• Why engagement time holds much greater value for publishers

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.

• 6 Steps to Diving into Digital Ad Sales

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?.

• Fake academic journals are publishing work from real researchers alongside junk science

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?

• Quartz forges ahead, but other news publishers shut down chatbots

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.

• 2019 Print Forecast: Tight Paper Market Will Continue Squeezing Publishers

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.

• Are We Asking the Wrong Questions About Magazines? Linda Thomas Brooks Thinks So

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.

 

• Parents Magazine Proves Print Still Has Panache

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

• If Paid Content is the New Hope, How Do We Convert Free Readers to Paying Ones?

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.

• Online publishers adopt Nielsen’s Digital Content Ratings, with sights on TV dollars

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

• News publishers rethink premium day practices

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.

• Under GDPR, publishers are adopting CMPs for fear of losing out on ad revenue

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: A year-long brand evolution

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.

• The Next Step in our Journey to Help Local News Publishers

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

• Publishers Can’t Compete with Google, Amazon & Facebook – So They Should Complement Their Commerce

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.

• In trouble? Condé Nast plans to put another 3 magazines up for sale

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.

• Dennis Publishing Sold to Private Equity

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 tops 300 million paid subscriptions as it reportedly preps new subscription services

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.

• Online publishers adopt Nielsen’s Digital Content Ratings, with sights on TV dollars

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.

• Opinion: How publishers can drive up traffic using Flipboard

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.

• 8 Ways to Increase Audience AND Online Revenue!

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.

• How Publishers Can Boost Revenue With A Subscription Box, Part 1

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

• Desktops Still Pull Highest Email Revenue, Study Finds

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.

• How errors in ads.txt files are harming publisher revenue: What can be done?

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.

• Aiming for TV dollars, digital publishers adopt Nielsen’s Digital Content Ratings

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.

• Will IGTV Deliver for Publishers?

With a new platform comes the recurring decision for skeptical publishers: How much should they care? And in the case of a new platform from Facebook, there’s every reason to be wary.

• Are you ready to grow your digital revenues?

Are you ready to grow your digital revenues? We all know we need to launch new digital products to diversify our online income sources in these challenging times.

• To Grow Print Revenue, Give Advertisers What They Want: Data-Driven Targeting

There’s an old saying that, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
I goofed. I’ve been advocating the use of a “hammer” to help magazines reverse a decade-long advertising slump. I should have been talking about what we need to build.

• Production: Combining Our Print Product and Digital Offerings Will Guarantee Success

A few months ago, I was asked to attend a conference to speak on the direction and future of newspapers. Then, a month ago I was approached by a different association asking if I would consider being a keynote speaker for their convention; the subject was once again about the future of newspapers

• Utah Valley Magazine’s Founder on Understanding the Needs of Your Audience

Last month, Folio: celebrated the Top Women in Media awards and highlighted achievements made by over 100 women across the industry. From Up & Comers to Corporate Champions, these women have done everything from achieving new revenue streams for their companies to building new brands from the ground up, and Jeanette Bennett is no exception.

• RockYou’s publishing pivot hits a speed bump

RockYou Media continues to fine-tune its pivot from social gaming to digital publishing.
The 13-year-old company has been attempting to make the shift over the past few years, but its efforts really began to take shape in November 2017 when it launched Vocally, a digital publication for multicultural millennial women that RockYou Media CEO Lisa Marino described at the time as the company’s “first non-game proof point in a business model we have spent the last three years developing and scaling.”

• Programmatic is not just for media buyers. What publishers need to know.

It’s a message we’ve been hearing percolate through the industry now for years: programmatic is the future of advertising. Brands, in search of more control over their media buying activity, have embraced technology-based approaches that promise efficiency, precision, flexibility, and superior ROI.

• Facebook is testing augmented reality ads in the News Feed

Facebook  is giving advertisers new ways to show off their products, including with augmented reality. At its F8 developer conference earlier this year, Facebook announced that it was working with businesses to use AR to show off products in Messenger.

