The Media Minute 02.27.2018

Yesterday’s Consumer Magazine report marks a key step change for ABC, revealing new industry agreed Standards that simplify reporting and further support market growth, says the ABC.

While most advertising on the web is respectful of user experience, over the years we’ve increasingly heard from our users that some advertising can be particularly intrusive.

Digital media companies may be facing some significant challenges, from taking on the ad blockers through to working out a response to the recalibration of Facebook’s news feeds.

It’s tough sometimes to find the good news stories in the publishing business; more often than not, the pros are outweighed by the cons.

The last decade has seen massive shifts in magazine media, in part due to digital publishing startups that are competing by creating innovative (and cheap) products that aim to stay a step ahead of ongoing disruptive forces.

Over the past six months, the amount of money publishers spent to distribute branded content on Facebook has risen dramatically, according to Keywee, a content marketing tool. In the fourth quarter of 2017, spending on branded-content distribution leapt 159 percent year over year.

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The Media Minute 02.20.2018

Creative Circle and the Newspaper Manager join forces to launch an innovative and affordable classified ad production suite for print and digital media.

Digital Content Next (DCN) recently released findings from its second annual DCN Distributed Content Revenue Benchmark Report.

Time Inc was the biggest faller out of the major consumer mags despite a promising set of digital subscribers gains, the latest ABC figures show.

A big party I recently attended illustrates a principle behind what I’ve consistently found to be the greatest source of waste, the greatest source of potential cost savings, and the biggest differentiator between competing printing proposals for all but the smallest-circulation magazines.

If you’ve kept your ear to the ground and monitored news and data about digital news consumption, you’re probably pretty excited about the opportunities up for grabs.

In 2017, The New York Times’ international digital subscriber base grew to 14 percent of its total 2.2 million digital subscriber base after adding over 100,000 international subscribers.

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The Media Minute 02.13.2018

Wired UK has stopped releasing print issues on a monthly basis and will instead to go to press just six times a year, the tech magazine has announced.

Email newsletters are a big hit amongst publishers. They generate big ad dollars and further engage audiences. While the term “win-win situation” is rather cringe-worthy, writes Mirabel Technologies’ Christie Calahan, it is actually the perfect way to describe them.

Newsweek is in the news—raided by the police last month as part of a probe into the owners’ shady finances, then subjected to a crude purge on Monday, when the owners sacked the editors and reporters who tried to write about the scandal.

Google and Facebook are the biggest tech companies in terms of advertising and biggest traffic sources for publishers, but they still only account for less than 5 percent of publishers’ digital revenue, a new report from publisher trade group Digital Content Next shows.

Trinity Mirror has agreed a £126.7m deal to buy a portfolio of titles from Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell, including the Daily Express and the Daily Star.

Times’ online subscription sales jumped 46 percent in 2017 to $340 million. Digital ad sales rose 14 percent to $238 million.

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The Media Minute 02.06.2018

Amid white, faux-fur beanbag chairs, trays of artisanal ice cream sandwiches and a glowing Teen Vogue logo, 600 girls and women gathered earlier this month to talk about politics, leadership and social change.

If you’re wondering why you got the same Apple News push alert from CNN a half-dozen times Tuesday afternoon, it wasn’t a coincidence. (CNN said it was an Apple News glitch, something Apple confirmed later.)

One needs no further evidence than the horrific connotations associated among media circles with terms like “pivot” and “restructuring” to know that legacy media’s transition to digital publishing has, by and large, been anything but graceful.

Arc, The Washington Post’s publishing software, continues its slow march towards becoming the go-to content management system for news organizations, from modest alt-weeklies to multi-paper chains.

While it has been part of a successful core strategy for a few major publishers for some time, the publisher paywall became a hot topic for the wider digital media sector last year, and the trend will most likely continue in 2018.

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The Media Minute 01.30.2018

Much of the strategic focus in the digital economy thus far has revolved around getting better insights into consumers.

Email newsletters are a big hit amongst publishers. They generate big ad dollars and further engage audiences.

Twenty-one years ago, almost to the day, the New York Times embraced the “World Wide Web” and launched an online version of its daily newspaper, part of its “strategy to extend the readership of The Times and to create opportunities for the company in the electronic media industry.”

Rupert Murdoch is calling on Facebook to pay “trusted” publishers if it wants to carry their news stories and videos, much like a cable company pays networks for their channels.

Tom Freston, television executive and philanthropist, once said “Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way.” Pop-Up Magazine is a living expression of that idea.

