Month: June 2021

Since at least 2019, Google has focused its justification for restricting fingerprinting around data privacy. “We believe users should have adequate transparency and control in digital advertising. Fingerprinting does not allow for this, which is why it is against our policies,” a company spokesperson told Digiday. “We are continuing to work with the industry on ads standards that preserve user privacy and control while allowing for measurement and fraud prevention.”

However, Google has refrained from disclosing its definition of fingerprinting. The company declined to provide Digiday with details of how it defines fingerprinting internally, nor would it explain how it monitors for use fingerprinting in tech operating on its ad systems. “We look at a number of signals when reviewing compliance with our policies, but we don’t discuss how we detect or enforce them so that bad actors can’t work around our detection or enforcement,” said the spokesperson.

As digital ad players parse Google’s statements about how it will treat use of data and identifiers when it stops accepting third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, more companies want to test ways to identify people for advertising without cookies. That includes tech that could fall under Google’s mysterious definition of fingerprinting. One ad tech exec who spoke on condition of anonymity said, “More and more companies need to rely on fingerprinting to actually have a persistent ID to work with.” The exec added that probabilistic identifiers “are based on fingerprinting tech but they’re not calling it fingerprinting.”

There is interest in fingerprinting tech to identify a browser and enable persistent data storage in the absence of cookies. “The ad tech industry needs to come up with something that is able to derive an identifier for a browser that is able to do retargeting,” said Bill Budington, a senior staff technologist with privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation who has tracked use of fingerprinting over the years. 

Already, companies are trying surreptitious fingerprinting methods to circumvent Apple’s crackdown on app tracking in its mobile operating system.

Relying on ‘what we believe Google is laying out as acceptable’

Companies like Flashtalking have built identity tech they believe satisfies Google’s fingerprinting rules, though it might seem more like reading tea leaves. The firm, which is certified to serve third-party ads on Google-owned YouTube, uses more than 30 data signals — things such as browser version, operating system, plugins that have been installed, time zone or other tidbits — to create a persistent identifier to use to target ads to an individual and measure how that person responds to those ads, for instance, whether they visit the advertiser’s site.

As far as Flashtalking is concerned, Google will be just fine with the latest evolution of its technology, which connects disparate identifiers to track user identity across the web, because the company provides notice of the practice and allows people to opt out from it via a tiny icon featured in the ads it serves. “We are taking our direction from what Google has published on its blog, and carefully choosing how we operate to stay within what we believe Google is laying out as acceptable,” said Flashtalking CEO Joe Nardone.

Nardone is referring to a January 2021 post from Chetna Bindra, Google’s group product manager, user trust and privacy. The post addresses Google’s “anti-fingerprinting” goal, stating the company is developing ways to protect people from “opaque or hidden techniques that share data about individual users” including tech that uses “a device’s IP address to try and identify someone without their knowledge or ability to opt out.” Flashtalking’s own privacy policy states that the firm might identify people “through the IP address from which you interact with the services and the user agent string broadcast by your browser or device,” but the company believes Google will allow use of IP or other device characteristic data for identification so long as it lets people opt out. 

“Our take is: let’s be as literal as possible and give [people] that notification and opt out on every single impression,” Nardone said.

But Google’s statements on that point are as literal as a Jackson Pollock mural. Similar confusion has emerged as ad tech firms have attempted to interpret Google’s stance on identifiers that employ emails or other personal data to track people.

Google’s IAB riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma

Even when Google does get in-the-weeds on its fingerprinting stance, it has some people scratching their heads. For instance, the company’s guidance for ad tech vendors states it will work with companies that are registered to employ methods defined in the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe’s transparency and consent framework (TCF v2.0) — specifically Feature 3 and Special Feature 2 — both of which the IAB itself says could be considered fingerprinting. According to IAB documentation, Feature 3 creates an identifier or re-identifies a device using data collected automatically from a device such as IP address, while Special Feature 2 uses active scanning of device characteristics to create identifiers or re-identify a device. IAB guidelines require tech vendors to obtain opt-in consent from people in order to use Special Feature 2.

