The Value of Branded, First Party Audience Data

First party data brandedPremium online publishers need to leverage their brand and the power of first party data to continue to stay relevant. CPMs are continuing to be driven down by third parties in the advertising ecosystem. By placing their ad inventory on ad exchanges and making them available through DSPs, online publishers are eroding their market differentiation and undervaluing their premium audiences. First party data is audience data created and owned by publishers themselves; third party data is generated on third party platforms and often aggregated with data from other websites.

Kevin Gentzel sums up nicely why branded data is so important in this quote from the recent New York Times article “Cutting Out the Middleman to Sell Small Ads Online”:

“There is significant value in branded data,” said Kevin Gentzel, the chief revenue officer at Forbes, which has not been selling through third-party networks. “A Forbes in-market car buyer has more value that just an in-market car buyer.”

Nick Johnson, SVP of digital media sales at NBC Universal, goes on to comment:

“We want to make sure that we’re controlling what happens with data . . . we want to make sure we control pricing. Control’s a very important message. We don’t want there to be a cottage industry built on our backs.”

At Crowd Science, we believe these kinds of sentiments from major online publishers will help set the stage for private exchanges to emerge. It is no longer in the publishers’ best interest to simply have their data, especially audience data, floating under control of someone else. It simply undermines the value of their audience.

We believe there is tremendous value waiting to be harnessed in first party data. By creating first party data, publishers can own highly accurate and reliable information about their valuable audiences that can then be used in a variety of ways, from more premium ad sales opportunities to better ad targeting. Ready to start owning your audience data? Check out Audience Profiler by Crowd Science and contact us today!

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