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Publishers are just looking for a little attention. Integral Ad Science hopes to serve it to them.
The ad verification and brand safety company on Thursday unveiled an attention tool that it says publishers can use to better sell their advertising inventory. The tool, called Quality Attention for Publishers, uses machine learning to gauge how much attention readers might give webpages.
The tool will be available to publishers, as well as the supply-side platforms (SSPs) that sell publisher inventory programmatically, and will allow them “to demonstrate inventory quality, enhance their ad effectiveness, and optimize user engagement,” according to IAS.
Attention, please: In recent years, attention metrics, which aim to estimate the quality of content adjacent to ad inventory, have become all the rage as advertisers and publishers continue to shift away from more traditional metrics like viewability. In April, the New York Times announced that it was working with the attention company Adelaide to create attention benchmarks for its ad inventory.
But the tech is still relatively new: IAS only made its Quality Attention attention metrics for advertisers product widely available in January.
Zoom out: Publishers have traditionally been a little uneasy about their relationships to verification companies, with some claiming that companies unfairly scrape websites and then sell data back to them.
Update 10/3/2024: This piece has been updated to better describe the tech used to power Quality Attention for Publishers.