Facebook’s news-feed change is likely to cut into the money publishers can make from producing and distributing custom branded and sponsored editorial videos on the platform, their top source of revenue on Facebook.

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The Media Minute 01.23.2018

ESW Capital, LLC, today announced that it has acquired privately-held Knowledge Marketing. Based in Plymouth, Minnesota, Knowledge Marketing provides media and publishing companies with an integrated data management platform (DMP).

In an ever-competitive landscape, user IDs and cross-platform tracking are the true measures of your brand’s worth.

Retargeting companies were in the industry trade headlines last week, as a couple of the leading retargeters had made efforts to allow users to opt into having their data collected.

With monetization pressures mounting, publishers find themselves at an industry-wide crossroads, and the endless predictions about what next year holds reflect as much.

Regional pubs need to be visible in the marketplace, but declining margins make it difficult to justify retailers’ fees.

The Digiday AI Marketing Summit is coming up in April and will cover how brands can understand and use AI and machine learning in their marketing.

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The Media Minute 01.17.2018

We asked 10 experts in media metrics to tell us what they expected to see in 2018 (including several of our MetricShift20 honorees).

We all know that getting work done requires many different web tools. In fact, the average business uses anywhere from 10 to 16 applications.

News publishers will need to reduce their reliance on Facebook to survive, experts have warned, as figures show a dramatic drop in interactions with their content on the platform during the course of last year.

Carey says advertising-dependent web publishers remind him of Buzz Lightyear in “Toy Story” — and that’s not a compliment.

Condé Nast is pushing to identify marketing opportunities across its publications, with the help of research initiatives designed to better understand consumer behavior.

We are just about a month away from the 2018 American Magazine Media Conference. In this evolving era of magazine media what’s top of mind as you prepare?

 

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The Media Minute 01.09.2018

A.H. Belo Corp., owner of the Dallas Morning News, has created a pair of marketing services divisions in an effort to better serve its clients.

As an outspoken advocate of newsstand sales and someone with experience in circulation marketing, I find there is a correlation between the loss of newsstand sales and the reduction in creative direct response subscription marketing.

We’ve seen some serious disruption in the marketing world throughout 2017. As new technology emerges and people start to interact differently with their favorite brands, companies are being forced to reconsider how they connect with the marketplace.

What would be late December without our annual What’s IN and What’s OUT List? As always, we’ll leave (most of) the politics, celebrities and sports stuff to others and stick to our own topics.

It’s been an eventful year for magazine media around the world. There was company consolidation and mergers.

Elizabeth Green, CEO and Founder, Brief Media
Folio: Where will you be primarily focused in 2018, based on your sense of the market?

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The Media Minute 01.02.2018

I came to America in 1978 as a student of magazines and 40 years later I continue to be a student of magazines.

An interview with Allison Adams, the B2B media company’s newly hired chief subscription officer.

2017 was the year Facebook emerged as the media gatekeeper.

Vivek Shah, CEO of J2’s Ziff Davis, knows a thing or two about surviving digital transitions.

Despite a torrid year, leading media agency says UK consumer magazine market has been ‘seriously undervalued’ by marketers

Publishers of a weekly newspaper in Alabama are buying three weekly newspapers on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Data-driven teams focused on publishing great content and growing their business always need to be asking how they can maximize their potential.

Editors select their most significant covers from the past 12 months.

Gannett CMO Andy Yost says 2018 is “the year of brand appraisal,” and the time to focus on growing memberships.

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The Media Minute 12.19.2017

Metrics is one of those words… one of those soulless new media words… Modern.

As the year comes to a close, top editors weigh in on the magazine articles that moved them the most.

With ad fraud scandals and brand safety mishaps hitting the headlines in 2017, the past year has proved turbulent for advertisers, media agencies, and publishers.

Multiple publisher sources said Facebook no longer plans to pay publishers and other video makers to produce videos for the news feed.

The magazine industry collectives may not want us to count ad pages anymore (or even ask about them), but surely they’re still here.

Wouldn’t a luminous crystal ball be great? At least some cool super-powers would be nice.

Ho, ho, ho! If you are a publisher, you are probably due for a very happy New Year. For many of us, 2017 was the year we mastered the art of banging our heads against the wall. After all, any organization that merely touched publishing probably felt a pinch.

Readers have never enjoyed greater access to content and the media industry has never been more competitive.

Marshall R. Loeb, a business journalist who turned a floundering Money magazine into one of the nation’s most successful publications in the 1980s and then led a similar revival at Fortune, died on Saturday in Manhattan.

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