275: Optimizing Ads - How Food Bloggers Can Make the Most Out of Display Ads with Paul Bannister and Becca Clark

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Hello. Hello, and welcome to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Alexa and we are so happy and excited that you're here today. This episode is a good one because it's all about ads, and ads are, as I'm sure you know, just a great way to make some money from your site and essentially, like, the more traffic you have, the more ad revenue you can potentially make. And there are just so many different strategies that can help you optimize your ad revenue. But ad placement and revenue is both an art and a science. So Paul and Becca, both from adthrive, are here today on the podcast to talk a bit more about how ads work on sites and how food bloggers can optimize their display ads for quarter four and beyond. It's a really interesting interview. It's something that I don't run ads on my site, but it's been interesting to learn a little bit more about how ads work and how awesome content is essentially still the driver of ad revenue. So it's a really interesting conversation and so without any further ado. Bjork, take it away.

Paul and Becca, welcome to the podcast. This is. This. This is one thing that I've learned. When we have two people, I have to direct the welcomes, so you don't talk over each other. Paul, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much. Really excited to be here.

And Becca, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much. Excited as well.

Yeah. Okay, so we're going to be talking about ads today, alting ads. And one of the things that I've learned from being a part of facilitating building Food Blogger Pro over the past six, seven years is this is really the heart and soul of so many different publishing sites. So many people are curious, especially food sites, about what it takes to do ads and to do ads well. So that's what we're going to be talking about. But before we do that, I want to hear a little bit about your story. I've met you in person, each of you, but I know a lot of the listeners haven't had that privilege. So we'd love to hear a little bit about your background, how you got started, and what it is that you do now at adthrive. So, Paul, I'll pass it over for you first to start and tell us kind of the elevator version or the socially distanced conversation version of who you are and how you got started.

Great. Yeah. So I will do an elevator version because my story starts a very long time ago and I will age myself massively with This. I started a website in 1995.

Before it was cool.

Before it was cool. And it was one of the first sites on the Internet to have ads. I have always loved media and journalism and publishing. I started when I was like 10, like a newspaper for my block. I worked in a school newspaper in college. I love writing and creating and it's something that's always been passionate to me and I always knew advertising was a key way how that industry, how the industry supports itself. So I've been doing this my entire career and enduring different companies and different roles. What I do now at adthrive is I run strategy, which means a couple of different things, but a lot of it's working with advertisers and with big technology companies on the relationship side of things as well as kind of working with our biggest partners, you know, Google at top of the list on like really big trends and changes that are coming into the industry. That's kind of what I spend my time on.

That's awesome. And we're going to be talking about some of those trends that are coming down the line, which I know a lot of people will be interested in hearing about. So excited about that. How about you, Becca? What is your story and how did you get started and eventually end up at death Thrive?

Yeah. So it's a little different than Paul's. Definitely did not have a history or background in the ad industry at all. My background was actually in psychology and counseling. Always have loved working with people and understanding more of their stories and really kind of came into this position through a mutual friend, I guess, kind of the way a lot of jobs work these days.

Yeah, totally.

But I had my first son and was looking for a job that I could do from home and this opportunity came up and started working with AdThrive. I guess it would be about six years now, crazy enough. And then moved into the account management position a couple years ago where really just able to work with some of our largest publishers to help them optimize their ad revenue, understand their business goals, and identify ways that we can both help them make as much money as possible while also valuing that user experience.

Yeah, that's awesome. One of the things that I appreciate from each of you, the perspectives is this reality that what we do is the technical. It is the big company, it is the understanding ads and affiliate and business strategy. And you kind of touched on some of that, Paul. But it also is the, you know, your background, Becca, in psychology and understanding people and publishing really is an art and a Science. And we're going to talk about some of those things, even things as simple as the balance between user experience and revenue optimization. And that being a really interesting consideration for publishers as well. Paul, one of the things that you said that I think was so interesting, you said you had a neighborhood newsletter, and it reminds me of my wife Lindsay, so author behind Pinch of Yam and you know, the content writer and creator, she had the Cool Cousins club newsletter when she was younger. And it almost seems like for a lot of people who this is what they do and they're good at it, you can trace that back. And for you, it's interesting to hear you trace that back to an interest in publishing, content creation, writing. At what point did you become fascinated and like, whoa, there's this entirely different world that I can go really deep on that kind of correlates to publishing world. But it's not publishing, it's not writing, but it supports that industry. What did that change look like and when did you know that you wanted to really shift into focusing on that?

That's a great point. I mean, it probably, I don't think it happened overnight. Like, I don't think there was like a single moment. I think it was more realizing, you know, for me at least, what I thought I could be good at and where I thought I could add the most value. And even today, like, I still love content creation. I contribute to the outdoor blog. I, you know, write things on the side for different purposes. Like, I definitely, I still like to create things and I still think that's part of my DNA and that's not going away. But I also think, like, I've been able to build skills over the years to like, think the same way a content creator thinks about things, but figure out ways to help them and kind of scale that up in our case across thousands of publishers. Like, what are things we can build to help all of them. So hopefully I've been able to build a mindset for myself at least that's like, you know, in keeping with our ethos that out thrive of really being very publisher first. Because for me, and I think for a lot of us, like we have been publishers in the past, we understand that pretty well.

