Author: Media Minute

The Media Minute 02.11.2020

Media Minute

Consumers expect to get whatever they want, whenever they want it, delivered how they want it. You can credit (or blame) Amazon for setting expectations so high, but those same expectations extend to online publishing.

Branded content helps audiences connect with brands on an emotional level and is most commonly used to build brand awareness and increase brand loyalty.

In the past couple years, Twitter has worked to position its platform as a destination for livestreaming video. But some news publishers tell Digiday that Amplify’s brand safety rules make it difficult for them to monetize their breaking news videos there, forcing them to forgo revenue they can earn monetizing videos on the same topics elsewhere.

Consumer spending on media grew 4.3% in 2019, which is slightly slower than the 4.9% that advertising and marketing spending on media grew last year, according to estimates released this morning from media industry economists PQ Media.

Is your content just something you send out and call it good? Or are you strategically posting, reformatting, and sharing to drive website traffic, attract new audience, and drive conversions?

For news organizations, selling advertising has become a notoriously complicated endeavor as media companies, tech businesses, and platforms compete for a share of the revenue.

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The Media Minute 02.04.2020

Media Minute

If you haven’t been following recent news, there’s a new marketing push in big media to unite audience data from different digital properties and sell advertising against the unified audience through proprietary ad-targeting platforms.

When we first covered TikTok and its half a billion users, it was to some collective brow-raising. Many felt the app was interesting, but hardly a serious contender in a mature market with well-established rivals.

Publishers’ efforts to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act have diverged as they parse one of its biggest ambiguities: whether selling targeted ads qualifies as selling California residents’ personal information.

Google’s researchers “evaluated ” a representative sample 273 Super Bowl ads shown from 2015-2019. It says in those ads, men were two times more likely than women to be portrayed as leaders, and guys were more than 2.5 times more likely to have speaking parts than women.

That “fresh start” feeling in the new year means it’s a great time to evaluate your audience data collection efforts — and make sure what you collect actually drives revenue and company growth!

Even today, much of the original reporting on the Trump administration originates at either the Times or the Post, thanks to reporters hard at work competing for scoops (and proudly seeking glory for their accomplishments on Twitter).

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The Media Minute 01.28.2020

Media Minute

Data protection laws and privacy-minded browser updates are forcing publishers to rethink their digital business strategies and communication with users.

Republicans trust Fox News far more than any other news outlet, and Democrats, similarly, place their trust in CNN. These, according to the report, are “the two cable channels that most clearly represent the polarized media universe.”

Minute Media expects its newest acquisition will help it fuel a profitable year and achieve revenue exceeding $100 million…

The Washington Post is the media equivalent of Amazon’s chain of physical bookstores: it pretends it’s a cleaned-up version of a beloved old thing, but in fact that beloved old thing is now propelled by a new engine.

Serious marketers use multi-channel or omni-channel marketing because it works. The Association of Magazine Media tells us you can see as much as a 14% lift in ad effectiveness comes when you combine media in marketing.

In 2019, we saw Gannett and GateHouse Media merge to become the largest newspaper chain in the U.S. We saw more news organizations take a stronger stance against the spread of misinformation and lies.

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The Media Minute 01.21.2020

Media Minute

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that 2020 will see more magazine closures and more experiments with reader paywalls. Here are eight, or maybe nine, not quite so obvious publishing predictions that will help you prepare for the year ahead:

Back in September, I logged onto Twitter one day and saw that the actor Shia LaBeouf was trending. At the time I had only a passing familiarity with the actor; I’d seen him in a few movies, but none of his performances had stood out to me.

Assembly Bill 5 has been in effect only for a few weeks in California, but any hopes that media managers had that they could sidestep its effects have already been dashed.

The Media Rating Council announced it has revoked accreditation for measurement services from Extreme Reach, Hulu and Protected Media, and denied accreditation for a service from DoubleVerify.

Audience and community marketing are more critical than ever for success (and revenue). Melissa Chowning has one of the best plans we’ve seen to get your audience development in the fast lane — check it out.

Arkansas-based Crittenden Publishing Co., Inc., and Tennessee-based Germantown Publishing Co., Inc., have sold their newspapers and related publications to Paxton Media Group, effective Dec. 31, 2019.

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The Media Minute 01.14.2020

Media Minute

We’ve heard all the buzzwords: predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning. But have you done everything you can to wrangle data and find the insights that reliably drive revenue?

Podcasts and AI to play a greater role in news organisations’ strategies, and three-quarters of publishers are confident about their company’s prospects in 2020.

Plus: YouTube would radicalize even without its algorithm, Reddit bans fakes both deep and cheap, and Facebook will let you dial down political ads.

Digital agency veterans Kenny Tomlin (founding CEO of Rockfish) and Dan Khabie (founding CEO of Mirum) are teaming up to launch CourtAvenue, a digital consultancy and product development company.

It’s week two of 2020! And time for Part Two of 20 Ideas for 2020 Niche Revenue! (Did you catch Part One last week with Ad Sales and Event Revenue ideas?)

As part of the 2020 International Newspaper Group (ING) Leadership Networking Summit, ING and E&P have agreed to collaborate on the first annual ING/E&P Operations All Star Excellence Awards, kicking off a powerful partnership. The Summit is scheduled for Sept. 18 to 20 in Chicago.