“[Fingerprinting] is usually defined as a set of information elements that identifies a device or application instance, so both processing operations under Feature 3 and Special Feature 2 could be considered fingerprinting,” said Helen Mussard, CMO of IAB Europe. While she said IAB Europe has no guidance advising against fingerprinting, it does require that vendors employing those features comply with the European Union’s ePrivacy directive. 

But here’s where things get confusing for some people. In its guidelines for vendors, Google says it will work with firms that use both features, but adds, “However, we remind you that our policies prohibit fingerprinting for identification (e.g., Requirements for Third Party Ad Serving), and we require that you adhere to our policies, which can be more restrictive than the TCF v2.0 in some cases, whenever you work with us.” Translation: We’ll work with you if you do fingerprinting, but you can’t do fingerprinting when you work with us.

The ad tech exec who spoke on condition of anonymity said they have asked Google whether the firm “has an exception here” or if Google can provide more information about its policies on fingerprinting, but has come up empty-handed. Another ad tech exec speaking anonymously called Google’s phrasing around TCF in relation to fingerprinting, “torturous.”

When asked about the perceived discrepancy, the Google spokesperson told Digiday, “We recognize that some vendors take a different perspective toward fingerprinting than we do and may use fingerprinting when working with other partners. However, we require that vendors comply with our policies when working with us via our products and platforms, regardless of how they register on the IAB TCF. We have longstanding policies against fingerprinting for identification of users and continue to prohibit it. This is also reflected in our TCF integration guidance and we require vendors to comply with this when interoperating with our ads products.” 

Amid all the perplexities, some ad tech executives have teased out some clarity. According to Ian Trider, vp of real time bidding platform operations at ad tech firm Centro, Google is not being confusing; instead the company is recognizing even it has limits on its power.

“The rules specifically relate to any scenario where Google’s systems are involved. This does not necessarily mean that [Google] is tacitly accepting the practice elsewhere — only that there are limits to its control. Its position about what should or should not happen is otherwise clear — no fingerprinting,” Trider said. “This makes sense to me, because it may be an overreach for Google to order companies to refrain from engaging on an activity when it has nothing to do with Google’s platforms or inventory.”

But when there is confusion, some firms are reluctant to make it publicly known to Google that they are worried their partners might be engaged in fingerprinting on their watch because Google could penalize the firms as well as their partners. Said the first unnamed ad tech exec, “Since we are depending on the ability for our clients to push tags from us to Google’s different platforms, and then for Google to serve files hosted by us and from our domains, if we were removed from that [approved vendor] list it would heavily affect us.”

Orchid Richardson, SVP, programmatic & data center at IAB, said the industry will eventually have to move past the bifurcated nature of the targeting solutions being proposed at present. “The greatest thing that ever happened to us as an industry is when we came around to standardizing programmatic,” she said. The industry needs to apply that same focus on standardization for the post-cookie world.

The standardization debate rumbles on

With Apple now allowing iOS users to opt out of sharing IDFA data, and the demise of the third-party cookie looming ever closer, the future of targeting and tracking consumers is still unclear. Right now we’re seeing a range of companies innovating their own in-house identity solutions, contextual solutions, cohort-based approaches such as Google’s FLoC, and the emergence of more finely tuned predictive targeting tech. However, there’s no clear winner yet, and the immediate future of programmatic will be the search for a new industry standard.

Tom Grant, SVP of programmatic platforms & operations at Havas Media Group, said the industry is almost certainly going to need solutions for targeting and measurement outside of authenticated identity. Several speakers said the likely solution could be a combination of several proposals. The question is which of the current solutions will scale or whether an entirely new solution will come along.

