Tech trends are fickle things. Back in 2004, if you were starting a media business online, or thinking of expanding your offline media business, one direction seemed obvious: adopt RSS, or really simple syndication, so users can get a feed of your content easily, without signing up for newsletters. The term ‘RSS’ overtook ‘newsletter’ as a search term on Google in July of that year.

A year or so later, and your crack team of tech advisors would have told you you need to get into podcasts. Everyone has an iPod, they’d tell you, and everyone is listening to this stuff. Indeed, by early 2006 ‘podcast’ had overtaken ‘RSS’ as a search term on Google. Ditto MySpace — you would have been told to get your business on this impressive social networking site — whatever that is, you would have been forgiven for thinking back then. So you start work on that.

Then, in 2009, the Amazon Kindle e-reader swept out of nothing to make electronic publishing the wave of the future, overtaking both ‘podcast’ and ‘RSS’. And then, of course, there was Facebook. And Twitter.

You get the picture: sometimes inexorable trends aren’t what they seem. RSS, it turns out, was great for delivering information to people but was too fiddly for most folk. Google, whose RSS reader had pushed most other players out of the business, closed down in 2013, citing declining use. Meanwhile newsletters, those unsexy throwbacks, are still doing fine.

So what about podcasts? Were the advisors right? Well, yes and no.

True, interest in podcasting (as a search term on Google, as reliable an indicator as any) peaked in early 2006. Interest continued to decline until the launch in late 2014 of Serial, whose first season explored a murder in Baltimore in 1999, singlehandedly pushed the podcasting niche into the mainstream. In short, podcasts are that rare breed among tech trends: they’re getting a second wind.

So what is driving this, and are podcasts worth doing?

Well, it’s true that Serial jumpstarted a fresh wave of interest. The appeal of podcasts is that they time-shift — users play them when they want, in the order they want, where they want. This may seem obvious, but Serial added a key ingredient: the serialized approach, where the story was being shaped as it went. This invited audience participation, suspense and a feeling that it was unclear where it was going.

All these elements helped differentiate podcasts from other forms of entertainment. At the same time, those coming in late could easily download old episodes: ‘Bingeable listens’ is even a category on iTunes, still the epicentre of podcasting.

The data all point to a growing market. Most figures are U.S.-centric so let’s look at another market: Australia. Recent surveys there suggest that nearly 9 million people will be listening to podcasts by 2022 — a third of the projected population.

Big players are taking note. Apple is improving its metrics, and applying some standards to podcasts it accepts for its iTunes platform and podcasting app. After leaving the field alone for years, Google is jumping in with its own Android app. Amazon has tried to add to its Audible audiobook service with some original programming, although it’s not clear how well that’s going.

Investors are interested: Luminary Media secured $40 million in venture capital funding for its subscription-based service. And of course Spotify has added NPR’s backcatalogue to its subscription service. Companies like Audible and Spotify are already in a sweet spot because they have already convinced users to subscribe. Most podcasts are free, and it’s hard to change users’ minds, as we’ve found to our cost in online journalism.

But of course, as we’ve learned from the past: trends can be reversed, even when they’re enjoying a second life. So will podcasts wither too?

Here’s how I see it for media players. Don’t do podcasts as an afterthought; it’s your brand and if you mess it up listeners might not come back. But do see how much you can do without having to create content afresh. If you’re in the spoken word business already, then package up 10 of your best programs and see, after a year, which ones are gaining a following.

And despite the talk of growing investment and advertising interest, don’t do it for the money. The industry is still too young and unstructured, the hits too unpredictable. The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released two sets of proposals to regulate advertising metrics across the industry, and uptake has grown. But some podcasters are nervous because their reported download numbers would inevitably take a knock, at least in the short term.

Then there’s the problem of the elephants on the grass. Apple dominates the space because no podcast can afford to not be on its platform. Google is now serious about podcasts, which could be good news for podcasters in Android-heavy markets. But the app is still pretty raw, and of course will only work on Android devices, leaving those cross-platform podcast players like Overcast more appealing to many.

These big players all seek to control the choke-points in the system. They can, like Apple’s AppStore, create markets, but they can also trample them.

And there are lots of pieces missing, another sign of a wild west. The technology of inserting ads, for example is still not quite there. The Washington Post last month (eds: July) felt it necessary to develop its own internal technology, Rhapsocord, for inserting ads into podcasts. This reminds me of the early days of the web, when everything was so new we didn’t even think of calling it an ‘ecosystem.’ Only a handful of companies survived that.

