What’s Next For Blogging with Eric Hochberger | Mediavine On Air Episode 51

If content creators have learned anything recently, it’s that the only constant in the blogging industry is CHANGE.

As we usher in the privacy-centric era for the web, the winds of change are blowing more strongly than ever, but what does it all mean for publishers?

On this Teal Talk, Jenny is sitting down with Mediavine CEO Eric Hochberger for a no-holds-barred conversation about the state of the blogging industry and everything Mediavine is doing to ensure that content creators not only survive the coming shifts but THRIVE.

Make sure to let us know what you think and check out the helpful resources below!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Helpful Resources

• Helpful Resource Slide
• Grow and First-Party Data
• Exclusive Content with Grow
• Grow Product Tour
• Mediavine x Slickstream

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] JENNY GUY: Hello. Howdy, friends. Welcome. Welcome, one and all, to another episode of Mediavine’s Teal Talk. For any of our first-time viewers, welcome. This is our live program where we feature experts from around the blogging industry on any and all topics that could help content creators build sustainable businesses. So basically if it concerns publishers, we are talking about it here.

I am with you as always as your host, Jenny Guy. So happy to have you here today. We have a very big show for today, so we are just going to kind of speed through our little opening. But I did have to say that believe it or not, however you feel about the various memes announcing it, like it or not, it is already May. Mother’s Day is Sunday. 2022, I have to say, is winning the award for Bat Out of Hell years. Like, I don’t– I don’t know if anyone– like, how is it already May? That’s insane to me.

This is our final episode of Teal Talk before we go on our hiatus for our fifth annual Summer of Live. So I don’t know how that happened, but it is happening. It is the truth. And in a world this crazy where time has no meaning, it can be comforting to rely on traditions. And from Mediavine, for Teal Talk, for this show, we traditionally start things and end things with a certain guest. He’s here with me today. He’s Mediavine CEO and co-founder. Please welcome the one, the only Eric Hochberger back to the program. Eric, welcome.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Thanks, Jenny. Good to have my usual anchor spot.

JENNY GUY: It is.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That’s the anchor, right? Yeah, OK.

JENNY GUY: Yes, anchor. You’re batting cleanup, for all you sportsball fans out there. Eric, is this year happening in a bananas, like, flying by crazily to you, too? Are you in shock?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I feel like the last three years, so why make an exception to this year. Don’t even– is it May? That’s great. Awesome.

JENNY GUY: What does time mean anymore? It doesn’t mean anything. And I also– I’ve said this repeatedly. I’m sorry for people who are hearing me say it over and over again, but I feel like anything that has happened in the last three years, like significant milestones, shouldn’t count. Why? I turned 40. Why? That shouldn’t–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That means I’m not turning 40? Is that the good news?

JENNY GUY: That’s what that means. That’s what that means. It’s crazy. OK, everybody. We are going to be talking about some important stuff today. We know you have questions about all of this stuff, because I certainly do. All of us at Mediavine do, so please post those questions for Eric or myself in those comments. We will get them to you. But let us without any further ado, Eric– we usually have you here to talk specifically about Mediavine updates, but today we have really widened our scope to talk about important things that are impacting the whole blogging, content creation industry.

There are some big changes on the horizon for publishers, and we wanted to break them all down. So I want to just start here at the top. I don’t know, again, with anyone else, it feels like we’ve been talking about the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome for thousands of years, definitely since dinosaurs walked the Earth, and the rules keep shifting and changing.

Now there is no denying that it’s an incredibly complex issue that will impact multiple industries and requires a multifaceted solution and collaboration like never before from people who don’t typically like to collaborate. So to start out with, Eric, will you just give us the TL;DR version of where we are right now? What’s Google’s current deadline for the deprecation? Will it stick?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Well that last one I cannot predict, but I can tell you the stated goal for Google is still mid-2023. So in the middle of next year they’re going to start a gradual deprecation of third-party cookies that will be completed before the end of next year. So we have– I don’t know where we are. In about one year from now, since we did establish it is May, right? That is the month we’re in?

JENNY GUY: It’s not going to be May, it is May.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: OK, it’s May. Good. Then yeah, starting about a year from now Google is going to start deprecating third-party cookies, again, assuming that everything is alive and well in the Privacy Sandbox.

JENNY GUY: OK, so it’ll kind of be like what it was with Core Web Vitals, like a slow roll. We’ll start a little bit, and then we’ll just kind of expand out from there.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So it’s going to be a little more interesting, because it’s going to be almost like an individual cookie is going to be– so as you start to set third-party cookies, the ones you set then are going to have a certain length of lifetime to them. So you won’t be able to set anything that will last longer than that year. So yeah, I mean it’s a very clever way of slowly putting an end to them without an overnight drop in third-party cookies.

JENNY GUY: OK, question that we have up there is for our audience. Are you currently taking steps to prepare yourself for the Cookiepocalypse? Let us know in the comments. And we have a perfect question from Paul Stamp. Our audience is honestly, the best, because they always predict where I’m going. It’s so good. I love them. But Paul said, “Uncertain times are ahead for display ads. How worried are you about third-party cookies going away? Can you give a percentage drop on revenue?”

And that is actually what I was going to ask you. We have heard some pretty dire predictions about what’s going to happen to programmatic advertising revenue from Google themselves. So what is the scoop? What can we potentially expect, understanding that all of this is prediction? We’re all gazing into our crystal cookie balls.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Right, so I think we all like to start with the scary number, and that is the 60% number that Google quoted. And that is 60% drop in revenue if third-party cookies go away and there are no mitigation efforts or no solutions or no alternatives. So if tomorrow we turn them off and nobody came up with any other solution, revenue would drop 60% on Chrome traffic.

So I’ll reiterate. I think the state of blogging is awesome and alive and well. And one of the reasons why is because first off, none of us have 100% Chrome traffic or Android traffic. Most of us have Safari, where third-party cookies are already gone. So you really only have about 50% of your revenue is at-risk from a third-party cookies go away. So that’s really a 30% drop, even using that Google number. But again, we’re working on a ton of mitigation efforts as an industry. Mediavine’s working on mitigation efforts as a company. Hopefully our publishers are working on some of their own.

