The Media Minute 12.08.2020

Media Minute

Google Analytics is a free platform for analyzing traffic on your website. This go-to digital marketing tool features a wealth of useful reports and the ability to segment data to extract valuable insights about your website’s performance.

In order to prepare for the elimination of third-party cookies, first-party data is a prerequisite in publishers’ programmatic ad sales. “First-party data has been a way to get in the door, but more and more with advertisers, it is table stakes.”

Social distancing in the battle against COVID-19 proves effective. However, it made 2020 a disastrous year for hosting live events. In March, organizers were forced to create online experiences that satisfied event-goers and conference holders.

It’s no secret that generational differences affect the way audiences interpret and absorb information. Learn about the shift to video content in publishing and explore examples of publications.

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The Media Minute 12.01.2020

Media Minute

Content marketers are always looking to make a statement and get the best of the best, no matter what industry they’re a part of. This blog explores different types of content marketing upgrades and why you should consider implementing these strategies into your marketing plan.

According to data from 2019, at least 900 communities across the US have faced profound loss of access to local news and information since 2004. Writing about the data in Poynter recently, Tom Stites argued, “News deserts are ominous to democracy.” That warning rings true, and is often repeated by others, but what does that mean in practice and how do we know?

Prior to the coronavirus, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 50% of digital leaders identified reader revenue as their major income focus for 2020. Advertising spend has been decimated, making subscriptions and reader revenue more important than ever.

Media consumers rely heavily on phones, tablets, and laptops to access content. While we’re all adapting to a life dominated by bright screens during a crisis like no other, the truth is that this way of living was inevitable. COVID-19 simply sped up the process a bit.

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The Media Minute 11.25.2020

Media Minute

Content marketing continues to dominate digital marketing, and measuring its effectiveness is vital for informing future strategies. Today, the number of clicks and views aren’t the only definition of success. Building brand awareness, engaging audiences, generating leads, selling products are all ultimate goals of content marketing.

Publishers have deployed various strategies to generate loyalty during the pandemic. By harnessing new products and services (and pivoting old ones to meet COVID realities), content creators are using different techniques to pique the interest and deepen the experience of users.

The word “publisher” conjures up different things to different people. Old-schoolers picture The New York Times or Condé Nast, while younger generations may think of digital-first publishers like Refinery29 or consumer-generated outlets like Reddit. Yet, anyone working in media and advertising knows that two largest “publishers” are actually Google and Facebook.

When it comes to magazine media and digital publications, reliable software is a necessity. From publishing CRM and magazine design, to circulation and subscription management, this ultimate guide to magazine software is an overview of the most popular tools in the publishing industry.

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The Media Minute 11.17.2020

Media Minute

Content marketing in particular is responsible for a big chunk of the marketing efforts we see on a daily basis. In fact, “88 percent of business-to-business companies incorporate content marketing into their overall marketing strategy.”

Digital publishing revenues in the UK fell to £96.6 million in Q2 2020, down by 14.3% in comparison to Q2 2019, according to the latest quarterly Digital Publishers Revenue Index (DPRI) from the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and Deloitte. This drop was less steep than anticipated, given the UK was in lockdown for much of the period.

Even prior to Covid-19, premium publishers were turning to audience revenue, mainly in the form of subscriptions, to grow profits. In an uncertain ad market, consumer offerings are critical for publishers. In fact, Reuters Institute confirmed this strategy in early 2020 reporting that 50% of digital leaders identify reader revenue as their income focus for the year.

Who wants to exist in a world without cookies? Apple, apparently. With its recent release of iOS 14 for iPhone and impending release of macOS Big Sur for desktop devices, Apple continues to move full steam ahead with its anti-tracking measures, giving pause to cookie-using publishers everywhere.

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The Media Minute 11.11.2020

Media Minute

We are still in the middle of the pandemic, and while that makes it difficult to predict the future, some media trends seen in the past 6-9 months look set to continue. Elsewhere, the consequences of the coronavirus crisis will continue to reverberate and impact the sector.

As publishers begin making plans for 2021 and looking for ways to slim down their sales organizations, many are looking to give more responsibility to their sales teams’ account managers, partly to cut costs but also to nurture the kind of always-on relationship that many publishers are trying to forge with their clients, particularly in an era of compressed planning cycles, fewer RFPs and more pressure on buyers to prove that their spending is driving results.

