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We talk with people interested in WordPress publishing. You'll hear interview with publishers who happen to be using WordPress, and also people in the WordPress space.
Hey, and welcome to the PublishPress Podcast. I'm Steve Burge and here at PublisPress , we help publishers succeed with WordPress. But you need more than just a great WordPress site to make a successful publication. You need money as well. I've invited my friend Matt Hoy from a company called Revcontent on to talk about just that.
Steve Burge:Revcontent is a native advertising company. And they're based here in Sarasota, Florida where Publishpress is based too. So he's a neighbor of mine and we're in are joining businesses too. Matt has a great a hundred foot view of the publishing industry. He sees revenue and traffic across thousands and thousands of publishers, and he sees what's working for them and what's not.
Steve Burge:So I invited him on today to talk about advertising, to talk about revenue, to talk about publishing. Oh, and a little bit of soccer as well. Hey, Matt. Welcome to the Publish First podcast.
Matt Hoy:Appreciate it, Steve O. Thank you for having me on.
Steve Burge:So people watching this might be a little confused. There are two British people on the podcast, both working in publishing, both living in Sarasota. And you're basically my neighbor. Right?
Matt Hoy:Pretty much. Yeah. We're down the road. We we play football together, Well, one of us does anyway. And
Steve Burge:One tries. And
Matt Hoy:yeah. No. We're, we're obviously friends off off the field as well. It's just bizarre that our industry sort of crisscross a little bit. It's it's kinda cool because we're in a sort of smaller market here for ad tech, if you like, and we've we've definitely found some synergies in in people we work with.
Matt Hoy:It's cool.
Steve Burge:Yeah. Florida is not a hotbed of tech companies, but Revcontent is based right here in Sarasota. Right?
Matt Hoy:It is. Yeah. It is. I mean, I think, you know, since COVID, we've had a lot of remote workers and stuff sort of moved down here and a lot of companies. You know, Rumble, for example, is is based on the road in Longboat Key, I believe, and there's a few others as well that are around Tampa.
Matt Hoy:But certainly, a lot of workers are down here remotely working, sort of moving from New York, Chicago. But we were incubated out of an affiliate network that started in Sarasota, Owner founded, and then we were sold to private equity about three and a half, four years ago now. So it's it's been a it's been a cool journey. It's been wanting to be a good part of.
Steve Burge:How long have you been with them? How long has your journey with RevCon content been?
Matt Hoy:It's I'm coming up on ten years. It'll be ten years in August. So, you know, I I started out just as a as a lowly sales rep and sort of worked my way through the ranks. And, you know, I I'm now the chief revenue officer. I was saying this to someone else the other day.
Matt Hoy:We we sort of wear many hats on the c level, so I think it's it's a CRO slash COO, which is pretty a shared responsibility for everyone. But my function is to is to oversee the the bottom demand and supply teams, account management for, you know, publisher attention, and then anything that sort of falls on the business side. Our CEO, Richard, sort of does a lot of the stuff with the board alongside me, so I'll do a lot of the business operations kinda day to day as well as the the sales and retention component.
Steve Burge:So you work with a lot of publishers. If I came to one of your customers' websites and was looking for rev content, where would I be looking? What would I see? What does rev content do for the publishers?
Matt Hoy:Yeah. No. It's a good question. So, I mean, we're below the full publisher. So, you know, much more limited viewability.
Matt Hoy:We're sort of looking to monetize that user once they get to the end of that article, you know, as opposed to just bouncing off the page. You know, we have some session retention tools and stuff that that work down there in terms of recirculating the user as well. And also before they bounce back to Google, Facebook, wherever they've kind of, you know, come from to the the publisher's page. CPC model, you know, it has that reputation of of being clickbaity, but the industry has certainly changed an awful lot over the years. Think different companies have gone in different directions, but I I like the lane that we've sort of picked and decided to sort of stay in.
Steve Burge:So if I come to an article about great places to visit in France, for example, like top 10 top 10 cities to go on vacation in France. I would scroll to the bottom, and at the bottom, there would be some Revcontent articles recommending, like, ways to get a cheap flight to France or related content links at the bottom of the article. Right?
Matt Hoy:Yeah. It's it's it's native content. I I would say, you know, in terms of the contextual relevance, it's probably not quite as deep as that. It's bit more of a broader scope. You know, if we have advertisers that go into that vertical, we're trying to verticalize as much as we can.
Matt Hoy:But at the end of the day, we're a monetization engine. So typically trying to force something into a into a very close niche like that typically kinda depletes the revenue pretty dramatically. We have a lot of brand controls that we work hand in hand with the pub on just to sort of make sure that the the KPIs on on marketing brand guidelines are sort of being met. But essentially, in a nutshell, yeah, you'll see our ads down there, sometimes mixed in with recirculated content from, you know, from the publisher, which pulls based on whatever KPI they have. Yeah.
Matt Hoy:Like I said, a CPC model, and it it's very consistent, reliable revenue for, you know, for our customers. And we think we provide very good customer service to go along with it.
