The digital publishing world is undergoing seismic shifts. As third-party cookies fade into obsolescence—driven by regulatory changes like GDPR and CCPA, and restrictions by tech giants in browsers and on major platforms—publishers find themselves grappling with how to maintain and grow their advertising revenue.
This confluence of industry forces is taking place amid significant external disruption from the advent of large language model (LLM) technologies and global changes in consumer behavior. While threats of disruption and the risks—and opportunities—presented by innovation are ever-present, this particular compilation has uniquely ushered in a renegotiation of sorts for our industry.
LLMs have brought the effective cost of written content to near zero, unleashing an unprecedented flood of content onto the web. They clearly present potential for more predictable—yet equally impactful—future attributes as a result of their effect on the digital world. The fallout has inflated the supply of ad inventory (content), added to the rising list of requisites for privacy-preserving audience data collection, and accelerated a battle among ad exchanges, search engines, and browsers to maintain market share and avoid obsolescence.
Here's a preview of some of the optimistic data at the end:
Publishers have relied on the relatively ancient—at least in digital terms—moniker of “content is king” for over two decades. That established a sensible focus that was as close to a law as any other form of advice for digital publishers seeking true north. It’s that incumbent thinking that is potentially the greatest risk facing the majority of publishers, who may not be fully awake to how the tide has moved out on what it means to have ‘unique content’. Publishers that have happily enjoyed the benefits of properties with the majority of inventory marked as ‘evergreen content’ (information that is fixed or objectively unchanging) have quickly become casualties and are sounding the alarm.
AI chatbots, Big Tech, and AI platforms crawling and scraping content across the web for embedding in their increasingly homogeneous models have brought an unthinkable scenario right to publishers' doorsteps. Content may be going from the currency in which publishers trade into a near-valueless commodity in many circumstances, with an expanding set of parameters for what content is included in that cohort.
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Content publishers have persisted through equally disruptive changes and challenges, and broadly, this era of change is absolutely no different; however, that comes with the caveat that this applies to publishers with a small ‘p’. Magazines are far beyond their golden age, as circulation and the mobile web have rendered the medium far less favorable for audiences, advertisers, and market stakeholders. Some magazine publishers have survived without core changes to their business, but not many. Most ceased to exist or adapted, making fundamental changes to the way they connected with their core customers—and the many gradients in between were surely the majority.
The compass for publishers will no longer be multipolar, with content and reach offering flexible approaches for publisher revenue and operations. The deflation of the value of information and ongoing redistribution of who owns that information (to put it nicely) has killed what was once king for publishers; however, the silver lining is that we’ve already seen evidence that this value has not been wholly lost, but rather it’s been redistributed and consolidated inside the lifeblood that is the publisher audience.
The optimistic perspective here is that publishers who ‘own’ or generate an audience are in a clear position of power and remain one of very few uncompromised gatekeepers that sit between advertisers—and the innumerable middlemen—and consumers. This is where publishers have compelling leverage to grow and mitigate the risks of elimination. The downside is that the approach requires a much narrower path than what publishers have been accustomed to and may not be ready for.
The takeaway nonetheless makes it easy for publishers to understand the strategic emphasis placed on fostering, building, and growing their relationship with the audience. The audience is the new king. Many websites will be scrambling to take lessons from influencers and YouTubers, while these previously native-to-social-media publishers will be quick to learn from established websites and brands how to navigate the dangers of a maturing environment with greater and greater barriers to entry and requirements for success.
In the last 12 months, advertisers—and the vast entourage that follows—alongside Big Tech have increasingly solidified the strategy that—at least initially—will be the working solution to the deprecation across all major systems. While third-party cookies have died one of the slowest deaths, this has created a sense of complacency and indifference on the topic. When you hear about something like the death of a major attribute of a fundamental industry railway, you can only be concerned so long. Unfortunately, the slow burn here has greatly benefited just about every stakeholder except for publishers.
While the individual parties on the advertiser and platform side of the industry may have drastically different plans and approaches, the process and implementation of new audience data collection methods have established a working framework for a means of using that data for advertising. Unfortunately, publishers are far less prepared and lack the same kind of consensus on a path forward that aligns their interests with how the rest of the digital landscape has evolved in this regard.
...so why haven't many publishers heard the term before? Or, if publishers are somewhat familiar with the topic, they're often 2–3 years behind the first experiments and announcements from Google, Apple, The Trade Desk, and other industry stewards regarding their intentions to use first-party data provided directly from publishers and their own systems as the de facto way forward in the post–third-party-cookie era.
Third-party cookies have historically been the backbone of targeted advertising, allowing advertisers to track users across multiple sites. However, with growing privacy concerns and regulations, third-party cookies are increasingly being blocked by default, forcing publishers to find alternatives. Enter identity solutions.
