Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Digital publishers are the backbone of the internet, and they deserve a playbook. Hosted by Jared Siegal, CEO and Founder of Aditude, AdTech Unwrapped dives into monetization, media models, and technology that actually works. Each episode unpacks real-world success stories and strategies to help publishers grow revenue.
Jared Siegal (00:02.013)
Welcome to our first edition of Ad Tech Unwrapped. I'm Jared Siegel, CEO and founder of Aditude. This is the show where we unpack what's really happening in ad tech and digital publishing, straight from the people who putting that into practice. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Yuri Yarovoy, the SVP of growth at Medal. And we're going to dive into the intersection of monetization and gaming. Let's get into it. Yuri, thanks for joining us.
Yuriy Yarovoy (00:29.87)
Yeah, thanks for having me. For your first episode, I'm so honored.
Jared Siegal (00:33.791)
First episode, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Yuriy Yarovoy (00:37.577)
Aw shucks.
Jared Siegal (00:39.071)
So let's just get into the niceties. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into this space and kind of what you're up to right now.
Yuriy Yarovoy (00:46.104)
Sure. So I started my career agency side, so marketing my whole life and then transitioned to more product intersecting growth stuff at a company called BlueStacks. And that also got me into gaming. And then I realized I never want to leave. Definitely beat law school. Let's put it that way. Yeah. Yeah.
Jared Siegal (01:08.499)
Awesome.
Yuriy Yarovoy (01:10.412)
So yeah, yeah, and now at Medal, I'm mostly focused on the revenue side of the business. So growing the revenue as opposed to the kind of the marketing product, growthy stuff.
Jared Siegal (01:23.337)
Was there any moment at that first job at Blue Stacks where you're like, okay, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life?
Yuriy Yarovoy (01:32.463)
I mean, especially coming from agency world, yeah, for sure. and I'm sure a lot of your listeners and a lot of people in ad tech have kind of done the agency thing or at least work enough with agency people, know, like agency life was great in that I got...
Jared Siegal (01:34.023)
Thank you.
Yuriy Yarovoy (01:51.247)
experience across a wide variety of clients and I learned all the kind of the verbiage the nomenclature all the you know the keywords right and understood kind of like how the various businesses work a little bit at a time but you don't really have agency
Like it's ironic, right? It's called an agency, but you yourself have very little agency or ownership over what you do. It's very much driven by the client, right? So you could work on a project for six months, deliver it, they're like, we actually don't have budget to implement this anymore. And you're like, okay, cool. We'll never see the light of day again. And that was really hard for me at least to deal with.
So when I went in Hal's house, was like, wait, you can actually do stuff. You could just you could just do things like you could just like, OK, I'm going to run with it and I'll actually see how that works. And, know, my the ability to learn quickly just accelerated, you know, like a hockey stick pace.
Yeah, and I was like, I don't want to go back to having someone else run my life or control what I can and can't do or how I can learn.
Jared Siegal (02:59.145)
Yeah.
Jared Siegal (03:03.432)
A lot of the people that I've talked to, whether they're friends, colleagues, just passersby in the agency world, it's a lot of stories of very late hours, not that much pay and not a lot of thanks. Right. And I think a lot of people who are like dying to get into our industry and say, okay, I'm going to go the agency route first because I'm going to get exposed to like literally everything very quickly. Knowing that probably one day they're not going to want to be in the agency world anymore. And they're going to want to switch.
Yuriy Yarovoy (03:25.046)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Jared Siegal (03:33.31)
whether it's publishing side, tech vendor, whatever it may be, but the other side of the chain there.
Yuriy Yarovoy (03:39.212)
Yeah, yeah, I mean my first job I was commuting from Philly to New York every day. that, you know, like, was like, big city life, I'm working at a big old co. And I was making not enough money to justify that commute. Let's put it that way.
Jared Siegal (03:53.735)
Right, right, right. Yeah, similar story for why I started attitude is I'm sure you remember. You're the 2 and a half hours each day from from Port Jeff all the way into New York City. I like, why am I doing this? Right. Very cool. And, know, since the transition or since you started, you've been there for a while now and business has grown. Tremendously, which is awesome. What was kind of the.
Yuriy Yarovoy (04:07.99)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, very much, very much the same.
Jared Siegal (04:25.202)
I don't know, like the biggest challenge or the moment in which you're like, hey, something like we need to take this a little bit more seriously, or we need to change up our thesis here to really hit the goals that we have for our business.
Yuriy Yarovoy (04:38.22)
Hmm. I think that there had been a few inflection points. I think for on the ad side, I think it's a very kind of easy one to point at, right? We, talked about monetization for a very long time. We'd launched a subscription product first, a subscription tier to our free product. and you know,
definitely kept the lights on, it was very healthy, it's still growing, it's still a nice chunk of our overall revenue. We were concerned about the ad side, right? I think our internal thesis was gaming plus ads bad for users, perception bad, all our users leave, it doesn't actually matter whether we're monetizing with ads and we're making a lot of money because everyone leaves, we actually lose money.
Jared Siegal (05:27.177)
Right.
Right.
