Over the last year, the hype surrounding native advertising has continued to grow louder. eMarketer recently predicted native ad spending to grow to $3.2 billion in 2017, up from $2.3 billion in 2014. While this is just a fraction of online ad spending (IAB calculated total U.S. online ad revenues at $42.8 billion in 2013), it is a quickly growing segment.

Native advertising is not just for large consumer websites like Forbes and Buzzfeed. We’re finding native popping up on consumer and b-to-b sites of all sizes and categories, from Complex and Automobile to BioTechniques and Engine Builder.

Many publishers have had success in offering native ads to advertisers. In fact, in many cases, native content performs as well as regular editorial content, making native buys attractive to advertisers.

What I am consistently seeing and hearing within the industry is that native is very important and becoming an effective tool to raise CPMs for publishers. Despite this increasingly popular sentiment, our July 2014 research indicates that only about 10% of sites currently feature native ads.

The takeaway? There is an opportunity for publishers to get ahead of the curve and be early adopters in selling native advertising.