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The creator economy is estimated to be a $104.2B market with “a substantial growth trajectory similar to the gig economy.” And, just as the gig economy has transformed the shape of work, the creator economy is impacting the media landscape.

*Image* *via* *Influencer Marketing* Hub

Industry-watcher Simon Owens notes how bootstrapped content entrepreneurs are harnessing platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Substack to engage new audiences, often through verticals overlooked by mainstream outlets. Some are also very successfully monetizing these efforts. Globally, more than two million creators have six-figure incomes, as they tap into opportunities for sponsorship, subscriptions, and other revenue.

Excitement about this potential has unlocked more than $800 million from venture capitalists in recent years. This is “sending strong signals confirming the creator economy is not only legit, but a force to be reckoned with,” Influencer Marketing Hub suggests.

“This is really a new form of work and a new form of entrepreneurship,” according to Kaya Yurieff, a former CNN journalist who covers the creator economy for The Information.

The rapid rise of this sector is evident in the flurry of deals, creative campaigns, and platform developments featured in a four-times-a-week newsletter Yurieff and her colleagues have produced since April 2021.

Five actionable lessons for publishers

Collectively, the size of this market, its characteristics, and projected growth makes this a sector that media companies should not just report on. They should be learning from it too.

Below are five ways that publishers can learn from the creator economy.

1. Harness the value of niche

“As solo operators, creators handle everything from content creation to marketing to monetization,” Owens explains. “This forces them to be incredibly innovative if they want to compete with much larger media organizations for subscription and advertising dollars,” he adds.

One of the ways that they have addressed this is through niche content verticals. Yurieff points to Substack newsletters focused on indigenous news as an example of one “area that traditional publishers historically haven’t dedicated a ton of resources to.”

“Creators have proved that there are audiences for maybe more varied topics than we’ve seen traditionally in the media,” she says.

For publishers, this demonstrates the potential to superserve smaller, targetted, audiences. It isn’t always about scale. Rather, the focus should be on tapping into passions and subjects that audiences will engage with – and potentially pay for.

2. Learn how creators are growing their businesses

Niche verticals don’t necessarily have to remain small. “The most successful of these solo operators eventually end up hiring staff and acting more like traditional media companies,” Owens points out.

He highlights how a former Cosmopolitan editor, Mia Freedman grew Mamamia from a one-person blog to Australia’s largest women-focused media company (with c.100 staff, 99% women). Owens also cites Adam White’s Front Office Sports, which began as a college project and now reaches over 20M people per month, as “examples of creators who leveraged their initial success to grow into more traditional media companies.”

The transferable lessons from these types of success stories are highly relevant to the digital strategies being developed and deployed by publishers. As such, they should be required reading in the C-Suite.

3. Understand it isn’t just about flashy new social networks

Many of the methods used by independent creators to share content and generate engagement – such as newsletters, podcasts, groups and messaging apps, paid memberships, subscriptions and other tactics – will be very familiar to traditional publishers.

That said, in doing this, they are more likely to use newer platforms like Patreon, Discord and Geneva, than traditional publishers. But in terms of their approach, it shows you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel. However, you do need to offer something valuable and distinctive. Content is King. Yet, in many cases, community is nearly as powerful. Distinctiveness can arguably be rooted in content, tone of voice, distribution channels and/or a combination of all three.

The Mamamia podcast network features around 50 different shows and 90 female hosts. According to their website, “it’s the largest women’s podcast network in the world.” Their podcast journey will be of interest to traditional publishers with similar audio ambitions.

By the same token, alongside a daily newsletter and podcast, Front Office Sports has created a paid Pro product. This includes research reports, access to events and market data, as well interactive courses sponsored by the likes of Meta and Ticketmaster.

Areas such as events, courses and research are among the tactics a number of publishers are also exploring as part of their efforts to diversify their revenues. The lessons Front Office Sports learned from these efforts is therefore relevant beyond the creator economy.

*Image: Screenshot highlighting a selection of* *Mamamia’s podcasts*

4. Reach new audiences where they are

Publishers are increasingly moving into spaces like TikTok and Twitch in an effort to engage new (often younger) audiences. To make these efforts more successful, it can pay to hire staffers conversant with the style and tone of the creator economy.

NPR’s Planet Money might seem like a venerable show, but its TikTok account counters that perception. Run by 25-year-old Jack Corbett, it has nearly 750,000 followers. Teen Vogue describes Corbett as “a wacky-professor figure, a talented TikTok comedian, and most importantly, a guide through the largely inaccessible world of economics.”

For NPR, Corbett’s skills potentially brings audiences to Planet Money’s content who would otherwise find it inaccessible, or assume it wasn’t for them. It’s a tactic others should study, if not try to duplicate.

5. Unlock the potential for partnerships

Publishers might, rightly, see the creator economy as a source for talent. But, those hires don’t necessarily need to be full time. Partnerships offer another approach that can potentially work for both parties.

Launched last month, as part of a suite of new advice columns, The Washington Post added TikTok content creator Jules Terpak to its cadre. The weekly column, Ask Jules, explores how technology intersects with digital culture and the lives of her readers.

Moves such as this enable publishers to benefit from a creator’s established audience and recognized expertise. (And in turn, creators may also benefit from an association with, and the resources of, a trusted mainstream media brand.)

Creators have a built-in following and have demonstrated that audiences value their voice and viewpoint. Partnering with them can help publishers diversify their own voice and content offering. This provides a gateway to new audiences for other content and products.

What’s next? Two trends to follow.

The creator economy is home to valuable case studies, talent and skills that the wider media industry can benefit from.

This may become especially acute given the latest set of changes to Facebook’s mobile product. The move is part of what New York Magazine’s John Herrman refers to as social media’s “race to see who can copy TikTok the fastest and with the least dignity.” As a result, It may put a premium on the style and types of content that are the bread and butter of what many top creators produce.

Short-form video

“The algorithm changes will probably push publishers to create more short-form video content,” predicts Owens. “I wouldn’t be surprised if publishers start looking more and more for prior TikTok/Instagram Reels experience when hiring out their social media teams.”

Private communities

For Yurieff, one potential trend to note is the migration of online conversations into “more private spaces… I think that’s something really to watch,” she says.

She cites Discord as an example of a platform which now has “lots of different niches and groups and audiences using it.” It’s part of a wider move among online users to connect in smaller groups, communicating privately and potentially going deeper on certain topics, Yurieff says. These are principles more publishers might want to get on board with.

In that vein, The Information’s move to create opportunities for its subscribers to network directly with each other demonstrates how some of the community principles evident in the creator economy can be applied by media outlets.

“These new features are meant to add more value to the news site’s subscriber base, as opposed to driving meaningful revenue themselves,” Axios reports. Nevertheless, in the future, The Information may look to monetize them.

Like and subscribe

The growth of the industry, and the success of some of its proponents, means that if the creator economy is not on your radar yet, then it should be.

For publishers, the maturing of the creator economy, and the growing numbers engaged in (and with) it, present a number of learning opportunities. We need to be looking at the creator economy, as well as the more traditional media industry, for case studies, talent and insights into how to respond to the next wave of digital disruption.

Yet, despite its growth, “this new breed of creators may be looked upon as charlatans and opportunists by some purists in traditional publishing,” suggests Josep Nolla, VP, Business Development & Partnerships at the e-commerce provider Bolt. “But the reality is there are more similarities than differences between this exciting new economy and traditional publishing,” Nolla advises.

Creators, like traditional publishers, are looking to drive subscriptions, diversify their revenues, and generate engagement and loyalty. They may use different platforms, content styles, or verticals to do this. But arguably, a lot of their core business goals are the same. And there’s a lot to be learned in these similarities – and maybe even more from the differences.

Care to disagree? Then let’s debate it on Discord!

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion | Featured Post

The gender gap in media is still wider than you think

September 27, 2022 Charlotte Ricca – Independent Media Reporter

When it comes to the representation and visibility of women across all media platforms, the industry still comes up short. That’s what The Status of Women In the US Media 2021, a report by Women’s Media Center (WMC), — an organization founded by Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Robin Morgan — found. Among the U.S.’s top five Sunday news shows more than two-thirds of the guests were men, and most of those guests were white men. While research into gender representation in prime-time broadcast and cable news, print, digital, and wires found that women told only 41% of stories, and just 15% of sports stories.

“This report will help to hold news media accountable for the persistent inequalities in media,” said Steinem in the report .“ Women must be visible and powerful in all aspects of media if American society is ever to be a real democracy.” While the struggle continues, strides are being made — thanks, in part, to top down initiatives.

The gender gap is closing — slowly

According to the Global Media Monitoring Project, things are slowly improving globally. However, the numbers make the U.S. media look like a beacon of hope in terms of inclusion and equality. Between 1995 to 2020, across 120 nations, the number of female news sources and subjects increased from 16% to 24% in newspapers, 15% to 24% in radio news, 21% to 26% in TV news, and 25% to 27% online.

Coverage during Covid-19 was particularly startling, with WMC reporting women comprised just 5% of experts in science, technology, engineering and math, and a third of people quoted in 146,867 articles about the pandemic, in the likes of The New York Times and USA Today.

“One productive step forward would be for media companies to release employment numbers by gender, race, and position,” said Julie Burton, President and CEO, in WMC’s report. “This transparency would allow comprehensive tracking of progress or regress for diverse women in the workplace. We recommend that managers and editors establish standards that require producers, bookers, and journalists to make sure the experts interpreting news stories include representative numbers of women and people of color to ensure that stories are told with authenticity and accuracy.”

