Month: April 2022

At the end of March, The Washington Post added an individually personalized “For You” section on the homepage to subscribers and registered users, after seeing success with the “For You” tab in its app. The news publisher also plans to roll out a new personalization feature next month aimed at retaining subscribers. While Coleen O’Lear — who was promoted to become the new head of curation and platforms in January — declined to share further details about the upcoming feature, she said it will “make it a lot easier to track what you’ve already read on our website and our apps.”

“Someone who’s coming [to the site] frequently, wants to know whether that story that they read before has been updated, or whether they should read something new. We’re really trying to help people start that journey as well,” she said.

The New York Times created a new “experiments and personalization” team earlier this month to experiment with personalizing the homepage on the Times’ website and app to get subscribers to read more stories. The team is working with editorial desks and product teams to test targeting readers based on their location or reading history, and is doing “active tests” in a module called “In Case You Missed It” — “to showcase some of the breadth of work that we have, as well as amplify some of the strongest pieces,” said Derrick Ho, deputy editor for personalization, who is leading the experiments and personalization team.

The Washington Post’s ‘For You‘

The Washington Post’s “For You” section combines a reader’s selections made while onboarding (when a subscriber or registered user signs up, they can select their topic preferences), reading history and data on stories’ performance on different platforms (O’Lear declined to share more details about the last signal). The more a reader engages with the “For You” section, “the stronger it gets,” O’Lear said. The algorithm can provide better suggestions tailored to what a person chooses to read.

“Relevance is a really important aspect of building a stronger reader experience,” O’Lear said. “What’s most critical is that we serve the right thing at the right time. That’s really about balancing impactful curation with smart personalization.”

‘ICYMI‘

An algorithm powers the “In Case You Missed It” module on the homepage below the Opinion section on The New York Times’ homepage, but editors select the pool of stories to show up in that section. If an article was read in the past 30 days, it will not be shown to a reader again in this section.

The Times has also tested geo-targeted content packages for segments of readers, such as giving visitors from California an extended package during Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recall election last year. The team has also considered providing local content recommendations, such as showing emergency location information during California wildfires for those who live in the state, said The Times’ associate managing editor Karron Skog.

Much of that is still on the horizon. “We’re still very much in the phase where we are trying to build the tools, and refine the tools. We are researching and doing a lot of user research,” Ho said.

Why news publishers are prioritizing personalization

While executives and editors at both The Times and The Post insisted most of their homepages will rely on manual curation to package the biggest stories of the day, sections and modules with personalized content can help take the pressure off editors and surface relevant content, which those teams believe can lead to better reader engagement, conversion and retention.

The Times, for example, publishes about 200 URLs per day. “No reader can get through 200 pieces a day. We are trying to use some of this work to really put the right things in front of the right readers at the right times,” Skog said.

As the Times’ subscriber base has grown to 8 million digital subscribers, leaders there want to scale a good homepage experience. “And this is one way that we can do it,” Ho said. “We want that experience to be far superior than what they can get from one of our articles that’s found in the wild.”

Personalization gives the Post an opportunity to convert readers to subscribers, as well as provides “good retention value for subscribers,” especially for those who come to the site frequently, O’Lear said. “It’s really important for them to see something new when they come.”

That’s also a priority at The Times. As stories move on and off the homepage, it’s easy for a reader to miss a big story, Skog said. An algorithm can help differentiate between subscribers who are visiting the site once a week or 10 times a day. The new team at the Times is working “to really make sure that readers see the things that we think are important on any given day, no matter when they visit us,” Skog said. “For me, that’s something that we wished we could do for a really long time.” Skog did not say how the team was identifying these readers.

There are two ways personalization can benefit both a publisher and a reader: it helps publishers compete with the algorithms of tech and social media platforms like Amazon and Twitter, and it can surface different content based on what the reader has (or hasn’t) already seen on a publisher’s website, leading to a better user experience, said Adam Singolda, CEO of content recommendation platform Taboola.