Yuriy Yarovoy (05:31.086)
There's a lot of hand wringing and debates internally about ads. And then we went live and then all of a sudden, you know, revenue went like vertical, not just like a curve, but like actually just vertical and continue to do so. And we had, think in the, I want to say 21 months we've had ads live.
Jared Siegal (05:47.198)
Yep.
Yuriy Yarovoy (05:57.902)
22 months actually, think October is when we took them live. 22 months we had them live. I think we had like five people complain about that, five. Right, like our thesis was very, it was conservative, right? And I think that, you know, that was a huge reflection point we realized when done well,
Jared Siegal (06:06.1)
May.
Yuriy Yarovoy (06:19.977)
when not saturated, when we actually care about user experience because we cultivated a very user-first product first, right? We had the platform live for six years before we included any sort of advertising. So we built that user experience and that trust within our community that when those ads went live, people weren't like, it was like, yeah, you guys have been great platform.
Now you need to make money, we get it. You're not shoving them in our faces, we also appreciate that. Yeah, why, like, we're not gonna complain.
Jared Siegal (06:56.498)
Yeah, I'd say this is a conversation that we have a lot in gaming, but also just in general publishing is this like general, I say fear, but nervousness around do ads impact UX enough where it's actually going to like be detrimental to our traffic, right? And I think your story is in the large majority, 95%.
plus of the publishers that we've ended up doing this kind of experiment with where like when done correctly, users actually don't care and they understand. Like the internet, unfortunately, is not free. So.
Yuriy Yarovoy (07:33.365)
Right. Yep.
Yuriy Yarovoy (07:38.945)
And yeah, I think that's the...
Yuriy Yarovoy (07:47.384)
Digital ads have kind of, they've become more interruptive by the virtue of, you know, we need...
more pressure to monetize, right? More revenue pressure. So you end up on CNN and you can't scroll on mobile or desktop without getting two out stream players, 12 banners, an anchor ad, and actually the content, you can kind of see it between the ads as you scroll, but you can't actually see the content itself. And I get...
Jared Siegal (08:01.928)
Right.
Yuriy Yarovoy (08:25.697)
like Warner has their public company, there's a lot of pressure to actually monetize, right? But there's only so much goodwill left with people, like with news especially, not to kind of go totally off tangent, you know, there are options now, right? For better or worse.
Jared Siegal (08:45.972)
Yeah.
Jared Siegal (08:54.162)
Yeah.
Yuriy Yarovoy (08:54.923)
like the kind of top-down, fourth estate news publishers are struggling for this very reason. And it's kind of like a downward spiral where they start, they continue to lose viewership, thus they need to monetize more, thus more ads show up on the platform, making the experience worse, more people leave. And then it's, you know, that death spiral continues to spin.
Jared Siegal (09:16.564)
So you and I were kind of ripping last week or a weeks ago as we were preparing for this podcast and you brought up a really good point, which is you guys have taken a very lean approach to how you monetize the desktop app and when you monetize the desktop app. So if you talk about that a little bit.
Yuriy Yarovoy (09:40.344)
Yeah, so gamers are sensitive, right? And I think our initial conservativeness was right in some senses, right? Like,
Gamers... A gamer will always look for reasons to blame something external for their poor performance, right? Like if I'm playing Counter-Strike or Valorant, like, it's my mouse sensitivity's off, or like, I lagged, or like my connection, it was a connection issue. It's never a skill issue, right? It's never me. It's always someone else, always someone else, right? So, like, but for us, we kill ads
Jared Siegal (10:21.076)
And we got, right?
Yuriy Yarovoy (10:30.357)
As soon as a game launches, for instance, right? We never want to be blamed. I never want a user to look at Medal running while they're playing a game and say, it's because this is super heavy and there's ads running and it's this thing that is actually killing my performance. Like, why am I running Medal? We never want that blame. So we eliminate as many of the variables that would point a finger at us as possible. Ads being the number one culprit.
You know, like our overall kind of the, our overall philosophy for ads is it should never be interruptive. It should never be something that stops or distracts or diverts a user journey. It should always be one either value add. So all of our like direct campaigns are all value add.
or it should be something peripheral to activities. It should never be something that draws attention necessarily away from your core actions. It should always be something that you can see but not distract.
Jared Siegal (11:40.628)
Sure. That makes sense. And I think the results are starting to show for themselves, right? Like you said, five complaints in 22 months, but you're still serving a whole lot of ads, right? As a company.
Yuriy Yarovoy (11:52.408)
We're still serving billions and billions of impressions a month, and it's quite nice.
Jared Siegal (11:57.589)
Yes, which is awesome. So the other thing that we were talking about last week was around sort of the complexities of desktop app and what makes it different, right? Than a traditional web publisher and some of the things that you've had to do from, whether it's like educating advertisers or hoping to educate advertisers, right? To different ad platforms. Yeah, so.
Yuriy Yarovoy (12:21.677)
I am Sisyphus.
Jared Siegal (12:25.94)
You get some very strong opinions about that.
Yuriy Yarovoy (12:29.619)
Yeah, I mean, you want me to wax poetic? Is this the T up? Yeah, it's frustrating seeing an impression treated like an imprint, like all impressions created equal and they're not. It's very hard to justify saying this two second...
Jared Siegal (12:30.334)
Love to hear some of that.