Driving diversity with data

The WMC has a database for this exact purpose. SheSource connects journalists, bookers and producers with more than 1,000 female, media-friendly experts in a number of fields, ranging from politics to technology. It is these experts that a growing number of media organizations are seeking out and putting center stage. The BBC launched its 50:50 Project in 2016 to push for gender parity in its content using a data-driven methodology to monitor its content. What started in one newsroom has become a global initiative, used by 150 external partners, spanning 30 countries. These include the Financial Times, Australia’s ABC News and Times Radio, as well as partners in academia, conference businesses, law, public relations and the corporate world.

“It is well established in the BBC and we have got 750 teams filling in spreadsheets every day of every month,” says Miranda Holt, 50:50 External Partners Lead. “It’s very empowering to content makers, because it’s about what you can control. For example, we don’t count politicians or people in the news, but we do count the number of women we interview about that news. It’s about collecting data to effect change.”

In the most recent Impact Report report in March 2022, 61% of all BBC teams reached 50% representation of women in their content. While external partners (of whom 70 out of 145 shared their data) showed a 73% improvement in female representation, after one year of sharing data.

Bloomberg’s New Voices is another successful initiative, which has already made significant strides in amplifying the voices of women. Since launching in early 2018, outside guest appearances of women on Bloomberg Television have increased from 10% to 26%. The program has also provided media training to over 180 women all around the globe, who have gone on to appear more than 530 times on Bloomberg Television, as well as other media outlets.

Equity at every level

Another way to ensure gender equity in content, is to ensure equity in content creators. If the newsroom doesn’t reflect society, the content it produces isn’t likely to either. Even though women outnumber men in journalism programs and colleges, they become the minority voice soon after entering the workforce. On average, women represent 41.7% of newsroom employees and produce 37% of reports. Furthermore, men account for 69% of all newswire bylines published by the Associated Press and Reuters, 63% of prime-time news anchors or correspondents, and write 60% of all online news.

Emma Tucker is the first female editor of the Sunday Times in 100 years and says she is all too aware of the impact her newsroom has on its readership. “We are very conscious of the need to diversify our newsrooms,” Tucker says. “It’s a work in progress, but we are aware of it. For example, we encourage applications from as broad a pool as possible to our graduate and apprenticeship schemes and we are making strides there. We know that if we want to grow our audience and build new cohorts of Sunday Times subscribers, we need to produce content that matters to a more diverse audience.”

Holt agrees it makes good commercial and economic sense to increase female representation in the newsroom and beyond. While 50:50 is about content and not about content creators, it naturally has a knock-on effect.

“The BBC has set new targets for the end of 2023 for our workforce to aim for 50% women representation, 20% Black, Asian and minority ethnic, 12% disabled and 25% from lower socio-economic backgrounds,” explains Holt. “These figures are based on the demographics of the UK, and as the national broadcaster it’s the people of the UK who pay for BBC content, so we have to represent them. And senior leaders are being held to this.”

Leadership is at the heart of a recent report by Reuters Institute, which analyzed the gender breakdown of top editors in 240 major online and offline news outlets in 12 different markets, across five continents. The results are shocking with women representing just 21% of the 179 top editors, despite the fact that, on average, 40% of journalists are women. The good news is that the U.S. and U.K. appear to be flying the flag for female leaders in the media, as half or more of new top editors appointed there in the last year were women.

Closing the pay gap

Not only are there fewer female reporters, they also earn less than their male colleagues, according to the WMC report. At the Associated Press there is a pay gap of $15,000 between white, male journalists and black, female reporters, while female reporters on the LA Times take home $14,334 less than their male counterparts. Similarly, at the New York Times, for reporters with annual salaries of $150k or more, only 36% are women. Working at the Washington Post? Women can expect to be paid 86 cents for every dollar white men are paid.

However, there are exceptions. Walt Disney Co. has just released data on employee earning by race and gender for the first time, revealing that women earn 99.4% of men. However, as Natasha Lamb, a managing partner at Arjuna Capita who put forward the proposal for the report, points out: “Disney is stepping into an elite group that are showing leadership on pay equity.” Transparency, it seems, is still a rarity rather than the norm.

While we should applaud these organizations working toward gender equity there is still much work to do. One reason could be that leaders in news media across the world believe their organizations already do a good job in terms of gender diversity, and therefore do not collect or make available data about their diversity. Or they don’t even have anyone formally in charge of this vital process.

But this has to change. Greater transparency is key, with media companies releasing employment numbers by gender and position. While creating new talent strategies to support and promote women in media, will ensure the “pipeline” excuse is buried deep underground, once and for all. According to Katica Roy, the founder and CEO of Pipeline Equity, these strategies should include hiring, pay, promotion, performance, and potential.

Representation leads to engagement

The word “engagement” is constantly used in media circles, but you can’t engage with your audience without representing the diversity of their communities. “Ultimately, any company that creates content should be thinking about how they appear to the external world, and how they represent society fairly,” says Holt. “This leads to diversity in the workforce at every level in a dynamic way, by identifying people, progressing people, and retaining those people. Only then can the media and its content truly reflect and represent women. Only then we will truly have gender equity.”

The cracks in Google’s adtech façade are starting to show

September 22, 2022 Jason Kint, CEO – DCN

Behind the scenes, Google is flailing – despite its predictably tight control over industry narratives.

The underlying shockwaves stem from an increasingly widespread understanding of Google’s dominant role over the entire adtech supply chain. Those who have sought to unpack and explain the complexities of the company’s hold on the industry can thank a senior Google employee for providing this apt analogy in discovery: They described Google’s role in adtech as “if Goldman or Citibank owned the New York Stock Exchange.” Now that’s something a jurist can understand.

The escalation of enforcement

In the last sixty days, Google has floated three different test balloons in an attempt to head off the intensifying scrutiny:

The Wall Street Journal reported Google has offered to split off part of its adtech business in an effort to head off the Department of Justice’s filing of a landmark lawsuit – expected this month according to a Bloomberg report. The only problem: Google’s offer was to split the adtech business and put it under a different part of parent Alphabet. To extend the previous analogy, placing the NYSE in a different division of Goldman Sachs would not solve the inherent issue. Hard pass.
Google announced a new feature with the innocuous title of “Confirming Gross Revenue.” They’ve pitched it to advertisers and publishers – and little doubt to enforcers, too – as providing transparency in a “privacy-safe way” as to the money flow in the advertising supply chain. The problem with it is that Google will avoid having to provide insights into auctions, transactional flow, or any real detail as to how Google’s decisions determine revenues across the market. Google’s press announcement crows that “Display & Video 360 is onboard as an early tester.” That sort of says it all, since Google owns DV360.
Google once again delayed its deprecation of third-party cookies, something that they’ve been dragging their feet on for nearly three years. From the very beginning, Google has used misleading Google-authored research of the Google-dominated supply and data system to suggest their delays are only due to their interests in not harming publishers. What is true is that a wrong move by Google (hello Floc, hello Topics) can very well continue the ongoing harm to premium publishers by treating every website as an interchangeable commodity. If there’s any chance that a move will hurt Google’s ad business, it won’t happen.

Litigation, legislation, and learning

So why all the flailing? To illuminate what’s going on underneath the surface, let’s take a roll call. Fifteen U.S. states, the U.S. Department of Justice, the E.U. Competition Commission, the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority … Netherlands … France … well, suffice it to say that the list is long (and growing) for investigations, lawsuits, and enforcement action underway – all of which are probing Google’s advertising tech business(es).

The E.U. has been particularly active by fining Google more than $8 billion across three decisions. It also recently passed its new landmark gatekeeper law, the Digital Markets Act, and is ramping up enforcement of its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, by pressing Google-friendly Irish regulators.

Importantly, enforcers and litigators are studying and learning from each other across issues of competition and data privacy worldwide. And they’re keeping especially close eyes on the Texas-led lawsuit which now counts 15 bipartisan state attorneys general as plaintiffs along with countless private plaintiffs. They certainly won’t have overlooked Google losing much of its arguments last week in attempting to dismiss this case. This blow came at the hands of a SDNY Court which very much seems to understand Google’s business. And that’s a huge problem for Google.

Full court press

Although “Jedi Blue” received the most press attention, due to the allegations of Google colluding with Facebook, there are a range of other very serious allegations which the Court has now given the green light for further discovery and trial. And, significantly, they are readily explainable to a jury. Two foremost allegations are the tying of Google’s adtech services and the manipulation of its auctions.

What if I told you Google required the use of its ad server in order to receive the benefits of Google’s market-leading ad exchange and the fast-growing advertising demand dollars flowing through it? Some might call this “tying,” which – if proven – is illegal. Note that Google had about 50% of the ad server market when it acquired DoubleClick (DFP). It has since steadily increased that stake to claim nearly 99% of large publishers. Please allow me to quote the Court:

“The States plausibly allege that Google used its monopoly power in AdX to actually coerce publishers into licensing a separate and distinct product, Google’s DFP ad server, and that Google’s actions had anticompetitive effects in both markets, affecting a substantial amount of interstate commerce.”

Or what if I told you Google had paid its publisher clients based on the third-highest price in an auction while collecting on the second-highest price with the determination it would re-route the variance into more advertising demand for its own services? Some might call this, “market manipulation,” which – if proven – may well have been an illegal way to protect its monopoly. As the Court again summarized Google’s project “Bell”:

“In other words, Bell penalized publishers who did not grant AdX preferential access by paying them based upon the third-place bid rather than a second-place bid, while using the difference to increase the bids made to publishers who allowed preferential access.”

In fact, the only count which was dismissed in the lawsuit is the infamous “Jedi Blue” allegation. Despite Google anchoring its press spin on this win, it’s this single dismissal – one that befuddled many legal experts watching the case. I wager this one will resurface again as the E.U. and U.K. have already announced their own investigations. Also, the “Jedi Blue” allegations are included in a private lawsuit against Facebook that has already been given the green light in the northern district of California. Each of these efforts builds on the others and the subsequent learnings can only aid the U.S. Department of Justice in its work.

