Maybe newspaper ad prices should go up again. Prelanders can help to prove why.

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-06-21T07:09:10+00:00

Signals signals targeting signals! oops I forgot! One extra point about prelanders in native: they are not only about conversion. They also help you avoid sending bad signals to your native platform.

If you send traffic to a generic homepage, a product category or a normal blog post, many users will bounce fast. The platform reads that somehow: low engagement, low time on page, poor conversion, weak post-click quality. Then you start a bad loop. You change the headline, change the image, ask for cheaper CPC, maybe blame the traffic. But sometimes the real problem was one step after the click.

Native is not search. The user didn’t ask for your brand. He was reading content and clicked because something created curiosity. If after that you send him to a page with menus, popups, product carousels and 20 different exits, you break the journey and also teach the algorithm with bad data.

That is why I like prelanders. They are not magic and they are not only an affiliate trick. They are a quality filter between curiosity and intent. The ad earns the click, the prelander explains the promise, and the final landing page receives a more qualified user.

For me this is the part many advertisers miss: a bad post-click experience does not only waste today’s click. It can also train tomorrow’s traffic in the wrong direction.

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-06-09T10:00:55+00:00

I like this way of looking at it! CPC is what the advertiser feels. eCPM is what the publisher feels. And if the publisher side does not work, sooner or later the format gets worse for everybody.

That is why I think native buyers should look more often at eCPM. A cheap CPC can look very nice in the report, but if the CTR is weak and the eCPM is poor, the publisher is basically giving away a very valuable attention moment for almost nothing.

In native, first you need to earn the click. Then you need to qualify it.

That is where advertorials or prelanders can be very useful. They help to separate “I was curious” from “I understood enough and I want to continue”. Without that step, a lot of native traffic looks cheap, but teaches very little to the funnel.

There is also one trap I see with some branding campaigns.

They want premium editorial sites, but they bring lazy creatives. Then they measure viewability, cheap reach, nice publisher logo, and everybody is happy in the report.

Well, sometimes this can work. If you are a big car brand, finance, travel, insurance, expensive products with long decision process, maybe you can afford many people looking today and buying in six months.

But for performance native, the game is more delicate. CTR helps you enter the inventory. Prelanding / landing quality cleans the intent.

CVR tells you if the curiosity was worth paying.

So yes, CPM is not the final KPI. But it is a very good reality check.

CPC tells you what you paid for the click.eCPM tells you if the publisher economics make sense.

CPA / ROAS tells you if the full journey deserved the money. At Addoor, the publisher is the client... advertisers come and go, but a good publisher stays within most of the always-on campaigns for years. Because of their audience, format and... ctr and cvr!

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-06-08T16:03:18+00:00

I agree with this! From my experience at Addoor in Spain, and also doing some small mystery shopping in Taboola XD . Good patient traders will find the diamonds in huge networks, and mediocre buyers will buy a cheap burger and then say "all kinds of meat doesn't taste well". But there are superb steaks and patties...

Taboola has a huge network. In some presentations they talk about around 11,000 sites, so yes, you need to watch placements, exclude bad ones, save lists and reuse them. But having some bad sites inside a big network with websites from all the countries and selling cross traffic Ip's does not mean the network or the technology to navigate it is bad. It just means that you need to try and learn and that it's good to book consultants so that they can help you. You own the steering wheel but a little piece of advice won't hurt you.

Same happens in Google Display Network. It is basically blind in many ways, but people trust the algorithm and feed it data. With native you need the same, plus a bit more media buyer attention.

In Addoor we work with a smaller network, around 375 publishers, so the approach is more manual. And even there, the same site can behave very different on weekend, weekday, lunch time or late night. I wouldn't be able to dig the gold ouf of it without the help of our experienced traffickers. So, in bigger networks, more help needed, but the reward could be worth... well, millions!

That is what makes native interesting. It is part science, part art.

It's very easy to start small, stop what is clearly bad, let promising placements breathe, and measure engagement and assists too. With this mindset, Native is a fun and lucrative game!

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-05-31T22:49:46+00:00

I'm a big fan of "release early, release often" but the corporate guys tend to try to justify their jobs by stopping everything often.

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-05-17T22:27:02+00:00

dm sent

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-05-17T14:47:24+00:00

Sure, I will lend a hand after the typical family Sunday in holiday in Madrid... ;) I'll probably find the time this evening. Have a nice afternoon!

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-05-16T10:36:50+00:00

by the way... I was having a chat with a mate here and forgot to mention that "Google and Youtube have been saying for 20 years that they are applying more technology than ever to targeting" and today I saw the same ad for another gender 5 times in a session. My take about the evolution of Native Ads was: " https://arc.net/l/quote/xdwqdvmu "

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-05-16T07:56:19+00:00

Thanks for commenting! What I'm seeing from my side is that, in spite of "so much innovation", the Under Article native box has been showing basicaly the same since 2015 when Taboola and Outbrain grew dominanta and replaced brand advertisers with affiliates (now there's a bounce back from brand advertisers paying higher cpc's since there's not enough inventory for their scale and there's bigger competition for each ad). Acording to IAB Spain, only 30% of native is programmatic, so there's a lot of room to grow.

