• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, May 2, 2016

For mobile users, speed is just about everything.

Users are more likely to abandon a page if it takes too long to load, which led Facebook and Google to start slotting content into a stripped down format that would run faster on devices—projects called Instant Articles and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), respectively.

Beachfront Media, a video ad tech company, recently became AMP-enabled, allowing publishers to monetize their content through its platform. Frank Sinton, Beachfront CEO, says that becoming platform-agnostic allows his company to respond to publisher demand.

Since Facebook reoriented its platform from being a nexus for traffic to being a destination, publishers have scrambled to find ways to monetize their inventory outside of the social giant’s walled garden.

That’s only been reinforced since Facebook announced that it was officially shutting down the portion of its LiveRail video ad tech division that focused on the open exchange. It is pushing those customers that bought and sold on LiveRail towards operating directly on Facebook via a private marketplace (PMP).

“PMPs make a lot of sense, if you’ve got an established brand,” says Sinton. But if you don’t have one, it’s like setting up a lemonade stand on a street corner and hoping a big advertiser drives by. Essentially, he says, Facebook’s move is “telling small and medium publications that they’re not a priority.”

The media market is already taking a correction in 2016, with digital giants like BuzzFeed reportedly cutting its revenue projections in half and other sites laying off employees.

At this point in the development of digital media, publishers need to be able to monetize their content wherever it may appear, and not put all their eggs into the same basket that everyone else is.