Antitrust is in the air

It was rightly said nearly three years ago that antitrust enforcement will take significant time. The wheels of justice do indeed turn slowly. Attempting to propose solutions before the investigations and allegations landed would be premature, but Google’s efforts to settle these cases shows they are nervous. And Google’s efforts to manipulate the outcome may be the most transparent thing about its business.

The reality is many of the charges against Google have now been found plausible and will proceed into deeper discovery just as many other regulators and legislatures attempt to curb its power. Make no mistake, Google is stumbling in a way we’ve never seen in its two decades. Of course, the company will look to proactively lay out solutions for all of us. But we all see through this. No one should settle for anything less than a return to competition and the rebalancing of bargaining power that comes with it.

Get smart, TV: Fix the usability experience

September 15, 2022 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Do you have more than one remote to operate various connected and streaming devices?

Among your family members, are there as many different streaming habits and preferences as there are people? And do these disparate behaviors lead, for instance, to heated arguments over whether captions should always be on and who’s responsible for turning them on and off?

Have you rented someone else’s home for a short stay recently? If so, could you log in and start using your streaming services on the TV? Within five minutes? After multiple emails with the host?

For all the joy that streaming “Stranger Things” and “Abbott Elementary” has brought us, the user experience of Smart TVs and connected devices has delivered far too much frustration. The mere act of turning on the TV to find something to watch is an inexcusably disastrous viewer experience—a complete fail on the part of the television industry.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of streaming services has not improved viewers’ TV usability experience. In fact, it seems exponentially worse. This is despite 81% of consumers citing “ease of use” as the second-most important attribute for video streaming, close behind “cost” at 84%, according to a 2020 Nielsen study. If streaming service providers and device manufacturers spent as much time improving the viewer usability experience as they spend building pricing models, perhaps they wouldn’t be forced to continuously raise prices.

While I think we’d all agree that there are much bigger problems in this world, viewer frustration with streaming service features and connected devices illustrates how much the TV industry takes its customers for granted. Sure, some products are arguably better than others. And right now, there’s probably someone making the argument somewhere that their supposedly excellent usability is a competitive advantage. And though there are some excellent products out there, there is considerable room for companies to improve the viewer usability experience and to gain loyalty and attention for the entire sector.

Let’s examine a few areas in need of improvement:

The multiple remote e-waste factor

First, proliferation of different and incompatible remotes is rampant. This is not a new issue with the streaming era, but it is now even more difficult to solve. Universal remotes notoriously challenge even the most tech-savvy and usually end up taking space in a drawer. In fact, many people have drawers full of extra, old and broken remotes, exemplifying the wastefulness of this sector of consumer devices.

Perhaps we need a new way of looking at this particular frustration, beyond the fact that it’s hard for consumers to navigate. So, let’s look at a similar issue in which an entity made a decision intended to minimize e-waste long-term: In June, the EU mandated the use by 2026 of a common charger for all new portable devices such as smartphones, earbuds, wireless keyboards and laptops. The argument could be made that mandating even a baseline of standardization for TV and streaming device remotes would minimize e-waste. Which government wants to take it on?

The personalized feature set

Second, personalizing one’s TV experience, within the operating system navigation, is ridiculously complex. Because this topic is vast, let’s look at just one example – turning captions on and off. Nothing exemplifies the lack of care for the TV viewer more than the inaccessibility of captions, especially given that the original purpose of the caption feature is … accessibility!

In one family I surveyed, one person likes to always have captions on. This preference is not due a hearing issue. Rather, this person believes captions or subtitles augment their understanding of a show, especially while they simultaneously are playing a video game on their laptop and scrolling TikTok on their phone.

This sort of use case is hardly uncommon. In fact, four out of five viewers ages 18-25 say they use subtitles all or part of the time according to one study. Meanwhile, within the family surveyed, other members complain that captions ruin their experience, often revealing a joke or a plot twist before it happens on screen.

The difference in preferences means that family members sharing the same TV and streaming services must frequently turn captions on and off. If you’ve tried to do this at all, you know that every service and device is different. If you haven’t tried yet, please do just to see how needlessly complex it is.

As we know, the lack of standardization for caption functions is the same lack of standardization for everything from start to fast forwarding to volume functions. It’s all unnecessarily complex and frustrating for the consumer.

The unfamiliar TV panic

Third, the issue of standardization goes beyond consumers’ own homes. Based on my recent unscientific, informal survey of a half dozen short-term rental property hosts and their guests, struggles with unfamiliar remotes and/or TV operating systems are one of the top sources of friction between hosts and guests. This applies to those young and old, tech-savvy or not.

One guest called his host frequently, complaining that the TV was broken. In fact, the TV worked just fine, but the guest was flummoxed by the Apple TV remote, despite several lessons. The guest is still complaining about the host’s Apple TV, although he has moved on to another short-term rental property (and despite the fact that this TV-challenged property was a beautifully designed home in an idyllic natural setting).

Another host described a guest who emailed a half dozen times in advance of his arrival, concerned about how he would watch TV. He asked for photos of both the front and back of the TV and a detailed assessment of whether he’d be able to plug in an antenna to watch local TV. After his arrival, this guest complained that he found the remote “awkward.” The host described losing sleep over whether this guest would write a bad Airbnb review solely based on his TV experience.

The bottom line is that both hosts and guests clearly would appreciate a TV experience that just works, easily, without instructions. And they really don’t want to have to communicate with one another about it. By setting a new baseline common standard for TVs and streaming services, the industry could perhaps improve the rental home industry’s host-guest relations – and help the rest of us at the same time.

Let’s fix the consumer experience

Forget for a moment some of the common complaints about today’s streaming industry, such as too many mediocre shows or ideas that should have been 90-minute movies but are needlessly stretched to seven-part series. Given all the investment in Smart TV technology, and all of the money to be made from distributing content via that technology, the industry would benefit from providing viewers with a much better experience. For what we are paying, we certainly deserve it.

We should have more standardized devices, accessible navigation interfaces, excellent search capabilities across devices and services, and more. Achieving this would require some cooperation among the major players. But primarily, it would require that the players start to care about their customers. It’s evident that they don’t.

Featured Post | Innovation

Forget cable 2.0. Streaming video is TV 3.0

September 1, 2022 Matthew Keys – Independent Media Reporter

A few weeks ago, analytics firm Nielsen Research earned some splashy headlines after it issued a press release reporting that television viewers streamed more content than they watched on cable TV for the first time.

To clarify, Nielsen’s own research put streaming services ahead of traditional cable products for the first time since it began collecting data on those practices. And, arguably, some of its data is debatable, since it rolled services like Hulu with Live TV and YouTube TV into both the “streaming” and “cable” categories (cable networks are core to both products).

Also, while Nielsen’s own data has streaming at a slight edge over cable, columnist David Bloom notes that the measurement firm doesn’t typically gather data from devices like computers or game consoles where streaming services are also offered. More importantly, as Bloom pointed out, the Nielsen report probably reflects a consumer trend that has been taking place for several years.

Still, the survey has fueled comparisons between streaming services and cable television — and not always for the better. Bloomberg media correspondent Lucas Shaw recently wrote that price hikes and advertising made it so that “the streaming business is starting to look like cable TV from 10 years ago.” The idea is that price hikes and advertising are turning the streaming industry into “Cable 2.0“.

It is difficult to argue with that logic from a price perspective: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus are among the streaming services that have implemented one or more price increases since their debut. (Netflix has raised subscription fees on average at least once per 1.5 years since 2014). But to focus squarely on price misses the bigger picture: Streaming has liberated good entertainment from the wall jack and the television set. And, in doing so, has made it cheaper and more-accessible than at any point in television history.

Streaming is not too far removed from cable’s history

Accessibility has spurred technological advances throughout the history of domestic television: Broadcast TV emerged about a century ago as a way to add moving pictures to radio programs. What is commonly known as cable TV started out as community antenna television. Regions in remote parts of the United States banded together to build a giant antenna capable of receiving distant broadcast signals, then ran coaxial cable from the antenna to homes. Customers paid a few dollars to maintain the system and had access to most, if not all, of the main three networks plus a handful of independent stations.

In the mid-1970s, television mogul Ted Turner figured he could make a few dollars more from the advertising he ran on his Atlanta station, WTBS (Channel 17), if he uplinked it to satellite. From there, cable systems could receive the station and distribute it to their viewers. The idea took off, and soon stations like WGN (Channel 9, Chicago) and WOR-TV (Channel 9, New York) jockeyed for satellite space so they, too, could get national distribution on cable.

Years later, another television pioneer, John Malone, saw that cable was a much-bigger business opportunity than anyone else seemed to realize. His Tele-Communications Incorporated (TCI) grew to become one of the dominant-players in the industry between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s. Malone and TCI bankrolled some of the first cable-only networks around (including Turner’s own CNN when it faced bankruptcy). And many of those cable networks are still around. (TCI is currently owned by Comcast.)

Both phases of television limited viewers to their TV sets. It wasn’t until streaming came along that video was finally liberated from the living room cable jack.

Streaming is not an extension of cable — it’s an evolution of television

Jason Cohen spends a lot of time thinking about this 30,000-foot view of the domestic television industry. In 2019, he left his job as a media portfolio manager for a Wall Street firm to launch MyBundle.TV, an online marketplace for streaming services. He thinks people who focus on streaming services being the new cable — “Cable 2.0” — are missing the bigger picture. He believes that “TV 1.0 was broadcast, TV 2.0 was cable and TV 3.0 is streaming. It’s taking the closed, set-top box model of TV 2.0 and opening up the marketplace.”