In January, Taboola announced a new product called “Homepage for You,” which adds a layer of A.I. to a publisher’s website to surface relevant and personalized content to match readers’ interests, which Taboola says can result in increased readership and engagement. It’s being used by publishers like McClatchy and The Independent. In a beta test, publishers saw a 30%-50% increase in CTR for homepage sections personalized by Taboola, according to the company.

“Most of the platforms people are consuming media on are already completely personalized, like Twitter and Facebook,” said Jeff Kupietzky, CEO at multichannel monetization and engagement platform Jeeng (formerly known as PowerInbox), which helps publishers gather reading history data on its site visitors to then be able to match content recommendations with a specific person’s interests. The algorithms that power the content people see on their timelines and newsfeeds are what they have come to expect, Kupietzky argued.

“There is likely a reader for every story we publish, and we’re just trying to find those readers,” Skog said.

In Europe, the concerns created by General Data Protection Regulations — privacy laws enforceable since 2018 that are still causing consternation — and are poised to be compounded further still with the impending Digital Market Act. 

Meanwhile, efforts to establish a U.S. federal privacy law have been continually frustrated — most sources don’t expect this to change in the immediate future given the myriad crises the national government faces — with a patchwork of state-specific regulations materializing instead. 

IAB Tech Lab recently convened a working group, a body representing ad tech companies, platforms and publishers, that seeks to establish a global privacy platform to help its dozens of members centrally manage diverse requirements under laws such as CCPA and GDPR.

A working document describes these efforts as “streamlining technical privacy and data protection signaling standards into a singular schema and set of tools which can adapt to regulatory and commercial market demands.”

Among these efforts are discussions to establish an accountability framework to promote transparency by helping participants detect if companies in their ad tech supply chain are not conforming with relevant privacy requirements.

Speaking recently with Digiday, Pierre Diennet, vp of product management at Lotame, described the discussions as aiming to promote transparency by demonstrating to the public that they do have control over how their personal data is processed by the industry.

“This is a framework across which we’re going to communicate people’s privacy selections so that we can meet the requirements,” he added. “And here’s how we’re going to do it across every jurisdiction at every step across the world.”

These efforts were showcased earlier this week at an event hosted by IAB Tech Lab where representatives of some of the internet’s biggest names, including Google and Meta, also discussed ongoing proposals to maintain targeted advertising and measurement.

Speaking from the conference stage, Garrett McGrath, vp product management at Magnite, who also serves as a prominent member of Prebid.org, noted how there are diverging opinions on how best to move ahead and that uptake of any particular solution would likely be slow.

“There are lot of opinions about whether or not to share assets with certain parts of the ecosystem,” he noted. “When we talk to a variety of publishers, we get a variety of [differing] opinions … and we have long philosophical conversations.”

Two of the hot button topics discussed at the event were Interactive Privacy Attribution, a joint proposal sponsored by Meta and Mozilla, as well as the Google-led Privacy Sandbox proposal with advocates of these methods promoting their wares.

Casey Beal, an exec who handles privacy within the ads ecosystem at Meta, noted how IPA proposes a methodology whereby pseudonymized match keys are used to help advertisers better understand how their ads deliver ROI. “This is key to the proposal as it enables cross-device attribution which was previously limited in other proposals [such as those from Apple or Google] to either on the device or web platform.”

Speaking separately, Michael Kleber, principal software engineer at Google, noted how a lot of parties in the industry are currently assessing their “threat models” before deciding which proposals for continued online advertising and measurement they’ll advocate.

“A lot of people are worried about how a single bad actor can infect the ecosystem and be able to ruin things for other people,” he said, noting how Privacy Sandbox differs from IPA’s methods. “That gets into very sticky questions about where they’re joining identity graph comes from that I think are pretty hard to answer.”

Discussions around the IAB Tech Lab’s accountability framework are ongoing with a draft document containing the proposals open for public comment until May 8.