Yuriy Yarovoy (12:54.645)
glance at an ad as an impression, and this user that is going to spend the next two hours staring at this platform is also an impression, right? And I think in gaming, especially when you have a very leaned in active experience, treating and basing measurements and success metrics on an impression model,
which is kind of, it's predicated on this idea of interruptive advertising, is a mistake, right? I think we do need really good measurement standards and like the IAB release measurement guidelines for gaming. And I think it's a good first step, but I think it's the entire.
The entire paradigm it's based on is this idea of impression-based, interruptive advertising that not only rewards models that don't really work well in games or just create bad experience in and around games, but also misprice the opportunity entirely because that two-second impression might be, you know, a dollar CPM, and you're saying that this two-hour impression is also a dollar CPM. That's just BS.
Jared Siegal (13:57.525)
I'll off the things I can.
Jared Siegal (14:09.844)
Right. One of those things or one of the metrics that stood out to me the most. Right. So Aditude has an interesting perspective on this and that we acquired one of the largest gaming exchanges right out there and do a lot of direct sold. And there's this thesis out there in our space that websites that have really long session durations and serve a whole lot of ads per session are less valuable at the impression level.
Then a site that only maybe serves two or three ads a session because of for two really specific reasons, click through rate and conversion rate. Right. And what blew my mind, I should say, post post the CPM star acquisition, whatever year and half ago. Was that the sex that we have the highest conversion rates on actually is desktop apps where the user is super engaged. Right. And like if they are clicking on an ad, there's such a high likelihood that you convert that.
Yuriy Yarovoy (14:47.628)
Mm-hmm.
Jared Siegal (15:08.244)
Because that means you really have their attention. They're literally playing some game on the computer and this was interesting enough for them to stop and click on that ad. And and so yeah, like the conversion rates are just so much more impressive than just like a standard, you know, casual website that you're you're going to read news or whatever, maybe social. And so I think that gets back to that same point. Right. Like.
That impression on Medal is worth something totally different than that impression on CNN versus whatever other website that we're going to talk about, right? Because the way that the user would and is interacting with ads is just a totally different mindset.
Yuriy Yarovoy (15:51.073)
Yeah, and unfortunately all of our kind of the all of our infrastructure is based on this idea of diminishing attention spans on web where I am CNN and I know my average, know, I get 1.1 page views a session and that page view is 12 seconds long. So I better get, you know, 15 ad units in there to make as much money as possible because I don't know if that person is necessarily ever going to come back. So I need to maximize the ARPU.
Whereas for us, we one own the user in a sense, right? Like they're all locked in, they're all our users, they're coming to our platform intentionally, it's not a website, it's they're using our platform, we're a social network, as well as a whole tool set for recording, et cetera, right? So that, it's a completely different, you know,
our monetization is reliant on a model that's just not built for us. And I'm very curious how the industry adjusts over time. know advertising in desktop apps is still quite new. It requires a lot of education, but there are dozens of us. I hope that together we can band together and really educate the market.
Jared Siegal (17:08.424)
Yeah, it doesn't.
Yuriy Yarovoy (17:17.824)
You know, there are many, I'm joking about dozens, but there are many of us that are pushing advertisers and DSPs, agencies to kind of look at us in a very different way than a traditional web publisher. And it's a hard conversation. It's something because you're not used to it as an agency. You're not used to it as a DSP.
Jared Siegal (17:18.078)
Yeah.
Jared Siegal (17:34.569)
Yeah.
Jared Siegal (17:39.229)
It's a hard conversation because without actually working in this space, which is such a unique animal from every other type, obviously I've been in publishing for 15 years, right. And until I met companies like yours, I didn't even realize that this was like this existed. Right. So, so it's, it's unique and very few people have experienced in it, but also a lot of the tools and systems around measurement around traffic quality around.
And traffic validity right around performance metrics. They literally don't even work. Inside of a desktop app, right? Which has become it's become a challenge. I know you and I have worked on this kind of stuff a few times together. But what is nice to see. Is that some of the major exchanges like Google and Amazon are starting to come around to this idea like, OK, maybe we actually have to take the metals with the world seriously because.
They have a ton of traffic, right? People love these.
Yuriy Yarovoy (18:40.428)
It's a of traffic. Yeah, exactly. It's a ton of traffic. But it's not just numbers of people. It's depth of data, depth of engagement, duration. It's not a transactional user base. It's very much a community-led user base.
Jared Siegal (19:05.191)
Mm-hmm.
Yuriy Yarovoy (19:09.972)
and lot of platforms like Medal, not necessarily that function like Medal, but desktop apps like Medal, build these strong communities rather than websites that are very, I just need to know this recipe on how to make carbonara. I'm never going to come back to this page again. I'll just take the screenshot of the ingredients at the bottom of the page. That's it, right? And if you're a web publisher, that sucks. That sucks for you.
But we're not a web publisher, yet we're held to kind of the same model and standards, which sucks.
Jared Siegal (19:41.873)
And yeah, that brings up one other point that has become a more popular conversation as of recently, which is AI and SEO. And I am a publisher that has recipes and I in trouble, right? And logic tells us probably, right? Whereas gaming platforms, desktop apps live in this alternate universe you talked about like
creating your own social network, right? Like, what's different about you guys is people aren't going to Google and typing in Mellow.tv and getting yours. They've been really installing the app on their computer. And these are people that probably have been coming for, like you said, six years, right? And so what is your strategy right now in terms of like building even a stronger or a larger kind of internal community?
