A new report from Digital Context Next (DCN) has shown that whilst Facebook and Google account for some of the largest sources of digital advertising and traffic, they still only attribute to 5% of publishers digital revenue.
The report attributed the revenue earned by publishers from their digital content that is distributed across a range of online sources. The report will be extremely significant given the limited data that is available regarding publishers digital revenue.
This is just the second year that this report, released on February 8, has been completed and what is notable is the almost non-existent change in revenue received by publishers.
This comes despite the majot tech companies, most specifically those like Facebook and Google, stating that they have employed techniques and processes to help achieve better monetary gains from digital content.
Combined, Facebook and Google collected a huge $52 billion in ad revenue in 2017 – just in the US! In contrast, publishers only received $10 million from third party platforms in the first half of 2017 making up 16% of their digital revenue.
The CEO of DCN, Jason Kint, said that “the biggest surprise was how little has changed.” He continued to say that those who are the best in their industry of entertainment and news are still not being appropriately supported.
The report also highlighted the importance of video content for digital publishers with this media format making up 85% of the total digital revenue received from third parties. This could be due to the increased focus placed on video by advertisers and companies like Google and Facebook.
Additionally, it is likely to show that users are more willing to engage with video than anything else. Worryingly though, the majority of the money made from video went to companies that were already established video producers.
Video is also more expensive to produce in comparison to standard content making the monetization of video dollars less impressive than it initially appears.
The video data shows that YouTube is still the number one platform when it comes to publisher’s attribution with just one quarter of the $10 million in digital revenue received by publishers.
The report from DCN comes at a frustrating time for publishers who are unsure about the monetary returns they are going to be getting from posts with some reducing the amount of content or becoming less concerned with the included information.
It also follows reports from Facebook saying they’ll be showing less news in the news feed in an attempt to improve user experiences.