CDP Institute

Traffic from Facebook and Twitter/X to global news sites has fallen by about two-thirds in the past year, according to Similarweb data collected by Axios. Both sites have deprioritized news links for their own reasons. Of course, the net result is that visitors receive less accurate information, an outcome that management of both sites seems to like.

If you think that most consumers will pay directly for quality news, get ready to be disappointed. A 20-country survey by the Reuters Institute and Oxford University found that 19% of internet users paid for any online news content in 2023, a figure that had been growing from 10% in 2014 but has leveled off since 2021. The figure was 21% in the U.S.

Do you have a friend who needs help understanding the finer points of advertising identity solutions? This IAB Tech Lab paper provides a relatively concise (34 pages) but comprehensive explanation of the topic. It includes a glossary, definitions, use cases, explanations of mechanics, and suggested evaluation methods. Very handy!

Syntasa offers tools to collect, unify, and activate customer data.  Their latest announcement is something called “Data Ready for CDPs”, which seems to repackage existing features rather than offering any major new capabilities.  Still, it’s worth knowing about if you’re looking for a tool to build and share unified customer profiles – a core CDP feature that some do better than others, and many “composable CDP” solutions lack entirely.

Given the endless attention paid to the looming end of third-party cookies, it’s in some ways amazing that so many companies remain unprepared.  Yet this analysis of traffic on the 33across ad exchange shows that cookies still drive about 75% of programmatic ad revenue, although the share is falling.  Lots of industry detail here.

Sometimes ad fraud feels like the weather: people talk about it but don’t take action.  One of the few positive steps has been IAB Tech Lab’s Supply Chain Object (SCO), introduced in 2019, to validate all parties involved in a bid request.  Alas, Pixalate reports that 13% of SCOs are not marked as complete and 19% of marked as complete by SCO failed independent verification.  The failed bids had 65% higher invalid traffic rates than the others.

We’ve written before about streaming video providers switching from subscriptions to an ad-based model.  One issue that raises is ad measurement.  To address that, Netflix has just integrated with Nielsen One Ads, which provides viewing metrics for digital ad campaigns.

Meta has always known that users are worth more as ad targets than subscription buyers.  Unfortunately for them, European regulators are clamping down on poorly consented data collection.  As a result, it’s looking increasingly likely that Facebook and Instagram will have to introduce an ad-free option for European Union residents, reportedly at a rate of $14 per month on mobile devices.

As so often happens, Elon Musk is betting against conventional wisdom.  Guideline data shows his campaign to make Twitter/X hate-speech-friendly has succeeded in driving its U.S. ad revenue down more than 50% since he took over last October.  So crazy it might just work.  Or maybe just crazy.