410: AI, Third-Party Cookies, and Changes in Video Advertising Standards with Paul Bannister from Raptive

This episode is sponsored by Duet. If you currently have an email list, you may feel like one of these three things here. Number one, you don't know what to actually send to your list, or how often. Number two, your email list is a bit of an afterthought once you create new content. Or number three, you're not even scratching the surface of what you could be doing with it. Or all of the above. I think that's usually the case with us. It's all three of those things. If any of those sound like you, you should really check out Duet. They are a team of email strategists and copywriters backed by Ali Grummert, who you've probably heard here on the podcast a few times, and they help bloggers like you engage readers and send traffic back to your site from email. And as you've heard time and time again on this podcast, your email list is one of the most valuable assets. As a business owner, you own your list so you're not impacted by constantly changing social algorithms or Google updates or all of those other things that we have to deal with, but instead you can decide what your audience sees and when you have control. And Duet can help you by giving you feedback on your existing email strategy and by actually writing emails and getting email sequences set up within your account. By working with the Duet team, you'll feel better about how you're showing up for your audience, consistently send valuable traffic back to your site, and feel more confident connecting with your subscribers. So here's what you have to do. Head to Duet co foodbloggerpro that's D U E T T co foodbloggerpro All One Word to download a guide to help you welcome new subscribers to your email list. That's a really important thing, that new subscriber series that you have and learn more about how the Duet team can help you leverage your email list for even more traffic and engagement, which is what we're all about and what we're all after. This is also really cool and I would encourage you to check this out. You can book a free discovery call on that page if you're interested in learning more about how Duet can help you. Again, that's Duet co foodbloggerpro and thanks to Duet for sponsoring this episode.

Hey there, this is Emily and you're listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Today on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Paul Banister, who is the Chief Strategy Officer and co founder of Raptive. Right off the bat, I just wanted to say that this interview is conducted in mid April. So over the course of the interview they're going to mention Ad Thrive and Cafe Media quite a bit. But at the end of April Adrive and Cafe Media rebranded to become Raptive. So I just wanted to clear any confusion out of the way and let you know that they are all the same thing, but now they are called Raptive. Anyways, it's a really great interview. They're talking about all sorts of hot topics in the blogging and tech space, including the removal of third party cookies, ChatGPT and AI and how it might affect content creation, the rapid growth of video and how it's changing advertising and lots more. They also touch on the transition from universal analytics to GA4 and how it might affect Raptive's eligibility criteria and more about the new standards for video advertising. It's a really interesting episode and we know you're going to get a lot out of it, so I'll just let Bjork kick it off.

Paul, welcome to the podcast.

Great to be here Bjork. Thanks very much.

Yeah, welcome back. You've been on I think a few different times. You have a depth of expertise specifically in the world that a lot of people who listen to this podcast would be interested in, which is revenue advertising. Your role officially is strategy Officer, Chief Strategy Officer at Ad Thrive Cafe Media. Is that correct?

That is correct.

Cool. Previously though in the research, now we do these research for these podcasts. So then I get these notes and I'm like wait a minute, I didn't know this. Your role previously was the founder of a very early and one of the most popular online gaming review sites. What was the site and tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah. So I to. To age, to date myself. I have the great benefit of getting out of College in the mid-90s when the web was like being born.

Yeah.

Use the earliest web browsers, even ones that didn't even have graphics. Like real, real early days go for mail.

Was that or what was the like email client? That was the first email client that people would use.

I used Elm and Pine. Remember all the email wood names like Unix, stuff like real like super super early. And so I got at that point in time and consider taking a traditional job and on the side did some traditional stuff. But I decided in my parents basement to start a website. Love playing video games. I still do as much as I can these days.

Sure.

And back then I was like I'm gonna play video games, review them, write tips and hints and whatever else and Got it off the ground. It started doing really well. I started hiring freelancers. I hired some people to help me. A good friend of mine built out the back end. And it was before there wasn't like WordPress didn't exist. There was no CMSs that existed. You had to kind of build it all yourself. And so we built all these different things. And then this was starting in 95 when we started the site. It did pretty well, pretty quickly. And we immediately got interest from somebody who wanted to buy advertising on the site. So ads had, I think the first ad on the web was on hotwire.com, which is in 94. So we had ads on our site in 95. So we were not far behind.

That's so crazy.

Very, very beginning. Yeah, I think made like $1,000 from selling a banner ad. And there was no, there was no ad server. You didn't count. Like there was a viewability. There were no impressions. Like click through rate was click through rate today like you're happy if you get like a 0.1% click through Rate back then the click through rate was like 4% or something astronomical. Very different time. And so ran it for a couple of years and eventually sold it to a publishing company that had a video game magazine. And it became like the companion website of the magazine. So it was really interesting. It was a great experience. And you know, I had already been very interested in like media and publishing and I worked on the school newspaper in college and the university TV station and whatever else. And. And so it was like kind of part of my passion was like content and making and running my own website was a great, you know, way to get out of college and really get into the thick of it.

And it is it right, that it was like a top 100 website in.

Yeah, it was a top world like.

In all the world wide web.

Yeah. And you know, this is so early where like I think, you know, most sites, any site we work with today, sure we would be big enough to qualify for app thrive, but like we wouldn't be enormous that, you know, back then there weren't that many people on the web. So it was, it was super.

