Five ways to improve the definition of ‘premium’

By Hazel Broadley

At our recent Navigator London event, we held a lively debate around the definition of one of the industry’s most used, yet most ambiguous terms – premium publisher. 

Back in 2015, AOL’s Head of Media Sales Jim Norton described a premium publisher as “one that provides marketers with trusted content and an engaging, high-touch platform that can connect to the right audience at the right place and at the right time.”

Meanwhile, tech vendor Decentriq says premium publishers are usually identified by their “consistent production of high-quality content… and while there’s no set line differentiating premium from non-premium, it’s generally… trust and loyalty which qualifies a premium publisher as such.”

But if we fast-forward to 2024, with developments such as the Trade Desk calling out its Top 100 publishers, many of us are left wondering: what are the specific metrics for defining premium? Here’s what publishers had to say.

It’s time to define premium

Premium is an extremely subjective word. Every advertiser’s interpretation is different. Every vendor’s interpretation is different. And a publisher’s own criteria for what makes their portfolio premium will vary, too. 

While everyone has raced to define other emerging concepts – such as MFA – has anyone set out clear guidelines for how we define premium? And how can we do this in a fair, representative way?  

Here are the top five suggestions for improving the definition of premium:

1. Choose another label

Premium comes from the Latin word for ‘prize’ or ‘reward’. Therefore, are we using the wrong word in the first place? 

Just as the term MFA is seen by many as a tautology (i.e. isn’t every website made for some form of advertising?), so too is premium a meaningless term without context. So perhaps it’s time to change it altogether. 

2. Don’t use it as a blanket term 

As an industry, we need to create different categories of premium, to give context to the premium designation in question, because ultimately, each campaign is situational. 

What’s more, if The Trade Desk’s recent list – which only includes a handful of UK publishers – is anything to go by, we need to be more representative. 

As MiQ’s President Paul Silver recently explained, “on the surface, [such lists] are making it easy to buy across a highly curated list of premium domains that enables more dollars to flow to quality content”. 

But in reality, there are some “meaningful-sized publishers out there that weren’t on the list”.

And of course, it’s not all about size – if a website is small but niche, surely that means it’s premium for those audiences who rely on its content, and who are more engaged with it than other audiences are with larger websites? 

Conversely, a global publisher who doesn’t allow betting placements, for instance, won’t be considered premium to an agency’s betting clients.

3. Introduce a scoring system

As we’ve seen above, while size is sometimes a factor, other times it’s trustworthiness or relevance. Once we have broken premium down into relevant categories, we can then start to assign publishers a score for each, allowing advertisers and their media agencies to quickly evaluate whether they are a good fit depending on their specific campaign KPIs. 

4. Audience + environment = a premium campaign 

It’s important to remember that you need to combine your audience with your environment to achieve a premium campaign, because one won’t work without the other. As one delegate explained, an advertiser will tend to think about a premium ‘spot’ rather than a premium ‘publisher’, so considering all the variables within a single placement (on-page content, time of day, device etc) is key. 

And as another admitted, when they optimized for attention, the revenue went down, resulting in them adding more ads back onto the page – so what might seem a ‘premium’ or clutter-free environment might not work for every audience.  

5. Don’t rely on adtech-defined lists of ‘premium’

As an industry, we need to agree who should be responsible for defining premium. Is it up to trade bodies such as the WFA, AOP, IAB, ISBA and so on? As we have seen, the key here is that premium is often in the eye of the beholder, so should it be advertisers and their agencies who get to decide? Or even the audience themselves? 

One thing everyone agrees is that no one DSP or SSP should define premium, and that adtech players should be discouraged from releasing their own lists according to their own criteria – which may differ vastly from the rest of the industry. 

As FatTail’s CEO Doug Huntington agrees: “The future of premium publishing and advertising should not be dominated by any one tech platform, intermediary or ID. Nor should it be led by programmatic, which provides value for selling remnant inventory but was never the ideal vehicle for selling the majority of a premium publisher’s inventory.”

In a world where premium means different things to different people, it’s time to take a more nuanced approach, define the metrics that matter, and match the right advertiser to the right publisher to achieve ultimate campaign performance – whatever that means to them.