And combined, we think all of these solutions mean an opportunity. Because again, remember, Safari already has no third-party cookies. So we can come out of this better than we were before as an industry. If we solve for a lack of third-party cookies, we don’t just unlock Chrome traffic in the future. We unlock that Safari traffic that we previously have not been monetizing well. So we can all use this as an opportunity to make more money, not less.

JENNY GUY: We are getting some of the best comments in here. When we asked what are people doing to prepare, Adrian said, “sure, working with the best ad network.” Adrian, we love that. Sarah said– Sarah, who I just saw last week in Los Angeles– said, “I’m taking the step of watching this video.” Nice. Michelle says, “I am just avoiding thinking or worrying about any of this cookie stuff and trusting Mediavine will have this covered.” All right, all right. This one– I feel, Susan. “I’m ready. I think I’m ready. I’m sure I’m ready.”

I feel you, Susan. We all feel you, because it’s been confusing. And one of the things I think that has been so confusing for everyone is Google’s solution has been a little nebulous. Things have been kind of shifting quite a bit again with the timeline has been moving around, but also we had– the birds were really big last year, the FLoC birds. They were in the Privacy Sandbox. So the birds are gone, but the Privacy Sandbox is still there. What about Topics? What is FLEDGE? That’s the newest thing I heard about, too. What are all these things? Where did the birds go, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, I think Google even got sick of the birds. So the Privacy Sandbox, for those who don’t know the bird jokes, are that they named every one of those solutions after a bird, and they use an acronym. And they were extremely complex, like FLoC was a Federated Learning of Cohorts, but the really cute name of FLoC instead. And they did this with a ton, including FLEDGE, formerly known as– or, I guess, TURTLEDOVE.

So there are lots of bird names still around from the ones that have not been killed off, but FLoC, which is not going to see the light of day, is being reborn as Topics, because I guess they’re getting away from the bird theme. So what is Topics? Topics is not really FLoC, but it is the replacement. So the idea is without third-party cookies advertisers will be able to learn what the topic of your site is about. And as a user browses multiple sites, it will pick out their top topics without necessarily giving away all of their browsing history, not having any sensitive categories, and sharing the limited data.

So Topics is still in its, really, testing phase or proposal, mostly, and we are working with Google on that. There are some issues. I think even Google will admit it’s not going to be a full replacement for third-party cookies, just one part of the solution. So that is one that will hopefully be live before that 2023 date of next year.

JENNY GUY: And we’re planning to– we’re working with all of these Google solutions, correct?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Absolutely. We work very closely with Google. We’re in the W3C, where these discussions are happening. So we are working actively on everything in the Privacy Sandbox.

JENNY GUY: Pause. What’s the W3C?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Do you want me to define every acronym? This is going to be exhausting. Or maybe I should stop using them. That would be the better thing.

JENNY GUY: Not a bird.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So the W3C is actually who sets the standards for most of the web. So you’ll see W3C mentioned not just when it comes to ads, but W3C is who defines things like HTML and the things that actually power the web. So it’s a big deal. Google is very vocal and active in there, as you can imagine, on all aspects of the web, and now with ads. And it’s not just Google, though. This is where companies like Mediavine can join and have these discussions. And most of it’s in a public forum, even.

JENNY GUY: OK, so we are in the room where it happens, for anyone– I was listening to Hamilton before I came on. So we’re definitely where the decision makers are, and I know, and I can say this, because I’ve been listening to the conversations behind the scenes at Mediavine. Our goal is to ensure through all of this that independent publishers have a voice as we move into this new era for the web, yeah?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: No, 1000%. I think we are uniquely positioned. Again, we are– so there was a recent internet giant article that we posted on, but we are the only internet giant that is an independent company. We actually are still started with the same founders that started this company, I don’t even know how many years ago. In 2004– someone else could do the math who’s better at that. 18? Does that seem like 18 years? Again, time has no meaning anymore. So 18 or so years ago we founded this company, and it’s still been the same founders. We are still an independent company, which is why I think more than anyone we care about independent voices.

And we are making sure that’s why everyone– we all have a seat at the table through Mediavine. That is our goal. We are making sure that the independent voice does not get lost. Because I can promise you a lot of the other voices there who have the money to join these boards are not small, independent publishers. They are the largest names. They are The New York Times, they are The Washington Post, people who are a little less concerned about third-party cookies, and I could explain why, but they don’t necessarily have all the same interests as Mediavine Publishers, and we are here to help represent the voice of the independent publisher.

JENNY GUY: Their business models are totally different. Their audiences are totally different.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Exactly.

JENNY GUY: And what we’ve talked about a lot of times is that switching to a paid model or a paywall, like The New York Times, it’s just not going to work for all of the independent content creators necessarily that we work with, so we have to look for other solutions.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Exactly.

JENNY GUY: OK, I’ve got a few questions here. This one is from Teagan, and we’re going to shift to– well, let me take a look at where we are. We’ve talked about revenue. Oh, before we get into these. We’ve talked about how we’re cooperating with all of the privacy solutions. We’re more than cooperating, we’re testing. We’re working on incorporating it. We’re doing everything that Google has coming out. Is there anything else other than Grow, which we are going to talk about, that we are doing? What else is out there that we are– I talked a little bit about collaboration. What collaborations are we working on?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Sure. I mean, I can tell you one collaboration is there are what we call the authenticated traffic type solutions. And as we have partnered with names like The Trade Desk, which may not be the same household name as Google to a lot of people. But The Trade Desk is actually the second largest buyer of ad inventory, and it’s slowly actually becoming the number one for some of our sites, even. So if you haven’t heard of The Trade Desk, it is a publicly traded company. It is large, but again, not the household name of Google.

And we have partnered with them on a lot of their initiatives, including Unified ID 2.0, which, as an industry, The Trade Desk is pushing to help support the independent web. And that’s making sure that when a user logs in to any of these sites with either Grow, or we can talk about the Identity API, or our integrations with things like Slickstream, if a user logs into your site, we can make sure through Unified ID 2.0 we can get a lot of the power of third- party cookies, thanks to that initiative. So we’re partnering with big names like The Trade Desk, and we are also working on our own initiatives of first-party data and, of course, our Grow product.

JENNY GUY: Is it OK if I rewind and go real basic here for a second?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Sure.