“I do think that people should look beyond identity,” said Rene Plug, Chief Business Development Officer at 1plusX. Plug said early results are showing that attempts to create a like-for-like identifier based replacement for cookies will be unsuccessful. “The matching rates are going to be very low. It’s just not going to be enough, and that is going to create massive challenges for both the publishers and for the advertisers,” he said.

There will certainly be space for some identifiers, with a lot of hope currently being placed on nascent solutions like Unified ID 2.0. Jesse Fisher, director, programmatic products & technology at Horizon Media, talked about the endurance of identifiers including certain IDFAs and TV identifiers like IFAs, but said that eventually, the industry will need to fill the gap. We heard from several speakers about the prospect for a long-term solution taking the form of some synthesis of identity-based targeting, first-party data, cohort-type approaches like FLoC, and technologies like probabilistic solutions, machine learning, and algorithmic decision-making.

Test, test, and test again — and don’t fear failure

In the short term, it’s unlikely the industry will coalesce around a new industry standard unless an unforeseen breakthrough takes place. Instead, we can expect to see competing solutions proliferate. In that context, many of our speakers urged peers to develop energetic and robust test-and-learn practices.

Tom Grant of Havas Media Group said the first step companies should take is to evaluate how much their business is threatened by changes to identity-based targeting. “What proportion of what I currently buy, my targeting and measurement, is dependent on identity that’s going away?” he raised. If you’re more invested in buying an audience, there will be a solution for that. If identity-based targeting accounts for a significant share of your spending, Grant said it’s time to get into testing.

Ryan Kelly, programmatic practice lead at Wavemaker, talked about the importance of benchmarking the performance of new approaches, for example, contextual campaigns, while third-party cookies are still available. Better to find out what works now and tweak, rather than be left firing blindly after cookies have been retired.

In doing so, advertisers have to get comfortable with seeing a degree of failure. “You might see some success, you might see some failure, but the overall drop-off that you see now will be far less than if you wait until cookies not being in existence at all,” Kelly said.

When it comes to data, make sure consumers understand the value exchange

Privacy considerations will weigh heavily on the viability of any proposed future industry standard. A number of speakers discussed how securing first-party data will be one way of identifying consumers, but advertisers have to get better at communicating the value proposition to the customer.

Christopher Reher, director of data strategy & products at Media Impact, talked about building “trust moments” between consumer and advertiser, while Kelly said advertisers have to walk a fine line in delivering a personalized experience that a customer believes delivered value, versus one that the customer finds creepy and invasive. “What I do fear is if we don’t tell that narrative effectively as relates to the value exchange, it’ll just continue to go further and further,” said Kelly. “At that point, we lose all functionality from a targeting standpoint.”

Calls for renewed urgency on DE&I

Elise James-DeCruise and Jazmine Brown from The Ad Council joined the hosts of the Minority Report podcast for a conversation on what’s going on in diversity, equity and inclusion in the industry. James-DeCruise, The Ad Council’s chief equity officer, spoke on the importance of creating workplace cultures conducive to sustaining diversity. Hiring is important, she said, but those new hires may head back through the revolving door if they find themselves in a culture that doesn’t support them. Leaders have to resource DE&I efforts appropriately if they are serious about seeing results.

As The Ad Council’s manager of diversity, equity and inclusion teams, Jazmine Brown talked about the importance of being comfortable with vulnerability and said leaders need to act with intentionality. She said that creating opportunities is not just about tackling the hiring pipeline but can also be about resolving “bottlenecking” by stepping aside from roles to make space for others. “Those two things have to happen in parallel,” Brown said. “To get results that you’ve never had before, you have to do the unexpected or the hard things that you’ve never done before.”

If it’s not already obvious, shortcomings on DE&I have very real results for business. Jennifer Garcia, multicultural data & science lead at Publicis Media Cultural Quotient, talked about removing bias in multicultural segments. She said the way some companies rely on mainstream cultural signifiers can stray easily into stereotyping. That can cause targeting to skip over large sections of a community that campaigns should be reaching. Having more diverse teams working on these projects has an immediate impact. “The machine learning is always is only going to be as good as what you put in it,” Garcia said. “If you don’t have the broader perspective of culture in mind, and the broader perspective of diversity in mind, then that’s going to be a biased outcome.”