Right, right. But it looked different too because it's like the pool wasn't as big. And so the percentage of attention that you had for people using the web, like, that's really cool. And, and one of the things that's so interesting with anybody who has the experience like you do is you, you view all of this differently. Like for somebody who comes in and starts, you know, yesterday. The way that they understand the context, the history, it's kind of like I remember in high school having these teachers who had taught for a long time or even, like history teachers, and they have a different appreciation for the way that things work because they have this long context around changes and patterns. And a lot of the things that we're going to be talking about on this podcast are things that are changing and evolving. But when you've watched those changes happen for 25 years, it. You. I would. I would assume you feel differently about it than you would. If it's like, you've been here three years and there's a big change happening. Does that resonate and does that feel true in terms of your response to things that sometimes seem like, oh, my gosh, this huge thing is changing. But for you, you have experience with things changing so much through the years that it's kind of like that's part of. That's part of the deal with the web.

Yeah, it's a good. It's a really good point. It's funny, I can't speak for the other side, so I don't know how other people feel when some big thing comes out and it's scary. I do know for me when.

Cause I think you're.

You're, You're. You're. You're right on the. Right on the money when something comes out that seems scary and big and like, oh, my God, what is this thing? For a little bit, I'm like, oh, my God, like, this is terrifying. And then, like, you. I quickly get to, all right, what do we do? How do we. How do we get ahead of this? Like, what's the opportunity? Like, how do we turn lemons into lemonade? Like, what's. What's the right way to. To deal with this? I'm working on a presentation now, actually, almost to this exact point where it's like, we thought cookies going away was the big thing, but actually probably AI is the big thing. And then, yeah, right, Give me some other thing. We're like, oh, the AI thing is nothing. Forget about that. We've all lived. Anyone who's been in the business for 10 years has lived through the pivot to mobile, the pivot to video. What are apps going to do? Search engine changes, all these different things. Um, so I think the. The more you've done it, the more you just realize, like, all right, put your head down, keep working, and keep doing your thing and figure out how to move to the next level.

Yeah. So you Mentioned two things there that I think people would be really interested to talk through. The first one, you know, if we were to have talked six months ago, a year ago, definitely would have been top of the list. And that's the removal of the cookie and specifically that happening with Google. Can you talk a little bit about what that is for those who aren't familiar and then we can talk about why that's important to be aware of. Yep.

So most of digital advertising today is based on a technology called third party cookies, which is a feature in browsers that lets people track you across the web. For mainly motivated by privacy reasons, many browsers have been getting rid of third party cookies. So Safari on iOS and you know, Apple Mac devices and Firefox and other browsers have gotten rid of those cookies. And at this point Chrome, Google's browser is the only one that, that still has third party cookies. They announced in 2020 that they were going to get rid of them by 2022. That has now been delayed several times and now they're saying that that deadline is the middle of next year. So it's a big deal because so much of like the foundation of advertising is based on this technology. So a lot of time has been spent over the last couple of years like rebuilding technology, figuring out new solutions, figuring out what is much more privacy proof, privacy preserving, privacy friendly, user friendly and kind of making a better advertising set of systems. So we've been working on that since the beginning. Back in 2020 even we were working on things pre 2020and with the delays it has, you know, in some regards it's, it's saps some energy from the process because a lot of companies are like, oh, Google's never going to do this. I don't believe it's going to happen. Sure, I'm wasting my time on this. But it does seem, you know, to those of us who are very close to it, and we're very close to it, that Google is getting more and more serious about it now. They really are investing a lot of resources in IT across the board. You know, I can't speak to for sure it will happen next year, but I think it's much more likely it's going to happen next year than at the same point in the process a year or two ago. So I kind of really believe it's going to happen at this point and we're really spending time getting ahead of it. I'm also more confident than I have been in the past where in the beginning maybe a little bit to your point, it's like, oh my God, this guy's falling away. What are we going to do? And now I'm like, all right, there is a raft of new technology being built. The foundations are being re architected and restructured. This will be okay and we're going to get through this and figuring it out. And it'll probably be a little bumpy, but I don't think it will massively change from a publisher or a user or some other perspective. Really heavily change the way things work.

Sure. So help me understand a little bit the why behind it. Because with Safari, so that's Apple's browser. That makes sense. Okay. Safari, Apple's extremely privacy focused. They don't have any downside in removing cookies because they're not an advertiser. They don't make their money from advertising. Same with Firefox. They're a. Mozilla is a nonprofit. Is that right?

Yep, that's right.

Okay, so nonprofit. They don't have. It's not like they're advertising. Their primary focus is how do we create the best browser possible. One of the ways is to make browsing more private. So we're going to remove a third party cookie. And the basic idea is like, you can't be tracked across sites in the same way. Would, would the basic example be like if you are. If I'm on Amazon and then I'm looking at like footballs and then I go to another site, then I won't see an ad for footballs because I'm not being tracked across sites. Is that a good example of a third party cookie? Okay, so it makes sense for Safari, makes sense for Firefox, but Chrome is a little bit, you know, it's owned by Google and Google's cash cow is advertising and that's how they make all their money. So what is the motivation for a company like Google that makes all of their money from advertising to say we're going to take away one of the most effective ways for us to advertise? Is it just they know they're going to lose users if that goes away? Or is it like European rules around tracking and needing to make a browser accessible to Europe as well as the.

US I think it is. So I'll talk about like a positive and positive. Negative is the right way to frame it. The first point is what you said about regulation. The way the wind is blowing what users want, like it's changing and it's harder and harder for Google to be this like sort of outcast where they're not doing what everybody else has done. And they're getting pressure from regulators and from different governmental bodies around the world that like they have to do more to protect privacy and they just know they have to do it. So I think, so I think the reason they're doing it is really that like external pressure which is probably governmental but there's other factors to the market.

In general is shifting and there's recognition of that. Yeah.

