Six revenue opportunities you could be missing

Published: 13 Oct 2022

The pandemic highlighted the vulnerability of relying too heavily on a single revenue stream. And as we adjust to an increasingly cookieless world and to the rise of new formats for audiences to engage with, there are a wealth of opportunities for digital publishers to diversify their revenues. But what could you be missing?

We asked our expert Associates to share what they considered to be the revenue opportunity that is most often overlooked by digital publishers in order to help you ensure you’re making the most of every opportunity.

Leverage the value of your first party data

Historically, this has been a failure to leverage the full power of their first party data - not just in relation to advertising, but for other opportunities such as affiliate marketing, subscriptions, newsletters, and other content-based revenue streams. However, with the inevitable decline and eventual death of third-party cookies, publishers of all sizes and across all verticals are realising the value of their usership and the unique data associated with them. Undoubtedly, the publishers who are able to leverage and maximise the inherent value associated with their user base have a bright future ahead of them.

Russell James, Senior Director, Publisher Development, Ogury

Personalise the advertising experience on your site

For years, publishers have struggled to monetise their sites with more and more ads, while trying to maintain a positive experience for their users. As a result, ad real estate has become a scarce resource on many sites. To combat this, publishers should consider moving away from the one-size-fits-all model to personalize the experience of their site, and number of ads, for different user segments. In this way, they can both increase revenue, and improve on-site experience for their most loyal users.

Jason Iliou, Publisher Account Director for the UK, Taboola

Target audiences in cookieless environments

Many publishers often overlook the opportunities presented by cookieless environments as they are often considered unaddressable and therefore, less valuable. Almost 50% of UK traffic comes from Safari and Firefox. By leveraging cookieless identity technologies, media owners can turn valuable Safari users into addressable audiences. Buyers are willing to invest more in addressable users. Recent case studies show that by leveraging first-party universal identifiers, publishers see up to 40% uplift in CPMs in cookieless browsers.

Jessica Werner, Senior Director of Publisher Development, ID5

Reduce your reliance on a single revenue stream

This is a potential plug, but we truly believe that having an effective, cohesive strategy to recover revenue lost to adblocking is something publishers should pay attention to. Apart from that, if more than 90% of your revenue comes from one source, you should experiment with new revenue drivers, such as direct deals, affiliate marketing, branded content, targeted subscriptions, and programmatic audio weaved into either original programming like podcasts or via text-to-audio conversion of existing content.

James Van Sweringen, Director of Revenue Operations, Blockthrough

Repurpose content to create new formats with minimal effort

The immediate revenue opportunity that is missed for most publishers is the ability to tap into RSS feeds. With EX.CO, even if publishers are not actively producing their own video content, they can automatically generate videos using their existing articles which dramatically increases recirculation and adds video revenue into the mix.

Additionally, many publishers are learning that they have an opportunity to provide a gateway between content and commerce via affiliate and partner marketing. Several specialist and B2B publishers, for example, now report that marketing services revenue (lead generation, affiliate, etc.) is now bigger than their display ad revenue.

Marc Thomas, GM, EMEA, EX.CO

Invest in tools to give you better insights into your audiences

Revenue insights: Publishers need the right tools to generate valuable and actionable insights to have better educated, data-driven conversations with buyers. This robust insight will enable publishers to position their first-party audiences towards advertisers better and proactively reach out to clients with ideas on improving programmatic experiences and finding additional revenue opportunities.

Thomas Baart, Customer Success Manager, Permutive