WTF are ….

Cohorts

With the imminent loss of the third-party cookie and its ability to follow one user’s movements around devices and online spaces, cohorts offer a privacy-friendly alternative to one-to-one tracking. Cohort-based solutions use shared characteristics or habits to create groups of internet users that can then be matched with advertisers’ targeting preferences. Cohorts identify these user traits without compromising the user’s privacy, passing a critical litmus test for any viable targeting or measurement solution as programmatic marketing moves toward the post-cookie era.

Overheard

“We have an obligation not only to ourselves but to the industry as a whole to really be thoughtful about how we’re going to advance this work and get outside of our comfort zones a little bit more, expand our networks a little bit more, because the talent is out there.” — Elise DeCruise, chief equity officer, The Ad Council

• One persistent shortcoming within the ad industry is a failure to realize that pursuing diversity, equity and inclusion doesn’t end with hiring. The industry’s culture can still be incredibly insular, cliquey and exclusionary, and it falls on leaders and managers to push the boundaries and embrace a degree of personal discomfort in order to create comfort and inclusion for all. DeCruise said those who already “fit in” often lack the awareness or confidence to start conversations with people who don’t look like them or who may not have gone to the same schools as they did, but pushing past that and embracing vulnerability is vital if we’re going to make progress on DE&I.

“Multiple studies have shown that creative is at least 50 percent of media effectiveness, beating out the more traditional optimization levers like audience and pricing.” — Natasha Potashnik, SVP, data science & media optimization, Known

• In a metric-obsessed field like programmatic marketing, the contribution of creative to a campaign’s success is often subjective, hard to pin down and thus easily overlooked. Natasha Potashnik challenged advertisers to take note of the central role good creative can play in helping campaigns achieve and exceed their KPIs. She said Known has seen a five-fold gap between the best performing creative teams and the worst performing teams. “How rare is it to find a small tweak in audience or media tactics that gives a five times difference in efficacy?” she said.

“Data deprecation in general is going to have a great impact on digital advertising as we know it, between privacy laws, browser operating system restrictions on data collection, and consumers opting out of third-party tracking.” —Bill Todd, chief revenue officer, AdTheorent

• Todd said that companies need to do more to get prepared for the disruption that is on the horizon. However, he said platforms that are not reliant on third-party cookies are already well-positioned for future success. The next evolution of programmatic will see machine learning, predictive targeting and customizable data science modeling all taking center stage, and everyone in the industry should at least be exploring these spaces if not deploying testing and learning strategies.

Stat to know

CTV is growing as a proportion of the programmatic mix, both in terms of audience reach and that all-important ad spend. In 2021, the CTV market is projected to be worth $13.5 billion dollars to advertisers — that’s a little more than double the $6.4 billion spent on CTV advertising in 2019, according to AdTheorent’s Todd.

Flexing FLoC

Since traffic started trickling in from trials of Google’s cookieless ad targeting method FLoC — or Federated Learning of Cohorts, which began testing in late March — companies managing ads for publishers have been breaking out their FLoC ID decoding devices, and they’re spelling out a lot more than messages to “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”

The key hits:

• The FLoC method uses machine learning to group people into cohorts based on the sites they have visited and pages they have viewed, then assigns a FLoC ID, a seemingly indiscernible jumble of numbers, to everyone in a given cohort.
• While that grouping is designed to be used for targeting ads, ad management firms are exploring other potential uses for FLoC.
• However, there are limits to FLoC’s utility at this early stage.

Improving content recommendations

FLoC IDs are revealing information that ad management firm Mediavine may use to improve how its recommendation engine aims content to people on publishers’ sites, said Eric Hochberger, the firm’s co-founder and CEO. “We’re starting to use cohorts to see if we can recommend an article to cohort 123 to see if it would be better than recommending that to an anonymous user,” he said. For example, if the company detects that a numerical cohort ID or several IDs are associated with people interested in veganism, “we’re more likely to recommend vegan-based content,” he said.