It is possible to cover costs, and attract advertisers, and should soon be possible to weave podcasts into broader subscriptions. But right now it’s probably better to think of honing your podcasting skills and ideas than of viewing it as a revenue stream in its own right.

Well, no. Publishers are finding themselves at the wrong end of an uneven, unhealthy bargain, which is bad news for both news business economics and quality, pluralistic information.

“This is a really depressing, dystopian way to think about publishers and platforms. It only really makes sense if you view writing as a fungible commodity,” says John West in Quartz. For the synergy logic to work, a piece of journalism must be viewed as an ad unit, its value being no more and no less than how many clicks it generates. Even more depressing for West is that Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and all other platforms view journalism in this way – they can see the cost (or potential revenues) of quality content, but not the value – and “that’s going to smother journalistic independence and the open web”.

The platforms have created such seamlessly efficient ways to deliver content that news publishers will soon have no need even to have a website. Facebook’s Instant Articles, Apple News, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, Twitter’s Moments, Snapchat – they provide comfortable, contained experiences, perfectly tailored for mobile, which is the direction audiences are headed. While the bare audience numbers make sense in the short term, warns West, “it will cost you”.

By granting control of content to Facebook and its like, publishers are turning platforms into the world’s gatekeepers to information, and these risk-averse megacorps already have a less than glittering track record of speaking truth to power and promoting diverse views.

It also means that publishers become ever more reliant on clicks: they only have worth to the platform if they bring in the traffic. The implication for quality is clear: as publishers become wire services for platforms, they lose their unique voice, their identity and their connection with their own audience. Editorial output has to match the platform’s audience, so publishers are incentivized to create bland, populist or clickbait brand of news. This means that a publisher’s traditional audience trusts them less and, with the context removed (knowing that an article was produced by The Guardian or The New Republic is an important part of the reading experience), an article has less meaning.

West also laments that “we’re also losing the organic and open shape of the web. It’s becoming something much more rigid and more hierarchical.”

“The answer is simple, but it isn’t easy,” he concludes. “We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention. This means that publications will have to abandon the rapid-growth business models driven by display ads, which have driven them to rely on Facebook for millions of pageviews a month.”

John Herman in The Awl take a look at another aspect of the unfolding battle between publishers and platforms. Platforms like Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and Google are creating their own editorial spaces and, in some cases, standalone apps, but are wrestling with what content to put there. With the platforms not having a clear content plan or even what audiences they want to serve, it leaves publishers with the headache of having to ask: “What do these platforms want from us? What will they then want for themselves? What will be left for the partners?” This is an uncomfortable place for publishers to be.

Herman points out that over the past few years, publishers have been providing platforms like Facebook with huge volumes of free content in exchange for big audiences and, occasionally, revenues. However, he warns that Facebook is simultaneously intent on destroying this same advertising system.

Platforms are sucking in the ad revenues that used to go to web advertising that helped support publishers. “These new in-house editorial projects located at the center of the platform, rather than at its edges, will succeed or fail based on how they assist in that project—not according to how well they replicate or replace or improve on publications supported by a model they’re in the process of destroying.”

Publishers be warned.

For Michael Wolff, writing in MIT Technology Review, the acceptance of Instant Articles by major players who have signed up to provide content through the feature provided yet another example of bad decision-making by the news industry. As he points out: “Netflix will pay approximately $3 billion in licensing and production fees this year to the television and film industry; Hulu is paying $192 million to license South Park; Spotify pays out 70 percent of its gross revenues to the music labels that hold the underlying rights to Spotify’s catalogue. Now here’s what Facebook is guaranteeing a variety of publishers, including the New York Times, BuzzFeed, and the Atlantic, which are posting articles in its new “instant articles” feature: $0.”

He accuses news publishers of giving away their content for free, while at the same time losing control of their branding and valuable usage data. In the Facebook deal, publishers can sell ads on their articles and keep all of the revenue, or have Facebook sell ads in exchange for 30 percent.

“In the case of these new platform distribution deals—while they all involve slightly different plays—they each mimic a standard publishing business model: syndication. That is, a publisher with access to a different audience redistributes the content of another publisher—of course paying the content owner a fair fee. In some sense, this is the basis of the media business … Content is valuable–otherwise why distribute it?”

