Data-Labor-Technology

For this plan to work at scale, Schibsted needed ad tech vendors — businesses that have access to programmatic ad dollars more readily than publishers ever will. It did just that last month when it plugged those IDs into Adform and subsequently made them available to any advertiser looking to bid on its inventory via the ad tech vendor.

Granted, this essentially limits the usage of such data to Schibsted’s own sites, including Norwegian newspapers Aftenposten and Verdens Gang. But for publishers like Schibsted that have a data management platform that can create valuable audience segments and broadcast those segments in bid requests in such a way that doesn’t require ID syncing or complex translation, this is a viable alternative to the current audience targeting paradigm. 

As Per Håkon Fasting, head of advertising and sales at Schibsted, explained: “There’s a lot of blind buying of our programmatic inventory in Safari and Firefox where third-party identifiers are banned but advertisers continue to buy regardless.” 

Or to put it another way, programmatic advertisers continued to try and reach Schibsted readers in those browsers despite not being able to frequency cap or precisely target their ads. 

Even for a publisher like Schibsted that isn’t reliant on this sort of advertising (70% of its ad revenue comes from direct deals), this is an issue. There are few faster ways to turn readers into haters than poorly targeted ads. Schibsted can’t afford for that to happen. Not when scaled publishers with premium brands and, ideally, large authenticated audiences are poised to benefit from the degradation of third-party addressability. Of course, Schibsted is going to build a first-party ID ecosystem across all its inventory.

To be clear, this ecosystem already exists for most of the publisher’s inventory — the part sold via direct deals with advertisers. This latest move just extends it to the programmatic part too. 

Doing so is a two-step process: first, the publisher is making its first-party IDs available to those programmatic advertisers that need it to frequency cap the number of ads they buy as well as optimizing bids. In other words, not targeting. That bit comes later in the year — sometime before the summer — when Schibsted will make its audience segments available via those first-party IDs. From then, this will be the only way to buy those segments programmatically across most of its ad formats (save for some video and native.)

“The market is driven by convenience in so far as if solutions like this aren’t in the faces of marketers then they will continue to do what they’ve been doing,” said Fasting. ‘What we’re doing is making it easier for advertisers to access our audiences without third-party cookies.”

Moves like this are creating (albeit slowly) a situation where there’s still user-level targeting in the open web (i.e. outside the large walled gardens) but on a much smaller scale. The more this happens the more premium publishers effectively become small walled gardens of authenticated, or logged-in, users. However, as a result of this increased scarcity, the cost of such inventory will likely be higher, compared to everything else on the open web. And that’s what Fasting is counting on. He’s sure that advertisers will pony up. Publishers are one of the few places that have first-party audiences of a decent size, making them safe effective bets, he continued. That’s been clear in the early tests for Schibsted’s first-party IDs. 

“This is going to give us new revenue [from programmatic] that we never had before,” said Fasting. “We know from our tests that our first-party data works better than third-party data and our contextual signals perform better than any inventory. If we can push that combination via our deal with Adform then we should be in a position where I can challenge my direct sales business.”

This could happen sooner, not later if the promise these IDs have already shown is anything to go on. It certainly was for Renault last spring. Back then it ran a campaign using first-party IDs bought via Adform, and  saw viewability rise to 80% compared to the 75% it got on the back of a third-party cookie traffic. Moreover, only ad traffic with these first-party IDs was able to meet daily spend targets across the campaign period, per Adform.

“Most publishers are sitting on a vast amount of rich first-party data, and as privacy regulations continue to tighten, operating with first-party data will be a significant and powerful advantage in the future. With this, you can build more accurate audiences and discover new sources of revenue, all through privacy-compliant methods,” said Freddie Turner, EMEA md at programmatic agency MiQ.

There have not been any campaigns sold yet on VMG’s Twitch content at the time of publication.

VMG and Twitch would not disclose the exact revenue terms of the partnership. Twitch’s standard revenue share for creators on the platform is a 50-50 split. In some publisher partnerships, Twitch will pay an upfront fee for producing content exclusively for the platform, according to a Twitch spokesperson; however they would not confirm or deny if VMG received that as part of this deal.

VMG started posting on Twitch at the end of the summer 2022, first with an interview news show on Vice’s Twitch channel from its Vice World News brand. At the time, Katie Drummond, svp of global news and global editor-in-chief of Vice News, said VMG wanted to wait on adding a layer of revenue to Twitch until after there was an established audience and community around the channel in order to gain trust from viewers versus appearing to only be trying to milk the platform for ad dollars.

