Sneak Preview: Publishers Pay to Play Free: Next Steps in Ad-Based Streaming Monetization
On Thursday, May 22, Brian Ring, Principal Analyst, Ring Digital llc, will moderate the Streaming Media Connect panel “Publishers Pay to Play Free: Next Steps in Ad-Based Streaming Monetization.” Increasingly, content publishers are finding they need more control over their ad stack. This panel looks beyond the touted monetization-ready feature sets in streaming playback solutions and drills down with key content providers on how well these solutions facilitate ad signaling and ad stitching and integrate with ad servers, discussing what kind of reporting they provide to measure success. The panel also highlights the differences in ad-based monetization strategies as between CTV platforms, online video players, and mobile apps. And finally, panelists dig deep into critical emerging standards that are changing SSAI this year.
Confirmed panelists include:
- Andrew Baritz, CEO, Eventually A Castle
- Raymond Holton, Senior Director, Advanced TV, IAB Tech Lab
- David Hassoun, Streaming Media Consultant, ex-Dolby & Founder, RealEyes Media
- C.J. Leonard, VP Publisher Operations, FanServ
Get your free pass for Streaming Media Connect 2025 today!
Brian Ring is Principal Analyst at Ring Digital llc, a consultancy that leverages video tech expertise, proprietary TV surveys, and 20 years of industry experience to help clients navigate the future of TV across all business models, geographies, genres, and platforms. It serves SaaS vendors, media companies, FAST channel publishers, CTV and OTT platform providers, and other stakeholders in the TV tech ecosystem with strategic support.
Ring has some history to share:
In 2019, online video ad innovator Rubicon Project—who had no CTV-focus—decided to execute a brilliant pivot to CTV. It merged with Telaria, which at the time had a growth spurt from tripling-down on CTV supply. Devices were flooding the aisles. Advertisers were out there! And COVID-19 was around the corner ready to surge viewership. The merged company was called Magnite.
Strategy is focus, and Magnite’s was CTV. The stock roared. So much so that it was able to purchase SpotX for over $1.1B dollars, consolidating CTV scale. By then, SpotX had already purchased a stake in SpringServe, a leading CTV ad server upstart—a different tech block in the horizontal CTV supply chain where a hefty load of decision-making and query processing takes place.
Fast-forward to today. Just last month, Magnite announced its next-generation SpringServe ad-server that will be fully integrated into their dominant SSP.
This story “speaks to a programmatic CTV ad tech narrative that is at an absolutely critical juncture in the evolution of free streaming TV,” Ring says. “Now is the time to re-think your strategy as a CTV-first publisher. This panel will ask the core question: How can we build our own CTV ad stack at a low cost, with low complexity? We need to pay to play free: Where should we invest? Where should we partner? How can we navigate free ad models when distribution is so fragmented? That’s going to be the focus of the panel. Join us and bring your own questions.”
Andrew Baritz has a decade of experience in the online video content distribution industry. He runs adtech ops for Cineverse and is aEO and consultant at Eventually A Castle, specializing in OTT streaming, digital advertising solutions, and strategies for media companies.
“The biggest challenges publishers face when trying to control their own ad stack are heavily determined by the scale of the publisher. For small to medium publishers, the biggest challenge will be scale,” Baritz explains. “Programmatic Advertising is still a game of scale, and without it smaller publishers can struggle to get into larger PMP Deals, open market, or general growth of accounts. This can also be limiting as Ad Servers and SSPs are starting to have monthly limits and costs to use/access the marketplace. Where advertising is always discussed at the highest price points and ad revenues, many publishers are operating in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars a month. With the various layers of technology costs, operations and sales costs, the overall infrastructure and cost basis around it can be a blocker for success for many publishers, where economy of scale is only achieved at the highest levels.”
Raymond Holton has worked in the video advertising industry for more than 18 years, holding positions at MVPDs, technology solution integrators, and broadcast TV content providers.
“One of the most prevalent challenges for publishers and advertisers in CTV is data inconsistencies caused by fragmentation,” Holton says. “Publishers must support dozens of viewer devices across multiple distribution platforms. Advertisers must work with numerous agencies and publishers to reach their target audiences at scale. These fragmentations result in inconsistent data, reporting, and viewer experiences.”
