In the face of market domination by Google and Facebook, publishers and broadcasters who rely on advertising revenue are struggling to increase their profits. Google and Facebook alone accounted for approximately 99% of the $2.9 billion in digital advertising growth in the third quarter of 2016. 017/01/04/google-facebook-ad-industry/) It is no surprise that many publishers are taking the “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach, using Facebook and YouTube’s aggregation platforms to get more video views and, if they are lucky, a share of the increased video advertising. However, many experts believe that relying solely on Facebook and Google/YouTube for video distribution is not a winning strategy, and ultimately a self-defeating plan in terms of monetization and brand.
## Adversely Affects Monetization
Premium publishers who rely entirely on publishing through platforms like Facebook and YouTube are losing out in terms of generating the kind of user data that advertisers are willing to pay for. By contrast, this approach benefits aggregators like YouTube and Facebook for a number of reasons. The aggregators fill their sites (mostly for free) with premium publisher content, and they also get access to user data that can increase their value to advertisers. It’s easy to see that this is not a good deal for publishers. They are literally giving away their content and audience data for free in order to recoup some of the costs of publishing online. It is much more beneficial for publishers to keep their content and user data to themselves and negotiate the highest prices with media buyers on their own sites. Media buyers for companies like Expedia and Toyota would not be interested in data such as how many times users revisit a publisher’s site to read in-depth reviews of products, services, and locations. Such data is a useful indicator of intent and is extremely valuable to media buyers.
Furthermore, the ad spaces sold directly by publishers are also being negatively affected by Google and Facebook. In time, direct sales efforts will also be forced to compromise due to their total reliance on Google/Facebook.
If the same content and users can be accessed cheaply through programmatic ad sales based on Google and Facebook algorithms, why would media buyers contact the direct sales teams of local publishers to buy ad spaces?
As you can see from the latest report, [CPMs are on the rise on some social media platforms](https://www.marketingcharts.com/digital-70519), and while this is leading to increased profits for social media, it is not leading to increased profits for partner publishers.
## Negative impact on brands
Google and Facebook are like “general stores” for online content, and while a wide variety of content is available on their platforms, not all of it is dedicated to journalism like premium publishers, or maintains the same high standards of journalism. Publishers who rely solely on Facebook and Google risk devaluing their own content by being lumped in with dubious, low-quality content. Remember the case of [advertiser backlash] (https://martech.org/american-brands-stop-advertising-google-youtube-extremist/) that was revealed when a large amount of online advertising was withdrawn due to concerns about ads being displayed next to objectionable content on Google and YouTube. Google responded by saying that it was taking action against inappropriate content on its advertising network, but that didn’t change the fact that publishers still had to play by Google’s rules. Ultimately, the publisher is not in control, even though the value of the brand that the publisher has spent decades building is being eroded.
## Conclusion
Maintaining a website that you own and operate is costly, but the risk of the former pales in comparison to the cost of handing over control of monetization and brand value to a giant Silicon Valley corporation.
The future of publishers will depend greatly on which “walled garden” they build their business in, or more accurately, who they become to cultivate and harvest the land for.
