How Us Weekly’s Publisher Turned Away From MFA

The software ecosystem is constantly changing. If publishers don’t evolve with it, they risk becoming extinct.

Over the past decade, A360 Media has transformed its business model in response to changing trends in the advertising industry. Formerly known as American Media, Inc., its old printing business revolved around tabloids like The Star and its flagship publication, the National Enquirer. But when hedge fund Chatham Asset Management bought it in 2014, the company went on an acquisition spree, expanding its print and digital footprint and entering new content verticals in search of ad revenue.

Since rebranding to A360 in 2020, the publisher has focused on women’s entertainment and lifestyle brands, including Us Weekly, In Touch, Woman’s World and DREW. In November, its sites attracted 350 million page views across 50 million sessions.

A360’s digital growth strategy is mainly based on programmatic advertising, with a slightly smaller direct sales business. Instead of building an in-house programmatic team, it turned to a third-party monetization partner, Media Tradecraft (MTC), to help it adapt to major changes in the market four years ago.

That partnership led A360 to abandon its made-for-advertising (MFA) model and streamline its website design to meet programmatic demand.

Waiver of Arbitration

Like many publishers, A360 faced a turning point during the pandemic.

Previously, A360’s digital ad business was built on arbitrage and paid traffic mostly from Facebook, said Paul Likins, vice president of revenue. He described the user experience as “100 slides and 200 ads” and “very 2007.”

But during the quarantine, “Facebook became a lot more expensive,” he said. In addition, audiences shifted their attention away from A360’s lighter, celebrity-centric offerings to heavier news.

“At that point, people didn’t care what the Kardashians were doing,” Likins said. “We could see a drop in content consumption, which meant fewer sessions, fewer app impressions, less of everything that drives revenue.”

A360 needed a new strategy “to get more blood out of that session rock,” Likins said. This meant revamping the website experience to keep users engaged without relying on paid traffic and slideshow gimmicks. But the company didn’t have the in-house expertise to craft a new monetization strategy.

A360 has never had a dedicated programming team—only one employee in charge of yield management, Likins said, which won’t work in the modern programming ecosystem.

Without the resources to build an in-house team, A360 considered several monetization partners, but none could offer revenue projections that could surpass A360’s existing arbitrage business, he said. The company ultimately signed on with MTC because its pitch on the programmatic revenue benefits of revamping the website experience was compelling, he added.

That overhaul included reducing the page load times of certain websites. MTC also worked with the A360 web dev team to remove old code from the newly acquired websites and improve the visibility of ad spaces — all things that now seem basic, Likins said.

MTC also worked on more difficult tasks, such as aligning A360’s ad technology with its content taxonomy. He also introduced a custom header bid wrapper and automated price floor adjustments, and helped A360 decide which SSPs to include in Prebid and which to move from the server side to Amazon’s Transparent Ad Marketplace.

More recently, MTC helped A360 adapt its site design to Google’s core web metrics. For example, to avoid getting penalized by Google for a high Cumulative Layout Change score, A360 removed some video download ad units that changed the layout of the page as the user scrolled down the page.

What’s in a Network ID?

In addition, most other third parties require publishers to set up a new Google Ad Manager (GAM) integration, Likins said.

A360 would have to set up a new GAM network ID and hand it over to the managed service, meaning the loss of “all the algorithmic goodwill that goes with a long-term network ID,” he said. It also means scrapping the optimization data that GAM has collected about the A360 audience over the years.

Losing the GAM ID would also force A360 to rewrite its sales strategy for private market business (PMP) or outsource the PMP business to a partner, he added.

“Media Tradecraft is betting that big publishers want to have their own reputation in the marketplace,” said Chris Kane, founder of Jounce Media, which provides reports on the quality of programmatic supply chains and tracks the prevalence of MFA publishers.

Jounce considers the A360 publisher a “frontrunner” that exemplifies programmatic best practices — proving that MTC’s strategy of allowing the publisher to be a market-facing entity has some advantages, Kane said. Other networks market their publishers’ inventory under their own names, he added.

Jounce’s endorsement also signals that the A360 has successfully put its MFA past behind it.

We have challenges ahead of us

Go-to-market also helps A360’s sales teams shift advertiser priorities from the open web to curated offerings.

To build more select PMPs, A360 partnered with data management platform ArcSpan this summer. But that relationship is still in its early days.

A360 is also actively testing alternative IDs, including Yahoo Connect ID and LiveIntent’s HIRO. His partnership with MTC helped him understand the complicated ID environment, Likins said — though A360’s testing of alternative third-party cookies has been slowed by Chrome’s changing plans to ditch cookies, he added.

Looking ahead, A360 faces another major challenge in its upcoming merger with local newspaper conglomerate McClatchy.

“We’re becoming a different company, with the convergence of a news publisher and an entertainment brand,” he said. “It creates a larger, more diverse network of audiences for both parties, and we may be able to bring in non-endemic advertising.”