I hope everyone had an amazing Thanksgiving holiday (if you celebrate). I personally went back to the wheat farm where I grew up and was able to celebrate with my family, which was very enjoyable. 

As is normal during the holiday season, we saw ad rates climb on the sprint up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but markets and economic conditions continue to keep rates lower than we’ve seen since 2019. However, there was good news this season around some recent optimizations and we’re continuing to work with our SSPs and team to deliver more revenue to our publishers. 

In-View Refreshing  

For those of you that have not heard directly from our team and made this adjustment yet, we recently did some optimizations around how our ads refresh and how often they can refresh for. With improvements to browser technology, it’s now safe and recommended to continue to let your ads refresh as long as they are in-view. This can be done by changing your refresh limit (if you had one set) to 0 rather than any other integer. 

New publishers to the NitroPay platform may not have to worry about this as the option was removed prior to the full optimization roll out, but feel free to double check. If you have any questions, please let us know. 

Update to TCF 2.2, GDPR Compliance

This is a short update, but we recently updated our consent management platform to TCF 2.2, which ensures that rates within EU countries stay as high as possible. You won’t need to make any changes or adjustments on your end, but we’re happy to offer that as part of our service. 

Sales Efforts in 2024

As we continue to roll out new products and services through the ad stack, we wanted to highlight an increasing focus on sales in the coming year beyond what we’ve already been able to bring in via PG, PMP, and other programmatic deals. We have a few new products on the road map, and we’re bolstering our sales team in the coming months so expect some exciting news in our Q1 newsletter. 

Upcoming Ads.txt Changes and Predatory Marketing Emails from Ad Tech Vendors

Many of you are already familiar with the predatory practices of many other ad tech companies and vendors, but we’ve recently seen an onslaught of emails from individuals making wild promises about rates and increases in revenue. A whole lot of you (thank you, by the way!) have forwarded those emails to us. We’ve taken a few of these calls, and while the majority are “normal,” a few have been targeting publishers and urging them to implement tech alongside the NitroPay ad stack as well as urging folks to upload a custom ads.txt configurations with them included. 

Do not do this. 

First and foremost, these companies are incurring risk to your inventory due to a lack of proper supply chain configuration on their part. They do not have the correct partnerships, ads.txt entries, or sellers.json entries configured. This puts your connections to the buy side at risk, due to the spend being miscategorized as coming from us when in reality it’s from other partners. 

Just to be safe, we’re going to be contacting folks who aren’t using the recommended NitroPay redirect in January 2024 to see if we can get all sites set up with a redirect so there won’t be an issue like this again. 

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That’s it! The NitroPay team and I would like to wish you all a wonderful, happy, and healthy holiday season. My tree is already lit up behind me as I write this, and I hope you find all the cheer you need to have a great ending to 2023 and an amazing start to 2024. 

– Cody & the NitroPay Team