Fiona McKinnon on stage at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in April. Photo by Rasmus Flindt Pedersen for WAN-IFRA.
Publisher alliances, especially those created around advertising, have become increasingly popular in the past few years.
A key reason for the creation of many, if not most, of these alliances is very straightforward: the ongoing steady decline of print advertising and disappearance of classified advertising are putting increased pressure on news publishing companies to actively seek out opportunities to boost their digital advertising revenues, even if that means collaborating with other publishers that they’ve traditionally regarded as competitors.
This webinar served as a complement to our recent report on the same topic, and McKinnon and Pangaea are also featured in the report.
Here are our top takeaways from the webinar, which can be replayed in its entirety by clicking here (or at the bottom of this post).
1. Alliances are growing
“Alliances are in a growth phase right now, with new regional collaborations forming all of the time,” McKinnon said.
Be it a data alliance, a tech alliance, or a collaboration of cost resource, each alliance has a different story to tell, based on the individual business requirements of each participating publisher.
“There isn’t a one-size-fits-all model,” McKinnon said. “We all operate under slightly different terms.”
2. How the Pangaea Alliance works
Made up of a group of major publishers, including the Guardian, CNN, The Week, Reuters, Fast Company and Inc., the Pangaea Alliance is integrated into header bidder and data solutions that combine the inventory and audiences of their partners to create a unique, brand safe and scalable audience for advertisers.
Publishers provide data related to content views from their page (such as business, travel or culture content), allowing the Pangaea Alliance to create unique segments by putting together different data sets.
“We then make that audience available for our advertisers to purchase. And that user can then be found anywhere across the Pangaea Alliance,” McKinnon said.
“It allows us to offer reach and scale to those hard to find audiences, and it also brings incremental brands to publishers who may not have fit the previous brief of having travel content or having business content.”
The Alliance itself does not collect any first-party data from publishers, McKinnon said.
“That is the domain of our publishers, that is their gold, we let them sell that themselves.”
3. The benefits for publishers
The Pangaea Alliance was born out of an idea from the Guardian UK team in 2015, created to address some of the shared industry challenges, and generate fresh revenue ideas in the face of declining traditional models.
According to McKinnon, the alliance offers publishers incremental programmatic revenue, introduces them to new tech partners, innovations and cross-partner data insights, and brings new brands to publishers that wouldn’t have been targeted as an individual media site.
The cost of investment for publishers is a percentage of revenue share, with the Pangaea Alliance operating as a non-profit.
4. What the alliance offers advertisers
Positioned around affluent and business-focused users, the Pangaea Alliance aims to offer advertisers a new, simple and streamlined way to buy their audience.
“We offer advertisers global reach, and due to the way that we construct our data and insights we’re able to give them segments which they wouldn’t be able to get if they just went to each individual publisher separately,” McKinnon said.
At the same time, advertisers’ inventory is viewable, and in a trusted brand-safe environment.
Register for our next webinar on 19 Sept.
Our next free WAN-IFRA webinar is scheduled for Wednesday, 19 September, and will focus on retention lessons for digital subscriptions.