Steve Burge:Oh, so the option is there for the publishers to insert some of their own content alongside the ads. It might be a good way to build trust. They see content from the same publisher they've just finished reading, plus also maybe an ad that they trust a little more next to it.
Matt Hoy:Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I mean, we you know, we've done some studies to sort of look at, you know, the the best sort of makeup of internal to ad ratio. And it it really depends on time of year with the publisher.
Matt Hoy:You know, sometimes they might have different events they wanna publicize on their own end during q four so we can kind of use it as a direct sold component for their internal resources as well. You know, during q one, you know, the the revenue needs might be a little more pressing, if you like, with the dry up of demand elsewhere so we can kind of increase the ad ratio again. But, typically, what people will see is sort of a sixty forty ratio from, yeah, from ads to internal content. But then a lot of our publishers will just run a % ads because they wanna capture the margin and the revenue for themselves.
Steve Burge:Well, that's interesting because forgive me for being quite so blunt, but some of the other companies in this space have a bit of a seedy reputation. Some of the ad blocks you'll see under posts are a little scammy.
Matt Hoy:Yeah. For sure.
Steve Burge:So you're trying to do things to build trust?
Matt Hoy:We definitely are. Yeah. I mean, listen, I'm not gonna sit here and and sit on my ivory tower and say, you know, that that that our ads are the best in the the best of the best industry. I mean, certainly in terms of content rec, we think they're the of cleanest and less clickbaity ads at the lot. But at end of the day, the the goal for our ads is to make the user sort of click, so we have to entice them in some sort of capacity.
Matt Hoy:That being said, the the user experience that we try and portray is is along their brand guidelines, blocking with keywords the same way Google will do things on their end, making sure that the ads that appear are essentially what their expectations are for the publisher, then also the number of ads. You know? We try and take the the route of sort of getting less real estate on the page. You know, some of our competitors, and I'm not here to bash them, will take, you know, a ton of real estate, ton of pixel space. And the question I always sort of ask is, well, if you're giving up that much real estate, are you really getting paid that much more for it.
Matt Hoy:And the answer typically is no. You know, the reason for that is really buried in the need for, you know, driving more and more profitability for a publicly traded company, and so they need more ads to sort of, you know, get more on the page. But for me, my goal and the mandate that I've kinda pushed the team here is to you know, we obviously need to make money ourselves, but at the same time, if the publisher is not making more money, then it's not beneficial to us. Like, if it means more for them to run a direct campaign that we make no money from, let's go ahead and do it because then they're happy. Their KPIs are being met, and we're sort of pushing our flexible nature, which is not something that's that's very prevalent in the industry as it stands right now.
Steve Burge:So what kind of publishers are running these ads? Are they Are they generally companies that are going after large search volume? They're not niche publishers exactly. These are scale publishers who are driving traffic through Facebook and other sources?
Matt Hoy:Yeah. Exactly. I mean, I I would say we've got a full spectrum of publishers. You know, we have a huge partnership with Apple News. So we're a reseller for Apple News, which is more of a programmatic partnership.
Matt Hoy:So, you know, if you classified Apple News as a as a partner, even though we work directly with the publishers, that's a very big partnership for us. But then on in terms of the the core business offering, which is is the web property, we have everything from on the larger side, sort of Hearst Newspapers, trusted media brands, you know, right down to small independent publishers on on the local news front, for example, is something we do very, very well. You know, we're small newspaper groups whilst, you know, individually, they they don't generate tons of money when you look at them cumulatively as as a segment of the industry, if you like. They're very, very meaningful for us. And we're able to sort of parlay our demand into these sort of swaths of publishers as a group, because we know the audience has been very, very similar in nature from publisher a to publisher b in the local news industry, for example.
Steve Burge:And this may be, just an extra source of revenue for them. They may be publishers may be selling their own ads. They may have subscriptions. They may have paid newsletters. And then RevContent is jumping in and adding maybe a fourth or a fifth revenue source for these publishers.
Matt Hoy:A % you've nailed it. And and like I said, I'm not here to bash competitors, but, you know, their direction now with the with the merger of Teeds and one of our competitors, Outbrain, and then Tibola's sort of filings is that they wanna take up more and more and more and more real estate and drive essentially more revenue for themselves as opposed to the publisher. We wanna take the inverse of that, be publisher friendly, you know, paying our bills and sort of growing the revenue in a in a scalable manner without sort of you know, I don't wanna use the word screwing someone over, but putting them first, if you like, rather than ourselves first. And it's interesting. I think, you know, some of our competitors are sort of looking to take on the trade desk and go after those placements.
Matt Hoy:It's an interesting strategy, and I'm not sure one that's gonna be successful. But they have to grow, and they have to grow aggressively, and they're sort of playing a different field to us. We're very happy with the lane we've picked, as I said before, and, you we're gonna keep doubling down on that because it is working for these larger pubs like Hearst Newspapers, for example.
Steve Burge:Are you threatened at all by Google's constant talk of banning third party cookies? Basically, a lot of ad networks will be pulling in data, pulling in cookies from external to target their ads. Google, well, one day they're banning it, one day they're not, but they keep on talking about banning the cookies that will make those ads work. How would that work for rev content?