Yuriy Yarovoy (20:25.579)
you
Jared Siegal (20:38.342)
As you think about like, maybe there is some sort of. Right out there open AI and everything keeps getting smarter, but also way more expensive. You know, what is what is nails kind of position on all that?
Yuriy Yarovoy (20:54.729)
think there's a lot of world ahead of us. For us specifically, for your listeners, I'm not sure how much you know about Medal, but it's we're the largest Game Clips social platform. What the hell does that mean? I'll give you the marketing spiel.
Jared Siegal (21:16.798)
Sure.
Yuriy Yarovoy (21:18.059)
So much of our core social experiences have moved to digital space rather than the meat space, right? Like you and I, when we grew up, it was all meat space. And then we saw this transition to digital space. And gaming is very much...
Jared Siegal (21:28.328)
Yeah.
Yuriy Yarovoy (21:36.36)
the core interactive medium for social connection. If I look at what Facebook was and what Facebook is now or Instagram or any other social network, it's really become this like feed of advertisers with sprinkling of my friends. So it like the social networks have become not so social anymore. It's become more of like a broadcast channel.
Jared Siegal (21:53.406)
Mm-hmm.
Yuriy Yarovoy (22:03.571)
rather than like a social engagement to way or group based communication or sharing gaming on the other hand when i play games you and i can play call of duty or peak or you know whatever other game chess
And we connect, we can talk on voice, we can share our day to day interactions. We could talk about what happened to me at school or at work or wherever, and could build these social bonds while navigating these digital spaces. Meadow has built that the way to capture those moments and capture those memories, just like what we would have in our pockets, maybe at the mall when I was 13 in the flip phone or our iPhones today.
these moments. Medal is that way to document these memories and moments and these fleeting instances when we're in game and sharing those moments with others. So that's what we've built, right? So our focus is very much on how do we enable more people to capture these digital memories while they play together. I think that is a wholly different problem set.
and a very different perspective than say like a web publishing, right, where there are, you know, SEOs.
I built my career in SEO. like, SEO was always like, this is how you generate organic free traffic, right? And that's become harder. There are other channels. So then we started talking about, okay, well, you have to build a brand as well, right? You have to build a brand around your website, your web presence. You have to build social presence and that can offset some of the lost, you know, traffic from SEO.
Jared Siegal (23:52.862)
Right.
Yuriy Yarovoy (23:54.73)
And that also, that helps, right? It's kind of like you kind of, have to start marketing by and large. But that's also becoming harder because there's more noise. There's more noise out there. The signal to noise is getting skewed heavily. So I think, I think for us, it's very much, there's a innate want and desire for friends to document.
Jared Siegal (24:09.3)
Yeah.
Yuriy Yarovoy (24:21.971)
their game time with their other friends. And as long as we continue to build product that feeds into those desires, that makes those desires easier to attain, I think we're okay and we'll continue to grow. I think if you're a web publisher publishing Carbonara recipes, where the first 90 % of that page is a backstory of your Nona.
migrating from Italy and how she found this recipe, I think you're kind of wrecked. I think your days are numbered because, fun anecdote, I really like to make, like I make pickles. I have a garden, have cucumbers, I make pickles. My pickle recipe did not come from Nona's website. It came from ChatGPT. I was like, need a heavily garlicky, dill bay spicy pickle recipe.
out of the game. They are delicious. Right? I never went to Google. I needed an answer and I didn't need your life story. And I think that is going to become much more prevalent. I think for a product like Medal versus a website like Medal, a product like Medal, it's hard, it's a lot harder to
Jared Siegal (25:15.804)
Nice.
Jared Siegal (25:29.609)
Mm-hmm.
Yuriy Yarovoy (25:40.758)
fill that need or answer that question without providing a massive infrastructure. Whereas, recipes, I'm sorry, we're picking on recipe, all of your recipe publishers hate me now. That becomes a lot easier to kind of cut out of the mix, so to speak.
Jared Siegal (26:02.42)
So if I flip that back on you, ask you one more question about this and we can move on. I'm a traditional publisher. I'm a web-based publisher. What would you do?
Yuriy Yarovoy (26:16.999)
So it's a great question. I would figure out how you can start owning your users rather than renting them. When you build on top of platforms. actually we saw this, a really good example of this I think is, I don't know if you remember what happened to College Humor and Facebook. All my friends I met are gonna date me. But so.
Jared Siegal (26:27.028)
Okay.
Jared Siegal (26:32.808)
Hmm.
Yuriy Yarovoy (26:46.699)
meta was like, okay, video is king. Publish all your video content on meta, on, on Facebook, run ads, do everything, right? And like, ignore all your other channels, we're going to kill it for you. So CollegeHumor went all in and then died because Facebook was like, actually we're going to change this algo and like all of the infrastructure for all the other channels kind of fell to the wayside. And that platform risk is very risky.
Jared Siegal (27:12.233)
Right.
Jared Siegal (27:15.976)
Right, right.
