Two others reported, anecdotally, that while traffic has spiked, revenue has remained flat.
“We have seen a spike in traffic due to the war coverage, but have not seen an equal spike in programmatic revenue,” according to one executive.
The brunt of the decline comes from two sources: direct advertisers asking to stop their campaigns and keyword blocklists built into private marketplace deals, according to another ad ops executive. Programmatic guarantees, which publishers have more control over, are less affected.
“The news from the Israel-Hamas war is obviously harrowing and not necessarily a suitable place for our clients’ advertising to appear,” said Josh Woolas, digital planning director at Wavemaker. “That being said, we want to support the media that keeps us informed of such vital news and not block news completely.” As such, the agency is using a combination of content avoidance tools from brand safety partners—so ads still appear in the news—as well as short-term keyword blocks on “certain non-negotiables.”
News outlets can account for these halts and blocks by tapping into open-exchange demand, but these bids typically yield a lower CPM and leave publishers with less control over ad creative and quality.
The net result of these measures is inefficient monetization, meaning publishers still generate revenue but at far lower yields.
“Typically, during this time, we would want to see our [ad] fill rate going direct rather than programmatic, so we are not being made whole,” said one executive.
Bloated blocklists
Compounding the issue, brands that add keywords to their blocklists often never remove them—either out of negligence or a sense of misguided prudence, according to Vanessa Otero, the chief executive of Ad Fontes Media.
Many crises also spill into other areas of news coverage, making it challenging for publishers to confine their un-monetizable content to a single section or homepage, according to one executive.
The latest Israel-Hamas conflict, for instance, has affected coverage of financial markets, domestic politics and—as influential figures respond to the events—even sacrosanct verticals like sports and entertainment. This means that advertisers looking for content untouched by blocked keywords and charged semantics quickly run out of real estate, according to an ad ops executive.