 

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The Media Minute 01.07.2020

Media Minute

There are big changes looming on the horizon for 2020. They’re predicted on every front. To better adapt to change quickly, we’ll need data.

Organizations as wide-ranging as Amazon, Salesforce, Burger King and Caterpillar have all invested in recurring revenue models as a means of driving predictable revenue, but also of building direct relationships with their customers.

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 239, dated December 17, 2019. Hello everyone. Welcome to the last Hot Pod of 2019. We made it to the end of the year! Frankly, I’m a little surprised.

National TV advertising for linear TV networks continues to slip in the wake of growing media competition — especially in prime time — dropping 5% for the 2018-2019 TV season from the previous year.

Happy New Year, Niche peeps! Let’s talk resolutions – reasonable, revenue-generating, growth-driving resolutions. No “lose 20 pounds by February 1st” madness here.

Turn on the television. Pick up a magazine. Scroll through your Twitter feed. Chances are, you’re being inundated with hundreds of marketing campaigns. But news publishers are only producing a fraction of those, and as an industry, we need to do better.

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The Media Minute 12.24.2019

Media Minute

In 2019, publishers fought shrinking ad revenue with diversified business models. Many focused on digital subscriptions, while others ramped up events, ecommerce, and other lines of revenue.

Publishers large and small are joining earlier adopters with their own reader revenues plays. But with subscription fatigue threatening…

Plus: “There is no bygone era of a well-informed, attentive public. What we have had in lieu of a well-informed citizenry is what might be termed a ‘load-bearing’ myth — the myth of the attentive public.”

B2B marketers are more engaged during the week of Christmas and New Year’s. This is the time that advertising engagement for business brands on LinkedIn increases, according to findings from a study released Thursday.

Email marketing is an art that takes plenty of time and patience to master. Most of the mastering comes from optimization, but in order to know what or how to optimize, you first need to understand the metrics that quantify the success of your emails.

After every major election cycle of the modern era, journalists from across the country all cross their arms, hang their heads low and sadly admit their coverage once again devolved into the type of horse race reporting they love to criticize.

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The Media Minute 12.17.2019

Media Minute

Now more than ever, the publishing industry finds itself on a quest for more effective ways to make money.

As part of WNIP’s series based around our Publisher’s Guide to Ecommerce report, Damian Radcliffe looks at how platforms are shaping the future of online shopping, from Pinterest and Facebook to Amazon and more.

I was reading a story the other day about next year’s upfront when I came across these quotes from some senior people on the publishing side of the business: ”a culmination of two years of commitment, collaboration and innovation…

Obviously, there are many reasons to attend journalism conferences — networking, an excuse to leave the newsroom, open bars, self-aggrandized posturing, hanging out with friends and former colleagues.

Show me a publisher who is not reliant on email, and I’ll show you a publisher who probably doesn’t do much advertising volume, because anybody operating at scale uses email for everything from marketing, to audience development, to production reminders, to getting invoices out.

With both publishers and advertisers looking to grow affiliate commerce, a growing number of publishers and advertisers have started using affiliate networks’ attribution tools to advocate for bigger commissions from advertisers and even earn commissions from customers that have read their content, even if that read doesn’t lead immediately to a click.

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The Media Minute 12.10.2019

Media Minute

Once a media company has decided to get started with business intelligence (BI), they must choose a vendor. There are many vendors that offer solutions in this space, but for most, SaaS (software-as-a-service)…

Gazeta Wyborcza, one of Poland’s leading newspapers grew from 170,000 digital subscribers at the end of 2018, to 200,000 nine months later. It’s publisher Jerzy Wójcik said…

Splitting Alphabet into three companies — Google Advertising and Other Services, Google Cloud, and YouTube — will not result from any U.S. government mandate…

At the start of my newspaper career I was introduced to a new world of electronic operations. Many of us remember typesetters literally the size of a compact car and costing about the same as a house in the Hollywood Hills.

People just want to learn a playbook. At the high level, it’s motivational, but at the grassroots level, it’s answering what do your proposals look like, what does your budget look like, how are you talking to donors and members.

Cyber Monday and Black Friday have long been make-or-break days of the year for retailers. They have recently become important to publishers selling subscriptions, and many of them found success this year by offering major deals.

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The Media Minute 12.03.2019

Media Minute

2020 is just around the corner. After a roller-coaster year of dynamic shifts in social networks and shaky new Google SEO updates, it’s time to take a short break to focus on what the new year will bring to the publishing landscape.

In this series from our comprehensive report on publishers and eCommerce, we’ve already explored how major publishers like BuzzFeed, POPSUGAR and Marie Claire UK are innovating in this space.

This holiday shopping season might be six days shorter compared with last year, but it has not slowed down consumers searching for deals and spending more per visit.

While the term “fake news” is thrown around with increased—and even disturbing—regularity, there remains the issue of whether reporters are doing enough to ensure that the information they write is factual and accurate.

Local news is important. Local newspapers are important, regardless of whether or not you’ve read a word on a dead tree in the past year. As I put it in a piece back in April:

In her senior year at Harvard College, Yolanda Scott received a letter informing her that her application to the CIA had been rejected.

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