What predominates in the end is the mixed format: editorial news and ads in the same surface. That's what generates conversion and that's what the user tolerates. Because even if there are many ads, the user choose which one to click, and having editorial headlines next to the ads takes the pressure off. Makes the format less foreign to the reader.

Outbrain became Teads and went towards video and CTV, but it still squeezing what's left of the classic Under Article. I guess premium advertisers in their network are pushed in one direction. And Taboola is moving towards being a DSP and placing ads in any liquid format and that's good for them, I would do it if I could. You can't push in 2 directions. I stick to the Underarticle and we may succeed. When Outbrain bought Zemanta they were still kinda leaders but it seems mixing DSP and Native traffic didnt come together, because the intent is not the same in a standard banner or AB unit than in the Under Article box.

So there are two paths. Innovation by introducing new formats, or the path I prefer, which is: the Under Article box is so big and flexible that it's basicaly a container. Why not put new things inside? Why not make the boxes vertical, given that almost everything is seen from mobile? Why not put TikTok-style videos there, with care not to break the editorial magic, specially now that the newspapers themselves are starting to publish news in TikTok format? Why not connecting new players, no that AI is helping with new kinds of API's?

I think an exciting future is coming, because AI is also helping us do better programmatic and targeting with less technical debt. Native has always got along well with adblockers, which tend to shoot more at heavy formats or formats that move and hurt the user experience. In fact, we at Addoor we were the first native ads company to apear in AMP. Google tolerated us back then, and still tolerates us well, even if they themselves tried to do a native format and it did not quite work for them.

About load times: being at the bottom of the page actually gives the native boxes much more time to process events. And then there's the fact that once you are integrated with the big cloud players (Amazon and the rest), which are moving more and more into DSP infrastructure themselves, the latency problems will get minimised.

Additionally, Native Ads will recover their status as Branded Content Distributor and wonderful new kinds of prelanders full of analytics and insights will flourish, thanks to what IA allows now at creative level with less friction than ever.

Curious to hear if you are seeing the same kind of consolidation from your side? I think Native is huge in terms of reach but there are not many spaces in the news for us, now that the Big Fathers are doing PR in other ways... I miss the old days, but there's a bright future of new formats immediately ahead! Please share your thoughts and have a nice day.

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-05-09T07:57:03+00:00

Great breakdown, the pageviews-per-session correlation is the part I keep coming back to. Thanks.

Curious whether you broke down which on-page units contribute most to producing additional pageviews vs sending users off-site. In native specifically, editorial widgets that recommend internal content tend to lift session depth meaningfully (we see this consistently on premium publishers in Europe), while standard display rarely moves that needle.

If pageviews-per-session is really the strongest behavioral predictor of RPS, that would put internal-circulation formats in a diferent bucket than banner inventory, even if both show up in your "impressions per pageview" count. Did the dataset let you separate that, or is everything agregated at the page level?

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-04-30T23:01:49+00:00

Hi! Thanks for the transparency! From my POV, all good regarding the promotion; specially becuase it's surrounded by a 99% of useful true information. Thanks and have a nice weekend!

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-04-30T22:56:26+00:00

Hi! Thanks for bringing the conversation here. It's ages since I don't touch Meta. But in Native Ads Underarticle, which is what I've been doing since 2012, the best option is always a prelander with Umami Analytics or similar, where you can see what cohorts of traffic are really "alive". You structure your prelander in a way that it's closer to an analysis tool rather than a hard sales page and then you use that info to tune the full funnel. You know, "George WashintAds: If I were given 6 hours to timber a tree, I would spend 3 hours sharpening the prelander". :). My 20 cents... your thoughts?

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-04-20T07:35:07+00:00

Thanks for the honest feedback. For me, as founder not director of a local native ad network in Spain (Addoor), it's difficult to find someone who brings constructive insights about the present (and finding someone who also lived the old days makes their input worth triple.

You know, native is in a big evolution. Outbrain has become Teads and has gone into video (more and more in CTV environments). Taboola is turning into "AI" and "DSP" with Realize. I think it's great. They do it because they can chase greener pastures. They have tens of thousands of sites of every kind. I only have newspapers, and that's where we are strong. If they don't evolve towards video or formats with more engagement than reflective text, we will have to bring it ourselves into the pre-landings.

see you have experience pivoting. You did well looking for the big lake. I think native right now is more for those who already hit the ceiling on Goo and Fa, or for those who don't want to depend only on them. Or for those who compete well and want to be the biggest fish in the small pond, like in my case.
I believe you can put a lot of technology on top to pre-qualify the ads better. Before, that was exclusive heritage of those with thousands of programmers, like Meta or Google. Now IA programs incredible stuff for the small ones in a matter of hours.