Matt Hoy:Yeah. It's like the tariffs. Right? Are they coming or are not coming? Right?
Matt Hoy:We've been sort of playing this game now for, I wanna say, what, two best part of two years at this stage. You know, it it's will they will will they, won't they? For us, it's kind of I can make an argument either way. In our demand, we're unique first party demand only. We have the option to throw very light programmatic in.
Matt Hoy:We recommend to most publishers they don't do that because we found that you actually brought Peter to pay Paul, and a lot of these advertisers will just enter a different price points and actually increases the value of their placements higher up the page. Whereas with our competitors, they sort of been into the lowest point of entry, which is the lower viewability of a table or outbrain feed. And you actually diminish the programmatic returns overall. So I would say for us personally, no. It's actually a benefit if that if the cookie goes away if the cookie does go away because we will not be impacted.
Matt Hoy:And it will sort of move towards a performance based model, which will probably open up avenues for us. And we've seen it in The UK a little bit, you know, with, what's it called, GDPR coming in over there. If you look at a lot of UK Publishers now, you know, companies like ourselves are taking up a lot more real estate beyond the below article slot. So in theory, opens up a lot of opportunities for us. The reason I would be hesitant to be ecstatic about it is at the end of the day, if publishers aren't making money, we need publishers who are making money and doing well for us to be successful.
Matt Hoy:And whilst it might be great that we can spend some extra money up and make some extra placements for them, if their overall yield diminishes, which I'm 99.9 sure would happen if the if the cookies go away, then it does impact us in in some regard down the line. Because if pubs go out of business, then we're all gonna be struggling. Right? So we need publishers to be healthy. You know, we need them to have a diverse revenue set, and we're happy to be a small part of that and play our part to help them grow and scale.
Steve Burge:Are you trying to adjust to the changes with Google Search disappearing? Google Search is sending a lot less traffic to publishers than it used to. So that may be impacting the amount of revenue, the amount of inventory you can serve on the publishers. Are you trying to adjust to that with newsletter tools, or are there other ways you can help publishers make money?
Matt Hoy:Yes. I mean, I I would say a % we've seen that impact. You know? Whilst we in a fortunate spot, we've grown very nicely over the last couple of years. When we sort of analyze it on a pub by pub basis, you can kind of see the core search traffic is definitely diminishing.
Matt Hoy:It's not something that keeps me up at night because I can't control it. Right? It's one of those things where if it happens, it happens. We can't really do anything about it. The the things that we can control, talking with publishers, understanding what their challenges are, and helping them out wherever possible.
Matt Hoy:You know, like I mentioned, we have a strong partnership with Apple News. That's becoming a very, very strong source of impressions, obviously, subsequent revenue, you know, not just for us, but for the publishers as well. I think the user behavior now, I I don't know what the statistics are on people that have iPhones, but imagine it's it's fairly high in The US. And so I think a lot of user behavior now, people are just going directly to, you know, their iPhones to consume the news. And then in terms of newsletters, we're certainly seeing a pivot towards publishers wanting to own their own audience and monetize it in whatever regard they can, be that subscriptions, be it a paywall, you know, be it a newsletter they monetize or bring the user back to their site.
Matt Hoy:I think people are just kind of I think people are just fed up. We're trying to rely on Google, Facebook, insert tech conglomerate name, you know, to rely on their business to run functionally. You know, if you look back to I think it's 2017 when, you know, everyone was sort of all in on Facebook, and then one day, they just closed the walls overnight, and pubs lost entire businesses. We had, you know, Dipli is the one I always think about. They had these huge offices in New York City.
Matt Hoy:They're a big partner of ours, and they closed business within three months of Facebook shutting things down because they hadn't diversified the revenue set at all. So I think, you know, pubs have to be they have to be able to pivot and sort of forecast the changes as they come, but also keep that level head and not freak out about it. That's the way we try and do business here. Like, I can't predict Google throwing up an AI search. You know, if you go and search for how to make an apple pie or something, and it the top, you know, core of the page is now an AI generated response, we can't control that.
Matt Hoy:Right? We can see that it's hurting publishers who are in, you know, the the lifestyle vertical. We've seen that take a huge hit in the last couple of years or last probably six months more so. But we can't control it, so we just have to work with these pubs, understand what's going on, and try and do our best to generate them as much money as we can whilst also not being reactive to whatever the industry is kinda throwing around at this point in time.
Steve Burge:Are there verticals that are getting hit worse than others? Doing what you do, you probably have a pretty good global perspective. I imagine right now political sites may be doing quite well, whereas other verticals are having a harder time.
Matt Hoy:Yeah. That's that's spot on. You know, there's a lot of news traffic out there, which I would say is the is the majority of our network. We're definitely seeing a resurgence, you know, in news. I think post election, people were kinda burned out with the news cycle in general.
