Content monetization is when brands use content marketing to make money by generating traffic, brand awareness, leads, or sales. The benefits of content marketing include: Increasing your brand’s exposure and credibility in your target market Building a loyal audience that can be tapped for sales or other opportunities Building a community of advocates who will spread the word about your brand and help other people make decisions about what to buy Increasing your brand’s credibility and credibility in the market so that people will trust what you say and buy from you in the future.

Here are some things to know about content monetization

1. Be authentic and stay confident in the content you put out. No matter what, be confident!

Be authentic & stay confident in your content. Embrace the fact that you’re not perfect and people will forgive your mistakes over & over again. An example with podcasts is not putting out an episode because you feel after hours of editing it still may not be good enough.

That said, don’t let perfection get in the way of being yourself. The quality of your content will speak for itself. 

2. Focus on the metrics that matter and seek to improve your content. 

When it comes to content monetization, the most important thing to focus on is the metrics that matter most to your business. Are you generating leads or sales? Are people clicking on your CTAs and buying your products? By focusing on the right metrics, you can measure your progress, discover where you can improve, and increase the ROI of your content.

3. Explore multi platform distribution. Your content will be seen and shared by more people. 

Your distribution won’t be effective if you’re focusing on one or two channel. You want more views and engagement so you need to ensure all your platforms are active with some form of your content. Articles can be repurposed for social media. Create videos repurposed for YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.This is the best way to make sure that as many people as possible have regular access to your brand.

4. Monetize with ads or other forms of sponsorship.

Advertisements placed around your content could be a good source of income for your blog. You can choose to sell ads directly with advertisers or agencies or you can sign up with an ad network such as Google Adsense to help. The higher your traffic, the better opportunities you’ll have for advertisements. Atunwa works with advertisers and agencies to source demand to publishers in an easy and efficient way. The team at Atunwa also shares recommendations and tips on how publishers can improve the value of their advertising inventory.

5. Consider selling merchandise related to your blog or podcast, such as T-shirts.

In addition to their ordinary revenue streams, selling branded merchandise creates an additional income stream. Selling or giving away branded merchandise is an effective avenue for boosting brand recognition. Branded merchandise can be acquired easily and at a fair price. If you’re looking for a way to build loyalty and keep customers hooked on your brand, selling branded merchandise is a great strategy. Google, as big as they are sell branded T-shirts shipped across the world.

Takeaway: Content monetization is an important part of building a successful website or blog, but it can be confusing to get started with this type of marketing strategy if you aren’t familiar with the process. However, keeping it simple and focusing on what matters enables you to earn from your content as time goes on. Always keep in mind that monetization is important but it’s also not just about money, its also about positive user experience.

In our experience, we have come to understand that you will also be discovered by new audiences on multiple platforms. You can host your podcasts for example on AtunwaPodcasts.com but you can also make that same content available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast or on Spotify. All of these platforms are equally monetizable and you can distribute your content on their platform for free. Explore the pros and cons of each platform so you are well informed about what makes them unique from each other.

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Programmatic advertising is essentially the buying of ad space in an automated way. It uses audience data and insights from a variety of sources, to allow advertisers to show highly relevant ads for the audience, at the right time and in the right place.

Types of Programmatic Advertising

There are two main types of programmatic advertising; Programmatic Direct, and Real Time Bidding (RTB).

RTB

RTB programmatic advertising is the automated process of buying display ad space in real time, by bidding based on the target audience you wish to reach.

There are a few components used in RTB:

Ad exchange:

This is where the publisher’s inventory is sold via an auction, and bid on and bought by advertisers.

SSP (Supply side platform)

A supply side platform (often called SSP), is a system which allows publishers to access the ad exchange and list their inventory to be sold in auction.

DSP (Demand side platform)

A DSP is a demand side platform. This is system which allows advertisers (and agencies) to access the ad exchange auction and bid for ad space.

There are essentially these main steps to how RTB works:

1. Publishers make their ad space available to the ad exchanges beforehand, via the SSP (supply side platform)
2. Advertisers decide roughly which audiences they want to target with their ads (this could be based on their existing audience data such as existing website visitors, act-alike audiences of existing customers / site visitors, or new prospecting audiences based on interest / demographics etc)
3. When a website user visits a web page and it loads, information about the visitor of the page (gathered via cookies) and the content of the page is gathered and reported back to the ad exchange
4. If the website user on the site matches the targeting defined by the advertiser, the advertiser will be entered into the auction, to bid against all the other advertisers who are also bidding for this audience
5. Whichever advertiser has the highest bid will win the ad space and their ad shows to that user on that site during that particular visit
6. Publishers get paid for the ads they show on their sites

All of the steps above (apart from step one, two and six) are carried out in less than a second as the page loads.

Programmatic Direct

Programmatic Direct (sometimes called Programmatic Guaranteed) on the other hand, is where ad space is still purchased programmatically but is purchased in advance, based on a specific number of required impressions and audiences required.

What are the benefits of programmatic display ad buying?

