Three steps to unlocking the revenue potential of your first-party data
First-party data is a strategic necessity for news organizations to meet the demands of today’s advertisers, who want data informed by direct relationships built on trust and accuracy. That’s why my colleagues at Vox Media and I have spent hundreds of hours over the past several years exploring publisher-led ad personalization and targeting to ensure we respect and support our users while also meeting the expectations of our advertising partners.
Briar Cromartie at the NPA Summit 2025.
Photo: Andrew Weeks Photography.
In 2019, Vox Media launched Forte, one of the first publisher-created first-party data solutions that utilizes real-time contextual, interest, and engagement signals to determine why users come to our brands. Advertiser adoption was swift, and the performance spoke for itself. Our insights strengthened the value of advertising without disrupting audience engagement, and, on average, advertisers saw 2.5X performance in CTR, VCR, and Interaction when using Forte compared to third-party audience segments.
Building Forte allowed us to meet the data demands of today from a position of strength.
In part, our work was born out of necessity. The enforcement of GDPR regulations in 2018 placed an uncomfortable spotlight on the fragility of how audience targeting functioned; to summarize the process, it used a series of third-party proxies to make probabilistic guesses about the person engaging on our sites. But the increased urgency to comply with data usage disclosures actually enabled exciting opportunities, as we now have better knowledge about our audience to improve performance for advertisers and audiences.
This shift means news publishers that rely on advertising revenue must focus on improving their first-party data systems, as this is the only path to staying competitive in a landscape where both advertisers and users expect relevant, effective, and responsibly delivered experiences. According to the IAB’s 2025 Outlook on U.S. based ad spend and growth opportunities, advertisers are acutely focused on data intelligence partnerships and maximizing ad performance. Highlights include:
62% of Brands cite new customer acquisition as the primary media investment goal
61% of Brands are focused on building attribution models
58% of Brands are looking at first-party data partnerships with publishers
54% of Brands are focused on performance advertising to drive strong ROI
Even more encouraging is the consumer outlook on the usage of data for greater personalization. The IAB’s study on consumer preferences shows that:
82% of U.S. consumers agree personalized ads help them discover products and services they’re interested in
80% prefer ads for products or services they’re interested in or shopping for
79% feel more positive toward brands/retailers that tailor their ads based on their preferences
So how can publishers capitalize on both advertisers’ and consumers’ appetites for personalization and start building their first-party data? Here are three key strategies to strengthen your first-party data and unlock its full advertising potential.
1. Create Utility and Encourage User Registration
Encouraging your audience to provide their email addresses (and perhaps some voluntary demographic information or content interests!) transforms your data strategy from probabilistic to deterministic. When necessary, this will allow you to map what type of users engage with which content. These insights are invaluable for building custom audiences for ad campaigns and can also inform editorial strategies–how does your content coverage align with audience engagement or what spikes in activity can be leveraged to create new advertising sponsorships.
2. Establish Rituals: Build Audience Habits
For advertisers, scale is not the only value indicator for a publisher’s first-party data. Persistence and consistency are more critical when proving out the efficacy of an audience segment. Just as it is important to have your readers log into your site, it is necessary to build robust user profiles to personalize both editorial and ad experiences. Weekly or daily prompts to encourage your audience to take actions in their accounts will enrich the data sets further. These can include: push notifications, personalized email reminders, “you may have missed” newsletter summaries,
3. Aggregate and Action on Your Data
All publishers–knowingly or not–are owners of an abundance of information. While the prospect of this is thrilling, the reality is that it is more than we know what to do with or that we will realistically use for audience targeting. Structuring specific, advertising, and user-focused data events and storing them in a centralized system, such as a Data Management Platform, allows for on-demand analysis and audience segmentation. The tracked events should align with your audience touch points across your websites and apps: logins, signups, newsletter opens, article clicks, or topics that they follow. Additionally, advertising specific events should focus on outcomes driven behaviors, like: video completion rates, clicks, or affiliate link clicks. Combined, publishers can mix and match data points to identify audiences that may heavily read about news & politics and also frequently watch videos.
Digital media and advertising has always been an industry prone to frequent, rapid, and transformative changes. Sometimes, these externalities beget innovation, but more than ever, publishers must focus on durable strategies, provide revenue resilience, and are firmly within our control–not at the whims of algorithms or regulations. A strong first-party data strategy does precisely that. It affords us publishers the ability to personalize content for our audiences in a media landscape where choices to read and watch news are ever increasing; it gives us the autonomy to establish deeper connections with advertisers who are looking for insights to inform customer acquisition and retention strategies; and, it untethers us from the inefficiencies and uncertainties of the third-party cookie. For publishers, first-party data is no longer optional, but is integral to a successful audience and advertising strategy.
Briar Cromartie is the Head of Product, Advertising & Technical Operations at Vox Media. For more insights, watch his keynote speech from the 2025 NPA Summit: “Reinventing Revenue: Why Advertising Must Evolve.”