Keyword and domain blocking, programmatic take rates, MFAs, cookie deprecation, reduced CPMs, not enough scale…the local news industry has experienced the negative impact of it all and journalism has suffered. Many publishers have had an uphill battle overcoming buyer perceptions of local news sites including poor user experience, low viewability, too many ads, sites look like MFAs, and news is not brand safe or suitable. Yet, with the countless panels on the value of news and related research that demonstrates news and brand marketers do well in the eyes of the consumer (Stagwell’s Future of News is the latest), it does not put journalism back on the offense with real solutions for growth with appropriate representation from an Publisher Agent to buyers. As that Agent, NewsPassID to date has generated revenue equivalent to 130 journalism jobs for the members of the Local Media Consortium. That’s great, we need more.
The Local Media Consortium’s NewsNext working groups of local news publishers (5000+ newspaper, TV, radio and online-only news outlets) and its NewsPassID advertising network are releasing three solutions that create an opportunity for advertising revenue growth and help build a more sustainable business model that supports credible local journalism in the United States.
Local News Taxonomy: the first version of new categories relevant to local news audiences.
Local News PMP Segmentation: the first PMP contextual segmentation for the local news categories.
Local News Supply Path Optimization: This is the most direct supply path to local journalism at scale in the industry. Through partnerships with programmatic advertising and contextual data suppliers, the LMC is improving programmatic margins and establishing new annuity revenue stream opportunities for local news.
Local News Taxonomy
Nearly 10 years ago at the onset of the IAB Tech Lab creation, the Content Taxonomy was officially introduced as the content targeting vehicle for global advertising. This taxonomy became the standard by which ad tech platforms could target contextual categories and brands could align their audience targets. Now in Version 3, the IAB Tech Lab Content Taxonomy has grown to be an all encompassing solution and, in many ways, the foundation of the global ad marketplace. However, standards are often the floor of capability in a Marketplace and innovators always find new ways to compete and demonstrate value above that floor. With that in mind, the LMC is releasing these Top Ten categories that represent some of the best of local journalism.
1) High School Sports
2) Weather/Climate
3) Women’s Sports
4) Local Politics / Elections
5) National Politics / Presidential race
6) NFL Sports
7) College Sports
8) Health / Wellness
9) Back to School
10) Travel / Tourism
These Top Ten categories have been identified by the NewsNext working groups as highly valuable because they are:
high quality journalism;
relevant to local audiences; and
monetizable opportunities.
Curated, these categories of advertising inventory represent massive scale. The Top Ten is the beginning of LMC’s Local News Taxonomy and subsequent categories will be released regularly over the next year.
We know some brands block news sites to avoid political coverage or other sensitive categories newsrooms cover to keep their communities informed. To address advertiser concerns, we created new Local News categories so brands can easily target valuable, untapped local news audiences in more brand suitable environments (like Women’s Sports, Climate/Weather, High School Sports, and Wellness/Health). Blocking entire domains harms journalism and to help enable the targeting of favorable content that suits brands, we have established the marketplaces to buy.
Local News PMP Segmentation
NewsPassID is releasing 10 Private Marketplace (PMP) opportunities for buyers that are aligned with the Local News Taxonomy. These PMP opportunities are inclusive of Display, Native, Online Video (Live and VOD) and CTV formats across our local news network. While each PMP deal is unique, we have the ability to customize campaigns based on geography and other subcategories.
In addition, powered by our partnership with Comscore, buyers can filter on contextual categories across our local news inventory through their DSP of choice. Buyers will be able to easily find the NewsPassID local journalism categories when Comscore rolls out this new segmentation in August.
Local News Path Optimization:
Streamlines the Programmatic Advertising Supply Path and Increases Transparency While Helping to Sustain Journalism.
In 2023, the Association of National Advertisers released the Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Report Indicating the average programmatic transaction costs in the open web to be about 30 percent. While this is a sample of the open web, local news publishers have found that percent to be often 40 to 50 percent or higher based on previous NewsPassID findings on this topic. This means reduced efficiencies for advertisers and loss of revenue for publishers. Through our partnerships, principally Media.Net and Hashtag Labs to start, we have worked to decrease that margin with the PMP and OMP offerings to less than 30 percent, in many paths including the DSP fees buyers are charged. Buyers can work with NewsPassID and know that more working dollars of their media investment goes toward reaching highly engaged audiences and supporting the journalism America relies on in their communities.
Scale and transparency matter. The “Long Tail” of the open web, across all newspaper, TV, radio, and online-only local news in the U.S. accounts for nearly 25 billion monthly ad requests. In addition, in a review of their Viewability through the Local Media Consortium partnership with Google, who is Accredited for Viewability by the Media Rating Council, the average viewability of the entire consortium membership was 70 percent. While some publishers have improvements to make, the perception that local news publishers’ product offerings are substandard and not in line with advertising industry standards, is just not true. The data does not support this conclusion.
The data does support that journalism is being blocked and many publishers do not even know it because of information asymmetry on the publisher side. The data also demonstrates too much bite of the apple has been taken by intermediaries and that journalism content categories, specifically those unique to local news, need additional identification. The LMC NewsPassID solutions released this month, along with its latest partnerships offer the straightest, most transparent, cost-effective path to advertising supply across the majority of local journalism outlets in the United States.
Scott Cunningham
Initiative Lead, NewsPassID and NewsNext
Chair, Publisher Council, Brand Safety Institute
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