When I say 'native', you say 'advertising'. This is how native is perceived in the digital industry, driven more so by the uptake in programmatic native, but is there more to it than just an ad format? In this piece, Alicia Navarro (pictured below), CEO and co-founder, Skimlinks writes for ExchangeWire that the marriage of sales and editorial allows the benefits of both to shine through and brings credibility back to the editorial experience for both publishers and readers.

Native advertising was such a good idea, in theory. Create beautiful, editorialised ads that would slide seamlessly into whatever the viewer was reading or watching. The more scrupulous advertisers would make it clear that this was still advertising of course, but somehow it wouldn’t distract, it would just simply add to the overall content experience.

In reality, according to Contently, only 19% of consumers trust native advertising while 62% think it diminishes the publisher’s credibility to run it. At a time when publishers, such as the FT, are having to make up for the drop in print readership and look to new revenue streams by building their own full-service agency, this isn’t a good sign. Publishers need to work smarter with brand advertisers to deliver editorial that is authentic, transparent, useful, and entertaining.

The advent of 'Comtent'

This is where comtent comes in. Admittedly a portmanteau of our own making, comtent is commerce-related content: the marriage of commerce and content. Instead of having advertisers drive your content and producing advertorials, ‘comtent’ is about having editors create content your users will love, that just happens to be about products and retailers.

Just look at the success many social and editorial-led sites have had with creating pure-play
comtent such as Refinery29, WireCutter, Apartment Therapy, Gizmodo. These are great examples of publishers that produce high-quality, engaging and unique content around shopping-related themes while being independent and trustworthy. But is the publisher cutting off their nose to spite their face? With great product listicles or feature reviews, have they just handed the advertiser some free – and every reason in the world to save their ad dollars to spend elsewhere?

1: Affiliate your content

The best way to monetise comtent is through affiliate marketing. It simply means that publishers receive a commission if viewers click-through and buy the product linked to within the comtent. Historically this has been frowned upon as a corruption of editorial integrity.

However, the modern-day publisher has established policies and best practises that protect the independence and authenticity of its content while still being pragmatic about driving revenue. For example, did you know policies that ensure product reviews include a link to buy the product reviewed? This is because providing the link is a better user experience, like linking to a retailer’s site rather than a brand’s non-shoppable site, or like hiring commerce editors to add shopping links to content written independently by pure-play editors. There are many approaches that publishers have adopted to ensure they are creating content that their users trust and return to read. And, as a bonus, it can be non-intrusive revenue drivers.

How does this differ from native advertising? Native advertising is created and purchased by an advertiser, and eventually placed, thanks to a direct buy or a when done programmatically. Comtent differs in that it is first and foremost content, driven by editors – or, in the case of social sites, by the community – that can be monetised by affiliate marketing. Advertisers do not control the message, the placement, the frequency, or the promotion.

It has an added benefit of being utterly non-annoying. Unlike most other types of advertising that interject, pop-up, obscure, or slow down the content reading process, comtent is just content that a user has chosen to read, with nothing else clouding the experience. A greater reliance and focus on comtent monetisation through affiliate marketing may slow the inevitability of today’s ad-block debacle.

2: Understand your audience

The second major new revenue generator for publishers, resulting from the comtent phenomenon, are high-intent shopping data segments, also known as second-party data. Leveraged directly from the publishers’ first-party data and deciphered through machine learning.

Users engage with appealing comtent that users interact with, the publisher is then gaining insights into the shopping behaviours and preferences of their users: from what retailers are they shopping, what type of products and brands are they buying, what kind of content do they most engage with, etc. More comtent = more insights into your users, that can directly translate into ad revenues.

How? Publishers are able to approach new types of advertisers for which their comtent analytics show their users have an affinity. Publishers can also negotiate higher CPM rates, if they layer behavioural targeting onto an inventory sale. Publishers can also optimise the performance of their campaigns to achieve targets, thus, more likely securing a rebooking.

More savvy publishers are recognising that, in their efforts to secure ad budgets away from the all-consuming power of Facebook and Google, they need to create specialised bundles for advertisers that merge premium inventory with user behavioural traits. Users interact with comtent, especially if a publisher is part of a data co-operative, they can then glean predictions around shopping behaviours that can dramatically improve the appeal and performance of a publisher’s advertising propositions.

Good, but not enough

Native advertising is enormously popular because it gets around some of the intrusiveness and heaviness of display ads, but it isn’t enough. Publishers who recognise that weaving commerce authentically into their content, in the form of comtent, can gain a flurry of incremental benefits without any additional costs or effort. Comtent is being created anyway by your editors, and is naturally being read by your readers. All that is needed is a monetisation strategy (of which there are a number of partners that can help automate) and the means to feed the data collected from interactions with comtent into a data co-operative that can boost a publishers’ internal programmatic strategies.

It’s not going to be the sum-all solution for publishers to survive the post-print age, neither will it solve the ad-tech industry’s challenges with consumers distrust. But, when done well, it can be the source of incremental low-cost revenues and powerful insights.