Dotdash Meredith focused on a very simple formula to improve its digital publishing, Jonathan Roberts, the company’s chief innovation officer, told delegates at the INMA World Congress of News Media in London last week. Though simple, the formula was challenging to execute at the U.S. media company: faster Web sites, best content, no bad ads. 

Getting to fast sites meant throwing a lot aside and starting with the content first.

“That means taking risks with things you think are going to make you money,” Roberts said. “You only go for stuff that has to go on page is the only way you get to a fast site. And we did this and people start rebounding, start reading our content, people stay on your sites.”

Getting the best content was not trivial, Roberts said. There was an economic agreement that the world had about the value of an ad based on volume of users, not quality time spent or more valuable content.

“When you work for the value of somebody else who can identify your user, the incentive is just a clickbait and not the best content,” Roberts said.

Eliminating bad ads

“Bad ads aren’t there for the advertisers, they are certainly not there for the users,” Roberts said. “Bad ads unfortunately are our fault.” 

With bad ads on the Web site, the entire marketplace devalued every ad there. With ads being viewable only 10% of the time, the marketplace also priced down all the high quality imagery. Quality ads were paid eventually by the market. 

When fixing his business, Roberts found some things were broken. This was not due to a fault in their business but due to the whole ecosystem industry.

“The advertising market is currently broken,” Roberts said. “It really doesn’t work for publishers as well as buyers and the Web. The buyer side is saying ads are too expensive. We are the people who sell the ads, who supply them.”

Roberts acknowledged that such an equation might seem beneficiary for the suppliers. However, it was just not the case, he said: “Actually the rates are flat on the publisher’s side. How can prices go up and rates go down? Only one way is that the market is broken. And this is getting worse.”

Content beats cookies

Roberts further explained that the answer was the buyers were not being shown all of the market. If the supply was artificially constrained, then the same dollars have to go through the smaller pipe. This jacked up the prices for the buyers. 

“This is because the cookie infrastructure of the Internet is breaking,” Roberts said, adding this was shrinking the cookies-based marketing strategy for the open Web.

“As that constrains, it is jacking up money to the buyer’s side,” Roberts said. “Ads to everybody here is business. It’s not that your audience has got less valuable; it’s that the technology to reach that audience is failing. So, why do we need a cookie in the first place?"

Instead, Dotdash Meridith made its version of a future-proof ad targeting solution that is intent-based ad targeting instead of cookie-based.

“Content is a better predictor of what you are going to do next than a cookie, which isn’t targeting,” Roberts said. “There is no such thing as cookie targeting; there is cookie retargeting.” 

The ad tech industry spent 20 years claiming that they knew the audience and news media companies more than anyone else, Roberts said, but they completely forgot about the right time.

“Ad tech industry has been beating their drum saying only those people who are identifiable are valuable,” Roberts said. “If you are running a business that is captured by somebody who has held onto their identity, you are not working for yourselves, you are working for the identity company.”

This was how clickbait was created, he added. By incentivising just the eyeball not the value, the quality of the content degraded.

To break that cycle, news companies can acknowledge their valuable audience, Roberts said: “It gives freedom in publishing, pursuing the strategy that you want to pursue and your understanding of your valuable audience to the market.”

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