The Media Minute 10.02.2018

Xaxis UK launched a new six-second ad format, Integral Ad Science verification is now available for Snapchat inventory, and Sublime Skinz rebrands to Sublime. Here are the top things that happened in ad tech from September that publishers need to know about:

If email is used in the right way it can truly help the sales professional win and grow business. Before we get into the best sales subject lines for email success, remember this about email:

When Cosmopolitan senior vice president, publisher and chief revenue officer Donna Kalajian Lagani was looking at ways to rethink the title’s October print advertising pages, she turned to the beauty category. Beauty is crucial to the Cosmo audience, she said — it’s made up about 60 percent of all of its advertising volume in 2018, which is up 55 percent from last year.

OK, fellow publishers, Google is on to us. And that probably means readers are on to us as well. As I’ve noted before, Google has generally been kind to magazine media publishers, tweaking its search engine to favor results from respected web sites, especially those with storied print brands.

Association magazines are a common benefit to members and have developed a longstanding, healthy area for publishing. But like much of the print publishing industry, such magazines are beginning to diversify the means for generating revenue.

TI Media, the new name for the recently rebranded Time Inc. UK, has partnered with smartphone app Ownable to allow readers to directly place orders for products featured in the pages of its magazines.

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The Media Minute 09.25.2018

Back in 2012, I was working as an editor at a major national magazine, and running the publication’s social media accounts fell under my purview. One day I received an email from a Google employee. She worked as a media liaison for Google Plus, a platform that, at this point in time, Google was still hoping would grow to become a viable Facebook competitor..

Are you gazing out the window at the fall colors, (or thinking about your favorite football team) instead of paying attention to all your unanswered emails? What about all the follow-ups? If you want to have stellar ad sales in 2019, think about making some changes NOW.

For Boston Magazine, events and experiential marketing are key ways to help sponsors and partners create engagement in numerous channels.

Hauser & Wirth is launching yet another new venture: a quarterly art magazine called Ursula, in honor of gallery co-founder Ursula Hauser.

In pursuit of revenue growth, the move to a subscription model has been inevitable for media businesses. For many publishers, the first inclination is to adopt a paywall strategy that gives readers access to a limited number of articles for free, after which they are charged a fee per article.

Bloomberg Media is trying to turn its Twitter network TicToc into a full-fledged media brand. The network, started in December, was part of a slew of live video push by Twitter that’s included partnerships with Cheddar, the WNBA and BuzzFeed. TicToc was the only 24-7 streaming network, though, so the expectations are higher.

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The Media Minute 09.19.2018

After months of searching, Meredith Corporation has finally found a proper suitor for Time magazine.
On Sunday, September 16, the company announced it has sold the legacy brand it acquired in January this year for $190 million in cash to Marc and Lynne Benioff.

I often speak about how to magically transform your content and audience into digital membership revenue. At the end of the talks, the most frequent question I get is “what is the difference between a paywall (or subscription) and a membership?

“A sense of magic.” “Works like magic.” “Magic” was an oft-repeated part of Apple founder Steve Jobs’ vocabulary. Something he professed to believe was a fundamental aspect of what his company stood for.

Snap is launching a new feature that will let media companies access public posts made by Snapchat users and package them into editions centering on live events, breaking news and other topics.

In previous posts, I explored the important considerations publishers should make before launching a subscription box and how to get your subscription boxes to your customers. In this third and final post, we’ll look at some ways to grow your subscription box revenue.

The advertising buy side (brands, marketers etc) has always placed a premium on above-the-fold (ATF) ad units. Research from Adomik indicates average ATF bids are $0.43, compared with just $0.08 below the fold (BTF).

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The Media Minute 09.11.2018

For the first time in Eddie & Ozzie history, one magazine will be recognized for having produced the best editorial content and design this year.

There were only a handful of digital officers around in legacy publishing two decades ago. Today, they are climbing to the highest echelons of publishing, and more recently digital officers have ascended to C-suite status with the creation of the title chief digital officer (CDO).

