The digital media press can’t seem to decide whether RTB is great for publishers or bad for publishers. One recent article stated how real-time bidding currently represents 17% if the display market and is expected to balloon to 43% in the next 5 years due to the demands of marketers and advertisers. However, publishers can be hesitant because RTB brings efficiency for advertisers, which means lowers prices paid to publishers for their non-premium inventory – non-home page, old content, etc.

We’re praising publishers like Federated Media and Forbes for their baby steps towards finding new ways to manipulate an evolving marketplace and make programmatic work for them so as not to take a loss.

And do they deserve praise? Absolutely, innovation is good.

But are they also overlooking an already existing, previously untapped source of incremental revenue that falls right into the premium bucket?

Yes. They are. And it’s email.

Almost every publisher already has an email newsletter that is distributed, opened and read by the single most valuable audience around: their subscribers.  It is content that is always new, always premium and, most importantly, requested by its audience. Email is immune to the pricing pressures that are giving these publishers such angina. Yet, looking to email to make up the ground on lost revenue doesn’t seem to occur to this publishing giants that are trying so hard to almost, sort-of, find a way to make RTB (or mobile, for that matter) work for them.

Why? Because it’s hard to find a way to monetize email, particularly in the programmatic sense, in the same way that you can traditional display advertising.

Or, at least, it used to be. That’s where LiveIntent comes in.

Liveintent has the technology to buy and sell advertising programmatically in email on open, giving publishers the tools to tap into the wealth of premium inventory they can sell direct to advertisers at high CPMs, while simultaneously filling the remainder of the inventory from our exchange, monetizing any unsold impressions.

So, the inventory is already there, the audience is already there, and the technology – through LiveIntent – already exists. All that is left is for the proverbial apple to fall on their collective noggins (as it has for 4 out of the top 5 newspaper and magazine publishers in the country).