This isn’t a new concern per se.

Publishers have had this beef with ad verification companies for several years. They’ve never liked the fact that the same companies scanning their pages for contextual signals on whether advertisers should advertise there are also selling those signals to advertisers to advertise there. Nevertheless, publishers resigned themselves to the fact that it would happen regardless. But now, they see a chance to draw a line in the sand by being able to set the terms of how those contextual signals are collected, and ideally get paid as a result.

It turns out that dreams can come true for publishers.

The Guardian announced this morning (April 20) that it’s working with a contextual ad firm that has agreed to more equitable terms for both parties. In a nutshell, those terms mean Illuma will pay the publisher so that it can collect and subsequently sell its data for targeting. The financial agreement was not disclosed.

“The technology we’re offering has its benefits in that it uses a wider breadth of contextual environments, but it’s not the thing that’s solving the issue here,” said Illuma’s CEO Peter Mason. “Really, this is about having a legal contract that says publishers should have a right to decide who does what, with intellectual property that they own.”

However, desires for this legal protection for publisher data has fallen on deaf ears, as they normally do when publishers are involved. They don’t have much leverage. That power rests with advertisers. All publishers can do is continue to draw attention to the issue, and hope that most companies want to explore these types of data licensing agreements.

Happiness isn’t a guarantee for The Guardian and Illuma after this honeymoon phase is over. Ad verification companies haven’t exactly been a shoulder for publishers to cry on, as they have maintained they’re not doing anything wrong to publishers.

After all, publishers are remunerated every time an advertiser buys an ad on one of their pages on the back of that contextual targeting. It’s the data scraped from that page (i.e. the classification data) that allows advertisers to know that the page is a good place to advertise, and therefore buy the impression. Any additional commercial agreement on top of this current one would mean the publisher gets paid twice for the same impression.

It’s a frequently made point, albeit one that has a bit of contention around it.

The first point of contention for publishers is that they see notably less money when an ad is bought via an ad verification tool instead of them. They don’t …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron