One of the ways we aim to give a great experience for our readers is to pick the most effective tech providers to help us run all aspects of our website, including which ads are served next to the articles we publish.
We recently signed an agreement with a British technology company, Illuma, which now has a commercial licence to categorise article pages and match advertising with those pages in ways that make sense to advertisers and to readers. The Guardian agreement with Illuma is the first standalone commercial licence to use data from our site for contextual targeting purposes.
There are many ad tech companies providing services to website publishers using different types of data to target online advertising. New privacy laws will mean that third-party cookies – used to track and reach audiences across the web – will soon be no more.
Advertisers will instead look to reach people where they spend time, including on premium news sites such as the Guardian. Rather than tracking and targeting individual people, so-called contextual advertising aims to match up advertising with relevant parts of a publisher’s website. For example, connecting advertisers with readers of sport, lifestyle or food journalism, without the use of personal data.
At the moment, we know that some companies allow advertisers to target context on our site without our permission to do so. These are often companies that industry trade bodies such as TAG and IAB UK, require publishers to allow on our sites to prevent advertising running on article pages featuring specific words, or types of news (such as politics or our coverage of the war in Ukraine).
Unfortunately, some of these companies are also scraping text and data from our website to create tools that claim to allow advertisers to target relevant article pages, without legal permission from the Guardian. We agree with the Association of Online Publishers that this isn’t good for marketers, publishers or consumers for at least two reasons.
First, such companies often categorise article pages incorrectly, which can prevent ads from running against article pages altogether, or mean that the ads don’t match well with the article page, giving a poor experience for the user and a poor return for the advertiser too.
Second, scraping and tagging by unlicensed third parties can lead to lag and delay on publisher sites, creating an annoying user experience and also delaying the time it takes for ads to load – another issue that potentially costs publishers money through lost revenue. Research by the technology company RedBud has shown that tagging and scraping of publisher websites by ad tech vendors can add 10-20% of lags and delays on page loading times.
The Guardian takes an open approach to publishing and distribution. Part of this approach has been the development of an Open API, which enables third parties to license the use of our journalism and intellectual property in an open, transparent and privacy-friendly way.
The agreement with Illuma means that it can access our content API directly, to accurately classify site pages, eliminating the need for any scraping of our site. Because they have no need to scrape, they won’t create page lag for readers either.
Crucially, the transparent and open agreement provides the Guardian with greater control and insight into how our intellectual property is being used to monetise contextual advertising on our site. With Illuma, we will have clear guidelines on what data can be accessed, how it can be used, and any other limitations or requirements. We also have an agreement to share data and insights into the targeting that is being applied.
We want to have more productive conversations with third parties about how our text and data can be licensed via legal contracts, and to deter the practice of unauthorised scraping.
We’re always thinking about ways to ensure the best advertising experience for users when they read the Guardian, and will seek to work with other companies that help to deliver advertising that protects internet users’ privacy, and improves the quality of experience for users and advertisers alike.