The other thing from an advertising perspective to, to massively oversimplify, Google has. Google has three parts of their business that are driven by advertising. They have some non advertising parts of their business, but there are three core parts of Google that run on advertising. There is Google search, there is YouTube and there is Google Ads. Google Search. We all know you go to google.com, you search stuff, you see search ads. That is their cash cow that makes them gobs and gobs of money that relies on third party cookies nearly not at all because it's based on the search term. And by the way you're logged in, most people are logged into Google anyway so they know a lot about you regardless. So the huge bucket of their money is unaffected. Bucket number two is YouTube which is small but growing and they really believe in it. And it's video and video is the future and there's a big investment there. Also relatively unaffected by third party cookies because so much of it's about like what you're watching on YouTube.

Sure, you're watching an insurance video and they show an insurance ad.

Exactly, exactly. And they can also share the data across google.com and YouTube.com because you're logged in and you're using that. They don't, they, they don't need third party cookies or anything to do that. So those two parts of the business which are by far and away the largest and the most profitable parts of their business, pretty, pretty protected from this change. Google Ads, which is the part that like you know, you and us and any publisher on the web uses that part is the least protected. But it's also Google's smallest business. And, and it's, it's kind of a bit of a problem. So what, what they're trying to do is saying on the Chrome side of their business, how do we get rid of these things? How do we build some new technologies into Chrome to make it so advertising still works? And then the Google Ads part is saying okay, how do we use these new technologies to build things on top of it and really kind of continue what we're doing, continue providing value to advertisers. So the big difference, I think, again, I sort of like buried it in there, but between Apple and Firefox and others is they took away third party cookies and they added nothing to support advertising. Chrome is saying, we're going to take away third party cookies and we're building a whole bunch of new tech that you can use also. And that new tech is really interesting and really cool. And that's where a lot of the focus is on building into those new technologies.

When you say you can use, are you referring to ad networks like AdThrive?

Yeah, exactly like ad. You know, ad driven companies can build on top of that technology.

Do you have, is there an example that you could give what that looks like or is it pretty technical in nature? I mean, I'm guessing regardless, it's technical in nature. But if not third party cookies, I'm trying to think through, like, does it have to do with logged in behavior and incentivizing that in some way or.

So, to use your football example, in the current world, I think you said Amazon. So if you go to Amazon and you search for a football, the Amazon servers and other companies that Amazon work with store that data about you and attach it to your third party cookie. When they see you on another site, that Amazon server sees you on that site also because Amazon code is running on that site for a variety of reasons. And they say, ooh, this is Bjork. He's looking for a football. Let me show him a football ad. And that's the way it works today. One of the new technology, when third party cookies go away, that, that method of that technological method goes away. One of the new features Chrome is building as a technology they call Fudge and Fledge makes the same system work, but none of the data goes to the servers. The browser itself keeps the data so it's protected from servers. So Amazon knows that about you, but they can't see you in other places. But they can still target ads at you because of this new technology where the data itself is stored in the browser. So it's, it's your data, it's on your computer.

Yeah.

Can still use it in a private way. So it's a very different way of thinking about it. So the, what the advertiser needs is still possible to execute on, but it's done so in a way that the data is not shared back with the companies.

Sure. Which is one of the big issues. That is there's a shift happening and the shift is who owns this data.

Yeah.

I'm giving you this data. Does the company own it? Well, technically it's my data, I should own it. There's all different degrees on how government weighs in on that, from, you know, the least regulated to the most regulated. Like, you know, us in general on not as regulated, maybe European countries more regulated and then California in the middle, like all of these, all of these restrictions that are in place. But inevitably what's going to happen is the trend is towards users owning their data. And so one way to get around that while still doing some version of targeted ads is to let the user maintain their data in their browser. They can, they can slide it on or slide it off, or as you see if you use an iPhone, you get a prompt all the time. This app wants to track using Bluetooth, allow or disallow. Like that trend makes sense. And you can start to see, like you said, how the building in tools to replicate what it was doing before while also solving for a problem which is like a company owning a user's data. Right.

Yep.

Really interesting. So the date for that change is when? In 2024. Is there an actual date that you know that happened?

I think it's like third quarter. So like August number is what they're saying. There's a lot of steps also between now and then this August. I think there they actually will have, assuming they hit their goals, the new technologies will be fully turned on in Chrome. So cookies will still be there, but the new technology will be there fully as well. Right now it's only about 5% of Chrome browsers now have the technology. The other 95 will get it over the next four or five months.

Sure, got it. And one of the other things that exists in my head is like a potential outcome of this. You can say if it's accurate, not accurate, or somewhere in the middle, third party cookies go away. It becomes less. A company has less ability to track somebody. Let's say it's chicken company and they say, great, we want to track people who have searched on Google for chicken recipes and then end up somewhere else in Chominade on that. That goes away. What it seems like might happen is there would be a benefit given to curated groups of large pools of content, like an ad network, where then a company can come to them and say this chicken company can come to them and say it's Tyson Chicken. They come to them and say, we want to show our ads and we want to do it in a way that we know it's effective. We can't right now. Exactly Replicate what we did before. So we want to come to you and say, hey, on any of your content in your network that has a chicken recipe show chicken ad, is there any truth to that or will these tools that come in to replace some of the third party cookie stuff essentially stand in the middle and not require that?

I think you're totally right. So we very much believe in that. One of our big investments this year is in direct sales, is in increasing the size of our sales team that goes directly to advertisers. We hired a few months ago a woman named Marla Newman, who, she was the president of Meredith, which is a huge publishing company.

Oh wow.

