Sharing audience data should be a boon for publishers

Tue, 9 Mar 2010 | By Suzanne Bearne

This initiative has been a long time in the making, but it’s finally happened two years after new media age first reported it.

Last week it was announced Bauer Media and The Financial Times have teamed up to share audience data to boost their ad proposition.

FT.com and Bauer sites Parker’s and Carmagazine.co.uk are collaborating to identify users who are both interested in buying a car and are earning an above-average income in order to target them with relevant ads across the sites (nma.co.uk 2 March 2010).

This alliance comes at a time when online ad revenues are falling, online video aside. Innovative partnerships like the FT and Bauer’s should be investigated by all publishers looking to increase CPM rates.

This sharing of sensitive information about their website and audience is of massive benefit to advertisers and agencies, which will want such valuable information to better target users and avoid lower wastage by not targeting irrelevant users.

The deal extends publishers’ scale of targeting beyond their own sites and, as premium publishers continue to face an increasing ad spend shift to Facebook, this is another way to challenge competitors.

Rather than seeing each other as competitors, publishers need to continue to work together more to find ways to unlock new revenue streams.

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