JENNY GUY: Because I just want to– OK.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I live this stuff, so you need to make me–

JENNY GUY: I know. You, too, and I do, too, to a certain extent, but not nearly to Eric’s extent. So what is the problem with third-party cookies? Why is those going away going to impact independent publishers so much?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so third-party cookies are what power personalized ads as we know them today. So a third-party cookie is what gives an advertiser the ability to say, hey, this user browsed both, or whatever you do, and “The Hollywood Gossip,” so maybe they’re interested in cooking even though they’re on “The Hollywood Gossip.” That has been what has allowed what’s called third-party data, or the ability to give advertisers the ability to target.

When they’re on your site without third-party cookies, when a user is browsing an article on “The Hollywood Gossip,” all an advertiser knows this is a user on “The Hollywood Gossip.” They can’t guess their age. They can’t guess gender. They can’t guess income. All the things that advertisers love to buy against, they won’t have any of those abilities without third-party cookies. All they can say is, well, this person’s browsing a Kim Kardashian article, so they’re probably x. And that’s really what they’re going to be losing a lot of, that powerful targeting that they’re used to.

JENNY GUY: OK, so that’s the problem. The problem is– because we talk about that all the time with programmatic advertising. It’s not related to what your content is– the content creator’s content– it’s related to what the user is browsing.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Exactly. And in programmatic advertising they’re buying on the user, not the content. And they’re going to lose that ability, which is how most transactions are today. So that’s a drop in revenue.

JENNY GUY: And why they pay, because we know that they’re talking to somebody who’s a hot lead. If I’m Honda and I’ve seen someone searching for tires, car safety, all of those things, oh, this is a hot lead for me. I’m going to serve my ads to them, so I pay more.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Absolutely. It’s why you can see– this really exists in all forms of advertising. There are certain sections in newspapers that are more valuable, because you know what a reader is reading at that time, so the same concept. We need that ability to offer a premium that advertisers are willing to pay. Otherwise to be able to find their user, they’re going to have to spray and pray, if you will, or blanket the entire internet with ads, hoping to reach that one user, versus before, they were able to say, hey, I found my user. I’m willing to pay a lot more. They’re not going be able to do that without third-party cookies.

JENNY GUY: Thank you. That’s helpful. So everything that we’re doing, all of these different mitigation efforts, are looking at ways to maintain the privacy that audiences and everyone is demanding but still give advertisers the ability to have some targeting in what they’re doing?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Absolutely. So that is the delicate balance that we’re all trying to walk. And where we see things like Topics that maybe aren’t as powerful I think as advertisers want, or even what publishers want, but because we have to recreate the web in a privacy-centric way. Users have made it clear they don’t want to be tracked. They don’t want all the creepiness that was third-party cookies, where I put a shoe in my shopping cart, and then I go to a website, and I have an ad for that exact shoe telling me to check out.

Those were the types of ads that made users uncomfortable. They thought their phones were listening to them when they were on Facebook, all sorts of things that weren’t necessarily happening, but that was where users’ minds jumped to because we weren’t transparent as an industry. So that’s the idea. Let’s be more transparent. Let’s offer some form of targeting but not the full, more privacy invasive ways.

JENNY GUY: We definitely have all had conversations about how everyone is being listened to. And I just talked about cookies, I didn’t even type cookies, and yet I’m getting ads for cookies. How did that happen? Why do people– how do they know? This is actually a great question from Noreen. She said, “I understand privacy, but wouldn’t the user prefer ads that are of interest than generic ads?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So 100% agreed. It is a better experience to have ads that are more targeted to you. Nobody wants to see the gross, untargeted ads. We’ve seen them. If you browse your own site, as many of you do, for hundreds of hours a month as you’re looking at how everything is on your site, you start to run out of ads. Mediavine ads are very premium.

But as you start to get to the bottom of the barrel, you start to see things like a toenail fungus ad, or gross ads you certainly don’t want. And I promise you that’s not what a majority of your users see, but that could be the future of the web if advertisers have no targeting. You’re going to get lower quality ads that you don’t want to see. I just think users want that balance, protecting their privacy but still seeing ads that interest them.

JENNY GUY: Absolutely. OK, here we go. We’ve arrived at our favorite topic, Grow. Please give us our elevator pitch. And what I want to really target in on here is why we are devoting so many resources to this and talking about it so much. We’ve already said we’re doing things with Google in Privacy Sandbox. We’re working with The Trade Desk in UID. We’re doing a lot of mitigation efforts. Why is Grow so important?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So Grow really puts the power that a lot of large publishers have always had in the hands of small, independent publishers. And remember kind of what we talked about before. Something like The New York Times has the ability to generate millions of users logged in. We know we can do that with Grow as a combined effort. So Grow really gives the ability for independent publishers to build authenticated traffic and first-party data, and we all do it together as a community. So we’re giving you tools for your website to help you generate first-party data while at the same time actually helping you build up your audience of users that will come back. So it’s a suite of engagement tools that help your users stick. They help them come back to your site, all while making you more money.

JENNY GUY: OK, you said a couple of terms in there that I want to talk more about. So Grow is designed to help independent publishers collect first-party data, or authenticated data, or traffic, or both, or what?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So both. So I think a lot of the times those two get conflated. So authenticated traffic is simply the idea that a user logged into your website. And that is really the start of your ability to create first-party data, or using partnerships like the Unified ID 2.0 I talked about, to give advertisers targeting abilities. Those are going to be your most valuable users, because they are logged in.

You know who they are. You have a relationship with them that hopefully is a long-term relationship. You could be able to send them emails in the future, get them to come back to your site. That is the idea of authenticated traffic, your most valuable traffic. But that’s probably only going to be our ambitious goal of 5% to 10% of your traffic. So what about the rest? That’s where first-party data really comes in.

So if you can get a reader to accept personalized ads but not maybe give you their email address or log into your site, we can still start to build privacy-centric profiles about that user. So it’s no longer going to be hey, this user put this shoe in their shopping cart, but again, they browse a shoe site that’s running Grow, we can suddenly start to serve them shoe ads when they come to your site because they agreed, again, to these kind of personalized ads without necessarily saying, hey, I’m willing to log in and do everything you want me to do.

JENNY GUY: OK so it’s not just my site, though. That’s the beauty of Grow. If all of these different publishers are using it and then you come to my site, you don’t have to sign up individually for every person’s site. Is that right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That is the most beautiful part about Grow, it’s that it is a community, that we’re building all of this together. So we have millions of users, when previously if we were all doing this on our own, the most successful Mediavine publishers maybe have tens of thousands of readers. Most of us probably have tens of readers, if we were to build our own login system. It’s very hard to get people to create an account.

