Unified Reporting for Publishers A Challenging Big Data Problem

In a recent report, NY Times announced a rise in their digital Ad revenue. Digital revenue now brings in 194M USD, or more than one third of the total advertising revenue for NY Times. Which is a clear indication of how important reporting is to the ad operations personnel in the major publishers.

In an article some time back, the challenges of unified reporting for major publishers was discussed. The basic crux of the problem was integrating data across very disparate data sources, and getting clear actionable insights as fast as possible. I think it is worth revisiting the problem again.

Most publishers today recognize that a big data strategy is imperative for extractive more from their digital operations. Excels and heuristics driven approach can only help them till here. After this realization, most publishers have 2 choices: invest in creating a solution in-house or invest in a 3rd party solution. Often people solve this problem by investing in visualization tools like Tableau, Lookr etc., but that is only part of the problem.

Building a solution in-house is quite an investment as a publisher would have to hire a team of dedicated engineers to set up ETL pipelines, invest and maintain a data warehouse and then setting up dashboards. It is no easy task and often can take months to have a decent digital pipeline in place. The second part of the cost of in-house development cost is the maintenance cost. With things moving fast in the programmatic world, the partner stack changes continuously; we have new metrics like viewability and engagement getting added every day. Moreover partners today have inconsistent reporting and APIs making pulling and integrating of data into a single solution a pain.

In a conversation with a publisher, an executive mentioned in the absence of proper digital pipelines they offered most of their inventory to the partner delivering the highest. Now while it may be a good enough solution in short term, it can be detrimental because the publisher had no idea on what is the quality of Ads served, whether they appeal to the targeted reader base, could they have earned more from their inventory etc. As digital revenues are on the upswing such questions become more and more imperative.

Hence a unified reporting solution that can pull data from different data sources, store in a single place and power insights through a rich interactive dashboard is the need of the hour. You can use this to forecast your inventory, run private market places, compare revenues from programmatic and non-programmatic sources, understand which properties are doing better than others, report and compare rCPM, identify revenue at risk etc. In short publishers can use their energy and money to create new properties and sponsorship opportunities.