Yeah. One of the things that you talk about is this idea of thousands of sites. And anytime that I talk to anybody who works in an industry where they have exposure to lots of different people at scale, I'm always interested to hear some of the through lines or consistencies that you see in the people who are operating in that Upper echelon. So one of the realities of this industry is it can potentially be kind of siloed or lonely. You maybe are part of groups and you have Facebook groups, but people only share certain things within that or you know, in Food Blogger Pro it's posting to forums and people might share things they're struggling with, but it's like it's kind of siloed. You're kind of on your own and so you don't have really good measure of what it looks like out in the world. I'm curious to hear from you, Paul. You can start and then would be interested to hear from you Beck as well. What are the common traits that you see in some of the publishers or creators who are coming to at Thrive and are in that, let's call it top 10%. So these are sites that are earning a substantial income. Maybe it's, well, I don't know, maybe it's a single author, maybe it's a team. Would you be able to distill it down into some characteristics of how these people approach their business and their website that enable them to be successful publishers and creators?

I definitely curious your perspective back out, but I think of two things. One is sort of simple, which is passion. I think you've got to love what you do. You've got to feel that you care about it, you feel connected to it, you feel compelled by it. My website that I started back in the 90s like it was for video games because I'm a gamer and that's what I love and that's what I want to do and that's what I feel good about. And I woke up every morning and wanted to write stuff because I, because I, because it was in me and I had to get it out of me. So I think the passion is a huge part of it. And the other one, which is more complicated and also hard is you really, you gotta be a Jack or Jill of all trades. Like you really, you've gotta be a great writer and photographer and get WordPress set up and what's your SEO and how do I capture emails and how do I set up, build my own community within my site? How do I, you know, use social? Like you really, I mean, you know, as you get bigger and bigger you can get other people to help you with pieces of that. But so many of the creators that I've talked to are so multi talented and so like so able to do lots of amazing things and you know, everyone's going to know what they're, what they're best at. I remember a conversation between a couple of our creators of our publishers where one was amazing at social and one was amazing in SEO and one was amazing at building their email. They all had different nuance and skills, but they all really work great across the board too. So that's what I think.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Becca, how about you?

Yeah, no, it's interesting you say that because I've definitely seen the consistent. Where publishers have just shared. I don't really know what success looks like. Like, what's the average following that you see on social media or percentage of chrome traffic or desktop traffic. And so just those metrics for success. Really hard to know how they're performing and doing, which I think, like you said, can be really lonely. But I would agree with Paul that some of the main things that I see has really been passion. For sure, they love what they do and they started it because of something.

That they love as opposed to, I see that I can make money from this, so I'm going to do it.

Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Whereas that seems more like it requires a lot more grind to kind of get it going. Not to say that if you have passion, it doesn't also require grind, but yeah, it didn't feel as much like work in the beginning.

Yeah, the grind feels different if you enjoy it to a certain level versus if you don't.

For sure, for sure. And I know they, like Paul said, having to be a jack of all trades, but two, just knowing what you do well and at least being willing to hire out for those different areas that you aren't great at. So building a team. And if you're not great at photography, someone who's a great photographer or videographer or whatever it may be, you know, bringing on those additional people so that you can continue to focus on your passion and what you do well, which in turn will help you be sustainable long term.

Yeah, totally.

Getting out and done, you know.

Yep. It's interesting, the passion piece and you hear that as kind of a theme. But even I think about Lindsay and I know that the thing she always talks about going to the grocery store and being so interested in seeing what people are buying, like what's in their grocery cart. And I'm like, I've never noticed that or looked at that or one of her favorite things to do is when we get together with friends, like, to hear what they've been making. Like, you can just see that she's more interested in that. And it's like that's why it works for her. To publish recipes 1, 2, 3 times a week for 10 years. The grind of that, which does feel like a grind at certain point, but because there's such an interest and passion in it. And same for me for this podcast. I love talking about business, I love talking about technology. I love talking about things like ads. Like, I can look forward to this conversation that I'm having with you because it's something that I'm interested in. If I wasn't, if I was just doing it because I thought it was a good way to make money, it's like pretty quickly you come up against that grind and you're like, maybe not worth it. So what's interesting to me is in that analysis, it's a lot of it is like the heart and soul and not so much like tips and tricks. And that stuff comes and it's a really important piece of it, but it's really the heart and soul. Are you, especially as it relates to publishing, are you willing to show up every day, write about this, and publish content on a consistent basis over a long period of time? But there is some important elements around understanding the tips and tricks and seasonality and industry trends. And that's one of the things that we're going to be talking about today. And I want to hear a little bit about and share with the audience. So as it relates to ads, this is, I want to start like high level macro and then start to come down. But Paul, can you talk about the transition from the ad industry at one point kind of being like handshake deals? Hey, we want to put ads on your site. Great Land O' Lakes. You can put ads on our site. What's your rate? Okay, we'll shake hands, we'll sign a contract, we'll put ads in to this thing called programmatic ads or the other terms that that encompasses. When did that happen and has that transition fully been made?