This leads Wolff to wonder whether “republishing initiatives are digging a deeper hole for publishers or helping them get out of the one they are already in”. He sees no reason to think things will turn out well: “…publishers have largely found themselves in this dismal situation because of their past bad decisions—accepting the general free ethos, bowing to a vast catchall of casual and formal sharing and re-posting agreements, and failing to challenge an ever-expanding interpretation of fair use. It seems only logical to doubt the business acumen of people who have been singularly inept when it comes to protecting their interests in the world of digital distribution.”

Facebook’s rationale for publishers to support Instant Articles is that it will provide a better user experience and deliver bigger audiences. While true, Wolff says that publishers will lose sustainable brand-building opportunities; it’s a model that better suits content that maximizes revenue potential, in particular ‘native content’, and will further push down digital ad prices.

According to Wolff, this type of syndication arrangement represents “another step closer toward what Ken Doctor, an analyst and journalist who has closely covered the demise of the news business, calls “off news site” reading. In this, publishers effectively give up their own channels and become suppliers of content to more efficient distribution channels … In effect, the New York Times becomes a wire service–the AP, except where the AP gets paid huge licensing fees, the Times does not.”

With the collapse of traditional ad revenues, publishers have justified pushing forward with digital experimentation because others were and because they couldn’t afford not to, even though they don’t fully understand the technology. “The ultimate result was a disastrous, sheep-to-slaughter endgame scenario, in which the new, digitally focused publishers are a fraction of their analog size. And now, in the prevalent view, there is simply no turning back.”

Meanwhile, dollars are flowing into the coffers of TV, movie and sports content creators. Even music, is fighting to win back control of – or at least payment for – its product. Wolff concludes that while there are differences between entertainment and news publishing that may explain why the old rules don’t apply in the new world, “perhaps publishers are just shamefully bad businessmen”.

In Mobile Marketing Daily, Steve Smith reviews the Apple News app and what it means for the news business. He concludes that in user experience terms it’s similar to Flipboard and Zeit – aggregating content from news sites and blogs in an attractive, easy-to-use way – but his diagnosis for the publishing industry makes for grim reading: “The legitimate worry of course is that media brands further lose control of their audience, data, context – and potentially, of their advertisers. I would say “Alert the media,” but in this scenario the media are already dead men walking.”

Writing for Fast Company, Joel Johnson points out that Apple and Facebook are just giving users what they want: a faster, less cluttered experience, compared to the slow load times and multitude of ad forms assaulting users on the sites of news publishers, who are forced into maximizing revenue by any means possible. Aggregators may provide a better – though banal – experience, “but it is unclear if most publications will be able to survive on only the revenue granted by these platform companies alone.” Apple’s attitude that “advertising is always unwelcome, unless it happens to be advertising that Apple itself lords over” is also a serious concern. “With small-to-midsize publishers already dropping like flies, things are looking perilous for readers and writers alike.”

The auction site, which is known as Bid on Print, began trading on 24 November with more than 140 newspaper titles available to media buyers.

Bid on Print is not a programmatic or real-time bidding exchange, like its digital ad counterparts – “instead, a publisher selects inventory, applies a floor price and then sets a timeframe in which the ad must be bought. Buyers then bid with the highest offer winning, or they can simply click a ‘Buy Now’ button.”

The exchange is designed to help publishers sell less valuable inventory and free up sales teams to focus on premium stock, explains mUmBRELLA.

“We are creating commercial efficiencies for both media agencies and publishers. Media agencies can bid and book a print advertisement with a click of the mouse,” Newspaper Works chief executive Mark Hollands said. “We have made the system as simple as possible to appeal to buyers and planners, and make the transaction quick and simple.

The site has been created by The Newspaper Works and Publisher’s Internationalé. It transacted more than AUD$350,000 (USD293,000) during pre-launch trials.

“Feedback from media agencies suggests we have reduced to just a few minutes what took them hours to do previously, especially for campaign-scale purchases,” Publisher’s Internationalé CEO Charlton D’Silva said. “Newspaper publishers see the benefit of helping to create efficiencies for agencies and have keenly supported the initiative.”

In contrast to programmatic trading, allowing publishers to fix a minimum price means that rates can’t be forced below a level they find acceptable .

World Newspaper Congress

There were five key takeaways: constant innovation (‘think like a startup’); blending tech, content and development; collaboration (‘why go it alone?’); mobile; leveraging technology and data.

The five takeaways are all driven by one “simple” fact: the digital transition. Speaker after speaker “gave pleas, encouragement and warnings to their colleagues about the urgency of today’s publishing environment”.