In the past, Mediavine only had two options: 1) targeting content to logged-in people according to actual previous behavior associated with their identified registration data or 2) suggesting content to anonymous users based on what they are currently reading and what other users are likely to read next based on that individual article. Now, FLoC IDs can create a new way to recommend content when people are not logged in to publisher sites. When people with FLoC IDs visit a site, the company can train its recommendation system’s algorithm to help it decide what individuals are likely to click on next based on what they have read, shared or favorited, said Hochberger.

To gauge success of the new FLoC experiment, the company will evaluate whether people associated with FLoC IDs are more likely to click on recommended content than completely anonymous people are. “Our hypothesis is that the data offered by FLoC will make for better recommendations than anonymous users, but not quite up to the personalization afforded a logged-in user,” Hochberger said.

Detecting cohort correlations for ad targeting

Another firm that manages ads for small publishers, CafeMedia, also is beginning to spot FLoC IDs in traffic coming into publishers’ sites. That allows the company to uncover correlations between cohorts and its existing content cluster data, which reflects sets of web content grouped according to the underlying meaning of the content or shared intents of the people visiting those content groups, said Don Marti, vp of ecosystem innovation at CafeMedia. “People have been asking about what the cohort IDs mean, and in a lot of cases we can map a range of cohorts to a set of content categories they’re more likely to visit,” he told Digiday.

That information can be used to inform ad placement and targeting to audience subsets, by analyzing what content clusters people with certain cohort IDs are browsing. This enables the company to glean more information about a given cohort than what their Google-provided FLoC ID may communicate and develop a fuller profile of the group. “For example, we can see that one range of cohorts is significantly less interested in browsing food content and more interested in personal tech and finance,” said Marti. 

Limitations to FLoC IDs’ uses

Some individual publishers like pop culture list publisher Ranker aren’t necessarily sure of the value of FLoC IDs at this early stage. “At Ranker we are taking a wait-and-see approach to FLoCs. We have healthy skepticism, but are intrigued,” said Clark Benson, CEO of Ranker.

Some of Mediavine’s publisher clients thought incorrectly that they would be able to see the names or labels associated with cohort categories, said Hochberger. “A lot of people were a little confused with how FLoC was going to be,” he said.

However, despite concerns about the intended privacy protections associated with it, the FLoC method is intentionally vague compared to other types of ad targeting. It is championed by Google in part because the company believes it preserves privacy because it assigns the same ID to a group of people rather than at an individual level. And, over time, the numbers associated with cohorts shift in an effort to protect against linking individual people to a persistent identifier. So, there are limits to what publishers or advertisers can glean from the algorithmically-generated strings of numbers produced through FLoC.

Another obstacle at this early testing stage: traffic tagged with FLoC IDs is miniscule at this point, according to both companies. “Google claims half a percent of traffic will be eligible to receive a cohort ID,” said Hochberger. That means sample sizes are too tiny to predict what will really happen assuming Google rolls out the targeting method on a wide scale as planned. Marti said, “Right now, only a tiny fraction of traffic is using FLoC, and the data is noisy, so you need significant scale to see anything interesting in the statistics.”

For publishers themselves, there’s even less traffic featuring FLoC IDs. “At the moment, we are seeing such limited volume coming through with FLoC IDs that there isn’t anything for us to analyze,” said Ranker’s Benson. — Kate Kaye

What we’ve heard

“I don’t know if our head of HR even knows how many people [working at the company] have left New York City.”

— Media executive

A guide to building a Gen Z audience

As Gen Z surges to become one of the largest demographics on the internet, publishers are working to figure out how best to engage this age group (roughly defined as anyone born after 1995). For as much as this generation has become associated with TikTok, video-based platforms are not only media companies’ only means of catering to this cohort.

