After two successful roadshows across Europe and the United States, AdPushup returned with their traditional First Fold event, this time in the vibrant city of Istanbul, where cultures collide and converge to become the best version of themselves.

This event featured more than 25 industry experts, including the likes of Güner Durmaz, Head of Digital Content at InterestingEngineering, Susanne Sperling, CEO at Stratechmedia, Mahendra Choudhary, News and SEO Lead at SODP, Alex Radyushin, CEO at PowerThesaurus and Mohammad Mohtashim, CEO at TutorialsPoint.

They shared their views across three different segments such as Open Forum, Panel Discussion, and Fireside Chat. 

The topic for the event revolved around the impact of artificial intelligence in the Ad Tech industry, Third-party cookies apocalypse, How to boost revenue for publishers during the holiday season, and more. Let’s have a look.

First-Party Data’s Significance

The Open forum, the “Publisher Pulse Check” was led by Shashank Mudgal, Manager of Publisher Development at Adpushup, which covered current trends and developments in the industry, such as the fall of third-party cookies.
While talking about the importance of first-party data and its increasing relevance Susanne Sperling, CEO at StratechMedia added:

“Death of Cookies is a huge problem for brands, but for the niche, this is the opportunity. Personally, I’m just waiting for the cookie to die so that we can move on to the next technology as an industry.”

While adding a perspective from the the telecom industry, Lameez Abrahams, Senior Specialist: Digital Advertising at Vodacom added:
“As a mobile network, we have first-party data. The real struggle for us is how to use that first-party data and to prove that we collected data the right way.”

Th discussion then moved towards the Artificial Intelligence and Q4.

Adapting to AI: Q4 and Holiday Revenue Plans

As the discussion slowly branched towards the increasing impact of artificial intelligence and its implications on the publishing world, Güner Durmaz, Head of Digital Content at InterestingEngineering said :
“AI is the next big thing and some sections of the industry are getting more conservative, hence the publishing world has to adapt to the changes and become more niche.”

As the discussion continued, next up on the list was the ever-important topic of Q4 and what should publishers be doing to gear themselves for a successful holiday season in terms of revenue. 

Abhinav Choudhri, Director of Customer Success at AdPushup added:
“This year has not been great, there have been a lot of rumors regarding an increased demand for the Q4 estimate and hence I believe it is ideal for us to focus on a lot of direct campaigns for ensuring budget spend.”

To add more to this from the perspective of consumers and subscription-based models, Mohammad Mohtashim, Founder of TutorialsPoint said:
“There is a segment that doesn’t like to see an advertisement and that is why it is important to have both tools at your disposal, which means you can either pitch them acceptable ads via AdRecover or pitch them nominal charges for ad-free solution (subscriptions)”

While shedding light on possible new revenue streams for publishers, Florent Lanne from Clubic added:  “Rather than deploying massive subscriptions on our website we would identify or monetize our newsletter which is crucial for its users or special content for a special type of audience.”

Panel Discussion 

The panel discussion mainly focused on Artificial intelligence and how publishers can boost their revenue in Q4.

The discussion was led by Dikshant Joshi, Director of Publisher Development- AdPushup along with Güner Durmaz, Head of Digital Content at InterestingEngineering, Susanne Sperling, CEO at Stratechmedia, Mahendra Choudhary, News and SEO Lead at SODP and Alex Radyushin, CEO at PowerThesaurus.

While being asked about how AI could help leverage the generation of content, Alex Radyushin added: “It can be used to personalize content and make it rich and professional. Make content personalized according to the tone of your audience. Many sites are not using it currently.
Ai can be utilized in user support, and can dramatically increase user engagement”

While talking about how AI has been implemented in current circumstances, Güner Durmaz shared his experiences at InterestingEngineering: “We have a huge video production team, we are relying on AI, using software for voiceover. We are also using software to automatically translate language but as we all know the human touch is really important as a layer on any AI-generated content. 

As the discussion continued, Susanne Sperling shed some light on the data consolidation aspects of AI and how it can help publishers with larger datasets, she said: “AI is used by us to find data. If you have data stories or any content like that, AI concept generation on data works really well.”