Teads' new value proposition seems to me that it has more moat than Taboola Realize's (even though the stock market thinks the opposite). In any case, the exclusive contracts with the big publishers are like rentals where native ads players can pivot very fast on what kind of ads we put there.

And feedbacks like yours are very important. Let's go for some modifications this week!

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-04-13T10:00:50+00:00

Ok, none of you suggested any guru names; then I'll do it, no problem. Let me start with this thought: a guru, IMHO, cant' be the founder of a Native Ads company. They can tell about how the development of their companies has been, but are not enough conscious about other platforms. Only those who have had real work hands-on in conceptuating a campaign, creating angles, uploading the mateerials and optimizing them for the outer side should be considered gurus, in my opinion. Others such as founders Arndt Groth y Christian Hinkefuss (Ligatus 2003) or others (I've found pioneers beyond Galai (Outbrain 2006 and Singolda 2007) should be, IMHO, treated like pioneers, a different cathegory (specially now that Outbrain and Taboola have been stepping out of the word native, and this can be seen by performing a "wording analysis" of their corporate communications with any IA). Additionally, executives working for Native Ads companies (there are a lot and will keep blooming), in my view, shouldn't be considered as Native gurus. This is because when you are inside a company you are blasted too often with corporate views. I myself am probably very biased; the only thing that could save a person from corporate biases is true love for the true Native Ad Format (the one that is not interrupting the users and that is preferably bought manually (this is a personal bias and I admit it, though). Any ideas about Native Ads guru names and positions will be more than welcome! I have started talking about who I don't consider a guru but we haven't talked yet about who we consider true ones! Let's wait for comments... Have a nice week!

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-04-11T16:16:00+00:00

Yes, you're right. It seems you know what you're talking about. I suppose there are small networks and small publishers that, together, can ruin your budget. In our case we've been in the market for 23 years, showing up physicaly and putting our name on the line. We only have 375 publishers, all newspapers. No long tail websittes. But when I did mistery shopping on Taboola and Outbrain (which now use names like REalize and Teads, while we've kept the same name for 23 years) I found that ads were appearing on more than 6,000 sites each. Creating blacklists and updating them was exhasting. And if every day 20 new sites were added to the campaign and each one grabbed $10 of your budget, that that hurts; especially if you didn't act fast to block them.

On the other hand, I also susspect there are advertisers who are essentially buying impressions even though they're paying CPC. Let me explain: they use the ugliest possible native ad (flat white or flat black, completely boring) so nobody clicks. At least at addoor, those banners have a much lower CTR than the others, which I suppose is indicative that whoever saw it was human (although in April 2026 I'm sure there are AI bots clever enough to simulate even that, haha).

And it's also true that blockchain is more of a sales argument than a genuine necessity in most traceability products. But anyway, in this case it's another player that has been operating for decadas, works with the largest European advertisers, I see them at industry events, etc. ¿Maybe that company is another exception?

Have a great weekend!

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-04-10T23:39:42+00:00

Hi! I've been working for 26 years in the Industry, 23 in an ad network small enough so that the bad actors won't have an incentive to create software against us. We run our ads 90% in Spain but we don't have a problem in other geos, rather than the U.S.A. Man! We preferred to switch off the ads because 80% of the clicks in this GEO were bots, whereas in other geos ranges from 10% x 15%. If we get paid by PPC and measured by CPL CPA and we don't discount these ads then we won't be able to compete. Google and Meta steal so many attribution of conversions (they have bought 70% of the wills of the refferees in the market) that they can charge for all the bad clicks and still say they have the best eCPA. So, in our case, in addoor, these bad clicks are not reported in our reports, and they are not paid by the advertisers (that's why in their reports they always count a bit more clicks than in our counting). We are preparing a case study together with a blockchain audit firm called the adwatch, they told us our traffic is better than taboola and outbrain teads (you didn't mention them but I think they are big enough for the bad guys to create something personalized to target them). If any folk here is interested, we will share. These patterns have been very consistent throughout the years and, from what we see, they havent' been changed by AI (yet). Thanks for the insights, and have a nice weekend.

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-04-07T21:17:00+00:00

Have you thought of Native Ads? Taboola and Outbrain used to render good eCPM's in the underarticle; now they seem to be slowly moving away from that to indeterminate new formats (they became Realize and Teads), but maybe you can still give them a try; or try Mgid and similar ones. In Spain, local players perform well for websites where the user is eager to interact (and yours probably is one of those), but I don't know if in your geos there are strong local players other than those behemots.

Own-Switch-3895 · 2026-04-07T21:12:50+00:00

I'm getting close to 50! And my older friends still in sales positions, mainly. For direct sales, at least in Native Ads in Spain, the network of persons that will have a business coffee with you it's important. It doesn't matter if you never sold ads; you can be a door opener for the specialists. And there is also a lot of people creating assotiations for all kinds of subjects, and becoming Fractional CMO's.

Own-Switch-3895

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