• The Trade Desk (TTD) published a list of 100 premium publishers.
• The emergence of the term «premium Internet» worries publishers, as it divides them into premium and non-premium.
• TTD's research highlights the growth of the open Internet and the decline in ad spend within Google's and Facebook's closed ecosystems.

It wasn't so much the list itself and the sites included in it that sparked discussions as the fact of its appearance. You can find the full list at the end of the article, but for now, let's take a look at what is happening around this list.

The company TTD, one of the leading DSPs, published a list of 100 premium publishers of the open Internet. This list includes major platforms such as Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN. The list is part of the company's strategy to strengthen its position as a portal for working with the premium Internet.

Premium Internet

In recent years, there has been significant growth in the consumption of premium content on the open Internet, such as online cinemas, streaming services, podcasts, and live sports broadcasts. This phenomenon is accompanied by a decline in the share of Google and Facebook in the total volume of digital advertising, as advertisers seek alternatives to these ecosystems due to their opacity and limitations.

Methodology

TTD compiled the list using its own data and data provided by Sincera, a company specializing in metadata analysis for programmatic advertising. The key evaluation criteria were the quality of the advertising experience, supply chain transparency, and distribution quality.

Market Impact

This list sparked active discussions among publishers, especially in the context of TTD's attempts to promote its alternative identifier — UID2. Some publishers are concerned about the potential loss of control over their data when using UID2, which could undermine their efforts to create tools for working with user data.

Open Internet

According to research by GlobalWebIndex, consumers in the USA spend 61% of their online time on the open Internet, while 39% of the time is spent in closed ecosystems.

This is a significant change! In 2014, consumers spent 62% of their Internet time in closed ecosystems. This shift occurred alongside an increase in time spent on the open Internet: from less than 2 hours per day on average in 2014 to more than 5 hours per day in 2023.

Users are turning to the open Internet because professionally created content is of high quality. According to data from eMarketer and GlobalWebIndex, for example, the adult population in the USA nearly doubled their daily consumption of streaming music and podcasts from 2019 to 2023 — from 97 to 181 minutes.

CTV and Digital Audio

CTV is becoming an increasingly important part of the premium Internet, attracting significant advertising budgets. In 2023, advertisers paid 78% more for advertising on leading CTV platforms. A similar situation is observed in the audio space, which has become one of the fastest-growing advertising channels.

According to data from GlobalWebIndex and Nielsen, the average daily audience of CTV channels in the USA doubled over the same period, from 58 to 115 minutes.

Closed Ecosystems

The growth of social networks, by comparison, has slowed significantly from 2019 to 2023: average daily usage increased by less than 10%, from 124 to 136 minutes per day across all social media channels in the USA, according to GlobalWebIndex data.

Research conducted by Insider Intelligence indicates comparatively low demand for advertising opportunities in closed ecosystems. Indeed, 2022 was the first year in a decade when Google and Facebook did not account for more than half of all digital ad spending. This trend continued in 2023, with these two giants accounting for 46.6% of digital ad spending compared to over 53% in 2019.

Identification

In the open Internet, user identification can lead to the reallocation of advertising budgets from UGC to premium/expert content. This is because new user identification methods being implemented by many premium publishers can increase advertisers' confidence that they are reaching the right target audience with the appropriate content at the right time.

Indeed, advertisers are willing to pay significantly more if they are confident that their ads will reach the right audience. Audio advertising that includes UID2 is valued 28% higher than that which does not include UID2. Similar trends are observed across other advertising channels: video +17%, display advertising +22%.

Recently, Unilever announced that a CTV campaign conducted on the Disney channel using UID2 was 12 times more effective in reaching the target audience compared to traditional targeting.

Authorization

«Why should publishers provide their data to advertising platforms so that they can make money from it?»

According to Will Doherty, TTD's Vice President of Inventory Development, he often encounters such objections. However, he suggests considering the fact that only 5-10% of the audience who have authorized on a publisher's site would be enough to have a significant positive impact on the business and attract advertising dollars from TTD.

«I believe these figures are realistic. We have already seen some publishers achieve 20-40% authorization levels with the right approach», — he continued. «The first thing I would say to traditional web publishers — you don't need 100% user authorization coverage to be truly competitive».

«If publishers simplify the user authorization process, I believe they will be surprised by how many authorizations they can get in exchange for their content», — says Doherty. «Having identification and authorization strategies is crucial for the long-term survival of publishers, in addition to everything else they have to do».

For Publishers

Despite positive trends, many publishers are concerned about the potential loss of control over their data and a possible decrease in advertising revenue. However, new products for user identification and authorization, such as OpenPass from TTD, can provide publishers with the necessary tools for effective cookieless audience monetization.

«Over the past 12 months, the industry has been built around alternative identifiers», — says Joe Root, CEO of Permutive, a company that provides data management services. «TTD needs to identify the user for their work, and they are facing problems due to the slow spread of their UID2 in the market. As a result, they are reallocating advertising budgets to CTV, blaming publishers for TTD not knowing who the audience is without their identifiers, even though the publisher has this data. The publisher collects this data and could enrich their ad impressions, but they lack the technology to work with it.»

Forecast

The emergence of the concept of a «premium Internet» brings both opportunities and challenges for publishers and advertisers. It is possible that this trend will continue to develop, leading to another round of competition among publishers, which, in turn, may lead to further improvements in content quality.

List