The web has presented legacy publishers with a monetisation challenge they have yet to master, and the emergence of media consumption on handheld devices has posed them with an even more difficult quandary as they now compete with Silicon Valley giants, games publishers,  and now even utility app providers (such as those making flashlight providers) for a finite amount of ad revenue.

This is a topic that will be debated at this year’s ATS London, where panelists from The Guardian, Angry Birds publisher Rovio, and mobile advertising veteran Todd Tran are scheduled to present theories on just how the 21st century  media owner will look as consumers shift towards mobile media consumption, and beyond.

‘The year of mobile’ (a hackneyed phrase used to convince conference delegates that mobile advertising would eventually bear fruit) was a running joke in the digital industry throughout the noughties, and with mobile media consumption in the ascension it is still mentioned with tongue firmly in cheek, even now as we begin to enter the era of ‘wearables’.

Of course, the rise of mobile, has been accompanied by the rise of programmatic as well as the rise of mobile app consumption (as opposed to browser-led web consumption in the desktop era), and the dynamics of media consumption, as well as ad spend, appear to be very different.

Todd Tran, Nexage, managing director, Europe, explains that mobile app developers (who create what we used to call ‘long tail content’ in the desktop era) are running increasingly complex businesses and now their concerns – including monetisation, as well as app store rankings – mirror those of legacy publishers who built their brands in print.

Nexage’s Tran, whose ad exchange helps both publishers and developers monetise their operations, explains that it’s developers (many of whom are making a healthy profit by running apps that are simple as alarm clocks) that are now earning higher yields compared to premium publishers.

One key advantage such players have is that they don’t have legacy interests (primarily revenue streams) to defend, as well as their subsequent overheads, meaning they are arguably more agile. Plus in many cases they are not restricted by language (an alarm clock app can be just as easily used by someone in Italy as it can by someone in Europe, whereas producing an Italian language version of The Telegraph would be a costly exercise).

Such content producers are more adept/willing to employ programmatic technology, plus the depth of data they are building on their users, means they are able to command much higher yields than publishers.

Meanwhile, legacy publishers’ interests are often diversified/conflicted over offline, desktop (both direct sales and programmatic) as well as mobile web and apps. To put the case quite simply, they are failing to realise the opportunities of programmatic in order to shore up ailing revenues derived from elsewhere.

In the meantime, utility apps have eaten-up a huge proportion of the programmatic mobile spend, plus when you also consider that social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter – and even news aggregation apps such as Flipboard – now generate many mobile users’ first contact point with premium news and magazine content, the situation seems almost cataclysmic.

The key question of this debate will be: ‘Can traditional publishers survive in programmatic?’, plus: ‘Are we seeing a new breed of media company emerging in an age where utility is fetching higher premiums compared to quality content?’ as mobile advertising is set to hone-in on the $20bn mark.