It’s always fascinating to read all the predictions that come out this time of year, but they fall into three different types: predictions about things we think are going to happen, predictions about things we wish would happen, and predictions for things that we should actively do.

I’m going to focus on the last one, because a vital future focus is the return of contextuality.

Advertising has been a monumental failure from a publisher’s perspective. While the tech platforms and ad-tech middlemen all got richer and richer, we as publishers have seen a continual decline in revenue per ad view. But money is only part of the problem. A much bigger problem is the disconnect between what makes the ad-tech middlemen rich and what we gain as publishers.

The best way to illustrate this is with this graph. This shows the tremendous growth of U.S. programmatic digital display ad spending. And as you can see, if you’re an ad-tech middleman, it looks like the future is made of pure gold.

It’s no surprise then that the ad-tech industry all claim that “the future is programmatic” — because to them, it really is.

For us as publishers, though, it’s a completely different story. Programmatic display advertising is, on a per-ad basis, the lowest-performing format we can use, and as we saw in 2023, its growth doesn’t gain us any benefit. And every publisher I have heard from predicts that 2024 will be as challenging as 2023 — even though ad spending is predicted to recover and programmatic display advertising will continue to grow.

But the problem isn’t just about advertising. It also impacts our journalism. Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen how a focus on optimizing for dwindling programmatic ad rates has forced publishers to focus on low-quality volume. Many magazines have turned to what can only be described as content farming, where work (especially on things like product reviews) is now outsourced to low-quality “marketing agencies” just to get more content to publish for cheap.

This is insane, because product reviews are a very important thing for our readers. They come to us because they want our help to decide which product that they should spend their money on — and then we give them an article written by a low-quality marketing agency. It’s a total journalistic failure.

Newspapers face the same problem. The easiest way to see this is by looking at the continuing problems with news fatigue and news avoidance. Yes, a big part of that is just the state of the world, but in every study we look at, people cite volume as one of the key reasons why they’re giving up on the news. And the reason why we’re creating so much volume is because we have optimized for clicks and views — again, a product of a programmatic focus.

This is the disconnect. The model that has made the ad-tech market rich is also exactly what has made us poorer — not just in terms of revenue, but also in terms of journalistic value.

So now what?

Well, if you ask me to predict what will happen in 2024, I predict that the problem will continue. Sure, publishers are starting to talk about direct, but it’s still with a programmatic focus. So my prediction is that as the publisher ad market grows more desperate, we’ll see even more publishers turning to exactly the wrong things described above in an aim to make up for the problems. That’s my prediction.

But we shouldn’t do that. That’s the wrong path. The solution instead is to change that focus and bring back contextuality, because it is, to this day, the best-performing model (per ad view).

The simplest way to illustrate this is to look at Google. Google has three ad models: Google Search, which is highly contextual, based on what people are specifically searching for at any given moment; YouTube ads, which are mostly programmatic; and Google Network (what publishers use), which is entirely programmatic.

Look at the revenue figures — specifically, how they have changed between 2022 and 2023. Google Search (contextual) was up 11.35%. YouTube ads were up 12.56%, while Google Network (what publishers use) was down 2.58%. But also look at the volume: Contextual advertising (search ads) represents 74% of Google’s total ad revenue.

And so while the ad-tech industry keeps insisting that programmatic display advertising is “the future,” it’s not. Contextual advertising is outperforming it by a very wide margin, as it always has.

This is what we need to focus on in 2024. We need to return to contextuality. And not just for the sake of advertising, but also for the sake of journalism. Context is just another word for relevance. If you want to build more direct audiences, get more subscribers, and generally create new revenue streams, focusing on your context to your audience is the key factor.

Do I predict that a year from now, this is suddenly the future? No, of course not. Do I predict any change in the directing of the ad-tech industry? No — they got rich on programmatic, so they’ll hang on to that. Do I predict that publishers will give up on programmatic? No — they are too worried about losing even more than they already have.

But what I’m telling you is that we should shift our focus back to contextuality. There is no future in the programmatic display market for publishers. It’s a path to nowhere.