is seeing the greatest year-over-year increase in social media ad revenues with a projected $8.4 billion. The firm chalks this up to increases in mobile and native advertising spend.
Social display ad revenues are expected to grow from $3.3 billion in 2013 to $5.6 billion in 2018 while native social advertising is expected to grow from $1.8 billion in 2013 to a whopping $9.4 billion in 2018 largely thanks to Facebook’s News Feed ads and Twitter’s promoted tweets. The firm expects native social advertising to eclipse social display for the first time next year.
“We were initially skeptical about the social-mobile market’s ability to capture optimal wallet share because of mobile’s limitations, such as smaller screen size, limited ad inventory and static creative,” said Jed Williams, VP, consulting at BIA/Kelsey. “Over the past year, however, Facebook, Twitter and other networks have generated dramatic revenue growth, primarily as a function of mobile ad acceleration and largely through natively integrated mobile ad formats. We expect this growth to continue throughout the forecast period.”
“While social networks are enhancing the geotargeting capabilities of their ad platforms, local targeting is still an emerging capability,” said Williams. “As social usage further migrates to mobile platforms, the need for locally targeted messages and offers that leverage mobile’s unique capabilities will expand. We expect social local ad spend to increase steadily through 2018, as SMBs better leverage multi- and micro-targeting to optimize campaigns, and national brands drive more traffic to individual store locations and target consumers with more personalized offers.”
The firm expects locally targeted advertising in the U.S. to grow from $1.3 billion in 2013 to $5.2 billion in 2018.
Yahoo is rolling out new, image-rich native ads, which according to the company, will be a “seamless part of the content around them.”
“These new ad formats can deliver deep user engagement and drive improved recall, intent and favorability for advertisers,” a Yahoo spokesperson tells WebProNews. “With half of our monthly active users coming to Yahoo on a mobile device, they are also designed to be mobile-first and targeted to the right consumer to drive even better results.
The ads are available through Yahoo Gemini, the marketplace the company announced in February.
Here’s what they look like:
“When advertising is a seamless part of the stories, photos and videos around it, it enhances the way people discover and share, while increasing engagement, recall, intent and favorability for advertisers,” says Yahoo Head of Americas Ned Brody. “We’re excited to move toward a new mobile experience that brings together engaging content and even richer advertising.”
As the image above shows, Netflix is already on board for the new formats.
They’re clearly marked as sponsored, and will appear within users’ content streams, article pages, and image galleries across Yahoo properties. When clicked, they’ll take users to the brand’s site or to a full-screen visual.
StumbleUpon just announced the launch of a new campaign creation interface for its Paid Discovery ad platform.
Advertisers can now choose whether they want to spend their budgets ASAP or spend evenly throughout their campaigns. Also included are some improvements to templates and interest recommendations.
“We’ve made it easier to create and use templates – save them for future campaigns and now either put in all or partial targeting based on desired results,” the company says. “To help advertisers optimize their campaign, we now recommend related interest categories based on what’s been selected.”
The platform now has DMA level targeting, grouping several surrounding areas into a single region, so local campaigns can have greater reach. Advertisers can also now target multiple locations with a single campaign.
Finally, StumbleUpon has added an audience estimator.
“We can project how many people can be reached based on the targeting criteria selected, so we’ll provide feedback on whether its too specific or too broad to fulfill campaign goals,” the company explains.
StumbleUpon first launched Paid Discovery back in 2011. You might say it was an early player in the native advertising game that’s gaining so much traction these days. Ads simply come in the form of sponsored web pages typically aimed to resemble the type of content that StumbleUpon users would enjoy anyway. These are labeled as “sponsored”.
As reported earlier this year, StumbleUpon has been expanding its native advertising sales team. As of February, StumbleUpon said it was serving 125 million brand and publisher sponsored placements per month.
Twitter announced the general availability of MobPub’s programmatic native ads platform after four months of testing it with mobile app developers. Availability will begin on Wednesday.
The platform provides advertisers with an SDK for creating customized ad units inside of apps, an ad server with full budgeting support, targeting options, integrated reporting, an ad extension to OpenRTB, frequency capping, creative management, prioritization control, and various campaign management tools.
“Not only are native ads a significant improvement for publisher monetization in general, but users engage with these ad formats at a higher rate than the desktop-era banners and interstitials which are so prevalent in mobile apps today,” says Twitter’s Kevin Weil . “Because of this, monetization through native ads can deliver a considerably better experience for users and also a better ROI for marketers. We’re excited to fully release this native ad capability to the many thousands of publishers who are using MoPub’s monetization and app discovery platform.”
MoPub says its exchange currently reaches over a billion iOS and Android users, and serves over 130 billion ad requests each month in standard banner formats.