• CommonWealth Magazine Shutters Print Edition

CommonWealth magazine, the 22-year-old quarterly published by Boston-based nonpartisan think tank MassINC, is going all digital. The Summer 2018 issue, out today, will be CommonWealth‘s last, editor Bruce Mohl revealed in the issue’s editor’s letter, arguing the magazine will more effectively serve its organizational mission—that is, coverage of the policy debates that impact lower- and middle-class Massachusetts residents—by devoting the bulk of its funding to its growing digital channels..

• GDPR and Third-Party Services: What Publishers Need to Know

By now, everyone understands the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is here to stay, and businesses must make themselves entirely compliant in order to avoid fines of up to four percent of total global revenue.

• Snapchat moves beyond traditional publishing brands with latest partnerships

Your mom might not know who Daquan is or what Goalslayin is about, but a lot of teenagers on Snapchat do — and Snap wants to work with the companies and creators behind these brands. Take London-based Fanbytes. The 18-month-old digital media company has four organic accounts on Snapchat — MakeupTuts, Goalslayin, Couples365 and IRelateQuotes.

• New Yorker magazine recognizes staff’s union

A little more than a month after staffers at The New Yorker declared their intention to form a union, the magazine’s top editor said that management won’t stand in the way.

• The sound and the story: How publishers can benefit from audiobooks

At a time when the publishing industry faces intense economic pressures, audiobooks have become a rapidly expanding – and lucrative – revenue stream.

• Digital Ad Selling: Turn Objections into Opportunity

I am going to suggest something crazy: Objections are actually good in the digital ad sales process. I say this because almost every sales call will have some. It’s going to happen. And those objections can teach you a lot about what your prospect really needs.

• LEAD MANAGEMENT

Lead management is a general marketing term that describes the process of optimizing lead-based marketing activities. Most of these marketing activities typically entail modern, inbound strategies for producing sales leads or “hot” prospects.

• ‘We’ve come a long way from CTR’: As attribution blooms, publisher headaches follow

Since it launched in December, News Corp’s ad platform News IQ has gotten a workout from advertisers looking to prove that the ads News IQ hosts led to business outcomes.

• Future CEO Zillah Byng-Thorne on the Sustainability of Ecommerce & Monetizing Specialist Content

Publishers have historically touted ecommerce as a golden opportunity to increase their topline revenue. In this age of digital disruption, where major platforms like Facebook, Google and increasingly, Amazon have asserted their dominance, publishers of all sizes have had to work hard to reconfigure their business models to adapt.

• Shelter Magazines Capitalize on the Evolving Concept Homes Trend

Showcase houses aren’t a new concept for shelter magazines. Generally viewed as a natural—and expected—extension of a brand, it’s not atypical at this point for a magazine to participate in the nearly three-decade long trend by building part or all of a house of its own.

• View From The Buy Side: The shift towards context-based advertising

The 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica scandal, and GDPR represent a tidal shift in how the ad tech and digital media industry will monetize their audience moving forward. And it’s overdue. Demographic data doesn’t define a person’s identity.

• Are Digital Magazine Apps A Stepping-Stone to Paid Content?

The conventional wisdom on digital magazines is that they’re dead, at least as a custom format, separate from print and enhanced for the tablet or phone.

• DoubleClick is out as Google ushers in new brand names for its advertising products

The DoubleClick brand is going away, along with AdWords. In their place are three new brands: Google Ads, which now identifies what was AdWords, Google Marketing Platform, which encompasses Google’s products for enterprise advertisers, and Google Ad Manager for large publishers.

• Why Brands and Celebs Still Want Their Own Print Magazines

When Doug Olson, the president and general manager of Meredith magazines, reaches for an analogy to describe the launch of The Magnolia Journal, his mind goes immediately to O, The Oprah Magazine.