Though not a direct result of waiting out the audience before starting to monetize the platform, VMG did miss its revenue goal set at the beginning of the year for 2022 by about $100 million, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed to Digiday by someone familiar with the company. The total revenue for last year was about $600 million, on par with VMG’s 2021 total revenue.

Reaching the Vice audience

Last week, Haik and her team hosted a dinner with Twitch alongside CES to announce the new partnership and hopefully sell ad campaigns on the “Good Game” show, which is an extension of Refinery29’s larger Good Game franchise that covers female and non-binary gamers and gaming culture.

When media buyers were asked if Vice or Refinery29 is a brand that they would consider for a client’s Twitch-based campaign, it ultimately came down to whether the brand was interested in reaching Vice’s audience, versus prioritizing the fact that it’s a live stream on Twitch.

“We would be looking at [a campaign] more for that [Vice personality] first before Twitch. There is enough education around Twitch now to understand that it’s a destination for live stream gaming, but it’s also a platform where other content is shown. I don’t think just being on Twitch is a reason to consider Vice content,” said Molly Schultz, svp and group partner of digital investment and innovation at UM Worldwide.  

Twitch certainly doesn’t seem to be the right fit for all publishers, and media buyers considering advertising on the platform are even more picky about what content is being displayed there.  

“When we’re considering Twitch, it’s important that there’s at least a tie to gaming. It is really difficult for publishers who are not necessarily endemic to gaming, even though Vice obviously is producing gaming content … it’s been really tough for publishers to break into that [space]. They’re not particularly known as a gaming publisher or something that the audience on Twitch is usually going to Twitch for,” said Schultz. 

Refinery29’s Twitch channel has 743 followers at the time of publication. In the past 60 days (the period of time that live streams are archived on Refinery29’s Twitch channel), the number of views per video really runs the gamut. The most viewed stream has just over 20,000 views while the video with the fewest views only has four, according to the channel’s public stats. However, a spokesperson for the company said certain episodes of “Good Game” that aired more than 60 days ago have accrued upwards of 200,000 or 300,000 views.  

To help ensure that sold live streams get enough views, Haik said that Twitch will promote “Good Game” on its homepage when the show is live, something the platform has organically done in the past. “Twitch will help us promote the show, [so] we can turn on scale very easily. Some of that will happen organically because of the [celebrity guests] that we have on but we have various ways of elevating and promoting the stream if we need to,” she said.

Vice News is still actively publishing on Twitch and currently has 3,800 followers. Two of its December streams garnering over 300,000 views each, but the channel is not yet earning revenue. Haik said while the plan is to monetize that news content in the near future, no solid timeline has been set. 

“As far as platform [revenue] sharing, it really is a story of the cream rising to the top,” said Geoff Schiller, VMG’s global EVP of commercial and sales strategy. “[Strong] social revenue streams on the passive side I think will be few and far in between [and] for only those publishers that are delivering the most differentiated [and] the most compelling [content]. And so from that lens, branded content and distribution of that branded content is where social has the most value. It’s more of a direct play.” 

Video news publisher The Recount debuted its Twitch partnership in April, when Twitch paid The Recount an undisclosed amount upfront to produce the show, “Recount Live” exclusively for Twitch. This deal would also give The Recount 50% of the revenue earned from pre-roll and mid-roll ads during the show as well as any direct consumer revenue from Twitch’s subscription tiers, as part of the platform’s affiliate program. Six months later, The Recount informed employees it planned to suspend operations, Axios reported in December, and “Recount Live” seems to have disappeared from the platform altogether.

Meanwhile, Rolling Stone is garnering an audience on its livestreams. The publisher currently has about 55,000 followers and its most recent broadcast on Twitch from Jan. 5, captured more than 233,000 views at the time of writing.

“You really have to focus and dedicate [yourself] on Twitch and that’s where we see most publishers burn out,” said Nick Cicero, vp of strategy at Conviva. “You have to want to build up the Twitch platform, and so whether you’re monetizing or not, that audience development is key. You can’t do it by simulcasting your live [streams] everywhere.” 

The Washington Post, for example, gained over 42,000 followers on Twitch but seems to have paused its experimentation on the platform, with its most recent live news broadcast taking place two months ago. Despite garnering several thousand views on its posts — and being owned by the billionaire, Jeff Bezos, who founded and serves as executive chairman of Twitch parent Amazon — the Post hasn’t been able to find the secret sauce for making news content work on the platform. 

“[Twitch] is not right for every publisher. If you have the DNA to understand how to build and grow an audience on Twitch, and you lean into personalities, I think it can be really successful. But you have to know your audience and where they live,” said Cicero.