Yeah, so it's funny, I was used Mad Men if people have watched it as like the analogy where, you know, people in dark suits are in smoky rooms negotiating deals and drinking martinis. And that's certainly the way it used to be. And even when digital advertising started in the 90s and early 2000s, there was a fair amount of that to it. Probably less smoke than the 60s. But other than that, it was a lot of handshake deals and people talking to people. And as the Internet grew and as the base of advertisers grew, it became pretty clear that it doesn't scale again, to go back to the 1960s when you've got four TV channels and 20 national newspapers of note, and 150 big advertisers. It was pretty easy to make those connections. Whereas as the Internet started taking off and there are hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of good sites that can be advertised on, or I mean, even honestly more than that, hundreds of thousands of millions at this point, as well as tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of potential advertisers. Particularly now with the rise of the direct to consumer companies that are selling every single thing that you know, possibly directly to people.

Can you explain real quick what that is? Direct to consumer for those who aren't familiar.

So, like, you know, the easy examples are like Harry's Razors and even like Peloton, like brands like that that don't sell through stores, they sell directly on the Internet where their brand is selling to you and they ship it to your house.

They're not selling a peloton in Walmart, they're selling you a peloton from Peloton.

Exactly, exactly. And there are thousands or tens of thousands of those kinds of companies alone. So this ability to do handshake deals is sort of kind of falling apart in a lot of cases. And so what happened is maybe 2008, 2009, this new technology came along called programmatic advertising. That made it. So it was all based on auctions, where technology sat on a given publisher site and technology was used by the advertisers and both sides talked to each other, and every single ad impression on a given site was filled by an auction automatically in real time by technology. And that started pretty small. It started slowly and had a lot of kinks and problems and didn't work in a lot of ways. But it kind of got going and going and going, and then probably about five years ago or so, it really, really took off and really kind of accelerated the process to now where the numbers I've seen recently, I think it's like 80 to 85% of all advertising is done programmatically. So it is the market at this point, and there's certainly some amount of the handshakes that still exist for very large deals. And we do some of that. But the overwhelming majority of what we do and what everybody does at this point is this programmatic advertising.

Yeah. So I think one of the questions that a lot of people would have, and probably one of the questions that you have to deal with a lot is if programmatic advertising is the norm and all different people are doing it, what's the differentiator between advertising companies and you can talk holistically as opposed to doing maybe like a business to business comparison. But how do people make that decision around advertising companies? Understanding that you're representing Ad Thrive and you'll have a bias towards Ad Thrive, but what does that look like? How do you, how do you make that decision and what are the variables that people should be looking at in the considerations?

Yeah, it's a great question and I'll have some thoughts. I think Becca probably has some thoughts on this too. I think that, you know, without getting too much into the details, like it's not, you know, aside from like running Google AdSense and just putting a line of code on your site, like none of this is simple anymore. If you look at the big publishers, you look at what New York Times or you know, Meredith or Conde Nast or these big companies is doing, they've got a team of 10 or 15 people probably at each of those companies that is setting up the technology, that is managing the relationships, that is, that is dealing with the optimization, that is dealing with their ad service, is dealing with all these pieces of running a programmatic ad business where to some level a lot of the people that might in the past been focused on talking directly with an advertiser now are focused on running these systems and making, really making them work perhaps perfectly and work well. So what an ad management company does like, like Ad Thrive is basically provide those services to a lot of publishers. So instead of us working for Meredith or Conde, NASA or the New York Times, we work for thousands of publishers that, you know, I wouldn't say people can't do it themselves, but you're going to be challenged. Like it's heavy technology, it's heavy. There's a lot of relationships with technology companies. There's a lot of optimization. It's a pretty challenging business and getting more so every day. So for a good ad manager, you want one that really has great relationships and it has best in class technology and understands that a squeeze, you know, every last penny out of every, you know, ad impression that appears on a site and has those kind of, you know, that data and those, that, that analytical expertise to make that work. So yeah, those are some of the things that I think about at least.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's one of the, it kind of ties into the building a team category. And one of the things that I've quickly realized with the work that we're doing is one of the quickest ways to make quick progress is to work with people who have Walked the path or done the thing that you're trying to do hundreds or thousands of times. And that might be somebody who's submitting taxes or running ads or building, you know, a website or doing branding. And ads definitely are an example of that, where it's complex. It's not something that you want to do on your own by any means. One of the things that you had said, Paul, that I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on, Becca, number one, any thoughts on additional thoughts on what Paul had? Because he kind of called out to that. So you can start with that. And then the second piece would be squeeze that thing that Paul mentioned, which was like squeezing every little bit out. And I think one of the things that people want to make sure that they're doing is optimizing on their site. Are we doing this right? Is there ways that we could be increasing ads? So first, any additional comments after to take on to Paul's. And if not, what does that look like for a new site who's coming on to optimize and make sure that they're in a place where they're earning as much income as they can?

Yeah, I think the only thing that I would probably add, just to really simplify it a little bit, is that a lot of different ad managers have different minimum requirements. So that naturally just filter down, you know, which one would be a good option for you based upon your current traffic profile and page views and that sort of thing. Obviously, like you said, I'm biased. So I think ad thrive is the best and would encourage you to.

It would be an issue if you didn't.

Yeah, right. But definitely just making sure. Asking a lot of questions, you know, are they a Google certified publisher or. And do they.