But all of us together, times the 8,500 publishers here at Mediavine and soon growing even beyond Mediavine, Grow allows us to hit millions of users in a much quicker rate. So our goal is to hit in the tens of millions of users, obviously, by the time third-party cookies go away and have a meaningful amount of users able to log in with one click. They don’t have to create an account. It’s very easy. They’ll see Grow. They’ll be comfortable logging into your site.

JENNY GUY: OK, helpful. All right, I’m going to start hitting some of these user questions. We have a ton. This is Teagan. “I already have thousands of registered users on WordPress, my most dedicated readers. How can I make sure these are first-party for the purposes of serving Mediavine ads?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So there’s going to be two ways to do this. That’s a great question, Teagan. You can use what we call the Identity API today. So that’s been live for over a year, and that is the idea of want to own the login system for your site. You want the users more siloed to your site. And that’s great if you have a following of tens of thousands of users or thousands of users, and you can already use that Identity API. We can put in a link for that, and that is the idea of simple, little code. You can make sure when a user is logged in. You communicate with us, and we’re able to make sure they’re served those personalized ads. You’ll make more money on those users.

There’s the alternative approach, where you could actually move over to Grow. This is something we’re working on when you’ll be able to import your users over. They won’t lose anything that they had. The idea is they’re just going to upgrade their account, if you will, to a Grow account. So it doesn’t just work on your site but across the thousands of other sites that are running Grow. So you have both solutions you can use.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Julie. “Is there any way to compare Safari traffic revenue versus Chrome traffic revenue from within Mediavine?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Not yet, but that is something we definitely want to be able to show you guys, because I think that’s important. I think once people start to see that’s where Google is getting its 60% drop, it’s real, I think that should help a lot of publishers realize the importance of why things like Grow are so urgent to install now and not just wait until third-party cookies are gone. So short answer, no, not today, but in the future.

JENNY GUY: We have a lot of questions floating around about revenue. The 60% that Google said, they’re wanting– I think everybody is wanting you to give a percentage with all the mitigation efforts. What might it mean? And are we talking about only Chrome traffic losing the revenue, or is it all traffic? Is it your total RPM? Help us.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So again, that’s only going to be on your Chrome and Android traffic and Chromium browsers that currently have third-party cookies. So things like Edge are actually just built, are just reskinned Chrome. So Microsoft Edge, formerly known as IE, is now just Chrome. So there are going to be other browsers, but they’re a small percentage of the market.

We care most about is what’s happening with Chrome and what’s happening with Safari. Those are the two main players. Safari, again, third-party cookies are already gone, so when third-party cookies go away in Chrome, your Safari traffic isn’t going to be worth less. If anything it might be worth a little bit more, again, because of all these mitigation efforts. Can I give you an exact percentage? Not entirely, because that’s all going to depend on sites and how involved everyone gets in Grow.

So I can tell you that users that are logged in to Grow are worth just a ton more when there’s no third-party cookies. They might be worth two to three times as much as a user who isn’t logged in. Are you going to make two to three times as much money if you get everyone to log in? Sure, but that’s not realistic unless you have a site that, again, has an incredibly dedicated base.

Maybe you have some sort of exclusive content that users are willing to log into, but if 5% to 10% of your users are making you three times more, that can be very nice towards mitigating a 30% drop by making 30% more money. We don’t have exact figures because it’s going to depend on site, but we think that this is an opportunity to make more, not less.

JENNY GUY: OK, this is a great question, and we already talked about this a little bit, but I want to get really granular. If I can’t get– Tanya says if I can’t get a significant decent portion of my users to authenticate via Grow– not a lot of people seem to sign up create accounts from what I’ve seen– how does grow still help with the Cookiepocalypse?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So that’s a great question. So again, first we’re going to say that Grow, where it is today, is not necessarily where Grow is going to be in two years. I think you’ve seen a ton of developments coming to Grow just really over the last year and a half or so we’ve had this product. But over the next two years it’s going to change even more, not just because we’re developing it but because the internet as a whole is going to be changing.

I think users are going to come to expect to log in, consent to personalized ads, or something more similar to what Grow is already introducing today. We’re just very early on in what the future of the web is going to look like. So don’t stress when you can’t get a ton of users to log in today. This is going to be a slow build. So your goal is to try to slowly introduce them to it.

You’re going to be adding more and more features that Grow has today, and again, more features that it adds in the future to encourage these readers to log in. So it is still going to help, and one of the beauties, again, if other sites are all running this together, those are shared users. And hopefully some of them can even come logged into your site automatically with some ideas we have in the future as well.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. OK. We’ve got more questions, but I want to break in with this one. Who is Grow for?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Grow is for everyone. So this is going to sound crazy. Our goal is not just for Grow to be for Mediavine publishers, but we really think Grow should be for the web. One of the reasons why is our industry as a whole has not come up with a lot of great solutions to third-party cookies. The Privacy Sandbox, as we mentioned, has one real proposal right now, maybe two, and none of them have gone live.

So there’s been a lot of outside interest– you’d be surprised– to run Grow, even from names you wouldn’t think. So not a traditional Mediavine lifestyle blogger, but large-name publishers don’t have their own solutions to this. So we partially want to offer Grow to help more of the web monetize with this first-party data.

But really because as a user, if you want Grow to be successful, you want to Grow on as many sites as possible. You don’t just want your login to work on 5,000 sites that are running Grow. Let’s get that login working across the web. So that’s one of our goals, getting Grow as universal as we can across the web so that a reader gets more benefit from creating and logging in with Grow.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. OK, so what that means– can you take that from the high level into a more specific level? What does it mean with people not– so first, Mediavine publishers can use it right now, yes? Anyone can be using Grow?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: If you’re a Mediavine publisher, go right in your Mediavine dashboard. You can toggle it on, and you’ll be running Grow within minutes, maybe seconds if you’re already logged in. If you are a non-Mediavine publisher or you have a second site that’s not yet with Mediavine, we are introducing Grow for the entire web, for the entire world. It is coming soon. It is actually being actively tested today on non-Mediavine sites, and we hope to have that live as soon as we can for more people to be able to sign up for it.

