Posted by: Matt Shanahan
In the upcoming posts, I’ll look into the impact data aggregators (pure-play and ad networks) have on publishers. Do data aggregators provide bi-directional transparency? What are the implication of transparency? What are the issues associated with attribution of data sources? What realistic contribution margin can selling data have to the bottom line of a publisher?
Data aggregators have been a big force behind the movement to audience buying. For the most part, they are the ones doing the audience selling, or reselling as it were. Essentially, they aggregate audience members from publishers and then repackage and resell them. Their goal is to build a big enough audience (i.e., pool of cookies annotated with rich information) for sale to advertisers and agencies for targeting. Creating differentiated cookies and understanding their traffic patterns, is the secret to building margins in their business models.
To create their cookie pools, BlueKai, Excelate, Bizo, AudienceScience, and other data aggregators provide a script that is run on multiple publishers sites. The publisher usually agrees to the script as part of an ad network agreement (e.g., AudienceScience) or a revenue share agreement (e.g., BlueKai). The script is responsible for issuing a cookie upon detecting a new unique visitor or recognizing a previously issued cookie from another site. During the visit, the script also collects behavioral information about the visitors to help establish demographics and intent. The information is collected and maintained by the aggregator.
Data aggregators focus on supply-side data collection and not demand-side. In the next post, I’ll delve into the implication for advertisers and publishers associated with the supply-side transparency generated by data aggregators.
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