Matt Hoy:So we saw in sort of January and early February that everyone sort of took a break from it and let this sort of dust settle in the in the world. And it sounds kinda sadistic, but obviously, whenever there's a new cycle, positive or negative, you know, ad tech companies benefit from that. And right now, there's a lot of people online ecstatic, angry, worried, whatever the emotion is. They're kind of manifesting that in going to publishers' websites or absorbing the news. And there's obviously a an impact on that positively for publishers and obviously ad tech companies like ourselves as well.
Matt Hoy:In terms of verticalization, certainly, the news is doing well. But then I I look at, like, lifestyle type sites that typically have done great in the past. And just because of the AI example that I used earlier, they're just not seeing that traffic, and they're getting crushed by it. And it's it's really sad because historically, those companies have had really great evergreen content that does really, really well, especially from an advertising perspective because there's nothing controversial there. So they're able to kind of maximize their revenue from, you know, people who do use cookies.
Matt Hoy:It's a very clean experience, and brands are happy to kind of bid on that traffic. And that's still the case, but right now, they're just not getting the volume through the door through search that that's typically kind of paid the bills and and driven a lot of money. There's a lot of worry out there in the space right now, I can tell you, from chatting to to pubs, and they're they're all looking for the the silver bullet to fix it, but I I don't think there is one as of right now.
Steve Burge:When you say lifestyle, you're talking about, like, travel sites, recipe sites, reviews?
Matt Hoy:Yeah. I I think when you look at AI as being the main driver to to sort of prevent these guys from making the money, if, you know, if you Google search something that's political, AI is not gonna make a judgment call on that because they don't wanna be seen to be taking a stance positively or negatively and whatever that search is. But when it's something that's completely noncontroversial, like you used your example of cities to visit in Paris. Right? If you throw that into Google right now, I'm I'm 90% sure you're gonna get probably some kind of AI generated response as the top answer.
Matt Hoy:And then below that, you'd have, you know, your your Time Out magazines and people like that that would sort of follow suit below there. Whereas previously, they'd have been right at the top of the tree in terms of that top Google search result. And whilst it may seem very small to have that slightly less pixel space on the page, it's massive because everyone knows, you know, nine out of 10 people will click the first three searches. And if that first segment on the page is taken up with AI generated answer, a lot of people are gonna kinda take that as gospel moving forward.
Steve Burge:Oh, I hadn't quite tweaked it like that before that the almost the the less controversial you are, the more likely AI is to eat your lunch.
Matt Hoy:Exactly. Yeah. A %. Because they can kind of jump on that request, and there's nothing unless there's nothing controversial about it. Right?
Matt Hoy:They yeah. Regardless of anyone's opinions on the politicians of today, they don't wanna be seen to be given an opinion on Yeah. Democrat or Republican politicians. And, you know, giving an opinion on travel to a city or how to make cake is is very easy to kind of generate as AI. I also think as well, you know, with the advent of of ChatGPT, I know myself, I find the results just extremely compelling whenever I'm sort of searching for something, and I'm happy to pay, you know, the $20 a month or whatever it is to kinda use ChatGPT.
Matt Hoy:I think it's great for for my personal work in terms of just bouncing things around in there and seeing what results are available. But I also think some users are sort of gravitating towards that as opposed to Google just because of the the kind of messy experience that it's become now. I do think that's a limited sort of percentage of society, but as it gets bigger and bigger, as we know that industry is going to be, I think that's the latest thing that's gonna sort of drag money and dollars and eyeballs away from publishers' pages.
Steve Burge:So if you don't mind me asking a bit more of a a technical question, how
Matt Hoy:We'll see
Steve Burge:how it Go ahead. How would How would an ad network work with newsletters and Apple News? I'll start with Apple News first. When it comes to being a partner of Apple News, are you selling directly to Apple, and then Apple will add your ads on the articles that are coming through the app? Or are you working with publishers, and the publishers are pushing their own ads through the app?
Matt Hoy:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly that. So we have a close working relationship with Apple, so we have to be approved as an official vendor. You know, you can go to their website, and we're listed there.
Matt Hoy:Our official designation is is a reseller, and it's it's it's not your traditional programmatic type integration, you know, where, you know, you eat what you kill in there. It it kind of is, but it kind of isn't because there's a lot of manual sort of adjustments that go on in terms of looking at historical bids and performance and kind of allocating traffic in a much more manual way either through Apple's Workbench or you can do it through GAM as well. So we basically work with the publishers, you know, understand what the rates are that we need to be at to kind of secure as much traffic as we can for them. And it's a good environment for us. It's a environment for them because it is performance based.
Matt Hoy:So there's no guarantee that we'll keep that traffic. But it's been great for us in terms of unlocking new partnerships because historically, for some reason, the content rec industry has sort of pivoted towards these long ridiculous contracts that lock people in for two, three, four years sometimes. Whereas Apple News, it's it's not like that, and Apple will not allow that to happen, which is a very good thing for publishers and for networks to keep on their toes. So we've been able to kind of spin up a lot of partnerships with big people like, you know, NPR, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, big Apple News publishers, Gannett, you know, that we can kind of go into their system, make them some meaningful money, build a relationship with them. And then when those bigger contracts do come across with the web, we've sort of already got that not that foot in the door, but that sort of established relationship to hopefully then convince them that we can work on their web properties as well.