Can you explain what that is for those who aren't familiar? So when you say Google Certified Publisher, Paul, you had talked about Google being a really important company. So when people hear an ad network or an ad company, why is Google included in that conversation?

So Google.

Sorry, I didn't direct that. I need to get better at double interviews. No, no, no. No thoughts on that. No problem.

Let the expert talk on this.

You know, when we think of Google, we think, you know, google.com and their search engine and you might think of Gmail and you think of. You might think of YouTube if, you know, they own that. Do you think of like those parts of what they do, but they actually also run it. They run the largest kind of advertising systems company that publishers work with. So they run ad servers and ad exchanges and all these other pieces of what a given publisher needs to set up, as well as working directly with advertisers on that side too. So they are very. Not only are they very large in the world in general, but they're very large specifically in the kind of publishing and digital media ecosystem. So everybody has to work with them. And kind of like I mentioned before, if you are Conde Nast, you just go to Google and say, sell me an ad server, sell me an ad exchange, tell me these pieces, and that works. But what Google has also done is they set up this program called the Google Certified Publishing Partner Program, which is a real mouthful, GCPP for short. And they even.

That isn't that short. That's.

No, it's not. Yeah, they need better. They need better marketing. They have basically authorized some companies, us included, and we've been one of these partners for a long time now, to run advertising for other publishers. So it's sort of like, you know, it means that you're authorized to work with Google. You can use their tools and technologies, and if you're not authorized, you actually can't do that. So sort of like a program that makes sure that as a publisher, you know, you're working with somebody who, at least at a. There's a baseline of knowledge, there's a baseline of connectivity. Like, you know, it's, you know, generally a good company and that's what the program is meant for.

Yeah. And I would imagine that part of it for Google is they have a huge supply of people who want. Who are running ads through them. Probably one of the biggest ad. Digital ad companies. And so if they can channel that into other places, you're maximizing your revenue by working with Google, by increasing the amount of advertisers who are potentially bidding against your content to place on it.

Exactly. Yep, exactly.

Back to this, the question of optimization. So we've talked about that. I think people think about that a lot. Becca, would you be able to speak to. When you start, let's say a site isn't working with ad Thrive and they. Come on. What are some of the immediate ways that you will be able to start working with that site to increase ad earnings? And it can be as basic as possible, but let's say they maybe have ads. They're using Google AdSense, which is different than kind of the Google that we've been talking about not optimizing in the same way. So what does that look like to take those initial steps to increase some of the earnings from a site?

Yeah. So an ad manager is really going to figure out where your readers are spending the most time and also make sure that you're using the most highly viewable ad units and placing them in those places where your readers are going to be engaging. So that might be looking at the different sticky ad units that are available here at Ad Thrive. We have three different ones, and I'm assuming that probably most of the networks work with these as well, so can talk through those if you want.

Yeah. Can you explain what two things with that? So view. One of the things you said was viewability, that being a term that maybe some people are familiar with and some people aren't. Can you talk about why viewability is important and what a viewable ad actually means?

Yeah. So a viewable ad is one that is on screen, I believe, for at least a second or longer. It continues to keep changing, but basically it's a way that advertisers know that their ad is likely to be seen. So obviously they're going to pay more if they know that their ad is going to be seen by a reader versus someone just quickly scrolling past and not even seeing it at all. So why different sticky ad units are so valuable? Because they stay on the page. As a reader is scrolling down the page, the viewability tends to be a lot higher. And then you also can get those additional ad impressions as that ad will refresh from readers spending longer on the page.

Got it. Yeah. So a couple important pieces with that. That idea of viewability, I would imagine seven, eight years ago, 10 years ago, maybe the technology didn't exist to know if an ad was viewable. So you might have ads that, if you can imagine, it's always hard to describe on a podcast, like a desktop version of a site. And then if you have like the mobile version that squishes everything, then you have ads that suddenly end up way down at the bottom and are never viewed. And if you're a company, it's like great if you're a publisher, because then you don't have any ads and you're getting paid for it. But if you're a company, nobody's ever gonna get see that ad and you. And at that point you're probably paying for it. And so viewability becomes a really important thing because now they're able to track. I don't know when the technology for that came, but like, hey, is the ad actually showing up? Great, we'll pay for that. If it's not, we're probably not going to pay for that. So one of the strategies That I hear you saying is it's important to have ads that are highly viewable, sticky being one of them. Meaning it sticks to the page in some way. So you get to the. It's on the sidebar and you scroll down far enough and your sidebar ends and it stays on there. Or maybe an example would be if you have a video and you're scrolling, you can see that kind of collapse down and it sticks in the bottom right corner are there. You had mentioned a few other ways that you can have sticky ads. Can you talk about what those are just briefly?

Yeah. The biggest one that tends to lead to the highest revenue is the sticky footer ad. It's I think what I've heard you refer to before as an overlay ad. It basically just sticks at the very bottom of the page, can be enabled on all devices and it just takes up that small little portion to where I'm sure the majority of you probably don't even notice it anymore because it's almost on every site that we go to. But yet you earn so much from that little ad unit because it's sticky and you're getting those additional refreshes and it has high viewability because it's always on screen.

