BuzzFeed Adopts Yahoo's Third-Party Cookie Replacement

Yahoo and BuzzFeed announced this morning the second leg of a strategic partnership that first debuted last November. This latest phase centers on growing addressable audience pools, giving marketers the scale needed as the use of third-party cookies dwindles, ultimately growing programmatic advertising revenue. The partnership gives advertisers using Yahoo’s supply-side platform preferred access to BuzzFeed’s network of sites, including BuzzFeed News, Tasty, HuffPost and others. In turn, BuzzFeed will adopt Yahoo’s identity tech products, ConnectID and Next-Gen Solutions, pairing its first-party data with Yahoo’s to create an addressable audience of over 148 million users, according to Iván Markman, the chief business officer for Yahoo. “We need to have solutions for publishers with first-party data and those without first-party data,” Markman said. “And because we treasure our consumers, in order to do that we need to have a community garden, as opposed to a walled garden, where we partner with like-minded publishers to help all of us grow.” Yahoo, which returned to private ownership in September, has sought to build momentum for its identity solutions, as Google plans to withdraw support for third-party cookies in Chrome in 2023, and no consensus for a wide-scale alternative identifier has been met. BuzzFeed, meanwhile, is preparing to go public via a special acquisition company before the end of the year. In anticipation of the impending deprecation of third-party cookies, the partnership will help both publishers strengthen their advertising and data capabilities and increase audience scale. We need to have a community garden, as opposed to a walled garden, where we partner with like-minded publishers to help all of us grow.Iván Markman, chief business officer for Yahoo The partnership makes ConnectID and Next-Gen Solutions more valuable as a result, lending momentum to Yahoo’s identity tech stack. ConnectID has now been integrated by over 3,000 publisher domains, including Newsweek, CafeMedia and The Arena Group, according to Markman. Nearly 1,000 advertisers, agencies and brands have also directly activated first-party data through the identifier. Preferred access could cut out key demand By providing preferred programmatic access to advertisers using Yahoo's SSP, BuzzFeed hopes to increase demand for its inventory and generate higher ad revenues, according to Ken Blom, svp of ad strategy and partnerships at BuzzFeed. Preferred access means that BuzzFeed can preemptively strike deals with advertisers using the platform, such as guaranteeing them access to certain audience segments. This helps ensure that marketers meet their objectives at scale, while BuzzFeed gets access to the richest possible demand. So long as the demand comes through the Yahoo SSP, it will likely generate higher CPMs, said Dan Elddine, svp of data and technology at Essence. This incentivizes BuzzFeed to use the Yahoo SSP, but it also discourages the publisher from tapping demand from other platforms, Elddine said. “If demand flows through other platforms, I'm not sure the monetization benefits can be fully realized,” Elddine said. “This is especially true of demand coming through Google platforms like DV360, which likely won't integrate with Yahoo's identity solutions in favor of Google's own Privacy Sandbox solutions.” Yahoo builds value for its identity solutions By adopting Yahoo ConnectID and Next-Gen Solutions, advertisers can identify and reach readers on BuzzFeed that have previously been identified on Yahoo sites. This overlap lets marketers serve more relevant ads to users, paying a more premium rate for this inventory as cross-site tracking gets tougher and most publisher-based first-party data solutions aren't fully interoperable. Yahoo and BuzzFeed will only be able to track users who give their consent to sites from both publishing groups. “The number of logged-in users isn't necessarily growing, but where you're going to potentially reach that audience has grown because you're not just working on Yahoo's network,” Blom said. “We’re adding inventory that you can run against that audience.” Yahoo Brand In the Know Launches a New Style Vertical Focused on Shoppable Commerce In situations where an ID is not present, such as a mobile app, BuzzFeed will be able to use Yahoo’s ID-less offering, Next-Gen Solutions. Rather than rely on first-party data, Next-Gen uses contextual information and real-time data signals, such as location and time, to make educated guesses about audiences and deliver relevant messages. The product uses AI to inform the advertising it serves, which it trains using data it collects for ConnectID. “The advertiser is now flying with more line of sight; they are not playing blind,” Markman said. “And the publisher is earning more for those impressions because the advertiser can get a better sense of their value.”

Media News

BuzzFeed is the Latest Publisher Adopting Yahoo's Third-Party Cookie Replacement

News provider to use search giant's ID tech, while Yahoo advertisers get programmatic preference

Mark Stenberg

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Mark Stenberg