Matt Hoy:So Apple's been a a really good environment for us to work in, and it's it's been it's been tremendous for us. They they're great partners. The publishers love it as well because of the privacy relay that goes on within Apple. There's no tracking. It's very hard for a lot of advertisers to monetize that traffic because of what I talked about earlier.
Matt Hoy:We don't have that issue. We don't need that to be able to, you know, throw ads in there that can be very beneficial for the advertiser, but also for the publisher as well.
Steve Burge:Oh, so Apple is basically looking for ad networks that are brand safe, family friendly, and they approve certain ad networks. And so if you're a publisher that wants to go through Apple News and you want to make money, you're basically looking for one of the approved advertising partners.
Matt Hoy:Yep. That's exactly So, yeah, we're like I said, we're an official Apple reseller is the is the designation. So whilst we work closely with Apple on product updates and making sure our code is, you know, compliant, whatever they have going on on their end, and that's someone way smarter than me that deals with that, by the way, You know, we just we work directly with the publishers, and they integrate everything on their end via Apple's mediums. And then the revenue flows directly from us to the publisher. Like, Apple's not in there taking a cut.
Matt Hoy:You know, they have some ambitions to run their own ad server at some point or ad network at some regard. You know, I think that's gonna potentially be something down the line that we have to look at, but the feedback that we get is that they're extremely happy with what we do. They see the value we provide for their publishers. And their main goal is not to kinda make this walled garden approach, but sort of have everyone involved, but they obviously want to be able to direct sell a certain amount of ads with a with a low fill rate, but, you know, high yield for them as well to improve publisher monetization on their side. But it's it's been a tremendous vehicle for us to work with pubs.
Matt Hoy:It's been a long road. Like, I'm sure you can imagine the Apple approval process is not straightforward. It probably took us a year and a half, two years get the approval done, but we've been now approved for, I think, let's say, about twenty months, something like that. And it's it's been going great, and it continues to go from strength to strength.
Steve Burge:Okay. So if you're a publisher that is seeing a dip in your Google traffic, Apple News might be one way that you can try and boost your traffic, and also newsletters as well. Are you just giving them like a little JavaScript line of code they can drop into Mailchimp or whatever their newsletter service is? So I just
Matt Hoy:HTML for email. Okay. So HTML tag for email. But, yeah, essentially, you know, we we serve the ads a little bit differently. It's more of like a single serve panel versus a multi panel below article type unit.
Matt Hoy:So it's more traditional sort of banner size, but we can kinda custom create with CSS whatever the publisher sort of needs us to do. And it's an interesting space. Like I said, I mean, I think a lot of pubs are now trying to sort of own their own audience. They're trying to get in front of that. Rates in email are a a lot lower just because the click through rates are lower.
Matt Hoy:Just generally speaking, that's the nature of the beast. But the the sort of impression volume is definitely there from the publishers we've integrated with. We definitely see variance in terms of quality, in terms of how publishers sort of procure their email lists and how often they email blast people. And like I said, different publishers have different KPIs. Some of them are very interested in in brand exposure and just kind of building their brand or bringing them to the website.
Matt Hoy:But a lot of them are just interested in a volume play and drive as much money as possible. And we don't really wanna work with those guys whilst it'd be beneficial to us. The diminishing return to our advertisers is just not really worth it for us. So we wanna work with the high quality pubs who kinda compile their email list in a very strategic manner. They're not e blasting someone to the same list with just nonsense.
Matt Hoy:We want someone who's having a high quality newsletter. Our ads are a very small part of that and it just kinda sits in there and helps them monetize a little bit. But it's it's a developing market. I mean, there's only two players really in it aside from us. One of them just got acquired by Zeta.
Matt Hoy:And, again, I'm not here to bash competitors, but we all know what Zeta is. It's a it's a data company. So I don't think they're that interested in the monetization side of things. And the other one, you know, was acquired recently by OpenWeb. I think they still continue to do an okay job, but I don't think they're sort of pulling up any trees either.
Matt Hoy:So for us, it it creates opportunity. And for the publishers, I think it's good to have a a third option in a pretty consolidated market as things stand.
Steve Burge:So, Matt, you RevContent, you can scale up. You've got Hearst Media Group. And through Apple News, you got some big publishers like Washington Post and The Guardian. But do you also scale down as well? We've had quite a few people on the podcast who are involved in local news, regional newspapers, town, city newspapers.
Steve Burge:Is that also the kind of the the kind of publisher that could use rev content?
Matt Hoy:Yeah. No. A %. And, like, we we never wanna sort of disrespect those those smaller publishers. At the end of the day, you never know when one of these guys has suddenly become a a big publisher.
Matt Hoy:But I think local news in particular has been very much neglected from just the industry in general. I think they just they struggle. We actually partner and we're an official, say, sponsor, official partner of the LMC, is the local media consortium. And they work with, you know, big conglomerates like TAL News, which is hundreds and hundreds of small, you know, local news publishers that we're on all of them. But then they work with, you know, very, very small independent guys as well.