There are still pain points for streaming services, with price being an obvious one. It’s true that over the last few years, most major media companies have raised their subscription fees as they invest billions of dollars in original content production earmarked for their own direct-to-consumer services.

And the marketplace is reacting to rate increases by diversifying their subscription tiers. For years, Hulu has offered customers the choice of buying their streaming service at a budget price if they are willing to tolerate ads. They also have the option of paying more money if they want a commercial-free experience. Since then, other streaming services like HBO Max, Discovery Plus, Comcast’s Peacock and Paramount Plus have taken the same approach. Disney and Netflix have confirmed plans to do the same in the near future.

Cohen thinks price diversification will help a streaming service appeal to a broad group of customers at any given time: “If a household wants to save money, they can watch tons of free, ad-supported streaming services. If a household has money to burn, they can spend a ton of money on ad-free tiers of streaming services and never watch another commercial again. And if it’s something in-between — which is probably most of the country — it’s subscribing to a handful of services at one point, and then switching them out during the year.”

TV 3.0 is a chaotic landscape that will stabilize with time

There is some data to suggest that consumers are growing more comfortable with the idea of switching services on a whim. According to the analytics firm Antenna, around one in five households dropped three or more subscription services in the two years ending this June. In 2020, the number was closer to one in 20 households within the same two-year stretch.

One reason why subscribers might be switching away is the sheer volume of streaming services. Consumers are also finding their favorite TV shows and movies shuttled between them. Netflix, for instance, has lost several of its top comedy shows: “Friends” moved to HBO Max, then “The Office” moved to Peacock. Disney has slowly pulled titles from Netflix, too, as it seeks to reclaim movies for its own Disney Plus streaming service.

The revolving door of content hits on another pain point for streaming: In the TV 3.0 world, finding content can be a confusing experience. Cohen believes that platforms are starting to address this by building technology that makes it easier to find shows and movies across a number of different services and devices, and recommendation engines should become better and easier to use over time.

As Cohen describes the situation, “Where is it easiest to discover shows? It’s probably your phone. Where’s the best place to watch TV? It’s probably on the TV.”

So, how do manufacturers and platforms respond to that? By building a bridge between the two — whether that’s Vizio Account, or a Samsung app, or a Roku app, or something else. As he points out, “every TV maker and every operating system is trying to figure out the best way to help consumers find content on their platform.”

That said, Cohen acknowledges the streaming world is something of a mess right now. Mergers and acquisitions mean the owner of one streaming service (like CBS All Access or Discovery Plus) suddenly becomes the owner-operator of another (Pluto TV, HBO Max). And that, of course, means figuring out a long-term strategy for both. (If you’re Paramount Global, each streaming service lives in its own ecosystem. If you’re Warner Bros Discovery, you announce plans to get rid of two flagship streaming services and start anew).

It is a particularly chaotic time to be a sports fan, with sports rights to popular franchises like the National Football League and Major League Baseball split between broadcast, cable and streaming. Major League Baseball games, for example, are carried on regional cable sports networks in many markets, except for a few games that are exclusive to either NBC (and Peacock) or Apple TV Plus. This means that baseball fans this season might have to subscribe to cable and make an account with Peacock and Apple just to follow their home team.

Adding to the confusion is the lack of a single sign-on feature that allows customers to have one username and password that covers every service they want access to. Some companies have experimented with offering a feature that comes close to this: Roku, Apple and Amazon have streaming marketplaces baked within their own platforms. And Vizio recently announced Vizio Account, which seeks to replicate that experience. (Google is also reportedly exploring this idea.)

Cohen’s own MyBundle.TV is a platform-agnostic marketplace that asks streamers about the channels and programming they want to receive, then directs them to streaming services where they can find it. Eventually, customers will be able to manage their subscriptions from within the MyBundle.TV platform. Currently, MyBundle.TV only offers this feature with Sling TV, but other partners are in the works.

Malone, the cable magnate who pioneered TV 2.0, thinks bundles will eventually be the winning ticket for TV 3.0. He also believes there will be further consolidation between media companies as their war with each other intensifies.

Cohen backs the idea of a single platform where customers can start and stop streaming services at will — he left his Wall Street job to build that kind of product. But he’s not convinced that streaming services have to appeal to everyone with everything. He thinks niche streaming services can be successful on their own merit: “Streaming services don’t need to be everything for everyone. There are options that appeal to every household.”

As content becomes more fractured, Cohen said consumers need to resist the itch to sign up for every streaming service that is out there. The idea that customers had to have access to everything hearkens back to the days of TV 1.0 and 2.0 — when popular shows were watched in real-time on just a handful of channels, whether they were on broadcast TV or cable. That experience resulted in appointment-viewing — people had to watch shows at a certain time (later, they could record them for delayed viewing) — and also helped spur water cooler conversations and pop culture moments.

The TV 3.0 landscape is different. Streaming, for the most part, doesn’t require appointment viewing, because people can — and do — watch things on their own time and at their own pace. Cohen says things like streaming watch parties are offering solutions to people who still want television viewing to be a social experience. But it appears to be a technology that few people want. What customers do want is access to everything. But those days are long gone.

Streaming still has its challenges. However, the technology will improve over time and consumers will eventually come around to the idea that the convenience and price of streaming is worth the sacrifice of not having access to everything. That, coupled with the flexibility of starting and stopping services as well as the ability to watch programming across any number of devices, means streaming should not be reduced to Cable 2.0. It is an evolutionary leap in a revolutionary entertainment experience. It’s TV 3.0.

Featured Post | Innovation

Live sports may be the ticket to growing streaming audiences

August 30, 2022 Chris M. Sutcliffe – Independent Media Reporter

Live sports have been the jewel in broadcast companies’ crowns for decades. The allure of a live and hugely engaged audience has proved to be an effective draw for brand advertisers, particularly those with high-value consumer goods to hawk. That allure hasn’t lost its luster.

Sports broadcast rights remain competitive, expensive, and increasingly fragmented. But what has changed is how audiences choose to interact with sports content. The rise of social media and streaming platforms has changed the game, as their inherent interactivity enhance the appeal of live sport.

Combine this with the investment other media companies have placed in their subscription- and advertising-based streaming platforms, and the growing cost of sports content, and you have a space ripe for disruption. And while the details of exactly how disruption is taking place varies by platform, sport and country, it ultimately has the same cause as the tumult across the media world: tech turning passive audiences into active participants.

Social sport

At Twitter’s recent Newfronts appeal to advertisers, the company announced the rolling over of the platform’s partnership with the WNBA. This marks the sixth year of the partnership which grants Twitter the broadcast license for live games. It is no coincidence this is designed to further engage a predominantly women-led audience at a time when bringing in new audiences is key. Following its 2022 regular season, the WNBA announced that the league “set records for engagement with 186 million video views (+36% vs 2021)” across its social media platforms.

Twitter’s rationale for that partnership is its ability to offer real-time reaction to every basket and foul on. The real-time interplay between tech platform and sports content is part and parcel of how many media companies are selling their sports streaming to advertisers.

Theo Luke, senior director of global content partnerships at Twitter, tells me, “A fundamental to the live sport experience is talking about it. Increasingly broadcasters are actively including social media rights in their deal renewals with leagues because they see the value of highlighting clips alongside the live streaming experience to capture larger audiences and other revenue streams.”

“For example, through our recent Twitter Amplify partnerships with ITV and Formula 1, we offer a number of real-time highlights and the opportunity to engage with the moments that matter directly on people’s timelines,” Luke continues. “From an advertiser’s perspective, this not only allows you to align with premium video content, but also position yourself at the heart of the action and fanbases. When sport happens on Twitter, you don’t have a passive viewership, but an engaged, attentive and connected audience.”

Live community interaction has also been Twitch’s core appeal from even before it was Twitch. Since its acquisition by Amazon, the livestreaming platform has been inching ever closer to a destination for premier sports content. That’s been accelerated by Amazon’s investment in the broadcast rights for sports, and the deeper integration of its advertising tech with the Twitch platform.

In 2020, only two years after Amazon acquired some of the rights for Premier League matches, it was already streaming those high-value matches for free on Twitch, as well as NBA content. At the time, Twitch’s content acquisition lead, Eric Brunner, said, “They’re very open to exploring new ways to engage their community, like co-streaming USA Basketball on Twitch.”

Effectively, then, the new streaming platforms are hoping the pre-existing live interaction that formed their core appeal will supercharge interaction around sports coverage. That creates huge opportunities for potential advertising partners, both in terms of activating those audiences in the moment and by providing analytics around the interaction.

Sports clubs reap the benefits of streaming

The transition to sports streaming on new platforms is also being driven by the sports leagues and clubs themselves. Andreas Jung, chief marketing officer for FC Bayern Munich, told me the club’s engagement windows have widened beyond match day: “This is the expectation that the fans have and they want to participate in everything. This means that they consume content everywhere and anytime… 24/7.”

Fans can pay a yearly fee to be club members, and Jung says members, “have the expectation to get more information, to get to be closer with a club and therefore we have to bring them more information, we have to bring them more services and so on and so on.” As a result, Bayern is betting on its multi-year partnership with Adobe to boost its streaming content for users – and to deliver greater advertising revenue.

Opportunities for smaller leagues and networks

And while platforms and the bigger legacy leagues take advantage of the new advertising opportunities afforded by live streaming, smaller clubs and platforms are effectively launching as alternatives. Unbound by the limited amount of airtime on linear channels, new wrestling leagues are vaulting over the lower bar to entry to replicate some of the new opportunities – albeit at a smaller scale.