As George Nimeh, Chief Digital Officer for Kurier in Austria, put it: “If you don’t start every day by thinking about your digital journey, you are in deep trouble.”

Constant innovation

“Innovation is day-to-day business,” said Thiago Madeiros Ribeiro, Digital Product Manager of Brazil’s RBS Media Group. Newspapers must break away from the assembly-line approach. Instead they need to make it possible for staff with different skills to come together to solve problems and get new products to market.

“The days of launching a product, letting it just sit there, and then moving on to another product are over. Everything needs to be tested, evaluated, developed and refined… constantly.”

Blending tech, content and development

Publishers need to blend tech, content and development. Tech isn’t an end in itself, it’s the means of telling a better story. Developers have to be at the same table as developers. Newspapers need to involve developers and designers in the news meetings and strategy discussions – “they are just as much storytellers as journalists are”.

Collaboration

To prosper, the media industry has to be as good at collaboration as it is at competition.

“Whether it be mobile, video, analytics, the upcoming onslaught of wearables, etc., it’s obvious that collaboration and partnerships are a key part of any publisher’s digital strategy, particularly when going up against goliaths and especially if you are a smaller publisher.” Collaborating enables publishers to access skills they don’t possess in-house, while at the same time saving costs.

“Although we often say that small and nimble is better, most of us are about as nimble as a big cargo ship.”

Mobile

In the current environment, mobile is first, last and everything in between. Partnerships are essential if you’re to succeed in that format – news publishers aren’t mobile companies and app development talent can only be found in specialist companies. Focus on what you do best and collaborate to do the rest.

“If you want to figure out social, then you have to figure out mobile. If you want to figure out video, you have to figure out mobile.”

Leveraging data

Data ‘oils’ the digital news business. You need to collect and analyse as much relevant data as you can to get the best out of your products and services. But for most it still has only potential value. “The actual monetisation of data is a much more involved process even after the not-insignificant work of collecting it.”

World Editors Forum

Key themes of the editors’ meeting were: the ongoing transformation of the newsroom; the impact of Edward Snowden; press freedom; video; pushing the boundaries of globalised journalism and digital journalism.

Ongoing transformation of the newsroom

“Stories under 500 words do well. Stories longer than 800 words work well. And in the middle there’s a deadzone.” – Gabriel Kahn, Professor of Professional Practice; Co-Director, Media, Economics and Entrepreneurship; Director, Future of Journalism at the Annenberg Innovation Lab, USA

“We still get people saying ‘we should hold this for print’ and I say ‘why not just throw it in the trash?’ Convergence is the only way forward. You cannot keep print and digital separate. It won’t work, not even in developing contexts.” – David Callaway.

Press Freedom

“This Golden Pen [of Freedom award] …materializes the support and shows that he is not forgotten. That he is one of us. That an attack on one journalist is an attack on us all and that jailing a journalist is a crime against humanity.” – Swedish journalist Martin Schibbye, accepting the 2014 Golden Pen of Freedom, the annual press freedom prize of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), on behalf of imprisoned Ethiopian publisher, journalist and blogger Eskinder Nega.

National security, liberty, regulation and the role of a free press in the post-Snowden era

“It’s created a very real chilling effect among our sources. They’ve become nervous about talking with us. They don’t want their phone numbers associated with us. And government employees who previously routinely talked to us, now won’t.” – Gary Pruitt, President & CEO, The Associated Press, USA.

“Journalism may have to be moved ‘off shore” to avoid creeping surveillance” – Janine Gibson, Editor-in-Chief, theguardian.com and Deputy Editor of Guardian News and Media, UK.

Pushing the boundaries of global journalism and digital journalism

“I believe we are at the beginning of a major movement in cross-border, collaborative investigative journalism.” – Rosental Alves, Professor, Knight Chair of Journalism, University of Texas, Austin, USA.

“Geography in the newsroom is the most important: having coders, designers, product people in the same room.” – Aron Pilhofer.

“Consistent revenue comes from a combination of both short, sharp video and long, evergreen content.” – Marie-Noëlle Vallès, Head of Video, AFP, France.

“Younger generations are increasingly interested in news but increasingly cynical about sources of news.” – Jason Mojica, Editor-in-Chief, Vice News, USA.

World Advertising Forum

The trends that have been shaping the industry in recent years show no sign of slowing, though digital revenues from tables are encouraging. The key takeaways were: print is in decline, but still the main source of revenue; accountability, ROI essential; new ways of measuring impact; programmatic may save digital advertising; and tablets offering good yield.