The biggest benefit of programmatic advertising is that advertisers can be incredibly specific with their ads relevance to the audience, because of the amount of data available on audiences. The data and targeting is very powerful and because the process takes place in real time and is assisted by automated bidding decisions based on data, it reaches the right audience, at the right time, in the right place. This simply isn’t possible with traditional display advertising which is negotiated with publishers and bought upfront.

• Reduced human error in the process of media buying because machines target the right consumer, at the right time, in the right place
• There’s less hands-on work required from things like creating insertion orders etc, which means that you can focus more on strategy!
• The reduced need for sales people also makes the entire process cheaper in most instances
• You can target specific ad messaging to specific audiences, resulting in precise matching of ad relevant to the audience
• The programmatic buying process does not slow down the page load time for the user, which keeps publishers happy and users happy too

Challenges of programmatic

Brand Safety

There are always going to be some sites that you don’t want your ads showing up on. The risk with programmatic buying which is based mostly on the user rather than the content of the site, is that your ads could end up in unsavoury locations! You can use a site blacklist to stop this from happening though, where you can list specific sites you simply don’t want your ads to appear on. Generally, blacklists are used by the demand side platform. Websites often change their domains though, so it’s best to constantly update your blacklist.

Some platforms allow you to exclude entire categories of content too, in addition to specific sites. If you have the option to do this, you should use it in conjunction with your blacklist as category exclusions aren’t always exhaustive.

If your brand is super-sensitive, you can take the opposite approach, which is to whitelist and only have a set of sites your ads can be shown on. This however will limit your ability to reach your audience. This will however likely make your buy more expensive.

If you’re using an agency to run your programmatic ads, you should ask them what they are doing to exclude low quality and sensitive sites from having your ads served on them. Because low quality / sensitive category sites often provide cheaper traffic, often agencies will not use a blacklist or not be extensive with it because it can drive up the cost of the buy and make reaching your delivery KPIs more tricky.

Cookie reliance

Programmatic is reliant on cookies to track users across devices, which can mean that when it comes to tracking users across devices, it can be a challenge. This is however the case across almost all display advertising, with the exception of platforms such as Facebook where the user is logged in so can be tracked even without cookies.

Ad Fraud

Ad fraud is a big concern across display advertising in general, however, programmatic ads are viewable at a rate of 44 percent to 55 percent, which brings them in line with industry benchmarks. The industry average for suspicious activity is 16%. This means that programmatic advertising can have lower levels of ad fraud than other methods of display advertising. The machine learning techniques used in programmatic can actually even help identify fraudulent ad issues and avoid them.

URL Masking

URL masking is where a publisher lists their website in the ad exchange as another, more reputable website. This is one way publishers try to abuse the programmatic auction process.

The future of programmatic advertising

As programmatic continues to grow, we’ll start to see it more across TV buying and radio. This will take a long time to progress, as currently there are not enough of a need for TV advertising to become programmatic as the ad space always sells out anyway, so there’s no need to move to auction type sales. In the future, if TV diversifies, this may change.

As mobile phones know more and more about users interests, demographics, and their locations, we’re likely to even see outdoor advertising such as billboards become programmatic. Information about the users in the local area will be shared with ad networks, and then advertisers could bid on the ad inventory for that half-hour of the day for example.

How to get started with programmatic

There are various programmatic solutions available for advertisers, depending on your budgets and experience. This is where Atunwa Digital can help you get started. We make the process painless while teaching you along the way. Contact us today to understand how to get started.

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The real beauty of it as an advertising format is the flexibility it allows for both parties, there are no specific guidelines regarding length, format, and placement (beginning, middle or end of the content) and literally when the ad is placed: advertisers can place an ad post podcast publishing meaning it doesn’t date.

How User Tracking Works on the Web

Now let’s take a look at how the technology works behind; being able to identify and show ads to users with specific traits.

 Cookies The mainstay of web display advertising. These are small blobs of data that websites can store on its reader’s browser and then access at a later time. Maybe they want to store how many times you visited or what you searched for or any other interesting data that they want. The cookies are specific to the ad tracking software so as long as publishers used the same ad trackers they could track users across websites.  The ad industry is now trying to move on from just using cookies since they can’t track users across multiple devices and are also able to be cleared or turned off by the user.

 Device Fingerprinting This tech tries to identify the individual device not just the browser that is being used. It can try and do this by combining an IP address, browser version, operating system, location and time zone settings, installed apps, in fact as many data points as they can. These data points are collected to create an identifier; the more data points, the more likely that the device can be identified as unique. It is essentially a game of Guess Who? at a massive scale. If you only guess against blue eyes then it’s pretty useless. But if you’re guessing against blue eyes, brown hair, receding hairline, mustache, glasses, oval head then you can make a pretty good guess. Of course the problem here is that we’re using multiple devices. How do you know if that ad for a vacation in Florida led to that person booking a vacation on their iPhone?

 User Identification One level above device fingerprinting is to identify the individual user across whichever device they are using – even if they have switched from using their phone to their laptop. There are two main approaches. Deterministic and Probabilistic.