Despite the account growth deceleration and hardware revenue decline, Roku did report upticks in its platform business, including with respect to its free, ad-supported streaming TV service, suggesting the choppy waters that Netflix has encountered may be more moderate for ad-supported streamers.

The key numbers:

• $733.7 million in total revenue, up 28% year over year
• $646.9 million in platform revenue, up 39% year over year
• $86.8 million in player revenue, down 19% year over year
• 61.3 million active accounts, up 14% year over year
• 20.9 billion hours worth of video streamed through Roku, up 14% year over year
• Average revenue per user of $42.91, 34% (up?) year over year

The hardware hit

Amid the ongoing supply chain issues, Roku’s hardware business — which the company labels “player” — recorded a 19% year-over-year revenue decline, and sales of its streaming player slid by 12% year over year. 

To be clear, Roku’s hardware business only represented 12% of the company’s total Q1 revenue. However, the growth of its “platform” business — which spans the money Roku makes from selling ads and streaming subscriptions on its platform — is connected to the health of its hardware business. 

Indeed, Roku’s active account growth has decelerated over the past year, and in a letter to shareholders published on April 28, Roku attributed the ebbing to the discontinuation of government stimulus checks that gave people the funds to pick up new smart TVs and CTV dongles as well as the supply chain issues that have driven up TV prices in the U.S.

During a call with reporters after Roku released its earnings report on Thursday, Roku CFO Steve Louden declined to say whether Roku has seen the trend of active account deceleration continue in the second quarter. “What we’ve seen effectively is a similar situation to what we’ve seen the last three quarters where you have supply chain disruptions creating some headwinds both from the U.S. TV market size as well as player costs,” he said.

The streaming view

Despite the cloudy picture for Roku’s hardware business, the view from its platform business appears somewhat sunny. Not only did streaming watch time increase year over year, but the average amount of time spent streaming per active account also ticked up.

In Q1 2022, the average active account globally spent 3.8 hours streaming video on Roku’s platform, up from 3.5 hours in Q3 2021. Moreover, the amount of time that people spent streaming Roku’s FAST service, The Roku Channel, also seemed to tick up to become, in Q1, a top 5 service in the U.S. in terms of streaming hours for the first time. However, Roku did not report how much time people spent streaming The Roku Channel, either on average per day or cumulatively over the course of the quarter.

Additionally, while Roku acknowledged in the shareholder letter that macroeconomic trends — such as inflation, in addition to the supply chain issues — “have the potential to reduce or delay ad spend in certain verticals,” the company appears to have largely held on to advertisers’ dollars, though it doesn’t break out advertising revenue as a portion of platform revenue. 

In Q1, the average spend among returning advertisers increased by more than 50% year over year, and Roku retained 96% of the advertisers that spent at least $1 million on the platform over the preceding four quarters. Of course, these are cherry-picked stats that could be designed to obfuscate any areas of weakened demand. 

That being said, Roku said that it projects total revenue to increase by 25% year over year to hit $805 million in Q2 2022. So given the supply chain challenges are unlikely to abate anytime soon and to the extent Netflix’s expected subscriber drop is representative of friction within the broader subscription-based streaming market, advertising is likely to be the big reason behind that revenue growth as it grows its share of Roku’s overall revenue mix.

“The ad business continues to grow, and we’re mixing more into the video ad business,” Louden said during the company’s earnings call with investors on Thursday.

“There is general agreement that attention metrics can and are being used for evaluating creative and ad effectiveness,” the ARF report summarized. “The real opportunity for the growth of attention metrics is to get beyond creative testing and help buyers understand the effectiveness of media channels better.”

The second piece of research, which Digiday obtained ahead of its wide release, comes from attention metrics firm RealEyes, and naturally forecasted a much rosier future for attention. Its fundamental finding is that 65% of respondents say attention metrics is a conversion stage in the customer journey. It also happens to be a more recent piece of research, having surveyed 320 senior advertising professionals in March.

