If you do one thing this week, take a look at the Warc figures in
eMarketer showing who gets what from digital advertising. It's an eye-opener.
The Guardian has been a brave voice in the media pointing out that it can't
be right that it -- as a quality publisher -- gets only a third of the revenue from programmatic. It does sound rather low, doesn't it?
Well, the Warc figures suggest that it is indeed on the
low side, but is representative of an advertising landscape in which the majority of revenue goes to the tech vendors, not the publishers or the advertiser's agency.
The breakdown is
pretty bleak. Publishers get around 40%, assuming there is no fraud while the advertiser's agency gets 5%. That means 55% goes to tech vendors and is what eMarketers refers to as a "tech tax."
So where does all the money go?
According to eMarketer's number crunching, data targeting and verification takes the largest non-publisher slice, with a share of 25%. The trading desk
through which ads run takes a 15% bounty and the demand-side platform (DSP) takes 10%, leaving 5% for the ad network.
The 40% slice that goes to publishers can easily be reduced if there
is fraud in the system. If one in ten placements prove to be fraudulent, Warc estimates publisher revenues dips down to 36%. That's not far off a third?
It hardly seems like a sustainable
landscape, and so it is increasingly likely that publishers will use fewer platforms and try to hone down on those that offer the best return. Direct programmatic is also a term doing the rounds
whereby there is a more direct relationship between publishers and advertisers. Buying and selling space would still be done by machines, but without so many outside actors taking large pieces of the
cake.
That has to be the way forward, doesn't it? Using first-party data held by a publisher rather than buying in targeting data and paying for it to be remotely verified?
Ad
tech vendors and trading desks are not going to disappear and are, of course, a vital part of targeted advertising being delivered and verified. But when this important role takes more out of the
revenue pot than the publisher, alarm bells have to start ringing.