By David Kohl, Co-founder – Symitri
A strategy for premium publishers and advertisers to close the performance gap by making audience signal usable—without surrendering control.
There isn’t a premium content company on the planet that isn’t feeling the combined effects of several significant shifts reshaping how advertisers reach their audiences. Google’s AI Overviews now answer more user queries directly on the search results page, reducing click-throughs to original content and reporting. Brand safety systems have long filtered out legitimate journalism when stories touch on sensitive topics, further shrinking the monetizable audience on the open Internet. And since Apple began tightening the screws on third-party identity, high-value audience budgets have been steadily consolidating inside walled gardens, where targeting and measurement are easy, and results are immediate.
It’s tempting to frame publisher revenue as a traffic problem or an audience targeting problem. In reality, it’s a control problem. Walled gardens win because they own the most useful audience data, control the environment in which it’s applied, and make performance measurement effortless for buyers. The open Internet, by contrast, has allowed too much of its most valuable audience signal to slip away. Publishers have an incredibly valuable asset, which they have failed to surface to advertisers in usable ways without giving away the farm. The result is a performance gap that premium publishers can’t afford to ignore.
The way forward isn’t to hand over more raw data in the hopes of winning a larger share of your clients’ ad budgets. It’s to calibrate the signal you share. It needs to offer enough to make your media competitive on targeting, measurement and optimization, while keeping control of the underlying data.
At Symitri, we call this approach Calibrated Signal.
Defining Calibrated Signal
Calibrated Signal is the deliberate practice of exposing just enough information about your audience and content to drive advertiser performance, without revealing personal identifiers or relinquishing ownership of the data. It’s a middle ground between “lock it all down” and “let it all out,” designed to satisfy privacy requirements, protect competitive advantage and give buyers the clarity they need to plan, measure and optimize with confidence. Publishers who calibrate signal stay in control of their valuable audience data, while advertisers gain the clarity they need to redirect their performance investments back to the open internet.
This isn’t theoretical. Calibrated Signal can take the form of aggregated intent cohorts, recency-based engagement tiers, deterministic privacy-safe audiences, affinity-oriented contextual signals and privacy-safe conversion reporting. Each element is designed for one purpose: to make it easy for an advertiser to plan, buy, measure and optimize against your audience as effectively – or more effectively – than they can inside a walled garden.
A publisher playbook for making Calibrated Signal a winning strategy for advertisers
Premium content publishers are at an advantage because they tend to attract repeat, engaged audiences. This regularity is a built-in differentiator that distinguishes premium publishers from the rest of the transactional open Internet. For publishers in this category, creating value from Calibrated Signal requires a modest effort and investment that will yield significant returns.
1. Own your data spine
Start with consented, first-party data and a durable identity framework you control. If you can motivate your audience to log in, that’s gold. But even without explicit authentication, commercial identity solutions can help you uniquely recognize repeat visitors in a privacy-compliant fashion. Whatever your approach, standardize the way you capture and categorize signal – content taxonomies, intent cohorts, engagement tiers – so it maps cleanly to advertiser needs. Share the schema (not the identifiers) so buyers or their technology partners can act on it without taking custody of the underlying data.
2. Federate signal to create reach
Even the largest premium publishers rarely have enough audience scale to fulfill most campaign objectives on their own. That’s why Calibrated Signal works best when it can be activated across a network of trusted publishers with a consistent taxonomy and governance model. When buyers can plan, target and measure against a unified signal set that spans multiple properties – without the underlying audience data ever leaving publisher control – it becomes a true alternative to walled-garden scale.
3. Measure results in real-time
Performance budgets follow proof. Programmatic performance budgets follow proof in real time.
While closed-loop measurement and optimization are standard in walled gardens, achieving real-time performance on the open Internet has become far more challenging. Why? Because underlying audience identity signals have largely disappeared from publisher inventory. Premium publishers need to own the work of restoring the signals that make fast, consistent outcome validation possible across trusted inventory – without giving away the farm. When that happens, the results will speak for themselves. Research strongly suggests that the premium open Internet will easily match – and likely exceed – platform benchmarks.
4. Give buyers the confidence to trust what they’re buying
All this focus on audience data and measurement would be meaningless without the valuable, high-quality inventory to which Calibrated Signal is attached. Buyers need to know they’re reaching real audiences in brand-safe environments that have a high propensity to perform. That means eliminating MFA inventory, ensuring direct, cost-efficient supply paths and consistently operating with verifiable supply-chain transparency. With these quality promises – and a consistent level of Calibrated Signal – buyers are likely to shift their big budget bets from the walled gardens to the trusted and transparent environments that premium open Internet publishers can uniquely offer.
5. Anchor everything in outcomes
Structure every campaign with clear KPIs – incremental reach, CPA improvement, conversions and lift – and fixed timelines. Make it easy for buyers to prove value quickly and justify scaling spend.
Why this is different from legacy data deals
Legacy audience data-driven deals often handed over audiences with limited controls or offered broad contextual targeting with no performance accountability. Calibrated Signal is different in three ways:
- Value is intentional: you share only what improves outcomes, nothing more.
- Measurement is integral: buyers don’t just trust; they test and see results.
- Privacy is by design: you always own and control your valuable consumer data assets.
This reframes the open Internet’s so-called “signal loss.” No individual publisher needs the same identity resolution scale as a walled garden. Instead, you and your premium open Internet publishing peers need consistent, privacy-safe signals that outperform on cost per outcome.
A call to action for the future of the premium open internet
Traffic patterns will continue to shift as AI captures more queries on the results page. Brand safety systems will still misclassify legitimate journalism. Don’t fight these headwinds by creating more commodity inventory or compromising with looser data practices. Win with Calibrated Signal that gives you the power to stay in control of your data while proving you can generate outcomes for advertisers that matter. When you do, brands will discover what many already suspect – that the open Internet can outperform walled gardens when premium publishers make signal a product, not a by-product.