“It’s too simplistic to say, ‘Let’s do it all in video and that will attract young people.’ Obviously, video is incredibly important to this generation, but they prefer text because [it offers] control and speed, and basically you lose control with video,” said Nic Newman, senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which published a study covering Gen Z’s news consumption in 2019.

By the numbers

• Gen Zers are twice as dependent on their smartphone as those over 45-years-old, but the majority of their time is spent only on a small number of apps, said Newman.
• Of those few apps, Instagram is the top used with Whatsapp, Snapchat, YouTube and TikTok rounding out the remaining top five. No news apps were in the top 25 collectively across respondents, according to Reuters Institute’s study.
• 40% of Gen Zers rely on social media for their news consumption, while 57% report their first interaction with news in the morning is on social media platforms, including messaging apps.
• While social media is the primary driver of information spreading, about 60% of this demographic still consumes news in more traditional mediums, per Reuters Institute.
• Pew Research conducted a survey last year between Aug. 31 and Sept. 7 and found that 41% of respondents aged 18-29 (Gen-Z and young millennials) primarily get their political news from social media while 30% get their political/election news from a News website or app.

Social traction does lead to owned-and-operated success

Looking at some of the media companies that were built first and foremost for Gen Z and young millennial audiences — like Overtime and Verizon Media’s In The Know — these companies have altered their strategies over the years as they’ve learned more about what young readers and viewers want and the lengths to which they will go to follow their favorite brands.

Digital sports publication Overtime’s bread and butter is its distributed content strategy, according to CRO Rich Calacci, which includes its programming on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. Since it was launched in late 2016, the sports media outlet has built up a following of nearly 30 million followers across those five channels.

Last year, Calacci said the company launched an owned-and-operated app in order to be the go-to destination for a sub-community of its most engaged audience members. This platform is free for users, but it does allow Overtime to monetize this audience with programmatic and other advertising that it couldn’t do in a platform-only distribution model.

In The Know started as a shopping-based experiment within the Yahoo portfolio to reach a younger audience. It’s first iteration was a series of short-form videos that was distributed on the Yahoo channels and was meant to be more evergreen and not tied to the news cycle, said Andrea Wasserman, head of global commerce at Verizon Media.

After gaining traction on social media, InTheKnow.com launched as its own standalone brand in February 2020 and the size of its web audience has grown by 3,300% year over year since, with 25 million monthly unique visitors in March, per Comscore. More than three-fourths of its audience comes from mobile platforms, which saw a 900% growth rate year over year this past year, as well.

That publishers would be finding success getting Gen Z audiences to check out their sites “feels very counterintuitive because this is a generation that likes convenience and, in most cases, owned-and-operated platforms are not convenient,” said Newman.

Nonetheless, at the end of the day, a portion of Generation Z is proving to have media consumption habits that are not so different from past generations. — Kayleigh Barber

Numbers to know

500,000: Number of people who pay to subscribe to Substack newsletters.

30%: Year-over-year revenue increase in 2020 for Atlantic 57, which The Atlantic is spinning out and is being rebranded Long Dash.

3,000: Number of people who applied to TikTok’s program supporting Black creators within the first 24 hours.

3 questions with BDG’s Emma Rosenblum

Emma Rosenblum, chief content officer of BDG’s lifestyle group, has been busy. The owner of Bustle, Nylon and The Zoe Report has redesigned five of its lifestyle sites in the past year, most recently Elite Daily, which relaunched in May. “We did all of them remotely,” Rosenblum said.

BDG plans to go public via a SPAC IPO later this year and, by that time, it may have even more sites for Rosenblum and co. to revamp. “Obviously, the goal is to acquire some new brands, which we can also then redesign,” she said. 

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. — Tim Peterson

I feel like we’re past the days of redesign trends with buzzwords like “mobile-first” and “responsive design” and “endless scroll.” But is there a common thread across your site redesigns that reflects a new era in publisher site design?

