How Digital Publishers Can Diversify Revenue Streams With AI

3 opportunities to increase your revenue in 2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools have, to varying degrees, been part of the publisher’s toolkit for years. Yet, in recent months, as programs such as the next-level chatbot ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, a system that generates realistic images based on a text prompt, have exploded into popular culture, everyone is rethinking the role of AI in their business and lives. 

For publishers, AI was already driving automated metadata generation and digital behavioral analyses. But as this new era of AI takes shape, media sales leaders must assess how AI will impact their business models and determine how they can leverage it to move forward. 

‍AI can reduce redundant hiring and help publishers be more efficient. Some estimate that AI has the potential to eliminate millions of media jobs by 2025, and most marketers—59%—believe that AI will revolutionize the industry. 

AI also has the power to help publishers grow. Here are three ways savvy digital publishers are leveraging AI today to diversify revenue streams and grow their top line in 2023 and beyond.

1. Refined, AI-powered programmatic 

Today programmatic is a highly in-demand, dynamic piece of the publishing puzzle. With prices increasing modestly in this domain over the past year (see our Pricing & Yield Trend Report for more), the opportunity to maximize through AI-powered additions to the programmatic status quo can increase revenue and improve performance. 

There are many opportunities to apply AI to programmatic advertising. AI can more easily optimize and adjust bids in real time by analyzing historic performance and current bidding data, helping advertisers to maximize the chances of winning high-value impressions at the lowest price. AI can also enhance audience targeting and segmentation, yielding higher conversion rates, optimized creative, real-time pricing updates, and flagged low-quality ads in a way that legacy systems cannot.

2. Better content and ad performance 

AI-powered content and native advertising monetization are shifting how publishers capture attention and dollars for their ad inventory. While many publishers already leverage sophisticated algorithms to determine ad placement, new advances in AI, including predictive analytics and advanced sentiment analysis, are raising the bar for how content is monetized. 

By using historical data and user behavioral patterns to create predictive models, publishers can anticipate engagement and content consumption. This data can then be used to predict trends and deliver the content most likely to be successful at a given time. 

Predictive analytics is particularly useful for publishers since it can also be used to identify opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. By analyzing user behavior, AI can recommend products and services likely to perform for advertising partners. 

Some of the top-grossing companies in the world, including Microsoft and Starbucks, are leveraging predictive analytics to forecast trends and personalize experiences for consumers. Sentiment analysis has also become more advanced with AI, enabling major retailers such as Target, Walmart, and Costco to anticipate customer sentiment and emotional reaction to their offerings, even using the data to reposition products as necessary and create new ones. 

3. Data as a product 

Anonymizing and aggregating user data has become an incredibly profitable new revenue stream for publishers. By sharing valuable first-party insights about audience segments with partners across industries, publishers contribute to a thriving and profitable economic ecosystem. 

AI has been pivotal in accelerating how publishers package their data for sale. Unlike traditional algorithms in which humans need to manually code each rule, business context, and variance, AI can extract increasingly complex patterns from a vast number of data points, self-correcting as necessary without human intervention. 

Although third-party cookie deprecation has been delayed, we will all eventually operate in a cookieless world. This will only make publisher first-party data more valuable and increase the need for publishers to supplement their data assets with third-party enrichment data. Already, 53% of digital marketing campaigns purchase this kind of data from nearly a dozen different providers. Publishers have an opportunity not just to capitalize on this trend but expand the possibilities with AI-powered software that aggregates and packages diverse data sets for sale.  

Get in on the action

In recent years, the market has been defined by enormous uncertainty paired with great opportunity. Many opportunities are made possible through technological innovations like AI. 

As publishers walk a tightrope between making necessary expenditures and cutting costs, automation and AI can help them mitigate risks while expanding their customer bases. Diversification is a crucial step to create long-term sustainability and new levels of scalability. 

Managing complexity and strategic diversification isn’t easy. Find out how Boostr can help you get it done. Talk to one of our experts today.