December 29, 2021 by Max Willens
On the shut of a year, it would possibly perchance perchance perchance also simply additionally be instructive to review support on what’s transpired. And if a image is price a thousand words, then these 5 charts, are price ample words for a medium-dimension Harper’s quilt legend, even supposing you would possibly perchance perchance perchance plow thru them sooner than a medium-sized Twitter thread. They are also built utilizing insights gathered all year long from Digiday+’s research panel.
Behold on below.
Pandemic vs. paperwork
We starting up, as we (sadly) ought to, with the pandemic. Publishers entered 2021 hopeful that they’d be in a set of living to score support to something traditional-seeming by the tip of the year. But as the media world cheered — then groaned — as vaccination rates rose after plateauing this past spring and summer, it became certain that a return to fat-time, in-paperwork became once no longer going.
By the third quarter of 2021, successfully sooner than the omicron variant’s upward thrust more definitively scuttled many office return plans, virtually two thirds of publishers had heard that they would possibly perchance perchance perchance be returning to in-person work top once in a whereas.
How the cookie’s crumbling
As tainted as the pandemic’s lurches felt at the starting up and cease of 2021, in many respects the year became once marked by a maintain of balance, albeit an queer one.
The digital media ecosystem began the year desirous about how it would possibly perchance perchance perchance reply to the unofficial cease of third-event cookies. Contextual focused on quickly leapt out as a most popular tactic, no longer correct amongst opportunistic vendors but even in no longer going corners equivalent to CTV, wth many brands and companies indicating they’d exercise more of their advert budgets on contextual advert campaigns.
Advert traders and sellers also began the year attempting to favor out how one can mix alternate identifiers built by companies starting from Amazon to The Commerce Desk into their plans. Publishers build a matter to alternate identifiers will play a pivotal characteristic in their agencies when third-event cookies are phased out of the industry’s plans. But thanks in half to Google’s extension of its closing date for deprecating those cookies to 2023, those identifiers are no longer yet half of most publishers’ advert sales deals.
Yet for your complete development publishers cling made in attempting out these sleek products, as we head into 2022, it appears certain that a host of the biggest points publishers face restful loom on the horizon. No matter having their playbooks set of living for how one can tackle the tip of third-event cookies, the percentage of publishers skittish about its maintain on their agencies remains the same to what it became once in the first quarter of 2021.
Platforms passé?
One of many defining traits of 2021 perceived to be how small energy publishers build in direction of platforms. Whereas TikTok gathered a host of consideration and publishers persevered to be troubled about the roles that Amazon and Google play in digital media, publishers largely stayed desirous about their maintain properties.