Yeah, People magazine and all recipes and you know, 50 other, you know, big publications and websites. And so she ran all their sales and now she's moved over to our team and we're growing that team very significantly because we really believe what you're saying and we're seeing it to be true. Where while some of the things that advertisers want to do will be replaced with a new technology. And so the technology can enable that and that's great, some things are just going to go away. And so advertisers who want to reach those audiences are going to be working directly with publishers and ad networks like us that, to your point, have that large scale, have that aggregation with the right kinds of content, have the right aggregation of the right kinds of audiences and really can help them achieve their goals. So we, we are seeing that trend happen and we're investing in it because we know it's, it's part of the way the wind is blowing.

Yeah. And it's, when you look at it at a macro level over the last 10 years, it's interesting to see essentially what it is is just companies trying to figure out where their dollar goes the furthest. And 10 years ago it's direct sales because there wasn't technology like there is today to do programmatic advertising, third party cookies. It shifts way over, over time. Like hey, we can, we can target not only people who are looking for a chicken recipe, but are also between the ages of 25 and 35 and live in the suburbs of Minnesota. Like they can, you can get hyper targeted. As that starts to go away, potentially there's a shift back towards direct sales because the impact of the dollar spent could potentially go further. It's to be determined still. We don't know yet. But interesting to hear your thoughts and reflections on that. So that's coming down the line kind of tbd. We don't know exactly what it will look like. Like you said, it will probably be bumpy to some degree as companies are trying to figure it out and dollars get reallocated and systems get figured out. But one of the things you said, that's this new reality that we're all navigating is artificial intelligence. And amazing how quickly it's adopted. Like, I think it's the 100 million people are using or signed up for ChatGPT within like three months or something like that. I don't remember exactly what a hundred.

Million users of any technology ever.

Anything ever. Right. And Lindsay is now at the point where she just kind of rolls her eyes. It was just like an hour ago. We're sitting down a meeting. I was like a friend coded up this little AI kind of chatbot that brought in all of pinch of yum content. We could like interact with it and be like, what's, I'm going to a friend's house tonight. What's the best dessert recipe to bring? And, and so you're starting to see people use it. But it's a, it's really impactful for the world of content. You, you can write an essay in 10 seconds on, you know, best chicken recipes or whatever it is. What is, you know, as you've watched this so quickly become used by so many people and also not only are so many people using it, but it's, it's also good. Like it's really good. Good at creating content and interacting with people and solving problems. Where, where do you think that leaves us as content creators? Like, how do we approach it and what should our mindset be? Yeah, yeah.

So I think there's a lot of different angles to it. Obviously two very big buckets are content creation and content content distribution. So in the content creation world, you know, you've got the, the risks of can people just use ChatGPT or some other system like that to create content that's as good as mine or better or, or nearly as good, but to a massive scale? Like, can the Internet be flooded with a trillion new pieces of content written by a chatbot that are pretty good, Maybe not perfect, but pretty good and just like overwhelm the human generated content in a bad way. So you've got kind of risk like that on the other side. You've got like the what the way we view it a lot of the time is like, what's, what's the opportunity there where, you know, we've had a technology for a year and a half or so now called Topic which is based on GPT, which is the underlying platform that does like content inspiration. So it's like, how can you use these chatbot and AI technologies to help you figure out like what content should I make next and when I write that, what should be included in it and give me some ideas. I mean, you know, you know, and I know like writer's block is a real thing that is hard to deal with sometimes and like to use those tools to help you figure out what to do and where to go can be really powerful. And there's other applications. Like your point about you know, using your content to answer questions as a component of the chatbot is like super interesting and there's lots of things down that path. So in the world of like content creation you've got a lot of things where there are some risks, there are some real ways to use this tech that could be really interesting. I do think a big factor with content creation that's important that you know the technology is moving fast. But I think there's a while before it gets there is the point of trust. Recipes are the example where yes, you can ask Chat today to give you a recipe for chicken Parmesan. I don't know if I want to cook that recipe. Like yeah, I think I'd rather go to Pinch of Yum and say they've got a chicken, chicken Parmesan recipe.

Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah.

And like I'm going to trust, you know, Lindsey and Bjork and what their recipe is and I think that's the right way to do it. So I think trust is a really big factor that I think publishers should keep relying on and leaning on. You know, we are all real people. We want to hear what other real people have to say. We want things that are tested and true and real and something that I can believe. I think that's where the AI stuff is not there yet. On the other side you've got content distribution. And I think the risk there is with Google's Bard and Bing GPT is a progression of what Google and Bing have been doing for years now, which is like the zero click search. If they can answer the user's question on the search page and they don't need to send the traffic they have shown over the years to do that significantly. And will these technologies make it so more and more types of content can be like disintermediated that way where no one needs to go to Pinch of Yum anymore because there's a recipe that's on the Google results page and what's the dynamic there? And how do you do that? So, you know, I think again, there, it's a real risk. I think there's a question of, like, how do you get ahead of it by owning more and more of your audience, finding other platforms and ways to reach your audience. Like, what's the right way to keep. Keep kind of moving forward. So we're thinking a lot about those things. So. So anyway, you know, I think you've thought about it, I'm sure, as much as I have, like, there's a tremendous number of things that are a little scary, and then there's a tremendous number of things we're like, holy cow, I can do that. That's going to be amazing. Like, how do I get ahead of that? So, yeah, all those. Those pieces.

