Publishers confess their 33 greatest challenges
Being an online publisher in today’s ridiculously-quickly changing digital landscape is not for the faint-hearted. If you work in this industry, you’d better thrive on a challenge… or 33 at once.
During the opening session of the Miami Digiday conference in September 2016, the speaker asked hundreds of participants to write down their greatest challenge on a sticky note and stick it anonymously on a wall. Keen as we are, we saw this as a great opportunity to better understand our customers. We took photos of the entire wall, wrote out all of the publishers’ challenges and confessions, and combined similar statements to compile this very list.
This exercise has led to many a discussion in the FirstImpression.io offices about what more we can do. We’re constantly developing our technology to help publishers better monetize their websites while tracking the effect on UX of different, customized, ad products.
But with all the ambition in the world, we can’t solve every challenge alone!
So we invite you to share this list, hoping that other ad-tech partners and platforms will be inspired to find real solutions to the challenges on here. At the very least, if you’re an online publisher, maybe you’ll find some sweet satisfaction in knowing that leading publishers worldwide face your exact same struggles.
Top challenges of online publishers
- Competing for the time and attention of users
- Driving return visits with a non-faithful audience and changing algorithms
- Driving traffic from sources other than Facebook
- Managing crazy swings in traffic
- Differentiating between too many vendors who do the exact same thing
- Managing relationships with multiple tech partners
- Knowing which third party verification partners to trust
- Preventing ad fraud
- Tracking and analyzing the performance of partners in our header bidding container
- Optimizing all the SSPs on our pre-bid container
- Hiring the right people with the relevant digital skills
- Attracting millennials in place of seniors
- Recruiting developers
- Finding the right balance between revenue and user engagement
- Balancing all the page elements, ads and content, in the design
- Raising RPM without increasing the number of ads per page
- Monetizing mobile
- Engaging different audiences across all devices
- Improving the mobile user experience
- Converting ad-block users
- Developing Latin America and emerging markets
- Investing in our social media efforts
- Creating expensive video content
- Monetizing video on Facebook
- Improving programmatic video fill
- Increasing the number of paid subscriptions
- Building audience lists
- Reducing page latency and load on the browser
- Dealing with latency from the ad networks
- Understanding RPM on a URL level and audience level
- Generating more content and output
- Juggling limited resources
- Remaining alive in an ever-changing digital world