It's like 100% viewability. That'd be an ad that's 100% viewable. Or maybe there's some small little pieces or technology reasons why it wouldn't be. But essentially it's 100% of the ad and it's probably going to be there. I guess the disclaimer would be if somebody leaves after a second or before a second, then it's technically not viewable. So the other thing that you mentioned was not only sticky ads, but you also said parts within your posts that are that are the most popular places for people to go. So can you talk a little bit about in a recipe site? We can speak specifically to recipe sites. Where do you find are the areas that are kind of the hot zones for people to spend a lot of time and then potentially the opportunity for people to create more income by putting an ad unit in those places.

Absolutely. So the recipe card, if you are a food blogger and you don't already have a recipe plugin on your site, highly recommend adding one of those. Kind of the top two tend to be wp, Recipe Maker or Tasty. But basically what it does is it's a plugin that allows you to add the set ingredients and instructions and then in turn you can enable some recipe ads within that recipe card. So the readers who are coming to your site making that recipe, they tend to spend the majority of their time hovering and having the screen open to that recipe card. And if your recipe plugin is formatted so that at least on desktop, the instructions are below the ingredients, you can insert a recipe ad right there next to the ingredients or instructions. So as someone has your site open making that recipe and figuring out, you know, what ingredients do I need to pull out of the pantry or how much of this item do I need to have? You're getting those recipe ad impressions, which in turn just helps drive up that revenue and how much they're earning from.

My guess is that there's some people who are listening. They're like, man, this all sounds like there'd be like code involved and it'd be kind of complicated. What does the process look like in terms of making decisions around putting these in? How much, how much, say, can somebody have in where they want things to be? And then how do you actually make that happen?

Great question. So I mean, I like you heard, not very tech savvy.

Can you explain the code development process behind the optimization of the ad networks? Pass.

So it's a plugin. I mean you just, it's kind of like this plug and play. You download the plugin, activate it, and then you're just adding kind of the text of the ingredients, the instructions. Definitely want to note, make sure that you are not including the specific steps and instructions earlier in the content because if you know, you tend to include it higher in the post, it's less.

That's where people will stay.

Scroll all the way down to that recipe card. But okay, look, with that assumption, you've added the ingredients and the instructions into that recipe card. Saved it. It's an easy feature that you can just add into as you're editing the post, especially within WordPress. And then you would just reach out to your ad manager, or hopefully they would be reaching out to you and suggesting this and they would be able to identify the best placements and you would be able to say, yeah, I like it there. I'd rather have it here. There's a lot of customizations that you can make in terms of where the ad could appear within that.

The last question that I have in that category is this kind of the art and science that we talked about before. Do you have any advice for people who are looking to weigh the balance? And this is something we always are trying to figure out with pinch of yum. I remember back to when we placed our first ad A single ad unit. We're like, is there going to be outrage on the Internet? Like, just so nervous about it. And over time, starting to realize, like, a great way to optimize revenue is to strategically place ad units. But also an important consideration to the user experience is how many different ad units somebody has to interact with. And there's kind of this balance. You referenced it before, where you kind of need to figure out what people are used to. You don't want to overstep. As people get more comfortable with things, it might be easier to introduce those. How do you go? What's your advice for people who are looking to understand how to balance the art and science of revenue optimization and user experience?

Yeah, I mean, I would. I just start off by saying that more ads doesn't equate with more money, you know, so you just don't want to go off and start throwing all these ads in everywhere you possibly can and then hope that you're gonna get as much revenue as possible. So really focusing on those areas where your readers are spending the most time adding the highly viewable ad units, like the sticky footer ads, sticky sidebar ad, recipe ads, and then also listening to your readers and knowing your readers. You know it. Sometimes you can try something and then you could get a lot of negative backlash from it. And then you're like, oh, okay, wait, I need to scale that back a little bit more, and that's okay. And like you said, it's that constant dance of figuring out what your readers. What works well on your site may not necessarily be what works well on another site. So you have to, one, enjoy your site yourself as a reader and not be going to your own site. But then two, know your readers. And that varies depending upon, you know, site by site.

Yeah, it's a. It's a great answer because it's going to depend, like, it depends on the norms, it depends on the industry. If you are in a niche of minimalism and simplicity, that's going to be different. If you're in the niche of, like, you know, making money from a website, like, maybe they're gonna be more comfortable with that idea and understand it. So it's really about knowing your audience and also knowing yourself and your own comfort level, which is important. Speaking of niches and different industries, Paul, can you talk to the reality of different sites having different earning potential based on the content that they publish and produce? And where does a recipe site fit in there? Is it on the lower end? Is it on the higher end? What does that look like for recipe creators and publishers. In regards to the earning potential for.

Recipe content, I would say recipe sites are on the higher end. When you look kind of across all verticals, they're definitely not the highest. If you're writing a blog, talking to finance professionals, that's going to do really well because whatever.

But talk about why that is, because I think it's an interesting case study.