And it feels like the hard thing to do in a situation like this is to know that, like, nothing lasts forever. You know, I think this is maybe more like a more poetic version of it, but I just came across that Robert Frost poem, Nothing. It's. I think it's called Nothing Gold Can Stay, but I think, like. And his is more like pontificating on, you know, life and its beauty and whatnot. Right. I think it's also true in, like, business. Like, it's. It's not like 20 years from now, we're going to be doing the exact same thing. So the question is, to what degree are you willing to kind of be light on your feet and say, what are my skills? What are the abilities that I have? How can those be adapted to a new reality? And one of the things that I do think will happen is, and you kind of alluded to this, like, there's a shift from information to. I think what's happened, especially in the last three months, there's been a value shift in terms of your ability to produce information versus your ability to connect and engage and the value of information, meaning top 10 healthy coffees to get from Starbucks. That's become less valuable as a piece of content because it's purely informational. There's not a huge element of your kind of humanity wrapped up within that, as opposed to somebody who says, here's my story in transitioning my habits around drinking really unhealthy drinks from Starbucks to figuring out how to still get my fix from Starbucks but not have a bunch of sugar. Like, it shifts it from, like, story, experience, person, or towards that, away from just, like, information. And I think the stuff that's really at risk is just pure information. Like, I agree. Yeah, best Places, most affordable places to stay in Minneapolis or like, whatever it is, stuff like that. So, you know, for a content creator, somebody who's like, is this gonna take over what I'm gonna do? And now my skills are no longer valuable or I've worked really hard to build this following on the blog. Does all the search traffic go away? Do you have any advice, just from a mindset perspective how to approach it and even any ideas on. Like, you maybe alluded to this a little bit, but, like, where the opportunity might lie within some of these changes for people not to be discouraged by it, but encouraged by it.

That's a big question. I think it's a personal question or it's specific to each person to some level. Another good saying I've heard recently that I've used a lot with these things is that we will overestimate the impact of it in the short term and underestimate the impact in the long term in the sense that right now everyone's like, oh my God, it's going to destroy the world. What's going to happen? That's probably not true. We have time. These technologies take. Even though this is moving fast, it will take a time for it to get to it. So to some level, for, like, for today, keep doing what you're doing, like, build your audience, like, create great content, like, to your point, like, imbue your humanity into what you do and that those are things that like, you are good at and you can keep being good at and keep refining. And then I think for the longer term it is like, start thinking about how can you use these different tools that are being created to go faster, do more, do better, like improve what you're doing. And yeah, so I think it is, you know, in the short and medium term, stress and agitation is not valuable.

Yeah.

It just creates angst and doesn't make you feel good. So it's like, focus on what you're great at and then for the longer term, really thinking about, like, okay, like, how do I use this stuff? How do I do more? How do I. How do I go to the next level and figure out what to do next? So that's, you know, my best advice.

I think that's great. Yeah. And the idea of not will this replace me in what I'm doing, but how do I use this to make what I'm doing better? Yeah, that to me is a really interesting question, even for me. What I've tried to do is I've had, I've tried to have ChatGPT up on another screen. And as much as possible, when I run into something where I'm like, I wonder about this, I try using it to help me understand, like, building a job description. Like, hey, here's the components. Can you help me build a job description? It's, you know, questions about, like, I was doing some math, like, what does that look like? Or spreadsheet analysis, like, starting to do these things that I otherwise would have to make some brain space for. And I kind of outsource that brain space a little bit. And it's not replacing the core function of, like, me doing a podcast as an example, Although there are some examples of people doing, like, AI podcasts and having conversations, which is kind of novel in itself. But one of the things that I heard you say, and I think it's an important thing to reiterate, is, like, what's true today? And using that as your foundation for making decisions, not what might be true in the future, because we don't know. And like, we talked about, things change on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. There's pivots. But what's true today. And what's true today is, you know, people connect with people. When I think of following along and, like, learning, the places that I go to are people who have a story that they've been through that they can, like, teach me what they did. We're still, at our core, humans who connect with other humans. And if you can get good at figuring out how to help people or figuring out how to entertain people, there's an opportunity for you to create things online and build a following. And I think that's an important reminder of what's true today. How that looks will always be changing, but your skill and ability to do that over time is what you should really refine.

I agree with all that. One funny, quick story to the point of we can't anticipate where this will end up. A long time ago, someone who I used to work with ended up moving on to a company that was a very early creator of an aggregator of YouTube content. So this is like 2008, 2007, a long time ago. And I had lunch with him soon after he started there, and he started explaining to me these videos people were watching on YouTube. And I walked away from this conversation like, I was like. Like, what are you talking about? Like, who would watch? Like, this makes no sense. And what literally a year and a half later, I realized was he was explaining unboxing videos to me.

Sure.

I was like, who would watch a person open toys this is the most nonsensical thing I've ever heard. Now it's like this enormous business.

Yeah.

And so, like, none of us can anticipate where the world is going. And what seems utterly illogical and crazy today can be a big thing. So, you know, it's not really getting stressed because, like, some new opportunities will come and keep your eye on what's out there and be like, that's really interesting. Like, I could do that.

Yep. My. My dad has this phrase that he always talks about or mentions in, like, any season of stress where he talks, he says, ambiguity creates stress.

Yeah.