Guildford Town FC is a regional soccer team in the UK, far removed from the glittering heights of the Premier League. Speaking about the club’s partnership with dedicated sports streaming platform Joymo, its manager Paul Barnes echoed the comments from larger clubs: “I believe this is where the world is going. We’ve talked about the benefits from a playing perspective and staying connected with our fans, but this is also a way for us to make revenues that can help the ongoing development of the club.”

In the U.S., too, smaller leagues are using streaming to grow audiences and revenue. Overtime, a sports media company aimed at Millennials, recently raised over $80 million in a Class C funding round. Much of the confidence around the investment is predicated on Overtime’s strong social media and streaming offering, which includes 65 million followers across all of its 80 social media channels

The strategy was pioneered by esports leagues, which grew from grassroots to huge events through judicious use of live streaming platforms like Twitch. What is especially interesting for wider media companies, though, is that even traditional broadcasters, such as BBC and BT Sport, are now adding esports coverage to their linear offerings.

New audiences, new approaches

“Twitter works alongside broadcasters and rights holders to help make live sporting events even bigger,” explains Luke. “Our platform connects people directly to what’s happening around live events and that conversation provides greater value to our partners.”

He continues, “Most recently, we saw this with the UEFA Women’s EURO 2022, which saw the number of tweets [triple] ahead of the final and nearly 900 million impressions in the UK throughout the tournament. Watching live sport in 2022 isn’t just about consumption, it’s also about engagement.”

James Hartnett, account director for sports-specialist marketing agency The Playbook, told me, “As the topics and ways they are discussed has also evolved, so too have the platforms sports fans turn to. The primary source of 39% of 18-24-year-old ‘social natives’ for sports news – including match highlights, unique moments and opinion commentary – is TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. The stats are much the same for 25-34-year-old, though they tend to prefer Facebook over TikTok.

Streaming has indelibly altered sports viewing. This creates new opportunities across the ecosystem, especially when it comes to engaging new, often younger, audiences – a challenge most publishers can relate to.

Featured Post | Innovation

3 reasons publishers need a dedicated YouTube strategy

August 25, 2022 Damian Radcliffe, Carolyn S. Chambers Professor in Journalism – University of Oregon

You probably have a presence on YouTube, but do you have a specific strategy for the platform? If you don’t, then it’s time to address that.

With close to 2.5 billion monthly active users, YouTube is the second most popular social network in the world. Only Facebook, with 2.9 billion users each month, enjoys greater reach.

Despite this, many publishers’ presence on YouTube can often feel like an afterthought. The popular video-sharing network sometimes seems like an also-ran when compared with the content strategies (and resources!) being deployed across newer, shiner, networks like Instagram or TikTok.

It’s time for that to change. Here are three key reasons why.

1. YouTube is too big to ignore

Originally created way back in 2005, YouTube is not exactly a new kid on the digital block. Yet it’s also far from being an internet dinosaur.

According to Semrush, a software-as-service (SaaS) platform used for keyword research and online ranking data, last month YouTube was the second most visited website in the world with 60.9 billion visits. The average session visit was a whopping 29 mins 42 seconds.

*Image: Screenshot(s) via Semrush, 22 August 2022*

“YouTube is a seriously undervalued part of most publishers’ audience development plans,” Nic Newman, the lead author of the annual Digital News Report, recently told me during an email conversation about their 2022 study.

The latest findings, which were published in June by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, found that across the 46 countries covered by the report, YouTube “is the second most important network for news after Facebook,” Newman says.

Because this is a global study, there’s considerable variance on a country-by-country basis.

Nonetheless, in the United States, YouTube is the second most popular social channel for news in a typical week (19% of the sample). That puts it behind Facebook (28%) but some way ahead of Twitter (11%).

It enjoys similar popularity when figures are aggregated across 12 major markets. This reflects the universality of its appeal and begs the question of whether publishers are giving the platform the attention it deserves.

2. YouTube is a versatile platform

User habits for news and other content on YouTube might also surprise you. As Micaeli Rourke explained in a feature for Digital Content Next last December, YouTube is something of an audio powerhouse. (Disclaimer: She interviewed me for the article.)

YouTube was the leading platform for podcast consumption in the Ulast year, the 2021 Digital News Report found. They don’t provide comparative data for 2022. However, the latest study does note that YouTube is the second biggest platform for podcast consumption in Germany (19% of listeners) and the top source in Spain (30%).

Video-led podcasts are part of the reason for this popularity, as well as the opportunity to access content on multiple devices. This includes desktop and Smart TV consumption, which allows YouTube to play in the background, as well as more active “lean in” viewing.

The rise of YouTube viewing on TV sets is one reason why mobile increasingly makes up a smaller percentage of overall views in many developed markets. This presents opportunities for content creators to reach audiences in new places and spaces.

WIRED’s Auto Complete Interview with Ice Cube.

Meanwhile, the ease of publication (and lack of a requirement for a broadcast licence) has resulted in the emergence of YouTube TV-style shows and commentary alongside popular formats such as WIRED’s Autocomplete Interview (where celebrities answer the internet’s most searched questions about themselves) and Vogue’s 73 Questions video series. It also creates opportunities for historically text-centric outlets, such as Portland-based newspaper The Oregonian to go deep with long-form investigative stories. And it enables the Guardian (and others) to produce highly effective short explainer videos on issues du jour.

Looking ahead, Podnews revealed in March that YouTube is working to improve promotion, discoverability, and monetization opportunities for podcasters, including audio ads and “new metrics for audio-first creators.” Similarly, YouTube Shorts, its “TikTok clone,” is also a growing priority for the platform and another space that publishers may look to capitalize on.

Collectively, these formats, along with more traditional video content found on the site, present a variety of means for publishers’ to harness YouTube as part of their engagement and revenue strategies.

YouTube generated around $20 million in advertising revenue in 2020, CNBC reports. Arguably, that puts it in competition with publishers for ad dollars. However, creators can join the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) to earn income through mechanisms such as advertising, sponsored content, channel subscriptions and online shopping. YouTube’s revenue share model means that publishers typically take home 55% of the revenue from ads shown against their videos, Digiday stated back in 2020.

That said, some of these returns might be less than publishers hoped for. Digiday notes that “news publishers, in particular, have a harder time attracting ad dollars because advertisers remain wary of their ads appearing next to controversial topics.”

Nevertheless, when it comes to both content and opportunities for revenue, the platform’s versatility means you don’t have to deploy a cookie-cutter model to be successful on it. There’s scope for variety, experimentation and avoiding the “one size fits all” approach, which you sometimes encounter on other platforms.

3. YouTube effectively reaches younger audiences

Reaching a youth audience has long been the Holy Grail for many brands and media companies. For publishers interested in reaching Millennials, Gen Z, and even Generation Alpha (a cohort born in the past decade), YouTube should feature prominently in their plans.

New data from the Pew Research Center demonstrates how YouTube usage is virtually ubiquitous among American teenagers. Teenage boys are more likely to say they use YouTube than teenage girls. However, in terms of those who have tried the service, there’s actually surprisingly little variance across a wide range of different indices.

Moreover, when looking at teens overall, Pew’s “Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022” report discovered that nearly one in five (19%) say they use YouTube almost constantly. That puts it ahead of both TikTok (16%) and Snapchat (15%). Collectively, around three-quarters of U.S. teens (77%) visit YouTube on a daily basis, some way in front of its rivals.

Roll credits

This isn’t a piece extolling another “pivot to video.” We’ve been there. We know how that worked out. Instead, it is a recommendation to take a look at YouTube and whether you are using it as effectively, and comprehensively, as you could.

Of course, the platform is not without its challenges. Its recommendation engine can drive viewers away from your channel to other creators. Publishers might prefer to keep traffic (and its associated ad revenue) on their own properties. And last year The Information argued that programmatic ad sales were also hurting midsize publishers. Companies like BuzzFeed and Vice receive less money via YouTube’s revenue share arrangements than if they sold the spots directly, they said. Nonetheless, despite these real considerations, YouTube’s size, versatility, and reach with younger audiences are all major plus points.

Press Gazette has outlined how the biggest publishers on YouTube—in terms of subscribers and all-time views—are typically broadcasters. Many of these providers will post copies of reports, bulletins and shows, or offer a livestream, on the platform. But that doesn’t mean non-broadcasters can’t punch through. Press Gazette’s research also shows how Vox has broken the paradigm with a distinctive approach to high-quality (and often quite evergreen) video.

Vox, along with Vice News and Insider, have also achieved success on the platform despite publishing considerably fewer videos than many of their more broadcast-led peers. This makes it clear that this isn’t just about volume of content.

In a separate discussion with video leads at UK newspapers, The Sun and The Guardian, they also posited how a clear voice, a willingness to experiment and “building trust with the casual audience,” are all potential ingredients for YouTube success.

Thus far, tapping into YouTube’s potential isn’t something that many non-broadcast publishers have done well. Yet.

But, if publishers are able to look beyond platforms like Twitter, Instagram and TikTok (channels that either fall into the media’s longstanding issue with “shiny object syndrome” or spaces that might also seem more natural hubs for their content), then that might change in the not-too-distant future.

Certainly based on its audience, reach and breadth of content you can post, there’s an argument to be made that YouTube merits more of many publishers’ time and resources than it currently enjoys. If you want to ride the next digital wave, this trusty steed may not be a bad one to back.

Advertising | Featured Post | Policy

What the landmark GDPR fine of the IAB signals for the ad industry

August 18, 2022 Chris Pedigo, SVP Government Affairs – DCN

In February of this year, the Belgian Data Protection Authority (DPA) dropped a bombshell on the ad industry when they ruled that the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) violated the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in several critical ways. Admittedly, that alphabet soup doesn’t exactly sound like a bombshell.

So, let’s go beyond the acronyms and break down what this means for publishers going forward.