Yuriy Yarovoy (27:16.123)
Similarly, Google doesn't owe any of us a business model. They don't. They have shareholders. They are a product. They're not a public utility. They don't owe us anything. So if you build around this idea of I will forever be discoverable through SEO and then Google stops serving that traffic to you, it's not...
It's not their fault. And I'm not here to defend Google. I'm here to say you shouldn't build your house on sand. Right? I think, you know, if we look at Google, and if we can continue picking on SEO, but if we look at Google...
Google, how does Google make money? If you look at their earnings, all their money comes from search, they have some other revenue sources, right? DFP is like, I think they actually lose money on display and on double click effectively every quarter. I think it's like minus three or 4%. Actually, I haven't looked at the last earnings, so don't quote me on that. generally, it's a loss leader.
Jared Siegal (28:25.747)
Yeah.
Yuriy Yarovoy (28:26.11)
Why do they have, they make all their money from search ads. Why do they have AdEx and DB360 and all of these services? AdSense, another really good one. Google said early on, okay, we need content in our flywheel. If we index a bunch of content and serve the best possible results, more people will come, we can serve more ads.
But writing content is expensive. It takes time. It's everyone's side hustle. Like, how do we build a career out of this? Let's provide a way for publishers to monetize. Let's provide AdSense. So now I can get paid to feed the Google machine so they can index more of my content so I can afford to write more content that they can index and then serve ads on top of it.
Makes sense, right? Then that revenue model has built the internet.
Now we have AI answers, for instance. And if you look at Google, I think they continue to say this, so every day Google sees 15 % of queries being completely net new. So these are queries that they've never seen before. Every day, 15 % of all queries are that. That's ridiculous, knowing what Google's traffic is. If 15 % are net new, that means 85 % are
You know, either navigational queries. I'm trying to find, you know, my mom Googling Google or, you know, I'm using Google maps or I am, looking for like where to buy shoes, whatever. Right. Like queries that they've seen before known as carbonara recipe. Right. Like people are looking for that. Sorry for picking on Nona.
Jared Siegal (29:57.363)
Yeah.
Jared Siegal (30:11.955)
Yep. Yep.
Yuriy Yarovoy (30:19.122)
So 50 % of those queries are probably real time, right? So this is news based, pop culture, things that are like fresh, very fresh, very new, by and large. So these are news publishers, right? The CNNs of the world or like anything that's more real time that Google's indexing. That 85%, Google can probably, and today they don't do a great job, right? Like AI Answers is rife with problems. But by and large, they have enough...
data at this point to properly generate the majority of answers without really providing a ton of attribution anymore. And okay, I'm not going to debate the morality or ethics of this at all. I'm simply stating, I'm simply providing observations. If Google then eliminates 85 % of search results in lieu of providing AI answers and just adds there, the answers are good, right?
Jared Siegal (30:49.065)
Bye.
Yuriy Yarovoy (31:17.162)
They don't really rely on any new content being published because there's a large corpus of content that they've already based on, right? People aren't reinventing carbonara recipes. There's probably like the entire corpus of content could probably generate enough new carbonara variations that were good for a while. And then the 15 % of real-time publishers, right, news, et cetera, they can continue to get paid.
Jared Siegal (31:34.642)
Yeah. Yup.
Yuriy Yarovoy (31:45.375)
Google can kill AdSense tomorrow, save a ridiculous amount of money, improve their margins, move a lot of that payment to news, which is demanding monetization, right? There's court cases left and right about this, and effectively eliminate traffic to the majority of those recipe sites. It's very dangerous to rely on a single traffic source.
Jared Siegal (31:58.133)
Yeah. Yep.
Yuriy Yarovoy (32:12.038)
it's very dangerous to build your house on sand and to kind of, it's very dangerous to not build and own your user. So to answer your question, sorry, this super roundabout way to get here, I think it's really important to, again, own your user. So what is something of value that you can create that can capture that user?
Jared Siegal (32:25.62)
great.
Yuriy Yarovoy (32:37.34)
into your own database, right? Like build that email list. Have presence across a wide variety of channels. Don't be reliant on a single channel like SEO. I think SEO is really powerful, continue to be powerful, but I think what we're seeing right now are very clear shots across the bow from the majority of people's traffic. And again, if I were Google, I could totally see a world where
we can save, I think, what, 30 or 40 billion dollars a year in publisher payments? Like, our net profits go up substantially. And the quality of results doesn't necessarily suffer for the majority of queries. Again, AI answers are horrendous for vast majority. Vast.
Jared Siegal (33:25.31)
Right. Yeah.
Yeah, fair enough. Yeah.
Yuriy Yarovoy (33:31.274)
array of queries but by and large like it's they're serviceable they're workable.
Jared Siegal (33:36.277)
I think the other sort of piece of feedback that I give a lot of publishers when I'm thinking about, for those that do rely a lot on SEO, right? Because that still is the majority of web-based publications is think about what makes your content unique and what cannot be replaced by AI, right? If you're just regurgitating what's already out there, you are going to be replaced by AI.
Yuriy Yarovoy (33:51.242)
Hmm.
