Parva tries to bring transparency between publishers & advertisers: Raghu Seelamsetty

Parva, the publisher-owned consortium for Indian publishers, is trying to bring in transparency between publishers and advertisers, said Raghu Seelamsetty, Founder and CEO.

Parva intends to give publishers an opportunity to have a smooth and simple way of generating higher ad revenue. With Times Internet Limited being one of the major investors, the platform aims to scale up a technology that will no longer require programmatic layers.

BestMediaInfo.com caught up with Seelamsetty, to find out what the consortium is trying to achieve. He said, “The idea of Parva started a few years ago, we have seen this industry grow from 400 crores in 2008 to 25,000 crores now. A lot of the growth has been cornered by Google and Meta. These two players today have a market share of 80-85% due to the innovations and the technology they bring to the table. The YouTube masthead which used to sell around 25-35 lacs a few years back now sells for 2.5 crores.”

Parva tries to bring transparency between the publishers and the advertisers, he said. Due to high dependency on these two tech giants, i.e. Google and Meta, publishers don’t get the right amount of revenue. A while back BestMediaInfo reported that INS (Indian Newspaper Society)  joined DNPA (Digital News Publishers’ Association) complaint against the search engine giant’s abuse of dominance and not being transparent in terms of offering fair compensation to news publishers. 

Seelamsetty further explained the biggest problems in the programmatic ecosystem. When an advertiser purchases an ad of Rs 100, by the time the money gets to the publishers, it is Rs 35 and the rest 65% is taken by the middlemen, as per him. He added that Parva wants to create a platform which is transparent in nature so that the publishers have a fair idea of their business. 

Speaking on introducing transparency in the system, Seelamsetty said, “We do this through stringent contracts with the publishers. We are going to be directly selling publishers’ inventory to the advertisers. One of the reasons it is difficult to introduce transparency is because on the buy-side you have DSPs, data providers, and on the sell-side SSPs, ad servers. So, when so many layers are involved and these impressions are being bought and sold in milliseconds through these layers, it is very difficult to hold anyone accountable for transparency.”

“Because Parva is an integrated platform, the advertisers can buy inventory and we don't have multiple layers, we are just asking for a fix percentage fee for bridging the gap between publishers and the advertisers,” he added.

Seelamsetty also opened up about the scope for malpractices in the digital world, he said, “In digital, there is a lot of scope of the fraud. Creating a website, copy pasting content and generating fake traffic. The advertisers sometimes invest in these websites and then their ads are not seen by many people.” 

Primarily, the platform wants to focus on top publishers from every region in the country. Time Internet, Sahakal, ABP, Jagran, Punjab Kesari and others are already on board with the platform as a publisher as well as an investor in the consortium.

Seelamshetty said, “Our primary goal is to create an open and transparent ad ecosystem where advertisers can reach really premium audiences in a premium environment as well and the goal is to drive real business outcomes.”

Info@BestMediaInfo.com