Niche events are a hot revenue stream and everyone’s doing it. But how do you ensure you stand out from the other events in your market? Does your niche event have a WOW Factor? Does it have that special something that makes a lasting impression on your attendees?

It was only a matter of time before publishers’ commerce operations started to get a little more programmatic.
Over the past year or so, a number of publishers, including Purch, MSN, Wirecutter and Allure have been experimenting with making the links in their commerce content biddable, adding a layer of automation to a normally human-powered process.

In the fiercely competitive space that is digital publishing, never has more emphasis been placed on the customer experience. With the increasingly vast number of publishers vying for the attention of readers across various platforms, if one thing is certain, it’s the rapid speed at which the industry has moved over the last decade.

To find the right concepts for ad campaigns it puts in front of its audience, Hong Kong-based publisher 9GAG has been asking said audience for ideas

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The Media Minute 09.04.2018

Four decades after debuting as an insert in a 1978 issue of Playboy, Food & Wine’s 40th Anniversary campaign celebrates not only its 24,000 published recipes and its collaborations with world-renowned chefs, but also the year of growth the brand experienced across its digital, social, video, events and print platforms.

We’ve all heard it before, print dollars have been replaced by digital dimes, and it’s only worsening with the increase in readers using adblockers.

From a purely commercial perspective, user traffic is the main resource produced by digital news publishers. Most established news publishers mainly convert this resource into revenues by selling advertising and exposing their own paid-for journalism to potential subscribers.

It was only a matter of time before publishers’ commerce operations started to get a little more programmatic.
Over the past year or so, a number of publishers, including Purch, MSN, Wirecutter and Allure have been experimenting with making the links in their commerce content biddable, adding a layer of automation to a normally human-powered process.

Though the UK’s vote to exit the EU and the election of Donald Trump may have roiled the British and American public, both have been great for subscription sales. Stories of the readership surge caused by the Trump Bump and the Brexit Bounce are legend among audience development professionals.

In the early days of digital publishing, publishers and ad networks were free to load up their sites with ads anywhere on the page without a thought for whether or not they were going to be seen. According to some analysts, this left more than 50% of ads delivered online going unseen..

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The Media Minute 08.28.2018

The person talking about the tremors in the WordPress world—thanks to Gutenberg—is none other than Edwin Toonen, an Editor at Yoast.

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve entered an era of on-demand media consumption. And due to its mobility and being a natural accompaniment for multitasking, audio has emerged as a favorite among the on-demand public.

One finding: “Need-to-know material converts (related to how to live your life, understand the world), while nice-to-know (guides, arts, reviews) converts badly but is key for retention.”

It’s not especially groundbreaking to report that teens are largely abandoning books and magazines in favor of smartphones. What is notable about the American Psychological Association’s new report on adolescent media use in the U.S.—one of the most comprehensive studies of its kind to date—is the accelerating rate at which its findings indicate screen time is displacing legacy media consumption.

Continuing its charm offensive with news publishers, Facebook has been testing a tool with five publishers including BuzzFeed to help them improve their reach on the platform.

Engagement time is defined as the total time a page is open and a user is deemed to be active, and it’s what forward-looking publishers are starting to focus on instead of looking at more ‘traditional’ viewing metrics.

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The Media Minute 08.21.2018

Engagement time is defined as the total time a page is open and a user is deemed to be active, and it’s what forward-looking publishers are starting to focus on instead of looking at more ‘traditional’ viewing metrics.

So you’ve mostly been a print publisher up until now. Maybe you’ve added a couple new revenue streams like a special edition book and a sponsored event or two. You know it’s time to really put some focus on digital ad sales. But where do you start without getting overwhelmed by the vastness of all things digital?.

In a time when fakery seems to expand to every corner of the internet (including fake Amazon product reviews and YouTube views), it seems like academia is the last bastion of unadulterated truth, right?