Further along the discussion, Dikshant Joshi raised questions regarding AI’s compatibility and uses for better SEO results, to which Mahendra Choudhary replied: “Google is not able to differentiate between AI content and manual content. What they are doing is relying on 16000 manual readers.”

Alex Radyushin further added: “If we add any experience or thoughts from the writer’s experience then that really helps in personalizing the article and it does not look like a standard SEO optimized article and rank better. A human-generated article would ask some questions, would have a particular style of grammar, would be engaging, and represent humility”

As the panel discussion neared its end, the panel experts gave the following closing statements:

Susanne Sperling, CEO at StratechMedia: “The best time to focus on is today so that Q1 is not the same. Use AI to make email marketing work for you.”

Güner Durmaz : “Every day is a new day with AI. You see fluctuation in monetization every day due to something. We have changed our mentality to suit the ever-changing industry. Google is to Adtech is what the US is to the World, and there is no alternative so best to be flexible and deal with changing guidelines.”

Alex Radyushin, CEO at PowerThesaurus: “AI can be stressful but we should not be stressed about it. Clear the vision, have a system, and make sure you follow the system.
Utilize AI as a tool to its best extent.”

Dikshant Joshi, Director of Publisher Development at AdPushup:  “Handmade cars came into existence 100 years ago. Now we have an assembly line and there are only Rolls Royce in the world that’s making handmade cars. Similarly with AI content, handmade content would go niche and the rest of it would be alligned with AI.”

Fireside Chat

After an intriguing discussion with our panel experts, it was time to move on to the next segment of the event, the Fireside chat.

Abhinav Choudhri, Director of Customer Success at Adpushup took the lead along with our guest Mohammad Mohatashim, CEO and Founder of TutorialsPoint. The segment was primarily focused on the captivating journey of TutorialsPoint as a platform and how Mohammad Mohatshim navigated his way during the process. 

When asked about his vision to be an entrepreneur, Mohammed Mohatshim said –

“It was the year 2006 when we started education content related to Tech as it was all very scattered and scarce. The information was not well structured and descriptive for those who wanted to learn. This problem statement triggered the birth of TutorialsPoint out of passion. It became business automatically.”

As the discussion moved forward, on being asked about any sort of breaking point for TutorialsPoint along this journey, Mohammad replied –

“2019 probably, when Covid came, it was a peak time for us. We put in 1600 tutorials and were thinking about what more we could do. We started another project Tutorix for K-12. Later we realized there were many things we could still do at TP (TutorialsPoint). Then many companies came up in the paid segment and became unicorns as well.”

Mr. Mohtashim also continued to shed light on the size of his team and how the recruitment of employees is always subject to the needs of the company. Mr. Mohtashim went on to say – “Qualities are subjective to your requirement for the resource. I started hiring freelancers in my friend circle, back in 2008, and they are still with me. In 2014 when we incorporated, those freelancers joined TP.”

While talking about SEO and Tutorialspoint’s content strategy, Mr. Mohtashim mentioned that they don’t generally use SEO and instead use all their energy to make sure that the content is fresh and good. He also went on to mention that due to the amount of experience his team has, it became easier for them to adapt to algorithms rather than focusing solely on a particular SEO strategy.

On speaking about his plans to increase viewership, Mr. Mohtashim went on to say that-

“Plans usually have a way of not working out. I think chatGPT has affected us a lot. Humans are now able to identify AI-generated content even with a lot of human work on it and at the same time Google recognized our outside-bought content to be AI-generated.”
As the floor was later open to questions, Mr. Mohtashim addressed various questions revolving around his primary revenue sources, he added that the TutorialPoint focuses on different revenue streams such as Advertisements, Sponsorships, E-books, and the marketplace.

While asked about how his products were being made, he went on to clarify that while TutorialsPoint makes their own product, they also target Udemy sellers to sell on their platform.

Final Words

All in all, the First Fold ’23 event in Istanbul was a remarkable gathering of influential figures and thought leaders in the publishing and Ad Tech industry. With a focus on the impact of artificial intelligence, strategies to enhance revenue during Q4, and so much more, the event provided invaluable insights and perspectives.

We hope to continue hosting such events and enriching publishers with valuable insights and the latest trends in the vast landscape of Ad Tech.

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