How Can Publishers and Advertisers Monetize Roku’s Platform?
In this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2024, Head of Roku Exchange Charlie Goodman and Future Today Marketplace VP Tim Ware discuss the opportunities and the challenges of monetizing the Roku Channel and Exchange for programmers, distributors, and advertisers alike.
How Roku enables advertisers to achieve their goals
Ware asks Goodman how Roku manages a model where programmers and distributors share revenues.
“Our philosophy at Roku is we want advertisers to find success however they deem [it],” Goodman says. “Maybe it's acquisitions, maybe it's household reach and frequency. And so our job is really to make those moments matter and give them that ability to be able to bid on the audience they want, on the programs or the genre that matters, because context matters.”
Goodman emphasizes Roku’s aims to provide transparency and valuable signals, allowing advertisers to bid on specific audiences and content genres. “People want to know where they're delivering ads to,” he says. “They want to know if it's live or not, [and the] genre, [and] content rating. So we bundle all that stuff together and send it out. And in the Roku Channel, we allow our publishers or our content providers to also monetize there. Our goal is to make sure that everything is mutually beneficial and we're able to reward users with great ad content and make sure the advertisers are driving their outcomes. We really want to make sure that we're using the open Real-Time Bidding (RTB) standards. There's a lot of semantically relevant fields there.”
Ware asks, “Do you have any of the revenue? How much is data-driven addressable versus non-addressable?”
Goodman says that he doesn’t have the revenue numbers readily available. However, he says, “I know from our perspective, most people that are coming to us, it's more than just the Gross Rating Points (GRPs). It's more than just this program has this makeup. Most of it is based on addressability at a household level. I think most of the investment that we're seeing is through addressability versus contextual only.”
How Roku’s relationship with publishers has evolved
Ware touches on the evolution of Roku's relationship with publishers, highlighting improvements in transparency and the sharing of identifiers, which facilitate better monetization for content providers. “Roku is, I think, through experiences, realizing more harmony with its content providers, which is really relevant,” he says.
“I totally agree,” Goodman says. “Our philosophy in working with our content providers is that we want them to be able to find success. So we are committed to providing things like Roku ID for Advertising (RIDA), which is our identity for advertising. I think it's a really valuable Identifier for Advertising (IFA), and a lot of people use that to monetize and make sure that they're reaching the right devices. We are all about [being] mutually beneficial, and I think that's the cool thing for me, at least in my position at places like the Roku Channel. It's no longer just like, ‘Peacock over here, Roku Channel over here.’ There's a lot of competition. I mean, you saw it with our NewFronts. You just saw it with the Olympics, where we had the NBC Olympic Zone. Really, our goal is to make sure that everybody's finding that success in the moments of the matter.”
Join us in November 2024 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect.
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