JENNY GUY: And if you’re interested in that today, we have a link that we’re going to be sharing that you can put your name down if you– so if you’re a Mediavine publisher and there are non-Mediavine sites that you’re interested in having Grow on, or if you’re not quite ready for Mediavine yet, or you’re working with another full service ad management company– whatever your circumstances are– if you’re not working with us for ad management, we are going to share a link towards the end of the live and again in the resource doc that you can sign up for.

We are pulling names from that as we move forward and expand our testing efforts to make Grow for non-Mediavine publishers. So just signing up doesn’t mean that you’re immediately going to get an invitation, so don’t expect that. But do put your name down if you’re interested, so as we’re adding more testers we can consider you. All right, lots of questions on Grow. Here they come. Are you ready? Do you need to take a sip of that coffee?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh, it’s almost gone. That’s why I’m so excited right now.

JENNY GUY: All right, Samantha Ashley, “if we have Grow installed right now, what does that mean?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: It really depends on how you’re using Grow. So just enabling Grow, what it’s going to do by default is turn that widget on in the bottom right-hand corner, allow users to favorite things across your site and across the web. That’s a great set of features to run, and it also enables social sharing and so many other things that are just built into that widget.

But really to use Grow you’re going to have to look beyond just turning it on. You have to look into features like Spotlight Subscribe. Spotlight Subscribe is the ability to grow your newsletter and logged in users at the same time, and that one does extremely well. It is a non-pop-up that converts nearly as well as a pop-up through a really good user experience.

So without necessarily having the bad user experience of a pop-up you can get near those conversions. And of course we have recommended content, search, and a lot of other features as well that you can opt into right from your Mediavine dashboard just by, again, simple toggles you can start opting into these things, and they’re all free.

JENNY GUY: I want to rewind, because you said Spotlight Subscribe. We’ve seen incredible results, and I can attest to it. We have it on the Mediavine corporate site, and it does incredibly well. But what if I don’t have a newsletter? Should I not turn on Spotlight Subscribe?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So one of the things we say is turn it on now and set up a newsletter in the future. One of the things we’re actually working on is the ability for publishers that don’t have a newsletter to kind of get a newsletter lite– name still pending. The idea is Grow will be able to send emails on your behalf if you don’t have a newsletter today. So another thing you have to run– so if you have a great email list set up with something like ConvertKit– you can continue to work with ConvertKit and not even turn that feature on. But this is for publishers that don’t have a ConvertKit account, don’t have their email series set up. Let us help you build it with Grow. That’s going to be our goal in the next few months.

JENNY GUY: Awesome. Love to hear that. OK, Terra or Tara, I’m not sure. She says, “What are your top tips for getting readers to log in with Grow? Exclusive Content? Something else?” I would love to talk about Exclusive Content. I don’t think we have yet.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So that is the number one way to get users to log in definitely is going to be Exclusive Content. It’s also going to be the number one way to drive your newsletter growth. If you thought pop-ups had good conversion, you have no idea what’s in store for you when you turn on Exclusive Content. I think Nicole, or whatever you do who works here, on her personal site I think she saw like a 500% increase in her newsletter sign-ups just by locking down about 30 of her top posts. So not every post, not all of her new posts, just some of her more evergreen content, she made it so you have to log in order to be able to see.

Has she gotten complaints? Only a few, and meanwhile her newsletter growth has been explosive. And a lot of us run into these issues where our newsletter growth gets stagnant over time as people unsubscribe. Are you growing more than you’re losing? And that’s why a lot of us hit a wall. We might have 10,000, 20,000 subscribers and never be able to get to more. This is your chance. Exclusive Content is live now, and it’s something you can test. And again, test it on just a few of your posts. You shouldn’t see necessarily any drop in rankings, because we tested and conform to Google’s SEO standards, and see how it does with your audience. It might do as well as it does for Nicole, so it’s something worth testing.

JENNY GUY: Even if it doesn’t do quite as well as it does for Nicole, it’s still pretty darn worth it. There’s a big margin here. All right, Jessica, “You mention that Grow will change in two years, but how will we expect that to help in one year when Google implements changes? Are there more changes sooner that will help us keep on top of these transitions?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Again, definitely. I think Grow is changing before your eyes. So when I say it’s changing over the next two years, I really mean by the time that rollout of third-party cookies, I guess the phaseout, is complete. I think then all of these features will begin to make a lot more sense. Exclusive Content, or what is really called a freewall across the internet, is not common right now. Most sites require you to pay or just give you the content for free.

In the future you’re going to see more of this, or more exclusive content. We’re just really early on into the industry. So if Exclusive Content is working for you now, awesome. But in two years it’s probably going to be a lot more expected of your users, and they’ll complain a little bit less. And so that’s kind of what we mean by it’s going to change over the next few years. You’re going to watch a change before your eyes. So it can help you now run these features today and run the new features that we continue to build.

JENNY GUY: Well I was going to say that one, it can more than help you now in terms of a preparatory way. It can help you now in terms of earning more money because advertisers are paying premium for these users, yes?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so again I’m going to keep coming back to Nicole’s site. She’s already at nearly our goal of that 5% of users logged in, which is insane. She’s there almost a year and a half to two full years early just by running Exclusive Content on a handful of her posts.

You make more money when a user is logged into your site, even when third-party cookies exists, because you have that one-to-one relationship with that reader. And you’ll make a lot more on Safari, where there are no third-party cookies. These are live solutions today that the industry has already created. You’re already going to make more money when third-party cookies exist and when they don’t. So if you start adopting these things now, it’s going to increase your RPM today.

JENNY GUY: So you’re going to start making more money now. You’re also going to be getting your readers used to these new features and building up that authenticated traffic as we go through time, yes? We can’t just flick it on when Google does it and go, shazam. That’s not how it works.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Right, which is why, again, places like The Washington Post and The New York Times, not as nervous when you’re in these boards– these meetings with them. They have been doing this for years. They know as well as anyone, you can’t do this stuff overnight. You have to start now. It is a slow process. Even with the explosive growth I’m mentioning for Nicole’s site, that 500% increase is still going to be a small overall percentage of her traffic. So grow it today so by the time third-party cookies disappear, you’re in very good shape.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. All right, another question. Oh, there are people saying all sorts of great things. We have somebody who says I have it on my non-Mediavine site. It works great. I just want to be able to offer a download upon signing up.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So that is a great champ. OK, well first off, thank you for running it as a non-Mediavine site and helping us test this. In terms of downloads upon signing up, so there are ways you could do that today. We have a Zapier integration where you could email them that downloadable right now.

