Back in the day when publishers made money!

The Struggles of a Publisher

Remember the good old days, when publishers actually made money? CPMs were $2 - $5, and display advertising alone could run your business. That lasted about 5-7 years. But then came programmatic.

Now programmatic advertising is designed to squeeze every penny from publishers while keeping advertisers happy. It's a race to the bottom. There's no way that benefited publishers, no matter how the ad companies spun it. In fact, CPMs are actually lower than they were 15 years ago – that's regress, not progress.

Publishers face increasing costs of doing business, while revenue has tanked. Costs are 5x higher, revenue is probably about 5x lower. To make ends meet, we need CPMs around $15 - $20. But everything favors the advertiser.

It seems like online display advertising is run by the mafia – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft... These Fortune 500 companies report record profits from advertising every quarter, but they share their massive slices of pie with the middlemen, not the small publishers at the bottom who create the content. Because everyone at the top is greedy. They give us table scraps and tell us to be happy. We can complain all we want, but we have no options. There's no one fighting for us – no regulatory bodies, no transparency. We're basically slaves to the corporate advertisers.

What happens if CPMs fall even lower? There's no publisher organization to fight back. The agencies pretend to be our friends, but no one actually looks out for the publishers. It's all rigged. Publishers work and scrape by, driving traffic because we have to, but the cycle never ends. At some point, this can't continue. People lose their jobs, their homes, their families, while those at the top get richer.

I miss the days agencies cared about publishers, gave gifts, and took our calls. Now they’re always complaining, blaming low CPMs on our traffic volume. They have nothing helpful to offer, just repackaged ideas that never deliver on their promises. Viewability was another false hope used to justify lower rates.

Without publishers, there is no ad industry! But they know we're desperate and can't afford to say no to their scraps. Can't we go back to the days when direct sales teams had relationships with advertisers, got them to spend, and paid publishers fairly? Greed killed direct sales – the big boys decided they wanted a bigger slice of the pie. They've bled publishers dry to the point of collapse.

Google controls the internet. They dictate how we build our websites, bury us in the search rankings if we don't comply, and starve us of even tiny Google Ads scraps if we don't play their way. It's all an Orwellian nightmare. The internet's ‘freedom’ is a lie. We rely on ad money to fund our work, and that gives advertisers all the power. We’re told we could have avoided this by diversifying, but it's all on the publishers to survive while the industry squeezes us.

How do we survive? We need to stop waiting for advertisers to solve our problems. We can't even control our own businesses! We need to bring back direct deals with sales teams to keep everyone profitable. Sadly, this sounds too good to be true.

The nightmare for publishers is real. I wish I could do more, but without organization, it's just a rant.

I know many publishers feel the same but are afraid to speak up. They have bills to pay, families to feed. Maybe I should have sold out to that corporation when they offered... Nobody cares about publishers.

We're not going to see positive change.

It’s always doom and gloom for us.

If you want to help, tell publishers about agencies still doing direct sales and deals. Those are our lifeline, because programmatic advertising is killing us.