The ruling

First, the basics. The GDPR requires companies to have a valid legal basis tied to a specific purpose before processing any personal data from consumers. The two most popular bases are consent (affirmative and freely given) and legitimate interest (essentially, the benefit to the consumer from the use of their data outweighs the risk). Although it should be noted that Facebook decided to take its own direction by using a contract as its basis, a strategy that is quickly unraveling.

To maintain the free flow of data that currently fuels a wide swath of digital advertising, the IAB created the TCF which allows companies to transfer their legal basis for the data used in the buying and selling of advertising inventory in a real-time bidding format. Under the TCF, a publisher can note whether or not they have a legal basis to process a consumer’s personal data. Then, advertisers and ad tech companies can decide whether to bid on the ability to show an ad to that person.

The Belgian DPA received several complaints, including one from Johnny Ryan at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, that the IAB’s TCF violated the GDPR. In short, the TCF was criticized for facilitating the widespread dissemination of personal data to the entire industry without any real controls on the access, use or auditing of that data. Specifically, the DPA found that:

1. The TCF and the ad tech companies using the TCF were processing a ton of personal data without any legal basis and certainly beyond any legal basis claimed by the publisher.

2. The IAB failed to properly educate consumers given the complexity of the data processing.

3. The IAB deployed no technical measures to limit unauthorized access to personal data.

4. The IAB was operating as a controller of data and, thus, should have kept a register of activities, appointed a data protection officer and conducted a data protection impact assessment.

The DPA ruled the TCF invalid and fined the IAB 250,000 Euro per day. The IAB is currently appealing in the hopes of making small changes to satisfy regulators. However, many insiders are skeptical that the IAB’s proposals will suffice. The fundamental problem is that the current ad industry is built on the ability to collect and share consumer data at will and at scale. And GDPR enforcers want meaningful change with meaningful protections for consumers. This approach to maintain status quo simply does not satisfy that requirement.

Impact on data-centric ad businesses

Let’s assume that the Belgian and other European regulators win on appeal and the TCF is required to undergo major changes. What does that mean for the ad marketplace, for real time bidding and for publishers?

For starters, ad marketplaces will be required to handle consumer data more carefully. Allowing free-for-all access to consumer personal data by any company that agrees to the terms of service just won’t fly. They may need to deploy technical measures to mask personal data and/or limit access to only those companies with a sound legal basis.

Of course, this could be a problem for some of the IAB’s biggest members and hundreds of ad tech intermediaries, which are dependent upon the ability to profile consumers silently across the web. However, should a more consumer-friendly, less data-invasive approach win out, advertisers will need to learn to rely far less third party data. The certainly won’t want to open themselves up to liability for using illegally-sourced personal data.

Marketplaces and the shifting data market

The second major impact will be on the organizations that run marketplaces. The IAB attempted to craft a framework which would save the status quo of third-party, behaviorally targeted advertising because that is the moneymaker for its biggest members and the sea of intermediaries who mine and resell access to user profile data as a core business model. However, a fine of 250,000 Euro per day is likely too rich even for the dominant platforms.

Going forward, organizations that want to offer automated ad marketplaces will have to institute more controls and assume greater liability. There is a real question as to whether any organization will want to take on that role certainly for the entire industry. It’s far more likely (at least in the short term) that smaller organizations will stand up marketplaces with segments of industry.

CPRA follows suit

Third, the issues at play on the European landscape are likely to play out similarly on the California coastline. California regulators have just recently proposed a set of draft regulations for compliance with the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). Starting next year, the collection and use of Californians’ personal data will be regulated in ways that are very similar to European law. Whatever solutions emerge to satisfy European regulators will have a very good chance of satisfying California regulators.

Future focused

Undoubtedly, the IAB faces significant pressure from its most powerful members such as Google and Facebook and the long-tail of adtech solution companies. Given that their businesses have been built on the ability to collect data (even off-platform, when consumers do not expect it), they are deeply invested in finding a way to comply with emerging regulations in a way that ultimately allows them to continue their business more or less as usual. In Europe, their strategy has been to put off any major interruption to their massive data-collection-and-use model for as long as possible.

But these businesses that have dominated the digital advertising market do not represent the only way of doing business. While regulation certainly changes the market, it does not inherently change things for the worse.

In fact, I’ll leave you with a feel-good fact: A revamped and GDPR/CPRA compliant ad marketplace could elevate premium publishers. They enjoy trusted, direct relationships with consumers. Instead of a wild west marketplace where all kinds of actors stake dubious claims of proper legal bases, the premium publishers, which are on far more solid legal ground, would be in a strong position of controlling access to a limited supply of consumers.

Featured Post | Innovation

Best practices from media organizations on using Twitter Spaces

August 11, 2022 Jessica Patterson – Independent Media Reporter

Once called a pandemic fad, social audio may have staying power. Digital content companies continue to experiment with the format to engage and build audiences, get feedback, and figure out what topics work for them.

Since Clubhouse launched in March 2020, other social audio spaces have multiplied. These days, Twitter, Spotify, Discord, Reddit, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin all have versions of social audio.

Social audio spaces can be started by anyone. Celebrities and musicians use social audio to have virtual interactions with their fans. Sports reporters and football fans are hosting Twitter Spaces after college football games, to discuss people’s thoughts, to debate or commiserate.

We’ve spoken with The Washington Post, Axios, NPR and the Texas Tribune for a series of case studies that explore how these organizations approach social audio. Notably, all opted to use Twitter Spaces (though some experimented with Clubhouse in the early days of 2020). Through these conversations we discovered some of the use cases for social audio. We were also able to uncover some best practices and tips based upon these media organizations’ early forays on the platform.

Social audio use cases

Large investigative pieces

While breaking news and trending topics are a terrific use of social audio, The Washington Post used the format to delve into the nuances of the Pandora Papers investigation, which involved a wealth of information and was a challenge to present given its scope and depth.

Michelle Jaconi, head of news talent strategy and development at The Washington Post, said social audio is good for things that are so complex that you need extra time, nuance, and care to explain. “The amount of nuance that you can go into in a platform in audio where you don’t have the set limitations of an article is wonderful.”

Service journalism

Concentrating on key issues that affect the everyday lives of their audiences is the focus of social audio for the Texas Tribune, according to Bobby Blanchard, director of audience. These include topics like voting issues and prepping for winter. “Answering reader questions and engaging with our audience is a key part of our service journalism work,” he said.

Benefits of social audio

Building audience

It’s clear that social audio builds audience. In our case studies, Twitter Spaces’ cross-pollination feature allowed media companies to introduce a guest speaker’s following to their own and vice versa.

Rothschild told us, “if you’re doing a Twitter Spaces and you want to bring someone on as a guest and they have a huge following, you can have some cross-pollination and introduce your following to theirs. The potential is certainly there.”

As companies invite speakers to their Spaces, their followers are notified that there’s a Space happening. When NPR’s Weekend Edition host Scott Simon interviewed Matthew McConaughey, they did it on Spaces. Adams said, “They might not follow NPR, they might not even listen to NPR, they might just be there because they’re Matthew McConaughey fans,” Adams said. “But maybe we pick up some new followers… and that’s key.”

Social audio is a tool to convene audiences of the curious, or those who become curious about trending hashtags, according to Jaconi at The Washington Post. “Every time we do one of these Spaces, our reporters get new followers. That shows that we’re building audience.”

Engagement and feedback

Social audio is also a great tool for companies to connect with their own audiences. In one of the Spaces NPR did about the housing market, Adams said they heard a lot of audience questions.

“There was a lot of back and forth about, how do you buy a house now? Why is the housing market so wild out there? How do you figure it out?” Adams said.

The value of social audio is that a company is not speaking at their audience, they’re speaking with them, live. Companies can bring their audience members on “stage” and get questions and thoughts. Social audio offers an authentic conversation.

“There’s cutting in and interrupting, with some give and take,” said NPR’s Rothschild, “And its not just, here’s me doing my rehearsed two-minute sound bite like they might be used to on TV or radio.”

Exposure and experience

Hosting a Twitter Space gives journalists another way to raise their profile and promote their work. It also offers a means to gain audio experience to broaden their skill set. Web and print journalists don’t generally have experience in audio formats, Rothschild pointed out.

“Some reporters are the type to go on MSNBC, CNN. Others are doing radio hits,” he said. “(Social audio) is definitely a nice option for reporters that don’t have as big of a public profile to have the opportunity to do live, on-air experience.”

“I think it’s important to many journalists — not all — to develop on-air skills. You never know when you might be invited onto a podcast or a radio hit or a TV hit, so getting reps in is valuable,” he said.

Evergreen content

Another benefit to social audio for digital content companies is the idea that social audio creates content that can be repackaged as evergreen content or content for the future.

NPR records some of their social audio Spaces and later makes them downloadable—or even broadcasts them on air, according to Adams. NPR have also transcribed their Twitter Spaces into stories that get page views, which also grows audiences. All of these tactics allow them to better leverage what might be a one time live-only event in a variety of ways, and to reach broader audiences.

Best Practices

Repeat yourself

Remember that audience members can join Twitter Spaces mid-stream. It’s possible those audience members have never met you before. Hosts should make a habit of re-introducing themselves mid-stream. This should include addressing new people joining the Space and telling them what they’re speaking about, their name, background, expertise, and the topic of discussion.

Blanchard said that they pepper in a lot of reminders for the moderator or host to do a fresh table setting of what the conversation is about midway through.

This means give your social audio Space a thread of everything you covered in that space. If you’re using social audio to discuss investigations, mention the methodology of your investigation, the complexity of doing the investigation, biographies of speakers or guests, in a thread. This assures that the listening experience isn’t just a one-off that happened in the Twitterverse. Instead it can be connected to other content, events, or used in the future.

