Publisher Monetization Briefing: April 1
Welcome back to your weekly briefing on what’s happening in the world of publisher monetization and why it matters.
Here’s what you need to know this week:
Deal or no deal: Tracking publishers’ relationships with generative AI companies
Toolkits is tracking the relationships between publishers and large generative artificial intelligence platforms including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft.
Our new database details which publishers are licensing their content to generative AI companies, which are currently in discussions to license their content, and which are suing or taking other legal action against them. The tracker is populated with information shared directly with Toolkits and gathered from lawsuits, filings, earnings reports, audits, and public statements by company representatives.
Avoiding the news isn't the same as not consuming it
People who avoid the news actually consume a lot of it, and most people who consume very little news aren’t actively avoiding it. Those were the key findings of a study conducted by a team of Austria-based researchers.
The research surveyed over 1,000 Austrian adults and grouped them into four categories based on their level of news consumption (high or average/low) and their level of intentionality (high/average avoidance or low avoidance). Over 70% of intentional news avoiders reported average or high news consumption and over 70% of people with low news consumption reported low or average intentional news avoidance.
That finding will be welcomed by publishers with news avoidance on the rise. The research suggests that even people who attempt to avoid news content still engage with it and may even be open to supporting news organizations with subscriptions or other direct payments and contributions. It may also signal demand for features and products that help them stay connected with the news in more efficient ways – an idea that some publishers say comes up frequently in their audience and market research.
The acknowledgment that not all audiences necessarily want to engage with their content but are anyway could help publishers develop products that are more palatable (and perhaps even enjoyable) for portions of their audiences. Some publishers are experimenting with quizzes and games designed to make news consumption more appealing, for example.
Do programmatic ads hurt subscription revenue?
Publishers that are serious about their subscription businesses are thinking more carefully about the ways they’re integrating advertising into their products and properties. Bloomberg Media’s chief revenue officer Christine Cook appeared on the AdExchanger podcast last week and spoke about the relationship between programmatic advertising and Bloomberg’s subscription goals.
A year ago, Bloomberg said it would stop selling its digital ad inventory through third-party middlemen and would only sell it directly to advertisers. Part of the reason for that was the negative impact that programmatically sold advertising could have on its subscription business, Cook said.
Programmatic ads often don’t look great, publishers have little control over ad creative, and third-party tags can significantly slow down pages – none of which aligns particularly well with a premium editorial experience for paying subscribers. The company also removed content recommendations from its site, such as those operated by Taboola and Outbrain, to focus instead on recirculating traffic internally.
People “aren’t paying us to come to our site and get bounced out to some other content… For any loss in revenue that we have from that, we have more than enough opportunities in a tighter, clean experience for our consumers that’s way better for our advertisers” Cook said.
The Toolkits Show: Episode 2
We’re back with another episode of the Toolkits Show, our new podcast making sense of the major themes, trends, and developments shaping the business of content.?
In each episode we explore how publishers are monetizing digital content, how content is transforming modern brands and companies, and hear from the people and personalities at the industry’s cutting edge. ?
LISTEN NOW ? Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Web
领英推荐
How Le Monde cracked down on password sharing
Some publishers still say password sharing is not a pressing concern , but others are following the lead of major streaming platforms such as Netflix and tightening up their content security to help grow subscription revenue.
French publisher Le Monde created an in-house tool called “Capping” which is designed to minimize revenue loss by detecting and/or blocking fraud risk activities such as account sharing and copying of content.?
“We were quite surprised because we thought it was a minor phenomenon, but actually, a quarter of all accounts were sharing massively their accounts,” Le Monde’s chief data officer, Charles Duenas, told INMA .
Capping works by limiting simultaneous logins and asking logged-in users if they want to switch their sessions between devices, and was first introduced in 2019. The company saw a steep increase in subscriptions following its rollout, it said, particularly among business users.
The Atlantic tops 1 million subscriptions
The Atlantic now has more than 1 million subscriptions and is profitable, the company announced last week. Its number of subscriptions has increased by double-digit percentages in each of the past four years and has doubled since it launched a digital subscription offering four years ago. ?
Media buyers don’t want to pay premiums for publishers’ first-party data
With third-party cookies going away, publishers are attempting to charge advertisers premiums to access their first-party data to help target ads. Some media buyers are balking at the prices, Digiday reports , perhaps suggesting cookie deprecation may not help publishers’ ad sales efforts to the degree some had hoped. Then again, media buyers are incentivized to try to drive down publishers’ prices. ?
The Financial Times tests AI chatbot
The FT has launched a new generative AI chatbot called Ask FT that can answer questions its subscribers ask. Users can expect natural language answers to their questions derived from the FT’s decades of published information. Other publishers have launched similar features and products designed to help easily surface information from their archives. ?
Diversifying revenue for podcasts
In an effort to monetize their audio output more effectively, more publishers are looking beyond advertising revenue and exploring subscriptions, one-off payments, and even merchandise. ?
BDG publishes fewer stories amid referral traffic declines
Bustle Digital Group’s flagship title Bustle published about 150 articles a day in 2022, but the company has drastically scaled back the volume of content it publishes and is focusing instead on “bigger reported pieces, celebrity features, photo shoots, video shoots… that really take off and create viral moments.”
Related reading
What consumers think of publishers’ subscription products: Consumer attitudes to publishers’ subscription products are evolving as media companies place greater emphasis on generating revenue directly from their audiences.
‘Lifting all boats’: Publishers explore total revenue optimization: Publishers are thinking carefully about how monetization opportunities should be prioritized to extract as much revenue as possible from their audiences.
Publishers are rethinking their definitions of “audience”: Some publishers are accepting that their actual “audiences” may be much smaller than they’ve previously chosen to believe.
News publishers broaden target markets in search of subscriber growth: Publishers including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are broadening their target audiences in an effort to grow their subscriber bases.
Thanks for reading. Please get in touch with thoughts, comments, questions, or suggestions.