Matt Hoy:They're just like a one man show who's running everything for a small newspaper in Iowa. And, you know, like I I think I said this earlier, but whilst those individually may not make a ton of money, we know what the audience is gonna be like. So when you cumulatively bucket those together into our demand pool and advertise it to our advertiser audience as local news, they'll just buy it up because they know that audience is great, and it's very transferable. So regardless if you're working with a media news group, like we do with, like, a Chicago Tribune, which is obviously a huge audience, big brand, the small guy in Iowa is essentially a very, very similar audience that we can advertise to and just adds to that sort of impression count that we can advertise and and use in our demand mix. So, yeah, we we love the smaller publishers.
Matt Hoy:We we think they're very, very important. We went through a stage of just working with smaller pubs, to be honest with you. And, you know, we we like to think now we have a really solid mix of, if you wanna call them target kind of accounts that we work with and sort of blue chip publishers. But we always sort of give the white glove service to the guys that are further down the ecosystem because like I said, you you never know when one of them's become a big pub down the line.
Steve Burge:So, Matt, we we run a publishing podcast, and our audience is mostly publishers. And so a lot of the questions I've been asking have been on the publishing side of things. But I'm curious about the reverse side as well. Who are the buyers for these ads? Who's coming along and saying, I want to run my ads on those on those publishers' websites?
Steve Burge:Who's making revenue from these?
Matt Hoy:Yeah. No. It's a really good question. So, I mean, we have a pretty diverse makeup. You know, there's a lot of direct response advertisers that are in there of sort of various different sizes.
Matt Hoy:We'll have affiliates that are working with us and just kind of grabbing offers from wherever they can to kind of find as much traffic as they possibly can sell into them. But, you know, we have a lot of guys that, you know, are selling we just brought a company called Nuzzle on, which is a a pillow company that's doing very, very well with us, for example, and using their product to kind of leverage Apple News and the web traffic and email traffic to get their pillows out there. They take a very measurable ROI from the traffic that we give them and scale up or scale down as they see fit. You know, if if they're not getting ROI on certain widgets or certain traffic types, they can actually go in there and block them on their end. The one area that we've moved away from is the MFA space made for advertising, which is kind of the the dirty word in ad tech, which it's just a diminishing industry.
Matt Hoy:It barely exists anymore. You know, people at The Trade Desk have just kinda blackboard these websites, and and rightly so, in my opinion. You know, the model for those that don't know is just they'll leverage a network like RevContent, Bool or Outbrain, whoever, and they'll buy a click for a certain amount and try to arbitrage it back based on whatever their ad stack looks like. But typically, the user experience is is very spammy, very clickbaity, and it's just something that we don't really wanna be associated with. So we've sort of moved away from that in terms of allowing that in our demand mix.
Matt Hoy:There's a couple of advertisers that still exist out there, but they're they're just not a big part of our platform anymore.
Steve Burge:Also, part of the secret sauce to make rev content work is to go out and find the right partners to sell the ads to. But you could be running this business in a much more spammy way, you could be taking on low quality partners, but a big part of your business is actually on the sales side too, looking for the right partners to sell the ads to.
Matt Hoy:Yeah. A %. I mean, there's a lot of money to be made if you wanna sorta lower your standards in terms of the advertiser mix that that you want to sort of portray. And I think, you know, to be fair, you know, it's more on Outbrain. I think they've been part of this as well.
Matt Hoy:All three of us have sort of moved to a higher standard of user experience in terms of the ads that are shown. I think back in 2016, you know, all three companies were just completely noncompliant with everything that goes on today. But we've all sort of moved in lockstep to sort of make the experience better. I don't think it's perfect still. You know, we have to constantly stay on these guys, you know, to make sure they're not rotating landing pages when they come in and get approved.
Matt Hoy:Once they're in the platform, that goes through an approval process. We look at the landers. We make sure it's compliant. We verticalize it and tag it to make sure the blocks that publishers have in place don't cross hairs with the, you know, the advertisers that that being sort of portrayed on their website. But we have to monitor it as well because once it's in the platform, the offer's there, it's very easy for them to manipulate a landing page and change that and make it noncompliant again.
Matt Hoy:So we have a zero tolerance policy. If we find someone doing that, they're just out of the platform and and gone. We can't risk our publisher relations, to be completely frank with you. And whilst we might make a quick buck on something that's non compliant, we have to make sure we're looking at the the long term effects of what that would do from a, you know, compliance standpoint on our side, but also a a brand safety aspect for the publishers. So we take it really, really seriously.
Matt Hoy:We have a whole department that's dedicated just purely to compliance, reviewing campaigns, monitoring campaigns, you know, looking at statistics, making sure we're not doing something shady, and and kinda slapping things down as we need to.
Steve Burge:So there's other other publishers that you've seen recently who are who have really taken off. Is is there like a a niche or an approach? Or is there anything that is working right now for publishers that you see? You've got a good global view of this? Are they focused on a particular niche?