But there’s a trick to hosting on Spaces. Like podcasts and radio, hearing the personal voice of a host is important. However, effective hosts find a careful balance between their voice, and hearing from multiple sources and the audience.

Mind the trolls

From a moderation standpoint, Blanchard pointed out that letting just anyone speak can become a minefield. If anyone can join the conversation, it opens up the possibility to trolls. It’s for this reason, that Texas Tribune Spaces events are scripted and audiences are asked to DM questions instead.

Planning and logistics

While just about anyone with a Twitter account can host a Space, social audio events require planning and logistics, just like an in-person event.

Blanchard said that, before each Twitter Space they do, they give everyone a chance to test their technology. They make sure they’re in a space with a good connection and have the equipment they need to record good audio.

“We always have a preference for actual microphones or wired headphones to Bluetooth or built-in laptop microphones. It ensures a higher level of audio, in our experience,” he said.

Is social audio right for you?

As publishers seek to appeal to new audiences, there are lessons to be learned from The Washington Post, Axios, NPR and the Texas Tribune’s early forays into Twitter Spaces. This audio platform suits discussions on breaking news, large investigations, service journalism and trending topics, issues or major events. The combination of the social component with the facility of audio makes it well suited to a range of topics, but particularly those that lend themselves to discussion.

While social audio may not be as polished as a podcast, it is being leveraged by media brands for a wide range of uses – and with much less daunting production requirements. For example, The New York Times started using Twitter Spaces in January 2022 to react to breaking news and host curated talks on arts and culture. The advantage of using Twitter Spaces was that The Times has over 50 million Twitter followers and the live social audio format could be easily integrated to existing workflows.

“We think that the Twitter Spaces can maybe be used as a way to appeal to audiences who don’t already subscribe to The Times and aren’t necessarily reading us a ton,” said Elaine Chen, the director of engagement on The Times’ Events team.

According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s Trends and Predictions report, 2022 is the year media companies’ efforts will go into podcasts and digital audio. “Consumption of digital audio has been growing — driven by offerings from Spotify, Amazon, smart speakers, smart phones, and a range of digital formats like audio articles, flash briefings and audio messages, along with live formats such as social audio.”

While podcasts may be the hot audio format of the moment, it’s clear from these organizations’ experiences that social audio provides a low-barrier way to engage audiences through audio. And, given the likelihood that media organizations (as well as their journalists and even their guests) already have significant numbers of followers on platforms offering social audio, listeners are easier to reach. At the same time, audience growth is built into the format. It’s clear that social audio offers media organizations a way to dip a toe into audio, give teams experience in producing for audio, and gauge the appeal of audio for their audiences.

Featured Post | Innovation

Game on: esports offer a big win for media brands

August 4, 2022 Chris M. Sutcliffe – Independent Media Reporter

Warner Bros.' MultiVersus game leverages a broad range of the company's IP.

While the media and marketing worlds lose their minds over the metaverse, it’s worth bearing in mind that most of the purported benefits of that phenomenon already exist elsewhere.

The metaverse – whatever it ultimately looks like – is being built on the back of gaming audiences. From the platforms that early metaverse experiments were built on, to the community-based nature of interactions between brand and audiences on those platforms… it looks a lot like gaming with a new name. Besides, even if the metaverse actually emerges as a wholly new phenomenon, its audience will still bear a good deal of resemblance to gamers. So, products that serve this crowd are likely to bridge any eventual gap.

Either way, media companies must continuously attract new audiences to monetize in the race for subscribers and advertising spend. It also helps if those new audiences fit a particular profile that merits content development dollars as well. They need to be niche enough to have a community that is deeply invested in the topic and lucrative enough to be monetized effectively.

The largest niche on the planet

Gaming – the most lucrative entertainment medium globally – is certainly appealing in its own right. But importantly for media companies seeking new and valuable audiences, gaming offers scale characterized by numerous niches, each with the potential for product development that will attract, engage, and inform gaming communities.

Craig Levine is co-CEO at one of the largest esports organizations, ESL Gaming. He says: “There are so many niche communities within esports – and here ‘niche’ doesn’t mean small. I think ‘niche’ means focused. There are some very, very large niches in competitive gaming.”

Unsurprisingly, media companies with valuable IP continue to develop their esports plans. Warner Bros, for instance, has a hit on its hands with the platform fighter Multiversus, which sees exciting IP crossover. Meanwhile the latest Pokémon Presents on August 3rd opened not with information about its upcoming games, but the competitive scene that surrounds them. Esports titles like DOTA 2, CS:GO and Fortnite are perennially popular, with some achieving widespread brand recognition outside the gaming sphere.

Sports brands like Manchester United and the NBA have invested heavily in esports, from both grassroots and professional level. They recognize a growth industry when they see it.

According to the latest annual predictions from esports research specialist Newzoo global esports revenues will exceed $1.86bn by 2025, representing a CAGR of 13.4%. That is driven in large part by a rise in the size of the esports audience, with the global audience expected to reach 532 million by the end of 2022. The number of what Newzoo classes as “esports enthusiasts” is set to reach 261.2 million. This is this ‘niche’ that should set a fire under magazine publishers.

Charlotte Cook is MD of gaming-specialist agency Calm Consultancy. She says that the niches do exist within gaming: “When it comes to brands, advertisers, you do need to still segment them as different experiences exist on different platforms. A game on a mobile is very different from a game on a console.”

However, she states that the overall competitive gaming audience is growing. It is also broadening into demographics that advertisers are desperate to reach. Newzoo found that 74% of esports enthusiasts are full-time employees (compared to just 56% of the general online population), and around 44% fall in the high-income bracket compared to 33% of the general online population.

So, magazine companies looking to make some money around the world of esports specifically should adopt the role of bridge between brands and the community. Media companies like Future are already reaping the benefits of ecommerce based around high-value gaming audiences. The rise of esports also provides them with the ability to act as a trusted source for information related to high-value competitive gaming products.

Storytelling

Magazines’ core strength has always been around creating a compelling narrative. Just as with real-world sports stars, the focus of that storytelling around esports should be around the individuals within the space. Those esports stars are effective influencers within their community, which influencer-specialist marketers believe delivers the best rate of conversion on any ad spend. Moreover, since magazines are seen as a safe space for brands, it creates a new channel for the brands who seek to reach those audiences but run the risk of appearing opposite unsuitable content on the traditional esports platforms like Twitch.

Levine explains: “We’re currently in a world where players and influencers bring the power of creators, and that means a sort of this infinite distribution opportunity. The superstars of esports that come out are these incredible influencers who create tonnes of fandom around the games they focus on.”

That’s backed up by the rise of the gaming influencer, many of the most popular of whom are in the esports space. Small wonder that brands including Netflix, the NBA, and

Formula 1 have partnered with those streamers to expand their distribution channels for content among gamers.

Eyes on the prize

Much of the focus for the intersection of media and esports lies is still related to broadcasters bidding for the rights for esports competitions. Game companies like EA and Blizzard are betting the farm on esports broadcast rights, and arguably the prices commanded for those licences significantly undervalue the size of the audience.

Daniel Schnapp, esports specialist and partner at Sheppard Mullin, told Variety: “If you look at the most watched [and] consumed esports events over the last five to 10 years, they rival that – in terms of overall eyeballs and audience participation in viewership – of some of the largest sporting events that are put out by the traditional sports leagues.”

But, as with the ecosystem that has grown around traditional sports, there is space for magazine publishers to launch dedicated esports-related brands. The ecommerce opportunities related to the niche communities and ability to boost the profile of the pro players would benefit not just the magazine company, but the esports ecosystem as a whole. That virtuous circle of increased audience, attention and ad spend benefits the entire vertical – and magazines can claim a share of that pie.

For media companies, then, the question shouldn’t be “should we launch an esports title”, but “when should we?”

Is consulting the next revenue stream for publishers?

July 28, 2022 Peter Houston – Independent Media Reporter

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve overcome in your publishing business? Increasing audience conversion and retention? Bumping up digital advertising yields? Effective content repurposing?

All of the above?

The chances are that there’s another publisher out there right now wrestling with exactly the same problems. And, if they knew that you had dealt with the issues they’re stuck on, they might just pony up to get you to help them out.

Media organizations large and small have spotted the opportunity to monetize their success in navigating the maelstrom of modern publishing. From global names like the Financial Times, Bloomberg and Axios to independent contract publishers like the UK’s Think Publishing, all are selling on the practical wisdom gained from doing what they do well.

Some benefited from making the move to digital early and are putting the secrets of their transition on sale. Others have developed new ways of doing old things and have priced up their processes. Still more have just been doing what they do for a very long time and are happy to let smaller players buy into their expertise.

Selling expertise

A perfect example of capitalizing on expertise is FT Strategies, the consultancy arm of the Financial Times. Their pitch explains that, as they transformed the 130 year old legacy print operation into a highly successful digital brand, they built “practical best-in-class expertise” that they will now share with other businesses trying to thrive in the digital economy.

When the division’s 2019 launch was covered by the consulting industry news site consultancy.co.uk, they recounted a consulting Gold Rush among ‘long-time incumbents’ across a range of industries. Established firms were selling advice to one-time competitors facing the problems that they had already tackled.

Interesting times

The disruption implied in the expression “May you live in interesting times,” is a curse to most, but a blessing to consultants. And in publishing, the ubiquity of problems with falling readership, rising digital competition and declining advertising revenues represents a very interesting opportunity for outfits with answers.

FT Strategies actually began with a curiosity about software sales: could The Financial Times commercialize some of their proprietary data technology. Vox Media and The Washington Post have both gone down that road; Vox has 350 clients on its Chorus platform and WAPO’s Arc XP platform supports more than 1,500 sites in 24 countries.