And I think that's largely what is happening here, is there's a transition. The transition could potentially be significant, but it's also ambiguous. And I think that's the piece that's stressful. Whereas for a long stretch of time, there were. There were changes, but they weren't changes in this way. And I think this is significant enough that it creates ambiguity. But like you said, the important thing to know is, like, out of every shift, there comes new opportunities that we never could have thought of before. And we don't know what those are until we see them. And then five years later, we look back and we're like, oh, yeah, of course. Like, if only I would have started unbox therapy 10 years ago and then have, you know, 10 million followers or whatever by opening new, like, iPhones and computers. But those opportunities will exist as well, and it's just a matter of being curious and paying attention to them. This one isn't quite as, like, juicy and not quite as maybe a big of a shift, but another big change that's happening in the world of content is this shift from universal analytics to GA4. And would be curious to hear any thoughts that you have on that or just kind of within, you know, adthrive thoughts that you have around that shift changing. And then one of the questions that came up actually within that, you know, there's a lot of people who are excited about potentially joining, but there's these markers around page views and numbers, and people kind of have those as the markers they want to get to. Will that change with the shift to GA4 for what you need to get in or to be able to apply to get accepted to AD thrive. So two questions, kind of just general thoughts around that shift, and then does that impact how you view analytics internally?

At a general level? Right now, I would say we are very much in the thick of just like, dealing with the change ourselves. We've got 44004500 sites we work with, they are almost all still running universal analytics, the old version of ga. They are all shifting and then over the next couple of months to GA4. And so we had to change all of our backend systems, all of our reporting, all of our analytics, all of our things to kind of work with the new system to, you know, Google as in normal form. The documentation isn't that great and it's missing and things that they say work, don't work and. But then there's no one to talk to. So we're kind of, you know, I think dealing with a lot of the same problems that almost anybody who's like dealing with the transition themselves is dealing with and just trying to get through this like this window of time. I do think that there are some interesting features that it has. It is another thing out in the world driven by privacy. A lot of the changes in GA4 are really around privacy and really protecting user data and doing it, doing all this in a way that is really much more privacy friendly. So that's like a real underlying trend on all of these things. So I do think like once we all get through this transition, there's some interesting things we can do with it and better analytics we can pull out of it and ways to help. So that's my, you know, 50,000 foot view of things in terms of our application process and kind of those markers, we don't plan to change them. We're monitoring kind of what's going on closely. We don't see a huge difference in terms of GA4 versus universal analytics numbers today. Maybe a couple of percent, but not enough for us to really rethink it. But as we, you know, continue down this process, down this pathway, we're always looking at it and I was trying to think about like, does this make sense? Do we, should we change what we're doing here and, and make sure we're doing it in a logical way?

Yeah, that's great. For those who are listening, we have a couple GA4 podcasts that we can link to in the show. Notes that we've, we dive deep on that. And also for Food Blogger Pro members, we have some courses and information on that. So you can check that out as well. One of the things that you talked about earlier is you said video is the future. Can you talk about what that means and why you believe that?

I believe that the greatest areas of growth on the Internet today are still video. YouTube continues to grow fast. TikTok is crazy. Snapchat is Big. There's Lemonade, which is a TikTok competitor. There's, what's the, there's another TikTok competitor out there that's, that's pretty big that I'm forgetting the name of. And that's, that's a vertical video case. But more and more and more and then there's, and then there's the continued rise of what's called connected television, which is, you know, watching TV on a Roku or Apple TV or a smart TV or something like that and the ability to, you know, everything's on demand, all those different things. So one of the biggest trends and in the digital markets, and then the digital ad market specifically is really this like continued very heavy growth in the world of video. People consume an enormous amount of people's time. Every day is spent watching video in many different formats and types and much more and more of that is moving into the digital world. So that's like a really big transition at a big moment. So at a macro level, you know, I said that because like it is where people's time is spent and it is transitioning the way it works from the old way of, you know, sitting down at 8 o' clock at night to watch busy TV on NBC and you know, watching, sitting through commercials and talking to friends about it the next day to this like, you know, highly fast moving, highly like decentralized world where, you know, there's a million shows on Netflix you can watch and a million shows on prime and a million shows on Hulu and then a trillion things on YouTube and a trillion things on TikTok and everybody's watching something different. And so it's a very big transition. And so we are continuing to build things in video, do more things in video because we know it's where there's just very significant growth and a lot of people's time is spent there.

Yeah, it's one of the things I love doing is zooming out and we can do this with your story because you had a website in 1995 and looking at the changes and kind of the why behind it in, you know, you can hear video. Video is the future. Like, okay, why is that? Well, if you look at any progression of, you know, or snapshot of the web in 1995, there was text and there were, there were links, maybe there was images, but like they would have load loaded really slow. And part of it is just, it's not like suddenly somebody had an idea and it was like, oh, images. We should do images. Brilliant idea. Let's do. Part of it just has to do with the capability of the Internet. And as images became more easily distributed through faster Internet, suddenly you started to see images show up more on websites. And then it was maybe like GIFs or moving images or like the, the clip art kind of stuff. Like you'd start to see that because you could do that. And it feels like, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but it feels like within the last five years really one of the shifts that's happened is mobile, but then also video capable mobile. Like when phones were first coming out, the idea that you'd be on a cell connection and then watch a video at high def quality, it's just there would have been a lot of difficulty delivering that video that just doesn't exist today. So is that one of the reasons why there is this shift? It's just because it's now capable for a computer, a phone, a tablet. All of these devices can easily stream video and people can more easily create the video as well. So there's not only is the demand going up, but the supply is starting to match that demand. And that's where then advertising comes in to sit in the middle of that and say like, okay, a lot of people wanting to watch this, we're going to run ads against it. There's a decent amount of people creating it who can create income from it. Does that feel like an accurate kind of portrayal of the shift that's happened?

Yeah, I think 100%. And it's, it's also part of, it's like not new when we're sort of talking about this a minute ago, it's not new time spent watching. It's time shifting from traditional television to these new types of video as well as new moments. My family went to France for spring break a few weeks ago and we took the train at the end because we were flying out of London. We took the train from Paris to London and so we're going through the French countryside at 200 miles an hour and all four of us are on phones or iPads.

