On Jan. 1, the privately owned business publisher Bloomberg Media shut off its open-market programmatic advertising, a move to better control its user experience and drive advertisers to reach its audience by buying directly from the company itself.

Six months later, the strategy produced its first batch of results, showing early signs of success through higher clickthrough rates and higher CPMs.

“If you look at your website like a math equation, you lose the magic of what readers are coming for,” said chief digital officer Julia Beizer. “We know readers are coming for journalism first, so monetizing that through ads and subscriptions has to be our second priority.” 

When the publisher first made the transition, it began using the newly available ad space, which generated less than 5% of its overall ad revenue, to promote in-house products, such as its subscription offering, newsletter stable and original reporting.

Although the decision threatened to decrease advertising revenue in the short term, the publisher reasoned that the improved site experience would lead to a net gain in revenue brought on by improved rates of subscriber conversion and retention, among other factors.

Since the transition Bloomberg Media has seen its average ad-load time reduce by 15%, its page-load time drop by 40% and its viewability across all ad units rise by 20%, according to Beizer.

After replacing select underperforming ad units with recirculation modules, its in-house editorial has also driven clickthrough rates up to four times higher than the ads they replaced, and CPMs are up roughly 20%.

“The math is deceptively simple: The more pages you can get a reader to visit, the more ad revenue they generate and the likelier they are to subscribe,” said Myles Younger, the head of innovation and insights at U of Digital. “Bloomberg is betting that an investment in its brand will ultimately yield more financial upside.”

More broadly, the company has seen its number of digital subscribers grow 7% year over year, and sign-ups to its newsletter suite have risen 30% in the same time period. 

If your readership is general or your content is undifferentiated, it gets a lot harder to make this move confidently

Jacob Donnelly, media analyst

The figures come with a smattering of caveats. For instance, upticks in subscription and newsletter sign-ups are the product of a variety of factors and cannot be attributed solely to the recent adjustments. Likewise, the increase in CPMs is the natural mathematical outcome of eliminating the least lucrative tranche of its ad business.

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