Jared Siegal (34:04.532)
If you have, whether it's op-eds or unique content that people can only get from you, right? Because who your writers are, who your brand is, or just the topics that you're covering that's not super wide, you know, like they talked about, you're in a good position. And so if you're in that former group, you need to seriously think about, okay, moving to 2026, 2027, what is going to be my content strategy?
Yuriy Yarovoy (34:16.02)
Yeah.
Jared Siegal (34:33.598)
Do have the right authors, the right writers, but also my writing about the right stuff?
Yuriy Yarovoy (34:38.026)
Am I staying relevant? There are many people that cover, for instance, tech and Silicon Valley. And then there's Strategia. Strategia is awesome. It's a great newsletter, worth every dollar. Thompson. Amazing analysis, amazing interviews.
I don't think they necessarily will ever rely on Google as a primary traffic source. Probably brings some traffic, some discoverability, cool, right? But by and large, they own their user base. They provide something that is irreplaceable, to your point. That analysis is important and deep, and those interviews are rare. Like, they're not happening anywhere else. They're not going into in depth quite like strict entry does, right?
I really hope I pronounced that right. I never pronounce it right. Yeah, I think that's the key. I think to distill, like, build a brand, it's really hard. It's hard, right?
Jared Siegal (35:35.133)
of you.
Jared Siegal (35:44.51)
Yeah, right. We're seeing this very casually. This is not easy stuff.
Yuriy Yarovoy (35:47.912)
No, no, no, we're saying it very casually and at the same time it kind of like backs out to this idea of like, it shouldn't be easy, right? Because it has been easy, we have so much noise and that's fine, you know, we'd like a lot of people have made a living.
Jared Siegal (36:02.142)
Right. Right, right, right.
Yuriy Yarovoy (36:08.157)
But I think that noise is very polluting. I think it's very hard to actually cut through it.
And I think this might actually serve to kind of clean out part of the internet. That might be like the spiciest steak I have today. Like, it might actually be good that 80 % of publishers kind of go away because they're not really providing any clear value. They're providing value for themselves and their families. And I respect that. Totally. That's like, you need to put food on the table. You have a business. But like, are you actually providing a good for...
Jared Siegal (36:33.353)
Yes.
Yuriy Yarovoy (36:43.407)
a distinct user that will care if you disappear. And I would say the majority of publishers, if they disappear tomorrow, like there are other options available.
Jared Siegal (36:52.98)
I used to spend a lot of time personally pondering that question back in 2012, 2013, 2014 when I was slinging slideshows across the internet. Am I really helping society? Probably not. Am I helping myself though, for sure?
Yuriy Yarovoy (37:05.233)
Yeah.
Yeah, and I respect that for a fact. Those two ideas can live at the same time, right? They're not usually exclusive. I could totally respect, do what you gotta do to earn. It's fine, right? I mean, like, within reason. Don't, don't, yeah, exactly, right. Right, like, do what you need to do, but at the same time, like, if what you're doing isn't valuable to a vast majority of people,
Jared Siegal (37:24.584)
Yeah, legal reasons, yeah, all that.
Yuriy Yarovoy (37:36.444)
in a way that doesn't make you irreplaceable, or that makes you irreplaceable, then you going away will not necessarily negatively harm the internet, or the wider society. Yeah. Yeah!
Jared Siegal (37:58.523)
I'm gonna keep on that very, know, rim.
Yuriy Yarovoy (38:04.167)
We're we're uplifting, Karen. We are, you know, short.
Jared Siegal (38:05.842)
Let's, let's, let's switch it up. You and I like to have a lot of fun in our calls, right? We talk about a lot of nonsense. So we're going to switch to what we're calling the hot seat. I'm going to fire off a bunch of random questions. Hopefully you went read through some of these and have some things to say, but let's see. What is the most overrated buzzword or term in our space?
Yuriy Yarovoy (38:30.633)
Authenticity. Because we say it without actually meaning it. Like, what is authentic? What does being authentic mean? Have you seen a truly authentic ad campaign? Like, truly. I've seen a lot of stuff win at Cannes and like make, you know, creative directors very famous and CMOs very happy. But like, from a customer perspective, like how much of it is genuinely being authentic and how much of it is like...
Jared Siegal (38:32.372)
Okay, why?
Yuriy Yarovoy (39:00.073)
corporate authenticity.
Jared Siegal (39:05.244)
authentic in that you know that if you do this, it's going to make a lot of money. Right.
Yuriy Yarovoy (39:11.625)
Again, from one perspective it is authentic because I am authentically trying to separate you from your dollar. As a customer, I also authentically see you trying to separate me from my dollar. Is that the type of authenticity you're trying to communicate? Is that what we mean? Because if that's what we mean, I actually take that back. But I don't think that that's the intention behind that word when we say it.
Jared Siegal (39:18.974)
Yeah, fair enough.
Jared Siegal (39:27.038)
Yeah, probably not.
Jared Siegal (39:34.873)
All right, along the similar lines, one acronym in our space, I don't want my answer to, so I'll throw it, I'll tell you my answer first. Hopefully it's not your answer. Hopefully it's not your answer. Can't stand the word CPM. I think that CPM is a phrase that is, or a term that is too focused on incorrectly by our space. We have a lot of publishers that come to us and say, I need to hit this CPM, right?
