Publisher-first approach aims to deliver safe inventory while providing a path to quality

Sovrn, a publisher technology platform that helps content creators remain independent and thrive on the open web, announced its “publisher first” approach to tackling made-for-advertising (MFA) sites in its inventory, effectively ensuring that all private-marketplace deals transacted through the Sovrn Ad Exchange are 100% MFA free.

Working with Chris Kane, Founder of Jounce Media, Sovrn created a framework to audit and assess its publisher inventory on an ongoing basis to dynamically pinpoint and remove sites that meet Jounce’s MFA classification criteria. These changes assure media buyers that their ad spend through Sovrn’s private deals deliver a better return on investment against key business outcomes and confirms its commitment to solving for sustainability and quality while eliminating waste and inefficiency. Furthermore, Sovrn’s attention-based deals allow advertisers to target highly engaged inventory, resulting in a three times higher response rate.

“Sovrn’s decision to block MFA inventory by default from all private marketplaces does not just serve buyer interests. It also rebalances revenue toward the most premium publishers,” said Chris Kane, Founder of Jounce Media. “The long-term durability of the open internet requires ad tech platforms to create incentives that financially reward the highest quality content creators, and this is exactly what Sovrn is doing.”

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In addition, Sovrn has built into its framework a way to identify former MFA publishers who are making investments to rebuild their businesses around organic traffic. Rather than enacting a ban on sites identified as MFA, Sovrn is committed to providing programmatic tools and data insights — including ad performance and CPM data, benchmarking analytics, and audience engagement — that deliver an objective view of the opportunities and incentives for publishers to reconsider their business practices.

The release of ANA’s supply chain transparency study has shone a spotlight on how suspect inventory can hijack and divert targeted media spend by taking advantage of the complexity of the open web programmatic marketplace. Not only does an unnecessarily complex system that relies on trading and reselling ad space, rather than on transparency and directness, drain revenue from publisher pockets, it decreases advertisers’ return on spend — and most of all — makes the consumer experience miserable. However, since establishing direct relationships with every ad buyer isn’t feasible for all but the largest open web publishers, Sovrn is focused on creating a more transparent system that delivers the right checks and balances for buyers while ensuring independent publishers drive value from their most important asset: their content.

“Our goal at Sovrn is to add value to the advertising supply chain for both sellers and buyers,” said Walter Knapp, CEO of Sovrn. “Sovrn takes a long-term approach to building and developing relationships and making sure that independent publishers thrive by providing tools, support, and data to help them better monetize their quality supply.”

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