with executives at ad agencies, B2B advertisers, technology vendors, media publishers, and other industry leaders.

On today's episode, we discuss why digital subscription growth is slowing, what's happening to publishers' digital ad revenues, and where their non-ad, non-subscription revenues are coming from. We then talk about how ads around print and digital news perform, whether targeting gets too much credit, and Nielsen's plans to cut ties with third-party cookies. Tune in to the discussion with eMarketer senior analyst at Insider Intelligence Audrey Schomer.

Taboola buys Connexity: The merger will help Taboola's publisher clients tap into ecommerce dollars while also helping Connexity's retail clients diversify away from Amazon.

With Chrome set to deprecate its third-party cookies by 2023, publishers’ digital ad revenues will likely suffer even more. But it’s not all bad for the publisher: USA Today’s subscription offering enters the market at a time when readers are willing to pay for news.

BuzzFeed may be the first big news publisher to employ this social-media-inspired monetization model, but it’s not the first time news and the creator economy have mingled. Substack is perhaps the best example of the increasing “creatorfication” of news, though it uses a more sustainable subscription model instead of paying for content ad hoc. What’s next?

eMarketer principal analysts Mark Dolliver, Nicole Perrin and Debra Aho Williamson at Insider Intelligence discuss what a new executive order could mean for user-generated content. They then talk about why The Wall Street Journal is doing well, publisher expectations for Q2 and Facebook's latest TikTok-like music making app Collab.

When we spoke with experts in publisher ad monetization in January, most of them expected the field of identity solutions to narrow over the coming year as adoption continues, but they felt it was unlikely that a single identifier alone would replace third-party cookies.

The program also hurt publishers by depriving them of income they may have otherwise been able to get from competitors’ larger bids. The filing certainly gives a lot more credibility to the Texas-led suit’s allegations, but it’s uncertain just how badly the suit will hurt Google.

Big Tech may pay US news publishers: If the US joins France and Australia in passing a bill that lets publishers collectively bargain with tech companies, it could cause a ripple effect worldwide.

Advertising dollars flowing to TV, radio, out-of-home (OOH), newspapers, and other print publishers contracted by 15.7% worldwide in 2020. Pre-pandemic, we had forecast a far more moderate 0.2% decline for traditional ad spending, which tracked with the medium’s persistent slow decline. For digital, the story was the opposite.

Ad blocking and avoidance have their most immediate effects on publishers that miss out on ad revenues they would otherwise have received from serving content to ad blocking users. Ad avoidance is just one of the reasons the average non-walled-garden publisher is struggling with ad-based monetization, and alternative revenue strategies have been gaining importance in recent years.

Advertising dollars flowing to TV, radio, out-of-home (OOH), newspapers, and other print publishers contracted by 15.7% worldwide in 2020. Pre-pandemic, we had forecast a far more moderate 0.2% decline for traditional ad spending, which tracked with the medium’s persistent, slow decline. For digital, the story was the opposite.

Media will experience a similar drop-off, as TV and radio producers and newspaper and magazine publishers shift advertising to their own properties amid economic uncertainty. Media will reduce its spending by 9.3%. Entertainment and media were already relatively small players in digital advertising, and both will lose market share this year.

The news: Fans, employees, and even some shareholders of major video game publisher Activision Blizzard are calling for CEO Bobby Kotick to resign following a report that he mishandled employees’ sexual misconduct allegations, per The Washington Post.

In Atlantic Canada, the Saltwire Network of five daily and 20 weekly newspapers laid off 40% of its staff.

The deprecation of the third-party cookie in Chrome will be significantly disruptive for publishers that monetize their sites with advertising. Here’s how web publishers are preparing for a future without third-party cookies.