The subscription model is not new, but it has taken on a new significance. Over the past seven years, revenue for all subscription companies – from software to healthcare – grew by 321% on average. In the case of apps, this positive trend was bolstered by a 32% year-over-year increase in the number of users who sign up for a subscription after installing an app.

The “retail apocalypse” of the past few years grew much worse in 2020. The pandemic led many people to avoid stores and shop from the safety of their homes. The upheaval in the retail industry will continue to shape the role of publishers next year as content and commerce become even more seamless.

Creating the perfect content marketing strategy for your brand is no small feat. No matter how well you know your audience or how long you’ve spent optimizing your content, every content marketer has faced the challenge of gaining readership and brand awareness.

A new browser war is here, thanks to how Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and a slew of startups have positioned themselves in the data privacy debate. While the third-party cookie is the obvious casualty, we can’t overlook the Balkanization of the internet and the hard choices small and medium-sized publishers will have to make to compete.

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The Media Minute 11.03.2020

Media Minute

In response to an initial coronavirus news bump, a number of outlets witnessed record traffic to their sites, as well as a growth in subscribers. At the same time, however, they also had to contend with a major slump in advertising revenues as marketers shut their checkbooks.

As the war between the largest online media owners and the governments of the world heats up, marketers are notably sat on the sidelines. They learned a long time ago they can’t have their cake and eat it too when it comes to openly fighting these platforms while directly funding them.

For quality publishers with strong consumer relationships, a content-to-commerce strategy offers a valuable revenue diversification approach. The International News Media Association’s (INMA) new report, Content-to-Commerce Brings Revenue in Post-Advertising World, outlines key considerations, strategies and their implementations to help publishers build this line of revenue.

Newspaper publishers have seen a drastic drop in advertising sales this year, underscoring the need to diversify their revenue as much as possible during the recovery from the pandemic recession. They have suffered disproportionately, compared with other media outlets, according a Pew Research Center study.

As the ways we consume content, media, and technology continue to evolve, so too do the ways companies market themselves and showcase their brands. Similarly, consumers are starting to look beyond simple advertising tactics and now crave more unique and engaging online content.

User privacy is the largest trend shaping the direction of digital advertising. Governments are creating and enforcing new regulations that impact how advertising works, browsers and app stores are limiting how data can be shared and users are demanding more control over their data.

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The Media Minute 10.14.2020

Media Minute

“In the US, one quarter of adults, or 60M people, listen to a podcast a few times a week, and 91M listen to one at least once a week,” according to journalists Piet van Niekerk and Pierre de Villiers. “And, as new podcasts are being aired every three minutes somewhere in the world, publishers have been handed the ideal revenue subscription tool.”

Pauley, Vox Media’s chief revenue officer, has been on the hunt for more upfront deals with brands and holding companies ever since Vox Media’s acquisition of New York Media gave the digital native publisher more scale — 125 million monthly unique visitors, it said at the time — and more titles to offer advertisers last fall.

With the introduction of each new set of regulations, it’s clear that we’re shifting towards a new era of consent. As third-party cookies disappear, consent will be required to counterbalance the loss of user ID to continue to target effectively.

The percentage of U.S. adults who said they “very closely” followed news about the pandemic fell from a high of 57% in late March to 35% by early September, Pew found. That decline is understandable as the pandemic becomes part of the everyday routine, and reader attention shifts elsewhere.

The last couple of months have seen media consumers rely even more heavily than usual on phones, tablets, and practically any screen they can get their hands on to access content. While we’re all adapting to a life dominated by bright screens during a crisis like no other, the truth is that this way of living was inevitable. COVID-19 simply sped up the process a bit.

Some businesses have reached the oversimplified conclusion that designating their ad-tech partners as service providers is a silver bullet that can solve their toughest CCPA compliance burdens without sacrificing business results. The theory underlying this approach is that using a service provider contract for transfers of personal information to an ad tech vendor will prevent those transfers from being classified as sales of personal information.