For each of the redesigns, we’re not only rethinking the sites’ identity and reimagining the digital media experience for this newer, younger audience, but we’re also putting it on our proprietary CMS. We have a custom card story technology, which not only makes the site look really cool [but also] it’s really great for advertising; branded campaigns can run across it. And that’s kind of like the new way that people engage with slideshows, particularly for women’s lifestyle sites.

I came into the company really wanting to bring beautiful aesthetics to sites that already existed. I think that the way that younger female audiences engaged with digital media is somewhat akin to how we used to do with magazine in terms of the environment has to look really beautiful as well as the content has to be great. So to bring that piece to all of the BDG sites has been the goal over the past few years. And we’ve now accomplished it.

BDG is looking to acquire more companies. Any particular type of properties that you’re looking for, and do the redesigns of the existing publications factor into what you’re looking for?

We have a number of different categories that are important that we’re trying to build out. We’d love something in the wellness space and health — those two things combined — and possibly also travel or something that gets around that category. As we go forward, that’s a category that advertisers are, once again, very interested in. We’re building up our beauty portfolio on every site and would love for something that is specifically about beauty; it’s a strong advertiser category as well. And also I think we’re happy to double-down on some of the categories that we already own and are executing on well. We wouldn’t necessarily need to look outside of our core categories in order to acquire something that was really exciting.

Around this time last year, a lot of media companies made pledges to improve the levels of diversity, equity and inclusion inside their organizations. BDG has made the pledge to have 15% of its content feature or be produced by Black people. Has BDG kept to that pledge, and how is it being tracked?

We have an internal inclusion council that tracks it. It has kept that pledge. It’s really important to all of the editors of the sites to keep that, and it is also part of something that we look at when we’re thinking about your review at the end of the year: Have you kept this pledge? Because I do think that it can have a trendiness to it and then fall by the wayside. We’ve seen that happen in a number of companies, and it’s very important to us at this company to not have that happen. Inclusivity has always been core to our company and our brands.

As we go forward, we’re still very deeply committed to upholding the 15 Percent Pledge. It’s something that our editors are thinking about all the time. We have a vertical on each one of the lifestyle sites that’s called Amplifying Black Voices, and it’s continually monitored to make sure that we’re adding to it and that we’re thinking about creative ways to get those stories on each of the sites.

What we’ve covered

Group Nine preps first-party data product focused on video views:

• The parent company of Thrillist, The Dodo and PopSugar has started developing a first-party data platform called In-Genuity.
• Among the data Group Nine will use to create audience segments will be the amount of time people spend watching its videos.

Read more about Group Nine here.

Amazon plans to launch its own identifier amid post-cookie confusion:

• Amazon has discussed plans for an identifier to allow publishers and advertisers to better track and measure activity within the e-commerce company’s ads ecosystem.
• Unlike other identifiers, Amazon’s ID will be limited to its own ecosystem.

Read more about Amazon here.

Insider’s SAGA platform pulls in more ad revenue this year than 2020:

• Insider has already secured 55% more ad deals this year compared to all of last year.
• The company’s advertising team has grown by 25% to total 130 employees, with plans to add 10 more by the end of the year.

Read more about Insider here.

The Digiday guide to news organizations’ social media policies:

• Of 8 news outlets contacted, most have not updated their social media policies in years.
• Some are in the process of adding changes.

Read more about news organizations here.

NTWRK is taking NFTS into the livestream shopping model:

• NTWRK CEO Aaron Levant appeared on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.
• The livestream shopping shopping aims to reach $1 billion in revenue by 2025.

Listen to more about NTWRK here.

What we’re reading

Reuters’ syndication deal jeopardizes paywall launch:
Reuters has pushed back its paywall launch because the subscription program could violate a content syndication deal with financial data provider Refinitiv, according to Reuters. The case puts a unique twist on the typical publisher paywall dilemma: How might walling off certain content for paid subscribers negatively affect other areas of a publisher’s business? Considering that Reuters’ articles have been freely available, it’s unclear what exactly the issue is.