Print in decline, but still the main source of revenue

“The real money in newspapers is still in print – digital is our future, but it is a future not yet realised.” The situation isn’t helped by the fact that “advertising fatigue” is growing, with more people turning to ad blockers for browsers, mobile and TV.

Accountability, ROI becoming essential

Today’s advertisers expect return-on-investment (ROI) and a much higher level of accountability than in the past. Businesses are buying into ROI, and it is increasingly governing decisions.

New ways of measuring impact

The industry needs to look at new ways of measuring its impact. “We need to stop thinking in terms of how many people read us every day and focus on how many people we influence every day”.

Programmatic is saving digital advertising

Programmatic advertising isn’t a passing phase, “it’s very much a stable part of the digital ecosystem”. “It’s no longer a question of should publishers get involved with programmatic, but how do we get involved?”

Tablets offering very good yield

“Tablet advertising is giving a very, very good yield. That is something that is similar to print in giving good value for us,” with tablets showing responses of up to 40 times higher than online ads.

Since it launched on 8 January, commentators have been falling over themselves to review it. Most have been quietly impressed by the changes, though many see it as evolution, not revolution.

Easier navigation, more white space

Jeff Jarvis thinks it is “neither revolutionary nor terribly disruptive … Still, The Times does much right”. He highlights its introduction of scrolling rather than clicking through longer stories, moving between articles by ‘next’ arrows rather than through a homepage, and its accommodation and clear labelling of native advertising (see below).

Like several others, Mashable points out that the redesign leans heavily on the newspaper for its inspiration: “…the site feels more like the New York Times than NYTimes.com”. It also notes that its “emphasis on visuals gives the site the chance to capitalize on the growth of lucrative video ads”.

Slate welcomes the injection of white space, created by folding the sidebar and toolbar for navigating among sections into a ‘hamburger’ – a pull-down menu accessed by clicking a triple-barred navigation icon. The public’s reaction to it has been, ‘Yeah, looks pretty nice’ – mainly because it’s more of a refresh than redesign.

Business Insider identifies three major changes: cutting the right rail, getting rid of the swathes of internal links that create clutter, and bundling most of its ‘newspaper section’ links to the ‘hamburger’, as noted above. This leads to a much improved reading experience.

Transparent with native advertising

Ad Age gives a cautious thumbs up to its treatment of native advertising, which runs against the current trend of dressing up sponsored content as editorial. Instead, it protects its credibility and brand through greater transparency, with its first sponsored content clearly marked with the notice: “This page was produced by the Advertising Department of The New York Times in collaboration with Dell. The news and editorial staffs of The New York Times had no role in its preparation.”

Examiner.com explains what marketers should know about how The New York Times now handles native ads, including that The Times’ ad department pitched story ideas to Dell. Dell approved the ideas that the paper subsequently contracted out to freelance writers.

Tech changes underlie reader experience

For a tech insight to the changes, Reed Emmons, the project’s development lead, explains that the redesign is “more than a fresh coat of paint — it’s built on a new framework and codebase to run faster while making future changes easier”.

Newsweek was founded in 1933. In 1991, it had about 3.3 million readers. But the dawn of the Internet eroded its readership and advertising revenue. In 2010, the Washington Post Company sold the magazine for US$1. In August 2013, the magazine was acquire by International Business Times Media.

The re-launched print edition will be positioned as a premium product, costing subscribers more than it used to. It will contain 64 pages and rely on subscription sales more than ad pages to keep it in print. Its new owner hopes to hit a circulation of about 100,000 for the print version in the first year.

Read more: Newsweek Plans to Return to Print

The cover for the final print edition of Newsweek released in December 2012.

With high growth and intense competition, news organisations need to stay on top of the latest developments to be competitive in the data-driven marketing era. Digital media poses business challenges, but it also requires news groups to understand key pieces of technology and terminology.

While the basic proposition of matching advertisers with audiences remains unchanged, in the digital world serving up highly targeted advertising has developed into the incredibly fast interchange of data and ad inventory between interconnected elements of advertising services platforms.  In plain English, as Ben Kneen at Ad Ops Insider says, incredibly powerful computers are running at companies such as Google’s DoubleClick and its rival Atlas that allow the buying and selling of highly targeted ads in milliseconds.

To get a strategic view of these ad technologies, we take a look at the challenges and opportunities for news organisations brought about by real-time bidding (or programmatic buying, as it is also known) in a discussion with digital advertising expert, Rodney Mayers, Chief Revenue Officer of data publishing company Proximic.