“We’ve learned that not only are native ads a significant improvement for publisher monetization in general, but that users engage with these ad formats at a higher rate than the desktop-era banners and interstitials that are so prevalent today in mobile,” says MoPub’s Jim Payne. “Because of this, monetization through native ads can deliver a considerably better experience for users and also a better ROI for marketers.”
SDKs can be found here for iOS and here for Android.
It’s no secret that native advertising has been on the rise. According to a new report from eMarketer, it has been “flourishing” across social media channels, content portals, news sites, video-sharing sites, and streaming services. It’s giving a great deal of the credit to the growth in mobile use of all of these types of services.
The firm recalls December data from BIA/Kelsey, estimating that native ad spending on social media would grow to $5 billion in 2017 (from $3.1 billion this year). They’re saying it will be as much as 42.4% of all social ad spending.
Also in December, a report from Kontera found that native advertising consumption had jumped significantly over the previous few months, going from 7% in June to 44% in November.
eMarketer reports, “For media publishers, native advertising represents an opportunity to reverse the tide of flat or declining revenues. eMarketer estimates US print ad spending will decline from $32.16 billion in 2014 to $31.29 billion in 2018. Digital ad spending on newspapers and magazines will increase to $8.41 billion by 2018, from $7.48 billion in 2014, but these gains will still leave the industry essentially flat for the forecast period. With these numbers as a backdrop, it’s easy to see why media companies are so eager to create new revenue streams through native ads.”
One very interesting takeaway from the firm’s research, as Ad Age points out, is that native ads are actually helping display sales.
The playbook is aimed at giving marketers a consistent framework for the discussion surrounding native ads. It was released as the FTC put them in the spotlight, and warned publishers about illegal ones.
Yahoo announced the launch of a new mobile search and native advertising marketplace called Yahoo Gemini. Advertisers can use it to buy, manage and optimize mobile search and native ad spend from a single place.
The product is available through Yahoo Ad Manager, the company’s existing self-service buying platform.
“Mobile is the fastest-growing market segment, and we have innovated how our users communicate, consume content and search for information across multiple devices,” said Yahoo’s Jay Rossiter and Adam Cahan in a joint blog post. “We are equally committed to building products that simplify the buying process and improve the experience for advertisers. Yahoo Gemini is the latest way we are helping advertisers reach millions of people directly on their mobile devices with smart, integrated, multi-channel campaigns.”
A Yahoo representative told AdWeek it believes the offering can help it attract more brand marketers.
As the report notes, Yahoo’s mobile search ads used to be available via the Bing Ads Platform. Perhaps Gemini is part of Yahoo’s apparent strategy of relying less on its partnership with Microsoft, which CEO Marissa Mayer “hates,” according to reports.
StumbleUpon announced on Wednesday that it has grown its sales team as it works on expansion of its native advertising and content marketing efforts.
The company points out that Shareaholic data from Q4 showed that StumbleUpon accounted for more publisher traffic than Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google combined. We covered the report here.
The company has appointed three-year SU vet Anthony Napolitano to lead the national advertising sales team from its New York office. Jean Genzano from that office is now leading the Southeast territory out of Philadelphia, and is focusing on consumer packaged goods, healthcare and digital agencies in the region. Shoba Subramanian is the new Midwest Sales Direwctor based ini Chicago, where she’ll work to introduce StumbleUpon’s distribution platform to the region (which also includes Detroit and Canada). Stacy Wormser is now leading the company’s offering in Southern California and Texas, working with major entertainment and automotive clients. Brian Bravo leads in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, while Joanne Kapp and Janelle Sterling join the company’s New York office working on major media holding company engagement and publisher relationships.
“The expansion of the StumbleUpon sales team reflects the increased demand for native advertising and targeted, reliable content distribution channels,” said Teal Newland, Vice President, Global Revenue and Marketing at StumbleUpon. “I am excited to welcome our new appointments to StumbleUpon and am looking forward to working with the top sales force in the field.”
Twitter’s MoPub has launched a new native advertising offering, calling it the “first programmatic-enabled native ads platform for mobile apps.”
Messaging service Tango is one of the launch partners. Here’s a look:
“Native ads are one of the most talked about topics in advertising, but there has yet to be a scalable and accessible solution for mobile app developers,” says Jim Payne on the MoPub blog. “Native ads offer an opportunity to monetize your app more effectively by matching the original content’s look and feel, maintaining the same great experience for your users. Before today, publishers told us that building one-off, custom ad experiences was too resource intensive and difficult to execute to be practical.”
“MoPub’s native ads product gives you the ability to work with direct advertisers, promote your own features and apps, and drive more revenue from one of the over ninety-five demand partners on MoPub Marketplace,” he says. “This single solution means you can provide a customized ad experience for your partners without building custom campaigns for each advertiser.”
Twitter acquired MoPub in September, saying it would use the mobile ad exchange in its own Twitter Ads platform.