We’re working on a direct ConvertKit, API Integration, where you would be able to do the same thing, and that will allow you to instantly send your user the download. But we’re actually working on through a feature similar to Exclusive Content, building downloadable directly into Grow. So that’s going to be one of our goals, hopefully later this year, is be able to offer downloadables directly to your users in Grow in exchange for them signing in to your website and, again, that you get it for free.

JENNY GUY: It’s the same thing with the email list. It’s an opt-in. It’s a freemium. You’re offering people– we’re doing that value exchange with your readers. If you will consent to being served personalized ads, give me your email address, I will give you the 15 best places to go in Italy backpacking. I’m just saying that, and that maybe that was just on the top of my mind. I don’t know why, but–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Woo, Italy backpacking. That’s going to be fun.

JENNY GUY: I’m ready. Let’s do it. Maria says, “Is Grow fully accessible?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Is that in terms of accessibility features?

JENNY GUY: I’m not exactly sure what she means. Maria, can you give us some clarification there? All right, I’m not sure who this user is, but it says it has blog articles suggestions too, and Spotlight Subscribe’s amazing. Love hearing that. And I’ve got another beautiful question that our readers are leading us right where we wish to go. Do you have visibility into how many users are actually using Grow to save articles, revisit them later, et cetera?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So one of the things that we are working on as we go to unveil Grow for non-Mediavine publishers, is a Grow dashboard. And that’s one of the reasons why we have not previously released this to non-Mediavine publishers because it’s in the Mediavine dashboard today.

So I think once we open up this Grow publisher portal or the dashboard, we’re going to be able to offer more analytics and show you more of this data. Today the best way you can get is through Google Analytics, and we can show you a help article that’s not going to give you a full picture. So we’re working on making sure you get the full picture of how Grow is helping your site today. So it’s something we working on.

JENNY GUY: Happening. It’s coming. It’s coming soon. Don’t worry. All right.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I’ve seen it. It’s real.

JENNY GUY: This is a great question from Sarah. Can you tell me more about Exclusive Content? Sounds like it doesn’t have to be paid, just behind a sign-up wall. Is that right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Correct. So today the way we’re launching Exclusive Content as what you would call a freewall. So all they have to do is sign up for Grow and subscribe to your newsletter, where applicable by law, and they get access to your content. So when I do that quick little disclaimer in the EU, they are able to get your content without signing up for your newsletter. It becomes optional, and that is a requirement of GDPR. But everywhere we can we’re going to lock down your content with an email subscription. So they don’t have to pay, but in the future we are exploring the idea of memberships or the idea of allowing you to lock down content as paid content.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Is it possible to have more than one Spotlight Subscribe form? I have several different email funnels and currently have to turn off Spotlight Subscribe and therefore Grow for my minor funnels and sub niche pages.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I have great news for you. You don’t need to turn it off. Yeah, Spotlight Subscribe does support multiple widgets. Right now it’s a little manual in the way that you’ll have to target them on your different pages. And I know– again, I’m going to keep pointing to Nicole. She does this on her own site. She just uses Grow so well. Great example. She has done this, I think, with a plugin called Ad Inserter as a way of inserting that code.

But one of the things we are working on is the ability to do category targeting directly inside of Spotlight Subscribe. So you’ll be able to pick a category and assign this widget to it and then complete your funnel that way. But you can do it today. You can create multiple widgets. You can manually insert them. They’ll come through differently in Zapier, so you can do the rest of your funnel appropriately.

JENNY GUY: Awesome. All right. Samantha. When you say logged in, it’s logged in with Grow, correct? Are there any tutorials we can see about using Exclusive Content?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, I think we have help articles today, but yeah, when we’re saying logged in, we mean logged in with Grow. And remember, when they logged in with Grow, it’s that Grow account they could have created anywhere on the web. It’s very easy for them to pretty much click one button if they’re already logged in. And even with third-party cookies, they might come automatically logged into your site today and just be able to click one button to subscribe. So it’s not as intrusive as it sounds, especially as more of us begin using this feature.

JENNY GUY: OK. We got some clarity from Maria. She said is Grow fully accessible for people with disabilities, the visually impaired, et cetera? Great question.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: As much as we can be we definitely focus on all things accessibility here at Mediavine. So small examples, in Grow when you pick the widget, we make sure your colors that you choose are accessible, so making sure for the visually impaired that you have enough contrast. We work wherever we can. If you find something that’s not accessible or you run into an issue, please let us know. But absolutely everything we’ve built here at Mediavine, we try to do to accessibility standards. Very important.

JENNY GUY: Can I put a download link behind the login option so that I’m giving away a PDF that way?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That’s actually one of the ways we see people using Exclusive Content today. So they’re locking down download links, so that is the way you can get it today, before we even build a downloadables feature. So you can have it right now. Again, go to your dashboard, set up Exclusive Content. It can be marked around anything. So in Gutenberg you could do it around any block. In non-WordPress sites, even, you can do it with just HTML around any content you want. So a download link is a great example. And in the future we’re working on ways to make downloadables like a first-class citizen or built right into Grow.

JENNY GUY: Excellent. Byron. If a user gives their email via Spotlight Subscribe, will they be authenticated, identified if they return to your site?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah. As long as they consent to personalized ads and hopefully create that full account, they will be authenticated or identified. We’re working on ways to make sure that that will happen more often than not. So to shortly answer that, yes. Our goal is to make sure as soon as they complete Spotlight Subscribe, they are going to be authenticated in the future. That is our goal with that product.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. All right, so if someone has signed up for Grow on another website and they come to yours for the first time, they’ll still need to click something to sign up for your/our newsletter?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so again, one of the things we’re building with Grow in mind is for this privacy-centric web. So we don’t just want when a user shows up on your site you get access to their email. That would make users lose trust in Grow, and I think this is one of the things we tried to explain the best at the beginning of this product. Grow is about not just the publisher but also the reader.