RealEyes also found that more than half of respondents (55%) believe advertisers should pay for attention metrics — and a majority believe it should come specifically from their media budgets. 

Both studies concurred that widespread adoption across the industry is about three years off. They also agreed that attention metrics deliver the most immediate value in testing creative executions and determining the effectiveness of various media channels. “Agencies have an opportunity to use attention data to unify creative, media and attention data for superior campaign outcomes and learning,” said Max Kalehoff, vp of marketing at RealEyes.

Agencies tend to agree with the position. “It starts with the inextricable link between creative effectiveness and platform performance in helping us get to the right attention,” Melanie Norris, managing director and head of planning at BBDO Worldwide, told Digiday last fall. “This data leads us to a depth of insight into attention that… we can activate against and really attract the right attention and think about which platforms and channels are right for which brands. Every client has a different problem.”

But the two surveys diverge otherwise. The ARF study found that while there is a clear interest in attention metrics, 80% of buyers believe more work is needed to prove its impact and 30% agreed that measuring viewability is more important than attention metrics today. In addition, buyers don’t necessarily believe attention metrics should be part of the currency or factored into CPMs. 

While the ARF study didn’t address it, RealEyes’ did ask survey respondents about attention as a determiner of business outcomes — arguably an important metric to determine ROI. It found that 65% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that attention is a conversion stage in the sales and customer journey. Creative and measurement respondents agreed the most, at 77% and 70%, respectively, while fewer than half of media buyers agreed at 47%.

Finally, RealEyes’ survey predicts that the next 12 months will see investment in attention increase. More than half, (56%) of all responders agreed or agreed strongly that their organizations will invest in media attention metrics in the next year, more on the creative side. 

“The upside is: competitive advantage, business insights, and greater campaign efficiencies and effectiveness,” said Kalehoff. “If you don’t invest, others will, and you will fall behind.”

“If you look at the rental audience, live sports is still huge,” said Dodson. “You still get massive numbers of viewers and you get them in real-time. We always look at renters versus home buyers and renters, apartment dwellers, they tend to over index and live sports, big time, as well as the big shows. We do that to always maintain that upper funnel, top of mind awareness for us.”

In 2019, Apartments.com allocated roughly 70% of its ad budget (minus what it spends on paid search) to linear television; today, the company allocates approximately 40% of its ad budget to linear TV. The company has reallocated its linear TV dollars to streaming, audio and social channels with streaming garnering roughly a third of the brand’s budget, audio nabbing a little less than 10% and social video accounting for approximately 12%. The company also spends on paid social and a few other channels but Dodson didn’t not break out the percentages of those channels or provide exact figures that speak to how much money this investment represents.

Apartments.com’s streaming budget has increased 150% since 2019, per Dodson, who noted that the company’s streaming ads now appear on over 50 VOD platforms including Hulu, Peacock, Tubi, Roku, Twitch, among others. As for audio, the company’s ads continue to appear on Pandora, Spotify, iHeart with Wondery and Studio 71 as new audio partners for 2022. 

Per Kantar data, Apartments.com spent $47.9 million on media in 2021, down from $61.3 million in 2020 and a slight increase from 2019 when the company spent $44.7 million on media. Those figures exclude what the company spend on social media channels as Kantar doesn’t track social spending. 

Making streaming video more of a priority and reducing spending on linear TV is a logical strategy shift to Duane Brown, founder of performance marketing shop Take Some Risk. “If a lot of their customers are steamers then being there makes tons of sense,” said Brown. “I imagine it’s also cheaper to do and thus get a bigger reach overall than spending everything on TV.”

Brown added: “With Netflix getting ads down the road, if they could buy ads during certain shows and or episodes, that could be very powerful.”

Going forward, Apartments.com will continue to implement a “test and learn” strategy on new channels. “We reserve a portion of our budget for experimentation,” said Dodson. “We are always raising our hand to be first to experiment with these platforms and learn.”