Steve Burge:Are they on substack? I'm just guessing or on? Or are they using certain techniques? What what are publishers doing that is working right now?
Matt Hoy:I think we we go back to the diversification. Right? I think that's what it comes down to on on what is key. You know, I'm gonna say I'm gonna have to divert to my earlier answer and just say Apple News because that's the one where we're seeing tremendous growth and tremendous, I guess, as a new to the industry. Right?
Matt Hoy:I think it's something that's really come in the last sort of three or four years, and it keeps on growing in terms of, like, users kind of using it and just seeing that as a very valid news source. I think, you know, the you gotta look at it generationally as well. I think there was a statistic recently where there was something around, you know, users who younger than you and I, Steve O, but, you know, sort of in their twenties and maybe early thirties, they don't use traditional cable news anymore or traditional websites for their news. They go into these alternative, you know, news sources, podcasts, things along those lines. Email is a big part of it as well.
Matt Hoy:I don't know if it's a trust factor or just the way the world's moved along, but they're they're looking at alternative ways of absorbing their content. So I think any publisher that is sort of ahead of that and diversifying into these other avenues, which, you know, we can't probably help them with, but things like podcasts, they're gonna be very successful. Obviously, there's a huge lift to be able to generate and produce, as you well know, a successful podcast. But I think, you know, being ahead of the curve on that sort of thing and building your own audience is crucial to better monetize it, you know, even for your foryour.com traffic as well down the line. You can cross promote.
Matt Hoy:You can do things of sorts down there.
Steve Burge:You know, by the time this comes out, you're gonna be, I think, like episode 14 or 15 for this podcast. We're quite new. But I swear in every single episode, it's not been the exact word, but the idea of multichannel has everyone who is talking about making it work in publishing, they have a website, which is like the basic table stakes, but then they add on a newsletter, a podcast, events, that they're reaching their audience through five, six, seven different methods, and it's hard work. It's like keeping on top of all that is hard work, but it's the only way to make it work right now.
Matt Hoy:It is. I mean, I think a good example I could talk about, you know, I I was good friends with with the guys that used to run a big Bitcoin site back in the day when Bitcoin was booming, and they ended up leaving the business because it was acquired by someone who just wanted to sort of use it as a voice for the cryptocurrency sort of industry. They pivoted that entire business now to be completely events based. And according to what I've heard, they're sort of tripling the revenue that they were on the website side of things. The website still exists, but it's all geared now, or it certainly was geared towards just the events and the, you know, the podcasts and stuff that they were doing just sort of using it as a mouthpiece for the industry, which which definitely parlays some easily monetizable opportunities for them.
Steve Burge:Oh, so they've moved down to, like, conferences or private events?
Matt Hoy:Yeah. Exactly. Conferences, events based. It it's it's a model I don't know a ton about, and but it seems to be working for them. Now that they've got some crypto bro who's sort of running it, he's got so much money, he doesn't need to make money.
Matt Hoy:Who knows? But in theory, like, looking from the outside in, it's it's definitely working.
Steve Burge:Oh, okay. So even the conference perhaps maybe promoting some other kind of product. Then you have the website is promoting the podcast, which is promoting the conference, which is promoting maybe a third party product. And these media companies are are stacking are stacking what they do on top of each other to to make make a company with five, six, seven sources of revenue.
Matt Hoy:Yeah. That's exactly it. And, obviously, there's an overhead that goes along with that, but, you know, we've had to do the same thing as well on our side. We've had to look and find new avenues of growth because sometimes we get boxed out of the, the website deals for various different reasons. And, yeah, we have to look at Apple News.
Matt Hoy:We have to look at email. I think international expansion is something that we we'd like to sort of kick the tires with down the line. Again, there's obviously an overhead that goes along with that. So we have to kind of weigh the pros and cons with it, but a lot of revenue comes outside of The US for our main competitors. So I know there's opportunity there.
Matt Hoy:So we have to look at the same things as well on our end.
Steve Burge:Yeah. I hear what you're saying, Matt. We've we've spoken with quite a lot of publishers who have had luck finding really quite strong niches in the publishing world. For example, we have one guy on the podcast who was raving about Flipboard as an app driving a lot of traffic to hit publishers. It had quite a lot of similarities with Apple News, in that it's highly curated.
Steve Burge:It's not just an algorithmic feed of spam. And they were doing like food and travel blogs and getting quite a bit of traffic. And then we've come across local news sites where WhatsApp has been a good method for them to grow a local news group. And they send their news out and get quite a bit of traffic that way. Are there other things that RevContent is looking towards in terms of growth?
Steve Burge:You've got the international, You've looking around for possibly other places you could put your ads?
Matt Hoy:Yeah. I mean, we're always open to it. Right? It has to sort of marry with the with the quality that we want to do. I I think, again, not hit to bash competitors, but I think their need for growth is sort of taking them into into areas where we've sort of tested things like having the ads on, like, handsets, for example, where it sort of preloads into some sort of feed similar to Apple News, but almost it's sort of forced onto the user when the when the iPhone or not the iPhone, the whatever phone it is sort of purchased.
