Publishers have two principal sources of revenue, subscriptions and advertising revenues. Regardless the degree to which they benefit from subscription revenues, all publishers benefit from increasing the value of their advertising inventory. Some publishers offer targeted advertising, celebrating their high quality first-party data, but even the most advanced publisher is still only going to be capturing static, and typically unverifiable, data. With verifiable demographic data, and dynamic target audience profiles, OwnYou provides data orders of magnitude more valuable.
The higher the quality of user data, the more valuable the inventory.
Publishers need to grow their audience
Publishers benefit from selling specific audiences to different types of advertisers. Overall traffic consists of subscribers, registered users, and anonymous users. Ideally, publishers nudge their subscriber numbers higher by growing their registered reader base, before converting them to paying subscribers. However, even the best publishers eventually max out conversions. This means that most publishers rely on registered users for up to 80% of their traffic.
The are several problems with relying on registered users. Firstly, some users don’t want to register. Secondly, the registration process relies self-labelling for both demographics and interests. Self labelling is prone to error and deception.
OwnYou offers an alternative; accurate, detailed, user data from real people. Every advertising impression becomes valuable. In fact, detailed and up to date target audience profiles should make OwnYou traffic more valuable that subscriber traffic. OwnYou traffic is always pseudonymous. That means a visitor can not be both a subscriber, and an OwnYou sign-in, without revealing the identity of the OwnYou user. Doing so would “dock” the user and allow the publisher to harvest their target audience profile and other demographics, for future monetization.
Attracting advertisers
Advertisers are also attracted to OwnYou’s real-time attribution data, without cookies and without relying on walled garden operators. By providing advertisers with more detailed targeted audience data, advertisers can more accurately match consumer interests, consumers are more likely to respond to advertising messages, and advertiser ROAS will increase. Higher ROAS will mean advertisers will want to spend more for ads delivered to those audiences. They will want to buy more inventory from publishers plugged into OwnYou audiences. This is the essence of the OwnYou publisher value proposition; higher quality user audience data will increase the value of publisher inventory, attracting more advertising revenue.
Low integration cost
OwnYou will make it easy for publishers to integrate with OwnYou. An additional login button on their homepage, or an option within their existing process, allows OwnYou users to access the publisher’s site, or App, and share their profile. OwnYou target audience profiles slot into the space already created by IAB’s seller defined audiences, and existing header bidding wrappers. By matching existing data schemas and protocols, OwnYou makes it easy for publishers to implement, and monetize, pseudonymous OwnYou users. The publisher may decide to implement more sophisticated content access tiering, conditional on the OwnYou user’s profile.
Improved auditing
Every impression is paired with rich, verified, user demographic data making it easy for publishers to evaluate their audience, and the value of their inventory to advertisers.
First-party data doesn’t facilitate attribution without user IDs
First party cookies might help advertisers develop audiences, but it does not help advertisers with ROI. The publisher’s first party cookies does not help advertisers track attribution nor with any performance metric. To be clear, using first-party cookies does allow publishers to track registered users, with permission, across the publisher’s own domain. That is valuable to advertisers who are looking for certain audiences. But most advertisers want more than just reach. The want to manage the entire marketing funnel. And for that, they need attribution. Publisher first-party cookies can not help with attribution. Google’s privacy sandbox, Apple’s ATT and other cohort-based attribution solutions can help plug the attribution hole, but that comes at a substantial cost in terms of timing, resolution and accuracy, which advertisers do not like. OwnYou strikes a direct pseudonymous connection between the individual and the advertisers, with the individual in complete control. The advertiser pays the individual for attribution data. But the publisher still controls the spigot; the publisher still cultivates the audience, without which there is no connection between advertiser and individual.