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The Media Minute 10.06.2020

Media Minute

The first lockdown to ‘flatten the curve’ of the Covid-19 pandemic happened swiftly and took the publishing industry by surprise earlier this year. Global in scope, publishers had virtually no time to implement any contingency plans as the industry became a virtual mix of Zoom calls, work from home protocols, and hastily digitized events.

Reddit has steadily accelerated its shift away from being thought of as “anti-publisher” over the years, since launching partnerships with publishers like Time magazine in 2017. While referral traffic from the platform is steady for publishers who put in the time and consistent effort to build a Reddit strategy, the primary goal is talking with Reddit members and using the platform as a resource to mine for story ideas.

With the imminent demise of third-party cookies in Chrome, and other browsers blocking them already, everyone is talking about “cookie-less” solutions. But what exactly are “cookie-less” solutions? And how will they help – or hurt – publishers?

It’s a heartwarming account of an inter-generational bonding ritual that formed a reverence for journalism and its vital role in a democracy. Sadly, many newspapers have died out amid declining readership and advertising revenue in the past 20 years, a period that coincides with Google’s growing dominance over the global digital ad market.

Who wants to exist in a world without cookies? Apple, apparently. With its recent release of iOS 14 for iPhone and impending release of macOS Big Sur for desktop devices, Apple continues to move full steam ahead with its anti-tracking measures, giving pause to cookie-using publishers everywhere.

“Publishers should be very choosy and take a hard look at what we decide to take on,” Beizer said. “There are some more niche solutions out there that might be right for a single use case, but not worth the time and attention a publisher would need to spend building for it.”

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The Media Minute 09.30.2020

Media Minute

Substack has been in the news lately as many journalists have left full-time positions to start their own newsletter on the platform. The most recent high profile transition being that of The Verge’s longtime Silicon Valley editor and creator of The Interface newsletter, Casey Newton.

Many publishers are struggling to keep their business models afloat with cookies dying and brands tightening their ad spend in an age of pandemic and recession. To contend with unprecedented challenges, publishers have taken to implementing a wide variety of new tactics.

Change is the “new normal” in 2020. Everything comfortable in our personal and professional lives has been upended. But in the face of massive amounts of discomfort, the digital advertising industry is beginning to collaborate like never before on the many challenges in front of us.

Penske Media’s merger with MRC brings together the publishers of competing entertainment industry magazines Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, leaving The Wrap as the only independent trade publication left in Hollywood.

COVID-19 World Content Publishing Market Research Report (by Product Type, End-User / Application and Regions / Countries) is the latest research study released by HTF MI evaluating the market, highlighting opportunities, risk side analysis, and leveraged with strategic and tactical decision-making support.

You would be hard pressed to find someone in this industry who doesn’t think marketing has a jargon problem. Our industry has the tendency to describe things – whether that’s processes, platforms or assets – with labels that are neither descriptive nor useful when put into real-world business application and strategy.

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The Media Minute 09.15.2020

Media Minute

Instagram is opened a “staggering 35 times per day” by The Economist’s followers, according to Kevin Young, the publisher’s Head of Audience. The photo and video sharing platform “has become a key platform for The Economist’s digital growth” and is enabling them to “reach and retain new audiences.”

The presidential election is still more than a month-and-a-half away, but publishers are building their own voter registration hubs and launching informative campaigns around issues. In past, these editorial pushes have made a real impact in not only driving people to the polls — but also in driving engagement with the brand.

We’re living in a world where people are limited in cash, limited on funds and certainly limited on patience. For the most part, I think everybody right now is actually limited to some degree in their cognitive abilities. So how do we expect someone we’re selling to to actually understand what they need vs. what they want?

The contentious issue of whether or how much digital media companies like Facebook and Google should pay news publishers for content this week was tucked into in a report on possible changes to America’s internet decency law. It’s a novel argument, but doesn’t get to heart of the issue of what value is being exchanged between publishers and digital platforms.

If you’ve published your branded content through a local business journal, we take care of promoting it to our audience through headline promotions, social media posts, adding the headline to our daily email newsletters and all the other ways we bring your content to our reader’s attention.

Scale is an issue, of course, but putting that aside, the benefits of email are clear. For years already, email has enabled advertisers to market directly to customers and to create Custom Audience on Facebook and Instagram. Publishers big and small, from The New York Times to local newspapers, can reengage site visitors and woo them into subscriptions.

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