So one of the things they’re going to have to do is consent to having that email address shared with your site. So that’s where Spotlight Subscribe is incredibly beautiful. If a user is logged in, Spotlight Subscribe gives them a one-click button to subscribe to your site. They don’t have to type in their email address even, because we know it as a Grow user. So yes, if they’re logged in with Grow we make a lot of really easy ways for them to subscribe to your content, including some new features we’re building soon. So Spotlight Subscribe built in with that exact idea in mind, Ashley.

JENNY GUY: All right. “A while ago I set up a Google Analytics for the Grow feature. Is there a tutorial to understand what each element is in that Grow dashboard in Google Analytics?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, I think in the help article we define what all of those obscure event names are for that exact purpose.

JENNY GUY: We definitely do, and we’ll make sure that we share that. OK, question for all of our audience. If you are using Grow, which feature performs the best for you? Give us a little feedback on that. And while our audience is talking about features, I want to talk about features as well. So let’s go through what is available currently in Grow. Because as you mentioned and as we talked about, just flicking it on is not the end of it. What you have to do is go in and look at all of the different things that are available, choose them, and test them on your site. So what’s available, and is there something can’t miss that you want people to use?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So Grow really is a tool kit that is designed to build Grow into your site as natively or organically as possible. You want it to fit in with your particular audience, which is why we offer so many features, to make sure we can find the ones that resonate best with your users. And no one’s going to know your users better than you. So try out a lot of these tools and see what works best.

So some of the tools that we have today, again, built in. Everyone’s going to have Favorites and Social Sharing. Those are built in to Grow into the widget. You turn on Grow, you get those. But some of the things you can opt into. We have Recommended Content. We have a lot of great experiences of Recommended Content, whether it’s the What’s Next feature on mobile, whether it’s In Line that performs the best, whether it’s the carousel at the top. There’s a lot of different ways you can show content to your readers, and that performs really well.

JENNY GUY: Time out. What is Recommended Content? Can you tell us a little bit more?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so Recommended Content is similar to something like Netflix where after you watch a Netflix show or a few Netflix shows, they get to learn what type of Netflix shows you watch, and they start recommending things to you. So they’re not always really related to the show you’re watching, but they are going to be recommended for you.

And that is the beauty of Grow’s Recommended Content. If the user is logged in it’s personalized to them. If it’s not, it uses users like them to figure out, OK, you are most likely to want to click on this next, which is why it performs so insanely well compared to Related Content, especially as you run it for a long time. It’s going to get to know your site, get to know your content. So I encourage you, if you run Recommended Content, don’t just turn it on and be like, oh, I hate the content this thing is recommending. Give it some time. Let it learn your site, and I think your users are going to love it.

JENNY GUY: And also if there are pages for sure that you don’t want recommended, like privacy policy, like that, you can go in and exclude those, right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, absolutely. You can list any individual pages. Coming soon in the new dashboard are ways to even do mass blocking of different pages. So there are a lot of ways in which you can block content you don’t want showing up.

JENNY GUY: Can you tell us more about why Netflix thinks I should watch John Wayne Gacy documentaries? Because I don’t know what I’m watching, but that’s what they keep recommending to me.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You should give one a try. Let’s see what you think see.

JENNY GUY: See if they’re right. Let’s test the algorithm OK, we have a lot of Spotlight Subscribe fans in the audience. And talking about features, you’ve already said that Spotlight Subscribe is probably your top. Why do you love Spotlight Subscribe so much? Why is it for everybody, not just for people who are currently focusing on newsletters?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I just love Spotlight Subscribe because I’ve never been a personal fan of options, or sorry, pop-ups, I should say. I don’t love pop-ups as a reader. When I get to a site, I’m struggling to find the ax as quickly as I can. I get those convert very well, and it’s certainly not a thing I’m going to say no one should use. Obviously if you want to run those on your site, go for it, and maybe a thing we’re even exploring in Grow itself over time.

But what Spotlight Subscribe does is get you near those conversions without having to do that to your user, and that’s what I love most about it. You can still get insane newsletter growth without upsetting your readers, which is really the best balance you can have. And again, if you don’t have a newsletter today, we’re working on solutions for you. So turn it on. Start building that list now for your email in the future.

JENNY GUY: OK, this is a question for me. What if I don’t want to use Grow? Are there alternatives to moving forward on this if I’m using something else that I like, maybe like a similar product. Is there something– what are the alternatives?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Thank you for interrupting what’s become a 30-minute pitch on Grow, so yeah. So going back to– obviously we do want everyone to be able to use Grow. It’s a great community effort. It’s an awesome tool. And it’s a tool that pays you, as opposed to a lot of the other tools that you’ll be paying a lot of money for. So isn’t it better to get paid? So I certainly would love you to run Grow.

But if you don’t, we’ve had the Identity API out for over a year now. So Identity API is the idea that you can integrate with any tool you’re running today. So that could be whether it’s OptinMonster, or whether it’s Slickstream, who we have an official partnership with, again, over a year old. If you prefer to run Slickstream, you can do so and know that those users, if they log in, are coming in logged in through the Identity API automatically for you. So you get those integrations, whether it’s Slickstream or whether it’s something you want to build yourself, and we’re continuously trying to make that easier for publishers as well who don’t want to run Grow.

JENNY GUY: What is the difference if I want to keep paying for Slickstream, or like you said, OptinMonster or something like that. What is the difference between a tool like OptinMonster or Slickstream in Grow.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So I think the biggest difference, hands down, it’s going to be the fact that grow is a community-based thing. We’re all in this together, the idea that we’re all building one pool of authenticated users. There’s nothing else like that right now. It is very tough, again, as I’ll keep saying, to get a user to log into your site. So if you are running Slickstream, I encourage you. Go into your dashboard. How many members do you actually have on your site? I challenge anyone to have more than– even at the largest of sites here at Mediavine– more than 1,000.

So we’ve seen even smaller numbers than that. Again, you might have eight users, for all you know, and you’ve been running this product for months. What Grow is built around is that exact purpose. How do you get a user to log into your site? These other tools are great. They’re great at what they do, but they’re not designed as a first-party data solution. So if you run Slickstream and you love its search, awesome. You should continue to run that product search. But what you should really look into is running Grow as your first-party data solution, because it’s going to be the one that gets you the most logged in users.

JENNY GUY: And that’s the whole purpose of it. Every feature that we create, everything that we do is trying to funnel towards this one common cause, denominator, while at the same time you’re getting paid more, and you’re keeping users on your site for longer. You’re strengthening that relationship with your readers. You’re gluing them in to you and to other Grow sites. All right, what do we have coming up for Grow? Because I know we’d said that this is going to be– when we released Grow we released it with– OK, I’m going to drop an acronym. Is it MVP? Is that right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yep, minimum viable product.