Initially one of the biggest challenges is understanding the terminology and the bewildering array of acronyms. This guide will help you make sense of it all.

Ad Exchanges – Just like a stock exchange, ad exchanges serve as an open online advertising market for buyers (publishers) and sellers (advertisers) to connect. Search advertising has captured a lot of the growth in digital advertising in the past decade fueling the development of search engines. While ruling the search engine market in many countries, Google acquired ad exchange DoubleClick, which rapidly became the biggest player amongst real-time ad networks. Google’s ad exchange helps advertisers to run display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network and on YouTube. By leveraging this platform, advertisers and publishers find it easier to manage and monitor ad campaigns in a multitude of formats and across thousands of websites.

Recently, major media companies such as Hearst and Condé Nast  and broadcaster NBC, all in the US, have launched their own private ad exchanges, enticing buyers with ever-more detailed data that advertisers can use to more accurately target the publishers’ audiences.

Data Management Platforms (DMPs) – Companies use DMPs to collect and analyse huge amounts of data from many different sources. DMPs are now so powerful that companies can track users and customers who visit from banners, Facebook pages, Tweets, mobile, video and even offline applications. They collect and analyse data from cookies, small files that keep website settings and also record user behaviour. For example, DMPs can allow e-commerce sites, publishers and advertisers to find out how many users who bought a big screen TV online also searched for high-end digital cameras in the past week.

DMPs consolidate user data into a centralised platform. They can be used not only for buying ad impressions, but also to help publishers achieve the long-term goal of attracting predefined targetable audiences. DMPs can help publishers gain more precise information about their audiences, which is useful not only in helping to sell more targeted, more effective advertising, but also in providing greater insight into the needs and interests of their readers or viewers.

DMPs can provide extremely useful insights, however publishers shouldn’t be misled into thinking that they are the sole source of useful audience data. “While DMPs do an admirable job creating segments based on data collected across multiple sites, publishers have their own treasure trove of data that often is under-leveraged for ad sales purposes,” says John Strabley, a media analyst writing for Business 2 Community.

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) – Based on campaign goals and audience profiles, real-time bidding allows ad buyers to bid for each and every impression. This dynamic transformation is called a “bidder” which can be built into any of the above platforms. For publishers, they can keep track of all their bids and build a picture of demand down to the advertiser level. However, one thing publishers should keep in mind is that data leakage is a potential risk in RTB platforms. Other parties using DSPs (Demand Side Platforms – see below) can read the stream of pages that come through in bid requests and use that to gain intelligence on their competitors.

Real-time bidding platforms still tend to be small relative to the total online advertising market, representing just $1.1 bn out of the total online advertising market, according to technology analysis firm IDC.

Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) – SSPs provide publishers with an effective way to measure the monetization of mobile and website attention. Attention data includes a range of statistics such as how much time visitors spend on a site, the number of pages or pieces of content a visitor views per session and the percentage of return visitors to your site. SSPs allow publishers to jump into the ad exchange to make their inventory available and optimize selling of their online media space. More practically, they help publishers sell their inventory at a higher price because publishers can demonstrate more clearly how their content performs to advertisers.

Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) – DSPs work together with ad exchanges and SSPs. These three elements support real-time bidding because they give buyers and sellers the ability to “value inventory on an impression-by-impression in real-time,” says Ben Kneen on his site, Adopsinsider.com. According to Kneen, the interplay of these systems enables targeted ads to be bid on and served to a browser in about 50 milliseconds.

DSPs submit a bid to the SSP along with an ad based on their valuation of a specific impression, determined from data about the user. The SSP picks the winning bid and serves up the ad. It is this complicated interplay of user data and bidding servers, the DSPs, SSPs and ad exchanges, that enables the near-instantaneous delivery of targeted advertising to users.

For news organisations, the key thing to remember is that the increasingly sophisticated use of user data is allowing the ever-increasing targeting of advertising. We’ll be looking at how to develop your advertising strategy in upcoming editions of the Digital Briefing.

Resources online:

• How Real Time Bidding, DSPs, SSPs, and Ad Exchanges Work by Ben Kneen at Ad Ops Insider
• Diagramming the SSP, DSP and RTB redirect path by Ben Kneen at Ad Ops Insider
• What is the difference between DSPs and SSPs? on Quora
• Demand Side Platform and why you should care by Marc Pocelli