• How commerce publishers cozy up to direct-to-consumer brands

As direct-to-consumer brands from Brooklinen to Curology try to wean themselves off of Facebook ads, commerce-focused publishers are trying to help fill the marketing gap..

• Publishers take note: Google will mark all HTTP sites “not secure” starting July

For publishers, getting quality traffic to their online properties is itself quite a big challenge, especially in the current environment of turmoil in the digital landscape. Next month onwards, things might get even more difficult for some.

• Email Marketers Report Mixed Results, But Technology Is Helping Some: Study

Email marketers have issues. Less than a tenth are free of challenges, and over a third have open rates of 10% or lower, according to The State of Email Marketing, a study by Return Path and Demand Metric.

• CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR MAGAZINE MANAGER CLIENTS!

At The Magazine Manager, we are thrilled to see our talented clients shine. That’s why we’d like to say “hats off to you” for winning multiple prestigious awards recently from CRMA and Folio.

• Managing Audience Data: A Road Map for Success

As the role of audiences in digital marketing becomes more important, it’s critical for publishers to not just gather data, but understand what they have, and how to best utilize it.  Smaller publishers in particular, whose teams and budgets may be more limited in scope, must navigate audience-building, targeting and marketing in a way that makes the most of their team and budget.

• Publishers can now monetize Facebook videos

Facebook has been flirting with video monetisation for a while, with beta tests of ad breaks in live video, in-stream video ads, and ad breaks in on-demand video. Till now, these were mostly available to a limited set of partners. Now Facebook is rolling out monetization products they are building to a wider audience.

• How New York Media grew median daily users 42 percent

New York Media wants to grow its audience like every other publisher. But it also wanted to make sure its growth was based on returning visitors and not just one-time hits. The publisher broke traffic records in four of the five months of 2018, reaching a record 53 million unique visitors in May, according to Google Analytics, New York said

• Emotions drive the B2B path to purchase

TOKYO: Emotions are important in B2B purchasing decisions just as in B2C and new research reveals the role different emotions play along the B2B path to purchase.

• ‘The New York Times’ Uses Machine Learning To Create Personalized Newsletter

“The Times publishes countless stories across news, opinion and features every day, and we’re focused on finding the best ways to introduce readers to the breadth of our journalism,” stated Alex Rainert, head of product and design at The New York Times.

• 7 pivotal trends in content marketing for publishers

The Content Marketing Association (CMA) — the UK industry association for marketing, publishing, advertising and social agencies — has just released a comprehensive report on the Key Content Marketing Trends in 2018

• News & Notes: SELF Links up With The Players Tribune; IMAG Award Winners Revealed

Condé Nast’s Self announced Thursday the formation of a new partnership with The Players’ Tribune—the media platform for athletes by athletes launched by Derek Jeter in 2014—under which the two brands will produce a series of personal essays and videos celebrating women in sports.

• Publishers turn to Hollywood talent agencies for help breaking into TV

Vox Media likely wouldn’t have been able to sell its upcoming show, “American Style,” to CNN without the help of Hollywood talent agency WME. Vox Media formed its Vox Entertainment division and signed with WME in 2015 to break into the TV business. Chad Mumm, vp at Vox Entertainment, had seen how WME helped convince HBO to buy a show from Vice when Vice was little more than a print magazine and digital publisher.

• Once Considered Mortal Enemies, Print & Digital Are Living Happily Together

“In three years, none of this will be in print,” a senior publishing executive told me, six years ago, about two magazines that are still profitable and still in print. Mr. Print Is Dead thought magazine publishing would soon be all about apps and the web. (You see, kids, back then there was this thing called the iPad that … oh, never mind.)

• 7 things publishers should be doing to transition their businesses

A few years ago, in 2014 to be exact, I wrote a post about what publishers should be doing to transform their businesses to a new multi-platform business model. Many of the tasks mentioned in 2014 remain the same in 2018, but a few have changed in light of new innovations and best practices. An updated list is presented in this post.