Advertisers are generally targeting. They're targeting at a from. They're targeting their ads on a bunch of different criteria, but the two primary ones are what's the content on the page and who are the users. And you know, it's funny, sometimes when I speak at a conference, I'll talk about this, but like, if you look at a magazine is a pretty good analogy. If you look at a travel magazine, like, you can think about like, well, who's the audience of a travel magazine? It's going to be someone who's probably a bit more affluent. They might you a little bit older. They're obviously interested in travel. I know that about them. But like, what other things can I figure out about the audience of that magazine? So when you open a travel magazine, you will see ads for maybe not today, but cruise lines and airlines and destinations around the world and whatever. But you'll also see ads for maybe luxury cars. You'll see ads. It's funny, the last time I did this, I opened a magazine, I don't have magazines that often but. And it had an ad for Botox because like the audience skewed slightly older. So things like that. So you get things and you start thinking about what's the audience. So in digital advertising, advertisers are working the same way and they're thinking, what's the audience of a given website? So for food, you know, these are people who are probably are the main shopper in their household. So they're going to the store every week and they're going, you know, they're going to the grocery store or they're ordering.

Online purchasing decisions.

Exactly. And that's a really important criteria. They are, you know, actively in the process of thinking about what to buy. So like, the time to talk to them is really relevant. You know something about them, you know that they like to, you know that they either like to cook or like they have to cook. So therefore, like food advertisers obviously going to want to be there. And food advertisers are a very large category of advertisers. So, you know, it's all different and all over the place. But those are some of the reasons why food does pretty well relatively to other verticals.

Yeah. What's on the low end? Like what would be the sites that in the ad world don't earn much at all? Like I think of, I don't know if it's true, but like celebrity gossip sites, like as potentially low earning sites. Is there anything else just out of curiosity?

Celebrity gossip doesn't do great. You know, sadly one vertical that doesn't do well that we're actually working on ways to help them is news doesn't do great in a lot of cases. And we all want to support journalism but like, you know, advertisers are a little wary. There's no purchase decision and advertisers are wary of being near content about wildfires or coronavirus or whatever else.

Yep. Can you talk about that as one of the reasons why ad networks might be able to charge a premium and how that works as it relates to programmatic advertising by having standards for who they're approving as their sites? Because I remember this conversation from a while ago, but the idea of like swine flu potentially talking about pig and then like a pork ad running against it and they're being like, wait, no, this is not what we want. And so one of these strategic advantages that an ad network would have or an ad agency that's helping bloggers is they're able to curate high quality sites. Is that still true? And why is that true?

I mean, it's one of the most important things that we do is we only work with the best sites and it's hugely valuable to the specific publisher that we bring on board. But it's hugely valuable to all the publishers because when we go, you know, you go back to what I was saying before, there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of sites, sites that an advertiser could buy with. And sure, they know Facebook, they know Google, they know Spotify, they know better homes and Gardens, they know some group of like very large and big well known brands. But once you get past that first hundred or two people don't know who they are. And so a big part of what we do is we show to advertisers the value of this collection that we brought together, that they're all so good and so passionate and so their contents of such high quality, their audiences love what they're doing. Like that goes a long way to getting advertisers to say, yeah, we're going to add these in case of food. I forgot how many sites we have but hundreds and hundreds of food sites because we can show the quality of the aggregate advertisers say, yeah, let's advertise on all these hundreds of sites. Whereas if you're not with an ad network or you're with one with lower standards, they might say, I'm not so sure about that. I don't know if that's good enough for me. I'm just going to stick to these ones over here that I know are good. So the aggregation and the quality and being really, super careful about who we work with is really, really important.

Yeah, that makes sense. So we're coming up to an interesting season. We're in an interesting season. 2020 is an interesting season. But speaking specifically from industry standards, we're coming up on an interesting season, which is quarter four. And Becca, I'm interested to hear you talk about why quarter four important. Why is this kind of the sweet spot when you're thinking about food sites, when you're thinking about publishers, and when you're thinking about ads in general? Why is quarter four such a big deal?

So year over year, quarter four continues to be like the peak advertiser spending. So if you think and look at the trends year over year, you tend to see huge jumps in Q4. So that's really the time to optimize those placements on your site, because that's when the advertisers are going to pay the most to serve ads in those placements. And especially this year, in the midst of COVID and everyone being stuck at home, we all are looking for reasons and excuses to celebrate, right? Yeah. So holidays are that much more important, and readers are beginning to search for those recipes, search for different ways to celebrate, fun activities to do with their kids, whatever it might be, even if it's from home, but different ways to celebrate that, and they're starting even sooner. So I guess my encouragement to the listeners is that maybe in the past you would wait until a little later to start publishing and putting out the holiday recipes and the holiday content and this year start sooner, you know, like you could even start now, I guess when we're recording this, I don't know.

When it's gonna be released.

We're about a month out, you know, from Halloween, and readers have already been listening a month prior to or looking up those recipes for Halloween a month ago. You know, so it just. What we have known from the past doesn't necessarily apply in terms of reader behavior this year and where we're at, but we do still anticipate that increased advertiser spending as we.

Yeah, and it's interesting how that changes. You know, I think of even March and April, and I remember reading, I think maybe even some of the articles you had put together, Paul, about how different traffic was and also how different ad rates were. Where traffic went up, ad rates went down because advertisers were spending less. Everybody was at home hanging out, looking for recipes or DIY projects or whatever it might be. But let's say it was a normal year, which is maybe hard to imagine. Can you talk about how things work? This is something that I learned maybe a few years ago and started to understand. But Paul, what do the trends look like on a yearly and then like quarterly and then even. Do you see trends and differences on a weekly basis? Looking at the food vertical?

