Schibsted Uses Custom Ad Algorithms to Claw Back Meta Budgets

Nearly two thirds of advertisers – 63.9% – have moved mobile budgets away from walled gardens to independent partners in the past year, according to a July survey of 166 brands and agencies by eMarketer and Datum Intelligence. Only 1.2% shifted budgets the other way. Norwegian media group Schibsted intends to capitalize on that reversal, and it is using custom ad algorithms to do it.

The context is still sobering. eMarketer projects Meta, Google and Amazon will capture 62.3% of worldwide digital ad spend this year, with Meta overtaking Google in ad revenue for the first time. Yet publishers with strong local reach are finding ways to compete, and Schibsted's strategy shows how.

What does Schibsted bring to the fight?

The company owns VG, Norway's largest digital news publisher with roughly 2.4 million daily visitors, and Aftonbladet, one of Sweden's largest with 3.6 million daily visitors. Last year it acquired Sweden's TV4 and Finland's MTV Oy – two of the largest broadcasters in those countries – from Telia. Combined with its local newspaper network, that gives Schibsted roughly 50% audience reach in its markets, said Christer Ljones, director of ad data capabilities at Schibsted Marketing Services. For scale: VG and Aftonbladet out-reach the Los Angeles Times, which draws 4.4 million weekly online and print readers, about 11% of California's population.

VG and Aftonbladet earn most of their revenue from advertising, split roughly evenly between online display and branded content. Direct sales account for about two thirds of ad revenue; programmatic makes up the rest. But reach alone no longer wins performance advertisers, Ljones said. Meta's AI-powered optimization tools, such as Advantage+, set the standard, and open-web publishers have struggled to match them.

Fighting AI with AI

Schibsted is working with Nodals AI, a London-based company building custom ad optimization algorithms for publishers in Europe and the US. Nodals Founder and CEO Aly Nurmohamed described the core problem: "Advertisers have been trained by Meta to just care about 'I put money in and I see how much money comes out.'" Advertisers were telling Schibsted: "I don't want to buy on a CPM, and you're really expensive relative to Meta. Here's what I'm doing with Meta. Can you replicate it?"

Nodals feeds Schibsted's first-party data into models the publisher owns. "We take their data and feed it into their own models, collecting everything they know about what their audiences are, any logged-in data they have, how far you scroll down the page, how often you click on content or ads," Nurmohamed said. "All of that goes into our model, and then you can have a powerful prediction on who is likely to click and buy on a particular advertiser." Because the publisher owns both algorithm and data, the system should not be affected by Apple's crackdown on third-party audience data vendors and ID graphs.

Schibsted's direct audience relationship matters here. Ljones said search drives only a single-digit percentage of traffic on its largest sites, insulating it from AI search traffic loss.

Legal pressure runs in parallel

Schibsted has also led opposition to Meta's planned terms of service update, which would have required publishers to share data for training Meta's AI models. Along with 180 other publishers, it joined the Norwegian Media Businesses' Association in suing Meta at the end of October. Within two days, the Oslo District Court froze the update in Norway pending a legality review – a decision that likely contributed to Meta pausing the update globally earlier this month.

What does this change for advertisers?

After testing Nodals' tech last summer, Schibsted built a direct-sold native ad product line with AI optimization priced on cost per click rather than CPM. Traditional advertisers, including grocery chains in Norway and Sweden, are buying it for a mix of performance and brand awareness. Ljones does not claim parity with Meta: "We won't be necessarily as good as Meta on average," he said, but "you don't need to beat them on the average. You just need to beat them with meaningful scale at the margin."

The pitch targets advertisers seeing Meta returns flatten. "We get feedback from advertisers that they've seen their Meta ROI, their conversions, flatten out, or maybe even decline slightly," Ljones said. "So, the overall idea that we see initially working is, 'Let's take 10% of whatever you spend on Meta, and you can probably keep most of your conversions and get more [from us].'" He added: "We're in an early phase, but we're seeing the right results" – new budgets from existing clients, defended budgets in some cases, and renewed conversations with clients Schibsted had lost.