This article is part of Digiday’s coverage of its Digiday Publishing Summit. More from the series →
The frantic era of publishers jumping on every trend — subscriptions, newsletters, paywalls — is fading. Now, they’re honing in on more thoughtful strategies, aiming to align their content with the smartest way to cash in.
How quickly this transition will happen is anyone’s guess. After all, breaking lifelong habits is no easy feat, especially in the dire straits publishers currently find themselves in. Yet, if the insights from the Digiday Publishing Summit in Barcelona are any indication, change is on the horizon.
“We don’t sell ad space anymore in so much as it’s not about those buttons and MPUs anymore — that’s boring,” said Mail Metro Media’s managing director of digital, Hannah Buitekant. “It’s about deep, immersive relationships with our audiences across all of the channels.”
To be clear, advertising is still a solid revenue source for publishers of this size, but the era of them relying on a single stream is over. Now, there are more who want to create a cash buffet, with ad dollars just one of the many dishes on the table. For Buitekant, e-commerce is one of those alternatives just waiting to be explored — though it’s not about sticking to the typical affiliate model that has dominated past efforts.
While effective, this approach was too narrow, focusing solely on the financial-decision-making step. Instead, Mail Metro Media’s efforts emphasize generating independent traffic and its influence over readers throughout the entire purchase cycle, not just at the tail end. This way the publisher not only gets the opportunity to command higher commission rates on the clicks it generates, it also opens the door to exploring different commerce models altogether.
As Buitekant explained: “If you want us to create really compelling content that’s enriched with our audience data and their preferences, we would like a slightly higher return on that.”
The same logic applies to a publisher’s intellectual property on a broader scale. Publishers like The New York Times and Condé Nast are increasingly bullish on this front, driven not just by the insatiable demand from networks and streamers, but also as a strategy to diversify revenues amid the collapse of traditional business models.
The Independent is one such publisher, actively seeking partnerships with production studios to capitalize on its strongest IP and explore new avenues. If only the paper had jumped on this train sooner, it might have reaped more from the Hollywood classic “Bridget Jones’s Diary”, which famously started as a column in the paper back in the 90s.
“If someone had taken IP considerations a bit more seriously back then that would have been a nice piece of IP to really nail down properly at the start before it became a Hollywood blockbuster,” said the publisher’s CEO Christian Broughton at the summit.
However, it would be a mistake to view these comments from publishers as a sign of their conscious uncoupling from advertising. On the contrary, advertising remains the backbone for many of them. That’s why they’re so focused on exerting as much control as possible over the flow of ad dollars into their businesses. And when they can’t do that, they’re committed to giving advertisers more reasons to invest with them.
This commitment was on full display at the summit, especially during the session led by BBC Studios, the commercial arm of the BBC. What began as an effort to showcase the media organization’s brands through Free Ad-Supported TV (FAST) has evolved into one of the division’s fastest-growing segments in terms of ad revenue over the last five years.
However, as growth accelerated, the BBC became increasingly eager to control how the inventory around its FAST content was sold. It wanted a bigger say in the ad sales process, moving away from the dependency on checks from the platforms and TV manufacturers that were directly engaging with advertisers.
“What this effectively means is that we now work really closely with our FAST partners to understand this kind of an end to end process,” said Kasia Jablonska, director of digital and on demand for EMEA at BBC Studios at the event.
This shift was crucial, as relying on others left Jablonska and her team in the dark about how BBC Studios was truly monetizing its FAST content. But not anymore. They can track which ad tech vendors are selling the ads and how they’re doing — whether through programmatic guaranteed deals or curated marketplaces. Additionally, they gain valuable insights into the fill rates of ad slots around the content and the CPMs for those ads. Intel like this is essential for a media owner like the BBC, equipping them with the data needed to be more discerning about how its ads are sold.
“This is essentially about us being able to get access to the proper data,” said Jablonska. “We ask a lot of questions when we partner with the FAST platforms, to basically understand whether they have means to monetize our premium content.”
Speaking of control, DPG Media has spent the last five years building its own ad platform to reduce its reliance on Google and compete for ad budgets — specifically in its local markets of Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark.
To achieve this, DPG Media recognized the need for scale. So, between 2019 and 2023, it acquired publishing companies like Sanoma Media Netherlands and Independer across those markets. As these deals progressed, the company moved away from the Google ad server — software that publishers use to manage and distribute the sales of their online ads. Once it established the necessary scale and some independence, DPG Media began to develop its own ad tech stack. Last year, it launched its ad management platform, an alternative to Google AD Manager that operates similar to the Facebook Business Manager tool. In July, it introduce a data collaboration platform with clean room capabilities, along with a self-serve buying platform and in-house creative agency.
Put another way: to keep pace with the big platforms, DPG Media is starting to channel its inner tech giant — carefully pilfering the less controversial strategies as its chief digital office Stefan Havik put it at the summit.
DPG Media is keen on getting advertisers to spend their budgets directly, and its local clout in Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark is on par with those platforms — at least in terms of monthly reach, Havik said. But unlike those giants, DPG is growing its ads business without flexing its influence in the same heavy-handed way.
Take the publisher’s stance on ad tech, for instance.
Marketers can use their own tech to buy ads from the publisher — a choice they are not always offered by the competition. Google and Amazon, for example, limit marketers to their own tech for arguably the most valuable inventory they sell, keeping a right grip on the flow of ad dollars. While Havik would certainly welcome a similar level of influence over that revenue, he’s more interested in advertisers choosing to use DPG’s tech out of preference than feeling forced.
“We still allow third-party demand-side platforms to buy our ads, and we still let third-party measurement track the performance of those buys — that’s totally fine,” said Havik. “That said, we do prefer it when advertisers use our media buying platform. Ultimately, though, it’s up to the advertiser to decide the route into our network.”
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