The Washington Post, The Guardian and Mic have discontinued their chatbots, according to their spokespeople. Others such as Business Insider and The HuffPost appear to have done the same, as evidenced by their Messenger accounts not responding to messages or directing people to email them instead.

At the beginning of next year, magazine publishers will be paying about 25% more for paper than they did just 18 months earlier — assuming they can find any paper to buy.

Although magazine media got plenty of attention earlier this year due to the blockbuster deals made by Meredith and Hearst to acquire Time Inc. and Rodale, respectively, as well as the ripple effects each deal caused, the months that followed were relatively quiet. And as the expression goes, no news is good news.

 

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The Media Minute 08.14.2018

The 92-year-old publication booked 10 new advertisers and sold 100 ad pages for its September issue.

So we’re agreed? Reader revenue is the way to go. We’re over traffic-at-scale and ad-only funding models. Subscriptions probably won’t pay all your bills, but a healthy mix of subs and ad sales is what we’re all about these days.

Recently, many online publishers woke up to welcome news, with vast jumps in the size of their estimated audiences. For example, Australia’s Daily Mail more than doubled its audience in the space of two months

The use of premium days as a tactic to grow audience revenue has caused customer relationship issues, and many publishers are seeking ways to maintain the revenue while moving away from the practice.

More publishers are feeling under pressure to adopt a consent-management platform to be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation, publishers and ad tech vendors say.

Meredith’s Shape magazine spent the last year thinking over and creating its own evolution. Shape, which is published 10 times a year, reaches a rate base of 2.5 million and an audience of 14 million across platforms, focuses on healthy living for the 21st century woman.

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The Media Minute 08.07.2018

Today, we’re excited to announce an additional $4.5 million investment in programs that support news publishers.

Publishers — especially commerce-focused publishers — can’t beat Google, Amazon and Facebook. They’re just too big, too powerful, and all-pervasive. To be successful, digital publishers need to augment the experiences that start and end with Google, Amazon, or Facebook. It’s time to stop competing and start complementing.

Condé Nast, the company behind Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, became one of the world’s most successful magazine publishers with a formula built on a heady mix of old-world glamour and all-American pizazz.

For the first time in its 45-year history, Dennis Publishing has been sold. The London-based publisher of The Week and Mental Floss, among numerous others, has been acquired by British private equity firm Exponent, both parties announced Tuesday.

Apple’s subscription business is already big, but it’s about to get even bigger. Apple has sold more than 300 million subscriptions to its own and others’ apps, an increase of more than 60 percent in the past year alone, Apple CEO Tim Cook said during the company’s latest earnings call on July 31.

Recently, many online publishers woke up to welcome news, with vast jumps in the size of their estimated audiences. For example, Australia’s Daily Mail more than doubled its audience in the space of two months.

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The Media Minute 07.31.2018

The ever-growing threat of a simple algorithm change to Facebook or Google continues to loom over publishers, but Parse.ly’s latest traffic report has a few solutions to that issue.

Publishers are starting to realize the unharnessed value of an engaged email database and how it can increase digital revenues. An opt-in email newsletter list can be one of your most valuable assets—because then you own the relationship with that reader.

Magazine publishers, don’t let the changing advertising landscape get you down. You have something not many businesses have: a successful magazine brand.

Smartphones are the leading channel for email opens. But they lag behind desktops in producing conversions and revenue, according to a study by Movable Ink.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab introduced ads.txt last year to help ad buyers avoid illegitimate sellers who arbitrage inventory and spoof domains, following calls from across the sector to clean up the supply chain.

Pete Spande said ad agencies seem to be looking at him differently these days.
In the past two weeks, the chief revenue officer of Business Insider said he’s had first-time conversations with many of the video and TV-buying groups at the agency holding companies. He said those talks are happening in part because BI started using Nielsen’s Digital Content Ratings to measure the size of its digital video audience.

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