Matt Hoy:And we found that the the quality there is is not great, but again, the the revenue opportunity is pretty huge. But we have to sort of balance that need for quality, you know, for the advertisers and and harmonize that experience as much as our own needs to sort of grow revenue sort of steadily. WhatsApp's interesting. I have not heard of that. So when I get off this call, actually gonna take a look at that because I I have not heard of that before.
Matt Hoy:But certainly, Flipboard and things like Newsbreak, whilst we can't really directly integrate with those two for various reasons, we've had discussions over the years. We do get that traffic in some regard. It's a little bit trickier because they do wanna keep those users within their own ecosystem to monetize them, which I totally understand. But once those users do bounce onto the the properties themselves, you know, you'll you'll find our ads are on quite a few of them once they sort of exit the Flipboard on Newsbreak, you know, app experience. But it's definitely growing.
Matt Hoy:And like I said, we talked a lot about diversification. I think Flipboard, WhatsApp, which I'm definitely gonna look at, and and Newsbreaker things that we we definitely wanna get, you know, in front of and be able to sort of monetize them as as best as we can for these pubs.
Steve Burge:Yeah. With WhatsApp, it's not I'm not sure you could serve the ads directly in there, but they do drive traffic. And basically, these local news sites will grow a group. I think the community or a group on WhatsApp that they can then add thousands and thousands of people to, and people can subscribe to it, and it's another way to get updates. I think ESPN has a WhatsApp group, and lots of quite a few newspaper sites too.
Matt Hoy:Yeah. No. That that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, I think the one thing we've always tried to avoid is the with a with a a spell in the industry where push notifications were like the buzz thing, and we tested that, and the quality was just not great.
Matt Hoy:And, again, it it all comes down to what I talked about earlier in terms of how the publisher is using that medium in the manner that they wanna do it because we found that some pubs would just push notification, blast out people with just nothing but ads on the on the on the send. And they would do it five, six times a day, whereas some pubs would do it once a week as part of a newsletter to drive them to the website. Our ad may or may not be part of that. We just decided as a company to move away from push notifications as a medium whilst it could drive a lot of revenue. It just didn't harmonize that advertiser experience in a in a very good way for us is what the feedback I think we we received on limited traffic we provided to them.
Matt Hoy:So, you know, it's it's those sort of things that whilst they they create a lot of opportunity for us as as as a revenue driver and for the publisher, we have to kinda keep that third wheel in place and make sure the advertiser is happy. Because at the end of the day, if the advertiser aren't happy, then we're not gonna make money. The publisher's not gonna 's not gonna make money. So we we have to be very careful on the traffic sources that we look at, before getting too excited about and we're British, Steve. We don't get too excited about anything.
Matt Hoy:Right? You know, we have to be very careful and just make sure that it it's the right fit for everybody because there's definitely some some interesting stuff out there. It's not like, you know, the the twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen days where it was all sorts of garbage going on, but there's still stuff out there that that renders big revenue dollars, but it's just not a fit for us as a business.
Steve Burge:So final question for you, Matt. You see hundreds, thousands of publishers a year. Is there one publisher whose work you really admire at the moment, someone who is when you see their newsletter in your inbox or when you see a new post from for them that you get excited, someone who is really doing good work as a publisher right now.
Matt Hoy:Well, I enjoyed the content this week around Coventry City playing Portsmouth, to be honest with you, with our nineteen fourth minute winner against your boys. That's why I've got the, the kit on for you today. But no. Mean, take
Steve Burge:It it made my eyes bleed throughout the whole podcast.
Matt Hoy:Yeah. Exactly. That's why I wore it for you. Just to and I've made sure the badge has been in view the whole time for you right there. No.
Matt Hoy:I mean, look, aside from sports content, which I I think that's both of our passions. Right? We're we're both very much into sports. And so anything sort of podcast related with sports, I I really enjoy, like, the Overlap podcast. I love the Peter Crouch podcast.
Matt Hoy:We're sort of moving away from from those ones. I I enjoy the Morning Brew stuff. I think it's I think it's solid. I think it's a very good product. I don't think they're trying to over monetize things.
Matt Hoy:I think it's solid. It's a good user experience, and and the content is is good. You know, without trying to take a lane either. It stays very factual as opposed to trying to divide opinions and sort of push people a certain direction.
Steve Burge:Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Matt. It's been great to have you on, and I wish you all the best with Revcontent in 2025.
Matt Hoy:Not a pleasure, mate. And same with you on your end. You know, hopefully, this gives pub some some interesting data, and they can always hit me at Matt@Revcontent.com if they've got any questions that sort of spin out of that. And, yeah, let's let's keep bringing the ad tech industry to Sarasota. Alright?
Steve Burge:Yeah. There's not many big companies down in Sarasota, but Rev Content is one of the biggest and the best.
Matt Hoy:I appreciate that, mate. I appreciate it. Top man. Alright. We'll talk soon.