• by Ari Rosenberg , Op-Ed Contributor, March 12, 2015

Far more digital publishers are going to miss their first-quarter ad-sales numbers than will make them.  The rest of the year will be worse.

That’s because established consumer publishers, along with thousands of quality vertical ones, trying to sell ads online are staring at an elephant-sized problem: 50% of their value proposition -- which they traditionally and heavily leaned on to earn a spot on a media plan -- has disappeared.  

The reasons advertisers bought ads from traditional premium publishers can be reduced to two: one was for branding, and the second was because the publisher’s content connected advertisers to the right audience in a defined mindset. 

A media salesperson who used to sell ads for a finance publisher made this connection perfectly.  He explained to his pharmaceutical clients that his site's readers, who invest time to learn how to plan for their financial future, plan to live a long life.  These are the people who will fill their prescriptions for Lipitor.

Today, a pharmaceutical advertiser can target adults between the prime usage age of 53- to 62-years-old, who go to the gym four times a month, and have visited a health site looking for cholesterol information in the last 72 hours.  Targeting through content can’t compete with this kind of audience targeting. 

The private marketplace business brings targeting back to the table for some publishers, but does not provide enough revenue to make up for this loss. 

That leaves traditional publishers in the enviable position of needing to extract more revenue from the branding value they contribute to a media plan.  It’s the value created by handing users content they source when sharing with others, because it makes users feel good about themselves.  Advertisers appearing under that publisher’s canopy of credibility benefit greatly.

However, media buyers don’t like to recognize this value out loud because they don’t want to pay a premium for it online. So how do publishers extract more ad money for this more ambiguous value online? 

We don’t do simple well, but selling weekly roadblocks of display inventory to one single advertiser per week (100% SOV) solves the problem. This immediately limits the supply of millions of “units” for sale to 52.  So where will the demand come from for a more expensive and restricted online ad package?

As a former media buyer, I can tell you that the only time a publisher had leverage to drive demand was when we were made to feel we were going to miss out on buying a media opportunity our client wanted, one where (even worse) their competitor might appear instead.  Selling millions of rotating impressions have never given publishers this kind of leverage, but selling weekly buyouts does. 

Let’s use Golf.com as an example of how this can play out.  Let’s assume the site averages 5 million page views a week (some weeks may be higher, but you need a “rate base” average to work with, and you have to stop losing sleep because of some over-delivery).

Now assume the site can charge a $30 page view CPM (an eCPM of $15 if it serves two ad impressions per page, an eCPM of $10 if it serves three).

The cost for an exclusive weekly “brandblock” would be $150,000.

Selling all 52 weeks would net $7.8 million.  Selling a few weeks shy of course nets less, but selling 40 or more weeks would give the site leverage to actually raise prices the following year. 

So where is the demand going to come from?  There is a golf tournament every week with title and participating sponsors.  Taking an offer to own Golf.com for the week to these sponsors, as well as the companies they compete with, seems like a good place to start.  Also adding to the demand for these limited spots will be non-tournament-sponsors who tend to advertise to this audience. 

All these advertisers have one thing in common: a marketing launch date. Advertisers are most nervous at launch dates.  It’s like sending out an Evite and being worried no one will respond.  Exclusive ownership of your site the week all their ads hit the market will alleviate some fears. 

The best part of this approach is when clients who buy your site this way can finally see their own ads, and they can send a link to their bosses, showing off what they bought. Now we’re getting somewhere.

The rotating-impression business was never a good business for premium consumer publishers -- and an especially bad one for smaller vertical publishers.  This strategy gets them out of that business and back into the branding one -- but this time, with leverage.