'Identity data' refers to a site or publisher collecting first-party data directly from their users, such as email addresses, login details, and other user-provided data, which can be anonymized (think of it as a composite generic bucket of 'yous') and then encoded and sent to advertising systems that have privacy-preserving decoding systems. They can then use this data to target those users in ways that fulfill the many requirements and regulations added over the last decade (which, in the strictest forms, were arguably disregarded until now). These methods are fundamentally different from the third-party cookie model, relying on real identities—like hashed emails or other anonymized identifiers—and placing a greater emphasis on understanding and reaching known users.
With the growing emphasis on first-party data, publishers are now focusing more on their audience than ever before. This audience-driven approach aligns with broader shifts in the advertising ecosystem, where contextual and privacy-first targeting have become critical. Publishers that master these identity solutions are seeing significant rewards, not only in higher advertising revenue but also in building deeper connections with their audiences.
This is a bit of a renaissance for publishers with newsletters, user-generated content (forums), mailing lists, logged-in users, and social media or video audiences. Over the better part of the last decade, these publishers missed out on a rash of publishers benefiting from unprecedented internet traffic growth from search engines. Now, the tide has turned in a dramatic fashion and at an accelerating pace.
What many thought of as 'original' content was gobbled up by LLMs and homogenized into general information in the past two years, and now it seems to be far too late for most publishers to do anything defensively helpful. There are a healthy number of exceptions, but publishers got caught on the back foot by fearing Google as the only looming threat of 'stealing' their content for years and years. The thought was always that Google wouldn't do it outright (Knowledge Graph) or it would happen so incrementally that it would only be a distant future problem.
The future was 2024, and unfortunately, 'original' content is not what it was a year ago.
To make these changes with agility, the publishers who once may have relied on SEO for growth—and many of whom will inevitably turn to it to save them now—will, in reality, quickly need to learn how the shift from cookies to identity solutions requires a pivot from creating the content search engines have shown them will provide reach to a paradigm shift that will require creating and marketing content according to what their audience now dictates. While this shift is filled with exceptions and gradients of how serious the transformations may need to be, it's likely most are unprepared for how big of a change this will be for their website or publishing business.
The rise of AI-generated content has made it easier than ever to create, aggregate, and publish vast amounts of digital material. However, with the increased prevalence of such content, the value of individual pieces of content is diminishing. For publishers, this presents a challenge: how do you differentiate when everyone can create similar content?
The answer lies in the audience. Publishers who understand their readers through first-party data and identity solutions can offer advertisers something far more valuable than content alone: access to a highly engaged, well-understood audience. With email hashing and other identity solutions, publishers can not only protect user privacy but also ensure that their ad inventory is attractive to advertisers. This approach allows advertisers to bid more aggressively, increasing effective CPM (eCPM) and overall revenue for the publisher.
Ezoic’s data backs this up. Domains that have implemented identity solutions, particularly those integrating email addresses through hashing, have seen a 2x increase in ad fill rates and significant uplifts in CPM, particularly on mobile devices. As mobile continues to dominate digital consumption, publishers that focus on audience identity and not just content will find themselves in a much stronger competitive position.
The entire industry is learning now, and data is limited on how impactful commitments to identity implementations and usage might be.
Ezoic has always led the way in this category and is one of few with significant historical data on performance. We intend to share it all, but here are a few of the highlights we'll be discussing at a series of events we'll be exploring with Flippa next month all across the U.S.
The financial upside of focusing on audiences rather than content is clear. Ezoic’s data highlights some key metrics:
46% uplift in CPM on Chrome mobile browsers for sites utilizing identity solutions.
31% CPM increase on Safari for mobile traffic.
Non-email ID'd traffic also saw a rise in CPMs, with total site EPMV up 13%, suggesting a spillover effect (which is not a surprise, but it's also not a simple topic; we'll write about it in more detail soon).
The rise of identity solutions marks a turning point for digital publishers. It's why we're partnering with Flippa for these events, as many of the buyers and sellers of web businesses have proven to be some of the most resourceful in changing environments. I recommend checking out one of the events if they're close to you. They'll provide a great opportunity to pick the brains of experts and other publishers as you navigate the coming months and beyond.
As third-party cookies disappear and AI reshapes the content landscape, identity solutions offer publishers a way to remain relevant, competitive, and profitable. The focus is no longer on creating more content—it’s about understanding your audience, building trust, and leveraging that trust for sustainable revenue growth.
Written By: Tyler Bishop
Tyler has been a digital publisher for over 20 years and is the CMO of Ezoic. He has written articles on web trends and innovation for for the Harvard Business Review, ESPN, Forbes, and AdWeek. He's a popular industry speaker and partnered with Google in 2016 to start Pubtelligence; the first major publishing event held at Google offices.
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