Media buyers keep insisting that the role of third-party verification firms are critical when assessing everything from brand safety to viewability in the programmatic market. Many publishers have been fed up for a while over how much their programmatic inventory gets demonetized by verification firms’ ratings or by over-generalized keyword blocklists, but the latest hits to programmatic pricing overall seems to be piling on. The four-week average CPM for the open marketplace in February rose slightly at $1.28, but the average PG CPM fell to $9.74 and the average PMP CPM was down to $3.20, indicating that publishers’ programmatic revenue is still being impacted by the economic slowdown. The Guardian and The Independent both have contracts with IAS while the LA Times has a partnership with Verity, GumGum’s contextual brand safety product. “People are having trouble letting go of those keyword lists, even though they’re also trying these contextual targeting tactics and I [think] you need to separate those tactics and test those separately.

Source: Los Angeles Times March 14, 2023 04:02 UTC