Yuriy Yarovoy (39:44.475)
No, yeah, Go, go, go.
Jared Siegal (40:03.86)
Technically speaking, you can hit any CPM you want. You said $100 for it. You can average $100 CPM. You're just never in a certain ads. And so we obviously, and we do this with either, we focus on revenue per session. Like you need to make sure you're maximizing how much revenue you make per session. Yeah, CPM obviously like probably the first term in our space like ever. It is just used or looked at incorrectly.
Yuriy Yarovoy (40:24.306)
Mm.
Jared Siegal (40:29.99)
understand what publishers mean when they say I need to maximize my CP, they're really saying I need to maximize my revenue without necessarily destroying the UX and how many ads I'm throwing on the page and all that stuff. There's a lot that goes into that, yeah, CPM kind of drives me nuts.
Yuriy Yarovoy (40:35.976)
Yeah.
Yuriy Yarovoy (40:41.395)
Yeah.
Yuriy Yarovoy (40:48.777)
Why would I... Yeah, no, I actually agree entirely with what you said. I don't know if that would be mine. Sorry, not a rapid fire. You're actually making me think here. So like things that used to drive me more nuts when I did a lot more paid, but like focusing on like CactiLTV rather than something like payback period or payback time.
Jared Siegal (40:49.086)
Hopefully it wasn't.
Jared Siegal (41:14.643)
Okay.
Okay.
Yuriy Yarovoy (41:18.033)
Right? like CAC to LTV doesn't necessarily mean what you want it to mean. Like I would much rather have higher CAC, but it's paid back in two months rather than like a CAC to LTV ratio that pays me back in like 12 months. Right? Like it's, it, we're focusing on the wrong metric. Like how quickly can I get my money back is probably a better measure of whether I'm investing correctly or not. versus like the total,
Jared Siegal (41:32.969)
Right.
Yeah.
Yuriy Yarovoy (41:47.186)
and like maybe lifetime value I'll get from the user.
Jared Siegal (41:51.667)
Yeah, LTV is something that also comes up a lot. That's really hard for a typical publisher to measure and track. We work with a lot of publishers who, whether currently or at times have partnered with media buying agencies to drive a lot of traffic and they get really excited like, my God, look how much traffic we're generating. And I kind of take a step back and ask them a very quick question. Like, are you actually making any money off of this?
Yuriy Yarovoy (41:56.105)
So, yeah.
Yuriy Yarovoy (42:17.417)
or you just like taking the money you make and just investing 100 % of it back into the traffic and actually there's no margin.
Jared Siegal (42:22.14)
Right? Yeah, and and typically it's the latter there, right? Like, they're like, shit, actually, we're not making anybody up this. is awesome. But no one's returning. These are not good users, things like that. Or it's taking me forever to make an ROI positive return on this. And so. That's an interesting metric, one that probably doesn't come up. Too often day to day conversations, but should because people.
don't fundamentally understand how they're driving traffic, right?
Yuriy Yarovoy (42:54.217)
Yeah, it's interesting. I think it was probably a lot more like if you're running like an ARB business, like pure MFA ARB, like that is probably much more impactful for you because you're just churning through traffic. I think actually coming back to an older, like earlier point we were talking about, like how do you, how, how as a publisher, do you like defend against platform risk?
Jared Siegal (43:02.004)
Yeah.
Jared Siegal (43:07.294)
Yeah.
Jared Siegal (43:20.306)
Bye, travel.
Yuriy Yarovoy (43:21.607)
I think it's like actually maximizing for retention, right?
Trish, I think the jammer is freezing. Or am I?
Jared Siegal (43:33.328)
no.
Yuriy Yarovoy (43:35.628)
Well, cut this out.
Jared Siegal (43:41.332)
I'm here. You hear me?
Yuriy Yarovoy (43:41.929)
Yeah, you're back. No, but maximizing for this idea of building enough value for you to return, right? So whether that's creating some downloadable assets or like...
giving users a reason to give you their email address or social connection or whatever it is, right? But like figuring out ways to kind of like come back into a person's day to day journeys, like we'll maximize that, right? Because again, yes, your LTV or sorry, like your,
Jared Siegal (44:12.052)
Sure. Sure.
Yuriy Yarovoy (44:20.728)
Average revenue per user like your ARPU right or ARPDAL whatever for like a web publisher might be very very small But you're basing that on like I paid X to get a user and then that user comes and I'll get Y from advertising But if that user comes back twice
or three times in a month, right? Now that they've discovered your brand, they come back that second, third, fourth visit is through social or retargeting, which is cheaper or some other organic channel. Now that user, like every time that user comes back, the marginal cost of that user decreases substantially, right? So like, how do you get that user to come back is like, I think the real question.
publisher like traditional web publishers should be asking themselves rather than like how do I get them in the door and get as many people in the door as possible.
Jared Siegal (45:08.756)
Yeah, that's interesting. I would imagine that the majority of publishers don't really think that way. Like, I only made 10,000 visits today. How do I get it to 11,000 tomorrow? Well, get to 11,000 by getting 1,000 of those people to come back the next day.
Yuriy Yarovoy (45:19.334)
Yeah.