• Deterministic: Using a login we can identify a user (think of Twitter; because all users have to log in, they can know which ads are shown on a user’s phone and the links they click on their laptop)
• Probabilistic: This uses a similar data set as device identification and there are a bunch of companies that will sell you solutions that can take anonymous user data and try and match it and tell you if this user. From my research, the accuracy of this approach seems questionable with today’s tech.

The difference between web and podcast downloads.

On the web as we have seen, there are many ways to track a user and be able to sell ads against them. Why is it different with podcasts? Remember when I said that publishers can execute code every time a page is viewed? That is the key to this whole ad tracking empire that has been built. If the publisher can’t execute whatever code it wants when a page is viewed then you’re left with a pretty dumb system. (Try turning off JavaScript in your browser and see what happens) Which is what happens with podcasts. Podcast players don’t execute publishers code when a listener requests an episode. Publishing a podcast episode is like mailing a letter. You’re pretty sure it’ll be delivered but you can be certain and you don’t know if the recipient even read it.

What can podcast players do?

Podcast players will send a “user-agent” when downloading a file. A user-agent is just a string of text that identifies what piece of software has made the request to download something. The podcast server will know the IP address that made the request to download too, and that can reasonably accurately identify the geographic location of the request and of course they know the time that a podcast episode was requested. And that is pretty much all you can do with podcasts. You can target based on the location (certainly country-level, maybe city-level) of the request, the time of the request, and which podcast player is being used.

What happens when I download and play a new episode

The vast majority of ads are created ‘server-side’. That means that the server does the work of inserting an ad into the episode and whichever podcast player is used, they will hear ads (we will discuss client-side ad serving a little later).

Here is the basic order of operations:

1. The podcast player sends a request to the podcast server.
2. The podcast server will see an IP address and a user-agent string and the time the episode was requested.
3. Using that info it will identify, out of all the ads it knows about, the most relevant one.
4. If you are the first person to request that episode and ad combination, the server will stitch together the podcast episode with the ads into a new mp3 file and return it to the player. It will also save a copy for the next request whose profile matches that ads so it can serve it faster.
5. The server sends the complete mp3 file back to the player that requested it.

How does the server know where to insert the ads? Most commonly, the ad server is integrated into the publishing platform so when a producer uploads a new episode they will just type in the timecodes where ads can go while they add the episode title and description and other metadata. The other way is a little more automatic. When making the episode the producer can insert an audio tone outside the range of the human ear that the ad server can check for and use that position to insert an ad. The ad server can also recognize the waveform of a certain jingle or other cue to identify where to insert an ad.

Server-side vs client-side ad insertion

So far we have just talked about server-side ad insertion. ‘Client-side’ ad insertion means that the podcast player itself inserts the ad rather than the server that sends the mp3 file. This is currently pretty rare since this means that only the audience using a certain player will hear an ad (unlike server-side insertion where the ads are in the mp3 file that are sent to all players). Hence you can only monetize against a subset of your audience.

What is the difference between Dynamic Ads and Host-read ads?

The perception seems to be that dynamic ads must mean radio-style commercials but that is not the case. One is the tech that delivers an ad and the other is a type of ad. I like to think of dynamic ads actually as dynamic content. There is no reason it has to be used for ads. One use case is to automatically insert a content warning read by the host at the top of the episode if the episode contains explicit language.

How Atunwa Digital Can Help?

Atunwa Digital is a full service advertising agency investing and positioning ourselves to be the go-to agency for brands and advertisers looking to penetrate the African market. We will walk you through each & every step of the process, to ensure nothing is going unnoticed.

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Ad placement is a big part of the advertising world. It’s the process by which a publisher places an ad on the site or app of a company or individual. It can be as simple as bidding on a single ad position on a page, or as complex as buying a whole network of ad positions on a page. The size and location of an ad also varies based on the size of the publisher and the size of the ad space.

Advertisers are the companies or organizations that pay for ad placement on a publisher’s site or app. They’re the ones who want to reach the largest audience possible, and they often work with agencies and in-house teams to find the best places on which to advertise. Agencies are the companies that help advertisers find the best places on which to advertise. They work with both publishers and advertisers to find the best placements on which to run ads, and they often help design and build the ad spaces themselves.

There are a variety of types of advertising, including display, video and audio advertisements. Display advertisements are the most common type, which appear on the web or app as large text or image ads. They can be text or image ads, and the size of the ad space will depend on the size of the space on which the ad appears. Video and audio advertisements are more specific types of display advertisements and are represented as pre-roll (before content), mid-roll (between content), and post-roll ads (after content).

When determining which ad space to place an ad in, advertisers first consider the size and location of the audience they want to reach. They also consider the size of the audience they’ll receive when they advertise on a publisher’s platform. Agencies specialize in determining which ad positions will receive the highest bids from advertisers, which will place their ads in the best locations on a publisher’s platform, and which will receive the most impressions. Ultimately, advertisers are the ones who decide where to place their ads. This can be a complicated process, as advertisers and agencies can have complex goals and requirements for which placements are the best. It can also be a process of trial and error, as publishers try different placements on different ads to see what works best. Generally, the first step in determining good ad placement is understanding the goals and objectives of the advertiser and the agency.

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