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At Playwire, publishers are our top priority. We work hard every single day to innovate and drive higher and higher revenue for the publishers who work with us. We would love to offer our services to every publisher in the market today, even those on the smaller end of the spectrum, but we aren’t quite there yet.

We do have some very exciting product developments in the works to serve a much more expansive group of publishers (which we will be announcing very soon!), but today our products and services are best fit for medium-to-large publishers.

Why? Because we want you to have the ROI you deserve. There are different stages of publisher maturity, and ultimately, different solutions make sense at different stages. 

Today, we find that we are best fit for medium-to-large publishers because there are risk-reward and effort-reward tradeoffs that kick in when publishers grow past a certain point. Below, we’ll go through different stages of growth a publisher might find themselves in, and help articulate the solutions that typically make the most sense in that stage.

Feel free to peruse the entire article or jump straight to your situation:

Playwire brings next-level publishers’ revenue to the next level. If you’re ready for that, we’re ready to hear from you. Contact us.

Small to Medium Sized Publishers

Let’s start by defining who fits into this category. Small to medium sized publishers are websites with less than 400-500K monthly pageviews or apps with fewer than 10,000 daily active users.

Newer publishers tend to fit into this category as they are getting up and running. Early on in the life of a website, app or other digital property, your margins will be thin and your goal will be increasing your audience.

In this stage, you may be back and forth on the idea of even having ads on your website. When looking to build an audience, it is sometimes best to focus on the user experience and content of the site first. Many sites and apps choose not to even place ads at this stage, until they’ve done the groundwork of building up their audience.

At the higher end of this range, it often starts to make sense to start monetizing with ads. In this phase, the best possible bet for your own ROI is to keep things simple with something like Google Ads or AdMob. At this size, you won’t have a ton of moving parts to keep track of, and keeping every dollar of your revenue will be important.

Keep in mind that at this size, even using a tool like Google Ads, you shouldn’t be expecting to bring in a whole lot more than $300 or $400 per month in ad revenue.

Mid-Market Publishers

Again, let’s start by defining who fits into this category. Mid-market publishers are websites with between 500K and 1M pageviews or apps with between 10,000 and 100,000 daily active users.

In this stage, you’ll find that you’re starting to spend a ton of time on ad management and have to weigh the choice between building out a full ad ops team or outsourcing ad management. Your ad tech stack starts to grow exponentially in complexity if you choose to manage it yourself in this stage of growth, and your focus gets pulled away from content production and audience development.

This is when you really start to see the ROI of a platform like Playwire’s RAMP platform. The amount of time and effort you’ll have to invest to get the right ad tech stack and ad ops team off the ground is fairly significant, and there’s no guarantee you’ll get it right (in fact it usually takes quite a bit of trial and error to get it right).

At this stage, the ad revenue you can bring in from your audience has significantly increased, but so too has the cost to manage the ads producing it. This is when you’ll find that you’ll actually make far more profit from your ads by using Playwire than managing them in-house, due to the steep initial investment of building out a team.

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Related Content

Feel free to review some of the articles in our Ad Tech Build vs. Buy series that outline what it looks like to build out different components of the ad tech stack yourself. You also may be interested in the Ad Ops Build vs. Outsource series that details what goes into building high performing ad ops teams.

Enterprise Publishers

The players that fit here are websites with more than 1M pageviews or apps with more than 100,000 daily active users.

Typically if a publisher fits into this category they’ve already selected a path between building an in-house team or using an outsourced ad management provider. At this stage, you may find that either path is more fitting to your needs and could be ready to make a change.

You’ll want to consider all of the following factors:

Tech 

Here you are likely struggling with a very complex and “bolted-together” ad tech stack with a menagerie of overlapping tools and technologies. Choosing to go with a platform like Playwire’s RAMP platform takes the management and constant maintenance of this off your team’s plate. 

It also reduces your investment in these tools. RAMP comes with all of the following technology built-in, at a significantly reduced “cost of ownership” for you when compared with purchasing all of these tools yourself:

  • Header bidding
  • Consent management
  • Ad serving
  • Data management platform (DMP)
  • Video player
  • Identity solutions
  • Brand safety and quality solutions

Team

You’ll likely already have an ad ops team of some kind in-house, no matter what your previous solution. The choices you are weighing here are typically how much you are going to continue to invest in growing that team and allowing the resources you have to be spending time on the most valuable efforts.

RAMP removes much of the “relationship management” or “putting out fire” types of tasks that inevitably fall on ad ops teams. Chasing down bad ads, managing relationships with each SSP or demand source you integrate, and troubleshooting the various problems that arise on a daily basis aren’t the best use of your in-house team. 

Choosing a solution like RAMP frees those valuable resources to focus on growing your business and, ultimately, significantly increasing your revenue.

Yield and Revenue Intelligence®

Playwire’s proprietary Revenue Intelligence (RI) algorithm maximizes yield on every impression without taking any time from you. RI is a machine learning based AI algorithm that adjusts and fine tunes thousands of settings across the ad tech stack, in milliseconds, on each and every ad impression you generate.

You can read more about the team and technology that supports RI in this in-depth article, but, in a nutshell, RI means you make the most of each impression without having to invest time in doing so. The size of the team that you’d ultimately have to build to achieve this internally would be cost-prohibitive, or you’d have to invest in building out AI technology to get the same level of revenue uplift.

Direct Sales

As a publisher of this size, you may already be conducting direct deals and have a direct sales team of your own built out, or you may not. One of the many reasons publishers of this size choose to work with Playwire is for the access they get to premium brand dollars through our global direct sales team.

Building the necessary relationships to drive significant revenue from a direct sales team takes quite a while, so publishers often find that onboarding with Playwire gets them access to more of this premium demand, faster. You can read more about all of the benefits of Playwire’s direct sales team in this article.

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We’ll Be Here When You’re Ready

As a brand, Playwire is dedicated to helping publishers accelerate their business by amplifying ad revenue and streamlining operations. How we can best help you achieve those two goals is directly related to where you are right now. 

The most important thing to us is providing you the ROI you deserve. 

If you’re a small to medium sized publisher and not fit for using the RAMP Platform just yet, we are here to provide detailed, technical content on how you can improve your ad revenue and simplify operations. And, right this very minute, our engineering team is busy working on a set of products just for you!

If you are a mid-market or enterprise publisher, the platform we have today may well help solve some of the challenges you’re facing and help to increase your ad revenue. If you’re interested in finding out more, feel free to contact us online.

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