Yuriy Yarovoy (45:23.164)
Yeah, yeah, you can either grow top of funnel or become more retentive. that, that that's it's it's usually one of the other you should do both. Right. But like improve the efficiency of your funnel, improve top of funnel, and then get the people to come back a second, third, fourth, tenth time through channels that are less expensive. Right. Because again, if you're paying for all 10 of those visits, it's not going to be worth it.
Jared Siegal (45:27.805)
Right.
Jared Siegal (45:31.924)
Fair enough.
Jared Siegal (45:40.187)
Super users, right?
Jared Siegal (45:47.912)
Yep. All right. We got two more questions for you. All right. This is a good one. You weren't in ad tech. What would you be doing?
Yuriy Yarovoy (45:51.752)
Let's do it.
Yuriy Yarovoy (45:57.321)
Oh, I don't even consider myself an ad tech now. I kind of, peripherally. Am I an ad tech, Jared? Oh, okay, okay, cool. All right, today I learned. What would I be doing? Like, are we talking about like I have helicopter money and like I could do whatever I want? Or like, I mean, helicopter money, honestly, I'd probably be investing in things like fusion and space travel.
Jared Siegal (46:03.208)
You're an addict. You're an addict. You're an addict.
Jared Siegal (46:16.02)
Sure. Whatever you...
Yuriy Yarovoy (46:25.104)
And I would be just like auditing classes at like Stanford, even though I'd be way too dumb to be there. Like I just want to surround myself by people way smarter than me. It makes me feel good.
Jared Siegal (46:39.348)
I'm going go out on a limb here and say that's probably going to be the craziest answer that we get to that question. My answer is just so much more humble, I guess. I want to open up a barbecue joint and just perfect my ability to smoke a brisket. Yeah.
Yuriy Yarovoy (46:43.14)
No.
Yuriy Yarovoy (46:54.802)
Hell yeah, this is why you are no longer in the Northeast and you move to the land of the brisket. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. That's a good answer. I like that. Yeah, I'd be making pickles and going to auditing classes at some university while investing in Fusion.
Jared Siegal (47:00.628)
That's right. There you go.
Jared Siegal (47:05.736)
Please.
There you go.
Awesome. Last question.
on the, what's the word I'm looking for? On the back end of our most recent trip together. Favorite Disney character and why.
Yuriy Yarovoy (47:35.122)
the genie, because Robin Williams is a god, frankly, live action Will Smith genie doesn't exist for me. Never happened. It is retcon.
Jared Siegal (47:45.074)
So Robin Williams' version of the song, way better than Will Smith's version of the song.
Yuriy Yarovoy (47:48.837)
Yeah, I mean, like, is that, I don't think we should even have this conversation. I don't even want to debate it. It's so factual that it is not up for debate.
Probably, yeah. Yeah, I mean like I classic Disney characters, right? Like I'm not talking about Marvel or any of the purchased Disney IP
Jared Siegal (48:08.446)
Yeah.
Yeah, fair enough.
I think mine is Maui from Oana mostly just because I like to tell people you're welcome.
Yuriy Yarovoy (48:25.224)
so you know the whole rap.
Jared Siegal (48:28.178)
I'm gonna do it now, but I think if it came on, I'd like to sing it for my daughter. She loves the song, loves the dance to it. think I know most of the words to the rap.
Yuriy Yarovoy (48:35.281)
Yeah.
Alright, karaoke on the next trip, obviously.
Jared Siegal (48:40.756)
Okay, we can do that. We can do that. Cool, man. Well, thanks for taking the time. I mean, we're almost an hour into this. It's been awesome talking to you. Thanks for being our first guest. Really appreciate it.
Yuriy Yarovoy (48:51.304)
I hope I set the bar at least medium.
Jared Siegal (48:56.116)
You had a great time. That's what's most important. That's right. That's right. Any final arguing words of wisdom for our listeners?
Yuriy Yarovoy (48:58.908)
That's true, it's the friends we've made along the way.
Yuriy Yarovoy (49:07.336)
I am sorry if I created more adjuna for our web publishers. I hope I'm very wrong about all of those things, to be honest, because it's not good. It's not looking good, let's call it. Right?
Jared Siegal (49:27.892)
I would say, yeah, good news is our next guest is one of the largest web publishers on the planet. So we'll get to hear her on her thoughts on everything that we just spoke about and she can really do a new one.
Yuriy Yarovoy (49:33.96)
Hey!
Yuriy Yarovoy (49:39.944)
I look forward to being eviscerated publicly on this. I'm happy to debate it too, but again, I think I would prefer to be wrong on this because of the implications. However, I don't really see that.
Jared Siegal (50:07.476)
Look, Aditude's working on a lot of really cool stuff that is going to help all of these types of publishers out. So how can you learn more? Obviously, we want to thank you for taking the time for speaking with us today. If you are interested in learning more about what Yuri's got going on at Mell, what we're doing with him and in general, Aditude, please make sure to subscribe to the podcast and reach out to us at Aditude.com. Until next time. All right. I'm Jared signing out.
Yuriy Yarovoy (50:12.36)
Absolutely.
Jared Siegal (50:36.818)
Yuri, thanks again.
Yuriy Yarovoy (50:38.185)
Thanks for having me. It's great.