How much revenue is my site really making?
It’s an elusive question for publishers of all sizes as they navigate the complex digital landscape. An entire economy has bloomed around the digital advertising world over the last decade as media buyers, agencies and publishers pieced together “solutions” with no real master plan in mind. This haphazard path has led to a question mark around transparency in publisher revenue with no clear answer.
Stories like The Guardian discovering as much as 70% of their revenue was going to third parties, and the World Federation of Advertisers echoing this sentiment stating nearly 60 cents on every dollar goes to agencies and tech providers have brought this issue front and center.
Larger SSPs and DSPs have responded, like AppNexus who introduced transparency tools into their dashboard for both publishers and advertisers to better see where their money is going. Yet, the majority of publishers work with multiple partners across different channels. This fragmentation and lack of an industry-wide standard around third party fees and revenue make it much harder for publishers and advertisers alike to distinguish where their money is actually going. We can all agree the growing call for revenue transparency for publishers is a hot issue, and it’s one we take seriously at Freestar, which is why we’ve introduced our new Partner Dashboard.
In the first week of April we rolled out our dashboard allowing our publishers to track their site’s revenue net to them. Our transparent revenue share model means there are no hidden fees or additional cuts to be made. What is reported in the dashboard is their site’s true revenue.
How is this different from other parties that offer dashboards? At Freestar, we holistically manage digital advertising operations for publishers – seamlessly maximizing revenue by utilizing our industry-leading technology, data, and experience. This means our dashboard encompasses our publishers’ total revenue in one single, easy to access place.
We’re working tirelessly to integrate even more features so our partners can hone in further on where their revenue is coming from. The next rollout of our Partner Dashboard will include: Revenue by Ad Size; Tracking of Direct Campaigns + Programmatic; eCPM.
Are you a publisher or advertiser? Let us know what features you think are important to add to our Partner Dashboard by emailing us at marketing@freestar.com.
