Stop growing robot food: How publishers can fight back against robots and ad blockers

A return to a subscriber-based mind-set and business plan may be the only way that a modern multi-modal publisher can survive in the new era. After all, there is an arms race happening within the bidder and browser ecosystem, which makes up the core of the digital publishing and marketing landscape.

But what exactly is a subscriber-based mind-set and how would this help? A subscriber-based mind-set is the idea that a publisher focuses on their committed subscriber community, not the passer-by. Publishers simply need to start to reduce their reliance on anonymous ad-serving via display ads on their website and migrate to a logged-in audience approach.

Today it is just too easy for consumers to read the news that publishers produce without compensating them. Most publisher sites are free (or nearly free) to browse. The small price that visitors pay is to have cookies dropped in their browser so that retargeting companies can bid for these audiences using data gleaned from other sites the audience has visited. A few sites put page limits on visitors, but when faced with the difficult choice of either showing some more ads or denying that one last page view, most publishers will choose the former and allow for unlimited browsing.

The problem with this approach is that as the page views multiply, the costs to the publisher in terms of bandwidth stay the same, but the revenue per page view is reduced. This happens because bids decrease throughout the user’s journey on the site. As a result, an odd asymmetrical situation is created whereby a loyal (non-bouncing) visitor – who may be just as likely to be a robot as a human – becomes less valuable the longer they are on the site.

What can be done about this? Old-fashioned lightboxes may be the answer.

You are likely to be familiar with a lightbox. That’s the annoying interstitial that pops up on sites. On the very best sites, they come up fast, after maybe three or four page views. They tell you that you have, for example, only six more articles to read this month. Usually, the trade-off for accessing additional content beyond the arbitrary limit is to provide some information, usually an email address.

Is asking for an email address an interruptive experience to the user? Of course it is, but it is also the fork in the road for your relationship with that visitor. If your user values your content, providing something of reciprocal value (like the email address) is a small price to pay to continued access to free content. If the user isn’t willing to provide this information, a publisher should deduce that either the visitor is a robot and unwilling or unable to complete a ‘captcha’ or the visitor is not a long-tail fan of the brand.

With respect to long-tail relationships, the current crop of online publishers have much to learn – and also earn - from their brethren in the retail sectors. Retailers learned long ago that the value of their enterprise was directly related to the size of their customer file.

Retailers now regularly employ teams of trained analysts, engineers, marketers, and administrative staff to build out the customer files that enable retailers to be successful. Retailers create these customer files in order to be present where their audiences are paying attention. They understand how their customers engage with their content, and where their customer spends time. And retailers are largely considered to be ahead of the game, mastering their outreach by leveraging their most valuable marketing asset: their customer file.

Publishers who want to survive the current extinction event should take cues from those asking more of their audiences. Retailers ask for credit cards and email addresses in the normal course of their business.

But how do publishers begin to create their own customer files, those very vehicles that drive the astronomical success of retailers? It’s fairly simple. Publishers must begin tapping into the subscriber asset that sits right at their feet: their customer’s email address. The Washington Post famously set the template for a playbook a few weeks ago, in the wake of ad blocking. When visitors had ad blocking enabled, they were prompted to enter their email address for six weeks of uninterrupted content.

That inherently shows the power of building a customer file and lays out the beginning steps for how publishers can create their own files to erect a bulwark that ensures success in a world of robot-driven fraud and people-driven ad-blocking. The power of a customer file is so encompassing that publishers can forgo advertising revenue short-term in order to capture it. That’s because that customer file allows for marketing to real people, not bots, outside of the confines of ad-blocking.

The publishers who succeed in the future will not rely on drive-by visitors. In fact any publisher who is not creating a rate-base quality audience on line risks the future of their franchise. Publishers who do the hard work of acquiring people-based data will always have home field advantage.

Dave Hendricks is president and managing director of LiveIntent UK. You can follow him on Twitter @davehendricks.