Definitely. I mean, food vertical is very, has been, has been very strong over the years. It's seen growth year over year over year, which has been great. And you know, part of that is just digital advertising is getting bigger. People are spending more time online. Advertisers are coming online more. I think last year was the first year that digital advertising was the largest form of advertising, like outpacing even TV advertising. So, like the money going into digital is getting bigger and bigger and food is a huge component of that. It's, you know, it's, I think, you know, I think food might be the largest place where people spend their money. So there's a lot of advertising money there, which is great. So the trends have been positive and on a year by year basis, they've been positive. And even this year, like, you know, there was, you know, this year has been very unusual in a variety of ways. We definitely have continued to see, I keep knocking on wood because you never know what's going to happen this year. But things have continued to get better from when they weren't great back in March and April to today. So that's a good thing on a week to week, month to month basis. I mean, Becca mentioned some of this, but holidays are huge for food. Labor Day, we saw huge spikes of people looking for barbecues and salads and different things like that. You know, all the summer holidays are kind of similar. Halloween is huge for, you know, whether it's, you know, stuff for your kids or theme parties for your in college, like there's all different things people are looking for where they're looking for recipes. And this year is, in some ways, this year is the same. Like there's still those spikes, there's still those things in some Ways this year is a little different sometimes because, you know, earlier this year, we saw big spikes around. Baking was enormous. Like, everyone was looking to bake at home. Like, that was a huge thing. We saw huge spikes around cocktails. Like, everyone was like, oh, my God, I need a drink at the end of the day and give me something good. So there were definitely different things this year, but that seasonality and those holidays and those events are really big and always are.

Yeah. So if you were to say, hey, looking at a year, quarter four is high, would you say quarter one is a low in terms of ad rates? Is that something that we should expect? And then if you were to rank them best to worst, quarter four top, quarter one bottom. Where do three and two fit in?

Quarter two is the second best.

Okay.

Quarter three is the third best. And Q1 is the worst. It's Q4, Q2, Q3, Q1, roughly speaking. Got it.

Yep. And interesting, because it's kind of hard as a publisher, you see quarter four against quarter one. Like, when you look at those and you're like, wait a minute, like, why did these things dive? Can you explain what's happening on the company side when they're spending money and why you see sometimes a spike at the beginning of any quarter or at the. See a spike at the end of any quarter and a dive at the beginning? And in some ways, it almost seems like quarter four is the best because it's the end of a quarter and it's the end of the year. Why does that exist? I mean, we know it's like Christmas and gift buying and Hanukkah and people are getting together and celebrating. But from an ad spend perspective, from a budget perspective, why is that happening?

Yes, budget is the key word. I mean, advertisers are saying right now, actually, they're planning their budgets. Some of them are already done, but they're planning their budgets for next year. Right now they're thinking, okay, what did 2020 look like for us as a company? How effective was the advertising that we did? What were the kinds of advertising that were good, that were bad? Where do we cut? Where do we add? They're making those decisions right now and thinking about their budget. And then at the beginning of next year, they're going to say, okay, in the first quarter of the year, we are going to spend 10% of our annual budget in this quarter. So on January 1, a whole bunch of. Well, hopefully not January 1, January 2, let's say a whole bunch of people go into the office or not the Office to their virtual office, to their.

Basement with their sweats on.

Exactly. And they. They sit down at their computer and they start setting up ad campaigns. They say, okay, I've got, you know, you know, I'm. I'm a. I sell chocolate, so I'm going to set up. I've got a campaign for my chocolate bar, and I've got a campaign for my chocolate chips, and I've got a campaign for my. My chocolate, you know, my. My candy bag, like, whatever it is. And they've got different ads that they have, and they're setting up different campaigns. So at the very beginning of the quarter, people are literally typing into their systems, like. Like, I want to buy this many of these ads on these sites and with these criteria. And here's the ad, what it looks like. They're setting things up.

So in the beginning, literally getting started, like, exactly.

And so at the beginning, there's few people have. Few advertisers have done it. They're just not set up yet. They're not ready. And as the quarter wears on, more and more people are set up. More and more things are happening. More and more people understanding, like, oh, this ad that I'm running over here is working well, Let me spend more on that one and begin to optimize. And, like, I push more into the places that are working. You see more money coming through. And then at the end of the quarter, you get the funny, you know, corporate America and corporate world stuff where people are like, you got to spend your budget.

You got to spend all my money. Exactly. Because then I'm going to lose it.

If I got 10% left at the end of the quarter. Like, I got to. I got to plow that through the system because.

Such a weird reality of budgets.

Exactly, exactly. So that. So it's these. In some ways, it's abstract, but when you think about it, like, it's literally people sitting at their computer, like, setting stuff up, like, that's what's happening, but it's happening thousands of times over again. So it's like, there's not one advertiser, there's tens of thousands of them.