IGN fights for editorial independence:
IGN’s editorial employees are trying to figure out whether the gaming publication’s parent company J2 Global has their back and to what extent they are under its thumb, according to FanByte. After an IGN article about helping Palestinian civilians was taken down, 82 IGN employees publicly called out the article’s takedown, but now executives at Ziff Davis, the division inside J2 Global that is home to IGN, seem to be putting the blame on IGN’s editorial team.

The AP addresses Emily Wilder firing:
The AP fired Emily Wilder because the new outlet believed the journalist’s pro-Palestinian tweets were biased, according to CNN. The issue has become a lightning rod in media circles. Some see it as an old-school organization clinging to an outdated tradition of both-sidesism; others view it as a journalist stepping beyond the bounds of occupational objectivity. But it’s way more nuanced than that, which contrasts with the AP’s binary decision to fire Wilder.

Inner turmoil at the Los Angeles Times:
Los Angeles Times staffers are angry that Republican pollster Frank Luntz has done unpaid work for the newspaper while also consulting for a Republican political action committee without notifying LAT of the political consulting work, according to Daily Beast. The situation is not the first time LAT employees have flagged Luntz for conflict-of-interest issues. 

The Depop acquisition fits into this goal because apparel is a high-frequency category. The resale market is expected to grow to $36 billion in 2024, up from just $7 billion in 2019, according to ThredUp’s 2020 Resale Report.

Key Details:

• Etsy will acquire Depop for $1.625 billion, primarily using cash. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021.
• 90% of Depop users are 26-years old or younger, giving Etsy more traction among Gen Z.
• Etsy has said that Depop will still operate in London under its existing leadership.
• This is Etsy’s second marketplace acquisition. The first was Reverb, a marketplace for new, used and vintage musical instruments, in August of 2019.

How do you do, fellow kids?

Etsy saw tremendous growth over the course of the pandemic as folks became sellers to supplement income, and buyers embraced shopping online. Etsy reported 4.5 million active sellers, and 16 million new and reactivated buyers in its first quarter 2021 earnings.

But many of those buyers were on the older side. The average age of an Etsy buyer is 39 years old, said Etsy CEO Josh Silverman in a conference call. 

Depop has traction among younger internet users, and teenagers are already quite comfortable with the idea of buying used goods — 47% of teenagers have purchased second-hand items & 55% have sold second-hand items, according to Piper Sandler’s Taking Stock with Teens Spring 2021 survey. Depop was the 10th most popular website among teenagers in terms of traffic volume, according to a Fall 2020 Piper Sandler survey. 

In first-quarter earnings, Etsy outlined the goal of increasing repeat visits and average revenue per user with the help four product updates aimed at driving this — quizzes, buyer triggers, restock updates and strategic discounting. While teenagers may not make the largest purchases, the acquisition could pave the way for Etsy to hook a new generation of customers early in their retail journeys.

#DestinationDepop

Founded in 2011 in Milan, Depop now has approximately 30 million registered users across nearly 150 countries. In 2020, the app had 4 million active buyers and 2 million active sellers. Etsy has 90 million active buyers, and 4.5 million active sellers, according to their first-quarter 2021 earnings. That same quarter, 63% of gross merchandise sales came from mobile sales.

Depop did around $650 million in gross merchandise sales in 2020, and made $70 million in revenue, both up 100% year over year, according to Etsy. Etsy did $2.9 billion in gross merchandise sales and made $551 million in revenue, according to first-quarter 2021 earnings. 

Apparel, one of Etsy’s top six sale categories, generated $1.2 billion in gross merchandise sales, compared to its highest-selling category of housewares and home furnishings at $3.9 billion.

Depop’s connection with younger consumers is especially apparent on fashion content on TikTok, where Gen Zers post different outfit videos, or show what’s for sale in their Depop store. The hashtag #Destinationdepop has been viewed more than 14.5 billion times on TikTok.