Every publisher wants to control their own destiny. With social platforms dominating the audience game and a deluge of 3rd party middlemen required for monetization, it can feel like you are being tossed about in the waves of these external forces. Your own team is something you do have control over. You want people who are experts at what they do. You want people who will be available when you need them. You want people who are as invested in the success of the business as you are. Unfortunately, finding candidates with those attributes is often easier said than done. Then, once you’ve found someone who is truly talented and engaged, the difficulty shifts to retaining and motivating them.

Outsourcing your ad operations and monetization capabilities gives you access to these critical capabilities without the accompanying HR challenges.

These are 7 reasons to outsource your ad operations:

Outsourcing your ad ops is almost always cheaper than hiring full time staff. When you factor in the cost of recruiting, onboarding, training and benefits it often makes sense to allow a trusted vendor to handle many of your operational functions.
You will have the leisure of taking more time to make smarter hires. This is one of the most critical decisions any company can make and has a tremendous impact on the existing team. By ensuring that you are not forced to make hasty decisions, you increase the probability of finding the perfect match.
You can access greater levels of talent and experience for far less than you would if you were to make a full time hire. Good operators are in high-demand. Those with relevant experience and deep industry connections even more so. This means they cost more and have more opportunities available to them, making recruiting and retention difficult.
Outsourcing accommodates ebbs and flows in workloads and activity. You won’t have staff completely overloaded one week and looking for something to do the next week.
You have access to a much broader set of contacts and experiences across vendors and technologies. Many traffickers and campaign managers have worked with the leading companies in the media space, but being immersed in their daily workload makes it difficult to stay current on a rapidly-changing landscape. A 3rd party that works with many publishers has the advantage of managing complex existing solutions, fielding inbound requests from new vendors, and maintaining relationships to keep abreast of the latest trends.
It allows your existing team to get back to their day jobs, or work on more strategic projects. Publishers often have a product or engineering resource working on their adserver, or an account manager pulling reports and devising optimization plans. These are things that detract and distract them from adding the maximum amount of value.
If you outsource to a group that takes the time to understand your business and build a strong relationship with you and your team, they will be deeply invested in your success. It may seem like common sense that a full-time employee would be more engaged and invested in a publisher’s growth and success, but having been on both sides of the table I have seen that ad ops teams are often simply looking for their next opportunity rather than building a long-term career by pushing the boundaries of whats possible for your site.

Hopefully, this gives you some insights as you decide how to scale your media business and whether or not to outsource your ad operations.