And when you think of that on a quarterly basis, we're into the end of the quarter, we got to spend our budget. The culmination is quarter four, where we have money from the year and money from the quarter. We got to get through this, we got to spend it all. So you see this kind of perfect storm, not only on the recipe side, more people making recipes in November and December, and also Companies being able to make more because it's the peak season for buying and then it's the end of their spend. So it's kind of this perfect storm of being able to optimize ads, which is awesome. I'll say.

One quick, funny story on that. Really quick. This is like six, seven years ago now. It was the end of a quarter and we saw this huge spike in spending from one advertiser. Like the last, I think it was March 31, like 10 o' clock in there. We're like, what is this huge site? And we look and it was Caterpillar, the company that makes, like the trucks. And they were advertising on, like, food sites and parenting sites. And we were like. And they were just like. They just spend their budget. I'm like, thanks, Caterpillar. Like, it's just like, you know, it creates such weird incentives for all of.

Those people looking to buy a backhoe and a bottle of ketchup. It's a really small market, but it's the construction and condiments market. So that's great. So, coming to the end of this, one of the things that I like to check in on and hear a little bit about is what is your encouragement to the people who are in the early stages still? So the people who are just getting started, who want to get to the point where they're able to work with an ad network, but they're still in that early stages and trying to get that traction. Becca, would you have anything that you'd say to those people and advice that you'd give them as they're looking to get started? Hopefully someday be able to start monetizing their site and running ads and potentially working with Adthrive to do that.

Yeah, I would say continue writing and answering the questions that you would have as though you were a reader looking for that recipe or whatever topic it is that you're talking about? You know, because Google can. Algorithms continue to change. They continue to try to optimize how people will find various content. And so, you know, I think if you really just focus on the reader and answering the questions that they have, you'll be more likely to see the growth that comes along with that and then just pushing it out through all the different channels that you possibly can, you know, making it as easy as possible for readers to find and access your content.

That's great. I think it's one of the recurring things that we hear that's so important is to not get lost in the kind of surrounding things around publishing, which is like optimization and social media and tips and tricks. And like I said at the beginning, all of those are really important and they're a piece of the puzzle. But the core is to make sure that the thing that you are creating is helpful and valuable and insightful and that somebody's coming to that and saying, you know what? This is helping me, whether it's a recipe, informational article, entertainment, that you're getting better at doing. That core thing is such, I think, such great advice and such a good reminder for us to look at getting really good at that as the thing that we do. Um, so. So I love that. How about on your end, Paul? Is there anything that you would say for people who are in those early stages as a consideration as they're looking to grow and build and eventually create an income from their site?

I'll say the same thing a slightly different way. Like, great content wins. Like, even if today you're. It's hard and it's a grind, and you feel like you're not having success and you're not where you want to be. Like, if you keep doing what you're. If you believe what you've got is great, and your little audience or bigger audience or whatever, like, feels that it is great, like, keep doing that. Like. Like, it's funny. Like, I'm a big home cook. Like, I love to cook. And, you know, seven years ago, I remember looking at, like, blogs and being like, I don't think these are. These are good. This isn't quality stuff. Like, I don't trust this. Like, whatever. And I would go to, like, the big recipe sites and get my stuff there. And now it's like, everything I cook is from blogs, like, every single thing. And, like, there's so many amazing people. And, like, people. The people who are great, like, floated to the top. And I think if you think you're great, like, just keep doing it. And I'll say the other side of that is that that's what advertisers want. Like, the number of meetings I've walked into with advertisers, and we're like, oh, you know, we represent this site and this site and this site. And they're like, oh, my God, like, pinch of them. I love Lindsey. Like, they don't know Lindsey, and I've only met Lindsay once. But, like, they love that. They love that connection. So advertisers, like, when they see great content, like, that's where they want to be, too. So I think it's important for both sides.

Yeah. What helpful insight to know it exists outside of just the reader. It's also the people you're partnering with, whether that be advertisers or sponsored content. So obviously people are most people, I'm guessing are familiar with AdThrive. So I'll do a little plug for that and a simple AdThrive, Google or AdThrive.com if people want to check out AdThrive and see what they're up to. But thank you both so much for coming on the podcast. Just like my intro in my outro, I will direct these to each of you. So Becca, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. And thanks for being a part of it.

Thank you for having me.

And Paul, thank you so much for coming on and being a part of the podcast.

Thanks very much. It was awesome.

Awesome. Yeah. Great to connect and hopefully we'll be able to connect again in the future. Until then, thanks guys.

And that's a wrap on this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Thanks again for tuning in today. We hope you enjoyed this episode and if you have any feedback or comments, we would love to hear them@foodbloggerpro.com 275. There you'll find the show notes for this episode with any resource links that you might need from the episode, as well as just a quick recap of the episode as a whole. I also wanted to draw your attention to an email opt in that we actually have on our homepage. So if you go on over to food foodbloggerpro.com you'll see an email opt in right there in the middle of the screen. And in addition to getting podcast emails and blogging newsletters and just more emails about who we are at Food Blogger Pro, you'll also get a free PDF download of 16 different ways you can monetize your food blog. It's huge, it's super long, it has a ton of awesome information in it and we think you're really going to enjoy it. So you can opt in free. Get that free@foodbloggerpro.com all right, that's all from us this week. Thanks again for tuning in. We'll see you next time. And until then, make it a great week.