Yeah, totally.

And it's like, wait a minute, what is this? This is unbelievable. Yeah, like tell that story to somebody from 10 years ago and they would be like blown away. And now you're very mundane kind of experience. And to your point, it's just like the capabilities and the ability for these, for this to work didn't exist and now it does and it's creating a lot of changes and a lot of, a lot of opportunities.

Yeah. And it's it's, it's, you know, if you were to go a hundred years ago, it's not that the attention wouldn't have been there. It just would have been in different places. So you would have had a newspaper and in the newspaper there would have been ads. And it's the same general concept. It's just that the medium is shifting to different delivery platforms and different ways of being consumed. So there's also been, this is now drilling into the video world a little bit, some shifts in the world of advertising as it relates to video ads. Can you talk a little bit about what's happened there? And for creators who do have video content, or even sometimes if they don't have video content, how they can take advantage of the premium that comes with running video ads?

Yep, for sure. So this is like a, this is weedy because it's technical stuff, high level. Tell me where I'm going. Off track.

Okay. Okay.

So the way video ads have worked for a number of years, to simplify, is there what are called in stream ads and outstream ads. In stream ads are, you know, you're watching TV and there's, there's, you know, you're watching a show and then there's a break and there's commercials. Those are in stream. And you see that on the, on the web. You see that on, on YouTube, you see that on TikTok. You see that in different formats where there's video content and then there's video ads as a component of that.

Yeah. And the content, we could view it as the stream, the stream of the video. And then within, in that video is an ad. So in stream. Okay, Exactly.

And then outstream is video ads that are just ads. They don't have any video content with them. So that is, you know, you're on a website and you see in the middle of the text there's just a video there, or there's a video player that's sticking somewhere that just has ads playing in it. No video content. So you. So that's like the other bucket. And that's the way of the way buyers bought video ads today. Really, that's just the way it's worked.

Those two buckets. And my guess is in stream is more valuable because the assumption is somebody clicks, they're watching, you have their attention, an ad runs, there's going to be more visibility for that ad.

Yep, exactly. So the challenge was there was a disconnect between what publishers just thought was an in stream video and what advertisers thought was an in Stream video for publishers, they very much went by the, and you know, us and big publishers and whatever went this way where it was really about that content. So if there's content with video ads that's in stream and if there's not, that's outstream. And so that meant, you know, we have a video player that we make available to a lot of our publishers where you can, you can take your video content, you can put it in our, in our player, we will play it on your site and you know, it'll, it'll. And then video ads will come next to it. And in many cases those video players are just on pages and they don't. The user didn't necessarily intend to watch that video. It was part of the experience. Advertisers had a different perception of what in stream versus outstream meant for them. In stream often meant things like watching tv. So where it really was like the user intended to watch, they were like, I wanted to watch this video. And that's what it was. So that's tv, that's connected television, that's.

Pressing play on a video player.

Exactly. Pressing play on a video player. It's a YouTube like experience where you're searching and you go to a video, you. It's those sort of experiences. It's really about intent. And so we realized.

Versus scrolling past a video that starts to play.

Exactly.

And you may or may not see it.

Yeah, exactly. So this, this like, sort of like definition gap has existed for a while. There's an industry trade group called the Ivy Tech Lab which defines the standards for how advertising works in digital media. I'm on the board of the Ivy Tech Lab. And so we undertook an effort to kind of redefine those video standards to make it so it was more clear. And now I think I'm over. I'm oversimplifying to some level. Now there are three kinds of video. There's in stream kept the old name, which, which really means has content. And the user really wanted to watch this. So that is click to play video players, it is connected television. It is things like YouTube. It's those sort of experiences. There's outstream, which is just ads, no content. And then there's this middle ground that we created called accompanying content. And that means that it wasn't necessarily the user's intent to watch it, but there is content here. Because, you know, I'll speak personally. For me, I believe that video ads perform better when they're connected to content, when they are something the user could be interested in. Watching when they are kind of part of the experience a little bit more. And that creates that kind of second tier. So. And now that makes it. So now the definition is clear for both buyers and sellers. And there's not this kind of definition gap anymore. So that, that's a brand new standard that was released two weeks ago. And now there's a process of like, people have to rebuild their systems and there's a bit of a time, but I would say in about the next six months or so, all the systems will change to kind of like deal with the fact that there's this new kind of middle tier and that will change how advertisers buy and probably pricing for things and things like that. And so that's the, that's the weedy story.

Yep.

Hopefully down in a way.

And it reminds me a lot of when viewability became something in the average. In the traditional advertising world where they said if you have a traditional ad, it has to be at least 50% viewable. Like 50% of it on the screen for one second.

Yep.

And again, my guess is that was there's a gap where publishers were like, hey, I have this Adam on my site. But it's like embedded in the footer. Right. Nobody ever sees it. And the, and the advertiser is like, I don't. It's not going to make me any sales if nobody sees it. So you have to close that gap by defining better what it actually is. Seems like a similar thing in the video world where you're not going to pay a premium rate. If it's like an autoplay video that somebody hasn't opted into watching, it's still valuable. Like there's still something there. But it's not as valuable as somebody putting their eyes on a video player, clicking play and saying, I'm going to watch it. So what does that mean for publishers? Knowing that video is the future, knowing that video is important, knowing that it's one of the best ways to create advertising revenue and will only become more important. What does that mean for us in terms of how we approach video content on our sites?

I think probably the same as what we were talking about. AI In a funny way, I think for today, like, keep doing what you're doing, keep making video content, keep trying to get it in front of your users. We've seen a lot of proof that even when a video is autoplayed, if the video matches the content of the page, that will perform better. That drives higher value in the, in the ad format. It gets more attention from the user. That's a really important thing and that's really good.