Holton believes, “Adopting industry standards like IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement SDK (OM SDK) and Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF) are first steps in simplifying and unifying industry fragmentation. OM SDK provides consistent measurement events across platforms. The ACIF framework and VAST Addendum provide the advertisers the ability to pass universal ad creative IDs across all distribution platforms, thus streamlining ad asset delivery and cross-platform reporting.”
David Hassoun is a streaming media consultant and the CEO/Founder of RealEyes Media, which was acquired by Dolby Laboratories. Before recently going solo he was the Chief Technologist for Dolby Laboratories and helped connect the business, product, and technology teams to drive Dolby toward success in the media-streaming space. He has worked with major industry companies to deliver thousands of live streaming events, including five Olympics and three Super Bowls.
“As advertising in the streaming space continues to evolve, users demand and inevitably react better to improved experiences,” Hassoun notes. “It is easy to find yourself riding the edge between the established ad tech stack of the past and the needs of the future. Sometimes they align, but the time and opportunity for innovation is upon us. However, dealing with this in a cost-constrained ecosystem has its challenges, and emerging solutions, standards, and technology are starting to change it all.”
C.J. Leonard is Principal and Owner of MAD Leo Consulting, LLC and VP, Publisher Operations for FanServ. She has extensive expertise in digital ad operations, ad tech, content delivery, and end-to-end monetization tactics. Leonard has worked across the advertising and content supply chain from Publishers to Advertisers, Content Delivery Systems to all forms of Revenue Generation platforms.
“Whether you’re a local sports team or a niche streaming publisher, balancing control of your inventory with the complexity of ad tech is critical,” Leonard advises. “To drive real results, you need the right people to evangelize your inventory and best in breed tech to deliver and pace campaigns effectively, especially in live sports environments. Building and maintaining in-house expertise is costly and often difficult to scale. That’s especially the case with programmatic sources of demand where inventory volume is a big part of the equation. FanServ works to provide leading technology solutions and guidance to help teams take ownership of their inventory.”
Register now for Streaming Media Connect 2025!
Related Articles
On Wednesday, May 21, Michael Nagle of Ashling Digital, will moderate the Streaming Media Connect May panel "FAST Break: Packaging and Selling Sports on FAST" with Fubo's Pamela Duckworth, Swerve Sports' Christy Tanner, Sports Studio's Cathy Rasenberger, TATA's Tom Buffolano, and HRM's H. Robert Muzac. The panel will explore what FAST sports channels look like, what kind of sports programming works on FAST, and how successful FAST sports channels target audiences, and how they satisfy advertisers while breaking ranks with the industry trend of sports rights exclusivity.
14 May 2025
On Tuesday, May 20, Mark de Jong, Chairman, CDN Alliance, will moderate the Streaming Media Connect May panel "Origin to Edge: Video Caching and Content Delivery," with an all-star lineup including Warner Bros. Discovery, Sky, and BuyDRM discussing the benefits of edge caching and distributed architecture for live sports, personalization, security, anti-piracy, and more.
12 May 2025
On Thursday, May 22, the NBA's Michelle Auguste, DAZN's Joe Caporoso, MTech's Matt Stagg, and WTFast's Darcy Lorincz will join Hub's Jon Giegengack for the Streaming Media Connect May panel "Highlights First: Gen AI, Gen Z, and Next-Generation Sports Streaming." As a new generation of highlights-first fans moves into the sports fandom mainstream, sports broadcasters need the agility and tech-savviness to produce and monetize personalized, short-form sports content at scale that meets the experiential demands of Millennial and Gen Z fans. If you're a sports rightsholder and you're not gaming out how to bring a personalized SportsCenter to every viewer, you're looking at where the puck was and not where it's going.
06 May 2025
On Thursday, May 22, Nadine Krefetz will moderate the Streaming Media Connect May panel "In AI We Trust? AI and Content Authenticity," featuring Think Alchemy's Andy Beach, I2A's Renard Jenkins, and Stringr's Lindsay Stewart. As generative AI is finding its way into streaming in many ways, this panel looks at two popular use cases: deep fakes and captioning. We'll discuss initiatives like C2PA to address emerging content authenticity issues and evaluate the current state of the art and tech.
05 May 2025