Jul 07, 2020 23:00:00

There is a possibility that website side profit will increase by stopping targeting advertisement

Behavior-targeting advertising , which tracks the behavior of Internet users and displays advertisements based on their personal information, has become the mainstream of digital advertising because it is highly effective. However, when the traditional approach of 'displaying advertisements related to content' was taken instead of targeting advertisements, there were cases in which a high revenue increase of 76% over the previous year was observed.

New data shows publisher revenue impact of cutting 3rd party trackers
https://brave.com/npo/

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users.It's meant to work like that, right? • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/stop_tracking_increase_revenue_effectiveness/

Targeting advertising, which estimates the interest based on the behavior history of the Internet user and targets the advertisement display, is known to be very effective. On the other hand, targeted advertising has been pointed out as a problem from the viewpoint of privacy because it collects user's personal information.

In recent years, there has been a growing disagreement with user tracking for targeting advertisements, and Apple has been strengthening its anti-tracking function called ' Intelligent Tracking Prevention ' (ITP) every year.

Apple's anti-tracking feature is shaking the advertising world-GIGAZINE

The New York Times, a major newspaper company, has also announced that it will stop using third-party data for targeted advertising.

The New York Times will stop using third-party data for targeting ads-GIGAZINE

Dutch Public Broadcasting also stopped third-party trackers on its online video site in January 2020. Stopping a third-party tracker will prevent you from tracking user activity outside of your website, which will prevent traditional targeting. For this reason, it is generally thought that “the profit will decrease if the targeting advertisement is stopped”, but in the case of Dutch public broadcasting, an increase in profit was confirmed.

Below is a graph showing the increase and decrease in advertising revenue for Dutch public broadcasting. Revenue increased 61% year-on-year in January when the third-party tracker was shut down, and 76% year-over-year in February. Earnings declined from February to March due to the new coronavirus (COVID-19), but still compared to the same period of the previous year, it increased by 18% in February, 8% in March, and 19% in April. I am.

Dutch Public Broadcasting offers content-targeted advertising instead of targeted advertising. Content-targeted advertising is a traditional 'advertising content-related' approach, such as 'displaying travel advertisements while reading travel articles.'

According to Stichting Ether Reclame (STER), which conducted this research and analysis, there are several reasons why content-targeted advertising has generated a higher profit than the targeting effect. First, the same effect can be expected with non-personalized ads, where clicks measure how attractive an ad is to a user.

In addition, in recent years, users have been concerned about the existence of ad trackers, and 'an approach that agrees to refuse tracking by third parties' was supported, Firefox's ad blocking function is highly effective and advertiser tracking In addition to limiting capabilities, lack of transparency in the real-time bidding (RTB) market is cited as a factor.

With RTB, instead of buying ads directly from the media, there is an ad agency between the media and the advertiser. However, there is “unspecified money” in the supply chain, and according to a survey by the British marketing industry group ISBA, about half of the advertising expenses paid by the brand side (advertiser) reach the website (media) It is clear that it is.

The digital advertising supply chain is ``well-known opaque, badly speaking scam'', it is clear that the site management receives only about 50% of money-GIGAZINE

In the case of the Dutch public broadcasting example, it is thought that the profit was raised by removing such 'cancer' of the ad tech industry, rather than the effect of targeting advertisement being ineffective. Given the growing concern about privacy, this example provides the media with an incentive to return to traditional content-targeted advertising.