JENNY GUY: I’m such an engineer. When we released Grow we did it with a very low minimum viable product. There wasn’t a whole lot of there there. But over the past 18 months, two years, we’ve been growing features, Grow adding features, compiling, taking feedback, changing, all of that. What’s coming up, though, because I know that we actually have quite a few things that are on tap in the next couple of months?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so I think one of the reasons we did this as such a minimum viable product was to learn from our publishers.

JENNY GUY: That’s an MVP. I would like for you to just call it the right thing.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: As an MVP, we want your feedback. Again, nobody knows your audience as well as you, and that has what’s been driving the Grow roadmap so much. So that’s where these features are coming from. You see it even in this live. We talked about Exclusive Content. People are asking about Downloadables. It was a natural fit for us to start working on Downloadables, so that’s one of the features that will hopefully be coming out soon.

So again, if you have a downloadable, you’ll be able to upload it, lock it behind Exclusive Content, automatically all through Grow and easily show that on your site, get users to log in, make sure they subscribe to your newsletter to get access to that downloadable. And previously you probably had to work together with a ton of different plug-ins and get them all jumble together to hopefully do this on your own. But now it’s going to be done beautifully and easily, directly through Grow.

Another one I’m extremely excited about, and I know our publishers are, are some ESP or email sending provider integrations. So I know a lot of people don’t like paying for Zapier, and they don’t like how a little complicated it can be. But remember, Zapier got us hundreds of email-sending providers with one integration. But now we’re looking at the top email sending providers our publishers use and working on integrations with them, including ConvertKit, which is the first one we have coming, and that is coming very soon.

JENNY GUY: And Samantha just asked a question, “does the subscribe with Grow integrate automatically with any email providers?” That is what we are working on in the mean, so ConvertKit will be first. Then we have others coming after that. In the meantime you do have Zapier to get those email addresses zapped directly into your ESP. We had a question here. “Is there a way to use Grow.me non-WordPress sites?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: One of my favorite things about Grow is that it uses similar technology to our ads, and that is what’s called software as a service, or SAS, if we’re going to play lots of acronyms today, and the idea being you put one line of code on your site, and you can run Grow. By launching it that way, the same way Mediavine ads work on non-WordPress sites, Grow works on non-WordPress sites.

So you can run Grow on Vlogger, on Squarespace, on SBI, whatever fun other CMS you have, it will work with Grow. And one of the greatest parts again about Grow, though, is that it can be enhanced by Grow Social, so our plug-in. If you are running Grow Social, you get some cool things out of WordPress, but not required.

JENNY GUY: We actually had some feedback here. One of the questions that we asked our audience is, what is Grow missing? The best way to help us shape this product is to be using it and to give us feedback. Give us all the feedback and tell us what is it missing. Ellen said, “I use Grow, but what I like about Slickstream is the heart feature on the search.” So OK–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: –that’s great feedback.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: There you go.

JENNY GUY: We’ll take it all in. We’ll take it all in and be looking as we go forward. Eric, how is the best way, what’s the best way for people to provide feedback on Grow features or ideas that they have?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Well we got to ask the product team. I believe–

JENNY GUY: They’re here.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: –we have– yeah, we have a link that they can submit feedback through. Worst case scenario, you can always send an email to grow.me@mediavine.com. But we have a feedback link, and we’re going to have that feedback link directly in the dashboard, hopefully soon, that new Grow dashboard.

JENNY GUY: It’s coming. OK, we always like to close everything out with action items, and we are closing out Teal Talk for Summer of Live with this episode. So Eric, if you are a Mediavine publisher, what should you do? What is the thing you need to go do now as you leave?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: If you are going to be worried about third-party cookies, then the first thing you should be doing is building up that relationship with your readers. And there is no better way than signing up for Grow or enabling if you’re already a Mediavine publisher, running things like Spotlight Subscribe, and start thinking about owning that relationship with the reader yourself.

So rather than having your following live on things like Pinterest or Instagram or Facebook, things that are very fickle in nature, and you could lose your entire following in a day, instead think about owning it yourself. And that is the beauty behind Grow and owning your own newsletter. So really own that relationship with your audience. Start running Grow today so that your audience is used to this idea, and they’re excited by this idea and it’s a long-term relationship with third-party cookies go away.

JENNY GUY: If you are not a Mediavine publisher, what’s a good thing to do today?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You should definitely sign up for that link that we provided earlier so that you can begin running Grow. Because again, we want to make sure that non-Mediavine publishers can run Grow and find ways that they can monetize that audience as well, even with other ad providers, as crazy as that sounds.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Love it. All right, everybody, this is the part of the show where we talk about the next Teal Talk, but the next Teal Talk isn’t until after Labor Day because the Summer of Live starts in June. Please stay tuned for an amazing lineup. We have so many great guests coming your ways, all the topics. We are also still looking for a couple more guests later on in the summer. We’re pretty booked up at the beginning. But we’re going to drop that link into the comments so that you can– if you are dying to come on a Summer of Live episode and talk about– you’re an expert in a topic. All of our publishers are experts in various topics, so please come on and share your knowledge with us. We’d love to consider you, so we’ll drop that link in as well.

We’re also going to be dropping the link to our resources document that will have everything together that we’ve talked about on this blog post– help docs, the sign up for Grow if you’re interested and you’re a non-Mediavine publisher. It’s all going to be right there. So we’re going to drop that in. Thank you so much for making this a absolute delight every month and every week in the summer to get to come to talk to you guys. Eric, thank you for coming and enlightening us on everything that is coming for our industry. We are excited and ready. We’re going to be ready, right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: We’re definitely going to be ready, and thank you for having me. And more importantly, thank you for translating me, which is always very important.

JENNY GUY: It’s what has to happen in my brain when you talk. It goes beep, er, beep, er. Those are the sounds that it makes.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Making me define every acronym is appreciated. Thank you.

JENNY GUY: It’s acronym soup. It’s alphabet soup around here with ad tech, and I love to, I love to define it. Guys, thank you so much again. We will see you in just a few weeks for the Summer of Live. Have a great rest of your day, everybody.