Meaning like if the video is in our, in our world, if the video is a recipe and the recipe is the same as the one that you're on the page for.

Yeah, yeah. Like that will just do better. Um, we even see, you know, I don't know if, I don't know if we publish data on this, but we've even seen some search benefit where like if you have matching video content and text content, like you can get a search benefit out of that too. So there's like a lot of reasons why you want to make video content and get in front of users and then also work on experiences and what we're doing is as well, what are experiences you can build where those sort of click to play experiences can work better and get more, more eyeballs on them and again, try to figure out more ways to engage your users. And honestly, also, I think for people, this isn't for everybody, but I think for people who are Predisposed to it, YouTube is fantastic. TikTok is fantastic. These different platforms are great ways if you've got the voice and Persona to really get out there and do that and be a part of those platforms also there are real opportunities there that are great also. So thinking outside the box of I've got a website and that's great, but what can I do more? How do I reach my audience in different ways? And those video platforms can be really good also.

Yeah. As a last topic, speaking of diversification of platforms, one of the things that I've noticed within that thrive is diversification of revenue and starting to place an emphasis on helping creators create revenue in other ways. E commerce type things, subscriptions, affiliate. Can you talk a little bit about that transition away from just advertising? Maybe why it's important for publishers to consider that and why internally those changes or improvements or enhancements are being made within NAT Thrive.

Yeah, many of those are pretty early. I think affiliate might be one of the further ones along. We actually are, we've got a bunch of sites, we're piloting these right now and probably have more plans to roll things out later this year. From our perspective and this gets into the much bigger picture, we view us and all of the creators and publishers we work with as competing with really big media companies. And you do in search in other places today where for every search term you rank for, you're competing against Conde Nast and Dot dash Meredith and Hearst and all these giant media and Disney and Viacom. And whatever else, and they are ranking in search. And so you're competing for audience against those sites, but you're competing for ad dollars. And we're dealing with that. You're competing for showing value to your audience. And we think affiliate is such an amazing way to do that, where if you can actually convince someone in your audience, you buy a product that's such a show of the. Of the trust that that person has built in you and believe in what you're about. And so that's obviously a great way, you know, to again, build trust with your audience, but also monetize and make money. So we're thinking about, you know, not even thinking about. We're building more and more of these services to help all of our creators and publishers really compete more with big media companies and really kind of building that trust, building their audience and do more there. And we think diversification is just good. You know, we're not changing from ad management first and that being our core. Like, we believe in ads, we are massively invested, and it's, you know, all of our biggest teams work on that and that alone. But we know that there's much, much more that the people we work with can do, and we want to just help enable that and help kind of scale that up for people.

Yeah, it's when you really think about all of the potential paths you could go down if you had the bandwidth. You know, you have however many thousand hundreds of thousands of people coming to your site. Advertising is a great way to create income from that, capture some of the value that you're creating. But there's probably, I don't know, 10 other ways that you could be running a business by getting traffic from search and social media in addition to advertising. And it's one of the things that we try and bring up. We probably don't talk about it enough on the podcast is not just thinking about how do I get more traffic, but thinking about how do I create more revenue and being strategic, not only about getting more of the same thing, but diversifying and saying, like, okay, if we want a business to double a year from now, but we knew that traffic couldn't, what would we have to do in order to make that happen? And those, you know, thinking strategically about those other avenues or revenues, a great way to do that. We could talk for hours about all things old and new things coming down the line, best practices, but want to be respectful of your time and really appreciate you coming on and sharing your insights. And I know these are episodes that people always get a lot out of Paul, if people want to connect with you or I know that you're writing on the blog as well, maybe following along with news and best practices as you're seeing it or as you and your colleagues are seeing it. Can you talk a little bit about best way to do that and how people can stay connected?

I think the best way is following our blog. I think we are trying more and more to get information out there and get all the things out there. I would say follow me on Twitter because I do tweet a fair amount, but I also tweet about super nerdy privacy digital ad things which if you're interested in super nerdy privacy and digital ad things, go for it. Otherwise, the blog is probably a pretty good way to do it.

Twitter is one of those places where you can get super niche into the strangest topics and have a community. Like my guess is you have your people who are also right there with you weighing in on it and commenting and giving their feedback or thoughts and opinions.

So I'm going to a conference next week and like we've already got a drink set up with a bunch of Twitter nerds to talk about talk about in real life.

Yeah, that's great.

It's a funny a funny world.

We'll link to your Twitter in the in the show notes so people can check that out as well. Paul, thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks Bjork. Always fantastic.

Hey there Alexa here. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. And if you are sitting there thinking, man, someday I'm going to start my own food blog. Or maybe you're sitting there thinking, I just started my food blog and I have no idea what to do next. Don't worry, we've all been there and we actually have a free ebook just for you and it's called the Food Blogger Starter Kit and it's full of different resources just to help you along the journey as you're getting up and running with your very own food blog. So you'll get access to our free course all about setting up your food blog. Some of our favorite podcast episode recommendations, some tips about plugins and photography, and then just some other ways to continuously learn and get a tiny bit better every day. If you're interested in downloading that ebook for free, just go to foodbloggerpro.com podcast start and you can download it right there for free. We'll have a link to it in the show notes as well so you can easily click on that there. Otherwise you can just go to that URL foodbloggerpro.com podcast start to download that food blogger starter kit PDF for free. So we'll see you next time. Thanks for tuning in again, and until then, make it a great week.

Sam.