But the FT didn’t travel that path. Supporting a SaaS offering is a massive undertaking and the team worried elements of their offering could be commoditized. Better instead to offer advice on how to make the best use of available technologies.

Scalable skills

What might be FT Strategies’ smartest move was its choice to focus on one key area of publishing strategy: subscriptions. At the peak of the paywall pivot, having just announced a million paying readers, the firm hitched its consultancy wagon to the reader revenue cause.

Speaking to the Media Voices Podcast in 2021, FT Strategies MD Tara Lajumoke said her team was not trying to be everything to everyone. “We have a deep set of skills, and experience around recurring revenue models,” she explained. “Subscriptions represent a huge part of the work that we do.”

That highly specific set of skills is allowing FT Strategies to look beyond publishing and begin offering consultancy services to other sectors, including finance. In 2021, the firm more than doubled its headcount and worked with almost 200 clients in more than 30 countries.

Expertise in the niches

Of course the FT is not the only media business offering consultancy services. Top-tier media organizations from Bloomberg to Axios sell advisory services. But you don’t need to be a multimillion dollar conglomerate to sell consultancy. You just need to be smart in your niche.

In the UK, Rethink is the consultancy arm of Think, an independent contract publishing agency that focuses on serving membership organizations. Rethink was launched in 2021 to formalize work the business had been doing for years as an on-going part of its customer service.

Ian Mcauliffe, CEO and founder of the £15 million business, has said that the company’s clients, many having just one title, didn’t have the scale to do the things a bigger publishing company can do. “They can’t compete,” he explained, “So we were increasingly being asked for advice.”

The company now offers a range of consultancy services built on 20+ years of contract publishing experience, from benchmarking costs and developing sustainable commercial strategies to increasing the value of a publishing business and preparing it for sale.

The foundation of a consultancy strategy

Adding a consultancy arm to your publishing business can be seen as just another revenue diversification play, but I think it’s a bold one. To sell consultancy services, you need to have several critical components in place:

Strong reputation

No one is going to pay you to tell them how to fix their publishing business unless you are seen as an exemplar in your chosen field. The FT’s digital transformation narrative, and its standout success in subscriptions, is an important foundation for its consulting operation. That doesn’t mean you have to have the profile of a 100-year old international news organization. Being the best in your niche is enough.

Seth Godin describes this as being famous to the family: “You don’t need to be Nike or Apple or GE. You need to be famous to the small circle of people you are hoping will admire and trust you.”

Demonstrable expertise

Being famous will get you noticed, but when it actually comes time to pitch your capabilities, it is crucial that you can prove that you’ve been there, done that and made a lot of money selling the t-shirts. The success of the “Smart Brevity” editorial strategy from Axios is there for all to see.

In just a couple of years the company has grown its local newsletter portfolio to 14 with revenues of $5 million. That success has let it leverage its trademark newsletter formula into a software and consulting business that sees clients pay $10,000 a year for help replicating their winning formula.

Clever staff

Building on your own company’s expertise is a strong foundation for a consulting business that’s tightly focused on your niche. The people that helped drive your success should be able to look at similar problems in other companies and develop practical solutions.

However, scaling into other areas is a different matter and a broader knowledge of business practices will be really helpful. The FT’s appointment of Tara Lajumoke illustrates perfectly the power of bringing in outside talent. Before joining the FT, she worked for McKinsey in London and Goldman Sachs in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the US.

Process

Cozy chats about what to do next aren’t going to cut it if you’re looking for billable hours; your clients will need to be able to put your advice in action and evaluate progress against key metrics. That means building your playbook to enable your staff to deliver detail on the strategies and methodologies that have worked for your business.

In the case of Axios, they actually wrote a book on it. Smart Brevity, the power of saying more with less teaches the how-tos of the approach and shows real-life examples of the technique in action.

Consulting as part of diversification

Can consulting become a real revenue stream for publishers? Yes, absolutely. But like everything else in this industry, it’s not a silver bullet. It can make commercial sense to leverage the learnings of success, and failure, to help other businesses face up to the challenges of digital transition.

But like everything else in publishing it will take talent, time and laser focus to turn what you know into cold, hard cash.

Featured Post | Innovation

They revolutionized podcast advertising. Now they’re coming for subscriptions

July 22, 2022 Esther Kezia Thorpe – Independent Media Reporter

Most media monetization models are reliant on two sources: advertising or consumers paying. With advertising rates tethered to a fluctuating economy, publishers have turned to memberships and subscriptions as the main way of getting revenue directly from readers. But not every reader wants to subscribe, but that doesn’t mean they are unwilling to pay. And, for Acast co-founders Måns Ulvestam and Karl Rosander, therein lies an opportunity.

Before leaving Acast — which was founded to make advertising in podcasts easier — they oversaw the introduction of premium podcasts. But increasingly they began to realize there was a ceiling to subscriptions as a means to generate consumer revenue. “Subscriptions are great if you’re a heavy consumer,” Ulvestam tells DCN. For example, superfans of magazines or newspapers see subscriptions as a convenient way to have unlimited access to content. “But that’s not true for everything. People might want to have one or two newspaper subscriptions, maybe a podcast and a couple of streaming services. But eventually, all the subscriptions add up to too much.”

Ulvestam’s comments are a reflection of recent findings in studies. According to Deloitte’s 13th Digital Media Trends survey, 47% of U.S. adults are frustrated by the sheer number of subscriptions. “It’s not that people are not ready to pay for good content,” The Fix’s Dushyant Khare wrote. “Rather they don’t want to go through the process of adding yet another constant, month-in-month out financial stream.”

The alternative is pay-as-you-go or single purchase options. But digital products and services have struggled with this approach. Micropayment approaches have been tried time and again, with little success. And the reality is that subscribing to a publication may not be a worthwhile long term investment for a consumer. Yet a specific piece of content might be highly valuable at a given moment.

Open, Sesamy

Armed with the firm belief that a la carte is the way forward, Ulvestam and Rosander founded Sesamy in March 2021. The service began with single purchase audiobooks and eBooks. Just one month after launching, it attracted $5 million in new funding to expand the model across Europe.

Last month, they launched a single purchase option for podcast episodes and series. These can be bought via Sesamy and listened to with any podcast app.

“It’s been going really well so far,” Ulvestam says, although he didn’t divulge hard numbers. “We don’t want to tie people into consumption in just one platform. I believe podcasting should be an open ecosystem. You should be able to consume it wherever you want.”

Residents of the Nordics, where Sesamy launched, have a reputation for being more willing to pay for digital content than those in many other regions. So you have to wonder if the early success the company is seeing in Sweden and Denmark can be replicated in larger podcast markets like the U.S. From his experience at Acast, Ulvestam is optimistic.

“When Acast introduced dynamic advertising — targeted, interchangeable ads — it was slower to pick up in the U.S. because they were selling on the wrong numbers, and they liked the host-read model,” Ulvestam says. “But eventually, the buyers — the media agencies and advertisers — demanded real numbers, verified numbers. Then the U.S. market had to adapt to our model, and now it is the standard.”

“You have three stakeholders: the creators, the transaction layer/platform, and the consumer. Everyone has to be happy for it to stay the same. The only way to disrupt that model is if one stakeholder in the ecosystem is unhappy,” he explains And by the looks of it, consumers are nearing subscription saturation.

Next up: content payments

But Sesamy doesn’t want to stop at audio. Ulvestam explained that they are looking at bringing the a la carte model to news and articles. The option to pay for single pieces of content has been raised on numerous occasions over the past decade, with many different start-ups dedicated to micropayment transactions. So why is he so convinced they will succeed where many others have yet to gain traction?

“The models that have been tried include driving people to an app to consume the content, or tried with too little money with micropayments,” Ulvestam says. “It’s also been the wrong timing. For the past 15 years, the newspapers have been putting more and more behind the paywall and optimizing their content for subscription revenue.”

Now, Ulvestam thinks that the market is ready for single content payments. Publishers are increasingly finding they’ve optimized what they can for subscribers. Growth is tailing off, and is at risk of declining with economic pressures.

“For me, it’s quite obvious why the consumer would want to do it,” he says. “I subscribe to a few newspapers and magazines. But I also find articles that I would like to read where I don’t subscribe. They’re missing out on incremental revenue.”

The risk for publishers in introducing a pay-per-piece option is that it risks cannibalizing existing subscriptions. This is something Ulvestam and Rosander are factoring in as they expand Sesamy. “We’ll build the software around that to actually reduce the risk of that happening,” he explains. It’s something the duo have been working on for a number of years.

The machine learning algorithm works like a smart paywall in assessing the visitor’s propensity to pay either just for the article or to push towards a subscription. “We call the software SmartID. The software, which will begin rollout this fall, will tell the publisher what to do do with you when you visit a website,” Ulvestam says.

Countering the skeptics

Micropayments and single payments are a touchy issue for the industry. Few issues seem to split opinion more among publishers and analysts. One accusation leveled at vendors who have tried in the past is that the revenue from single purchases can’t hope to be sustainable for publishers. But Ulvestam was emphatic that this is a complementary revenue stream, not a replacement for subscriber revenue.

“It’s not been tried at scale before,” he says. “If you read a magazine every day, you should be a subscriber. This should not replace subscriptions, it should be a compliment. Everyone can relate to having encountered a paywall where they don’t pay, because they don’t want to be a subscriber. It happens every day. Obviously, the consumer need is there.”

Sesamy is not a micropayment solution. When it rolls out, it won’t be charging pennies for content. With the audio pieces currently in its library, prices range from podcast episodes at $1.50 each to audiobooks at over $20. Instead, it could be an opportunity for publishers to put a fair price on features, investigations and other long-form content.

There are already many alternatives to subscriptions. As digital wallets gain mainstream adoption, there is certainly hope for a tipjar-style micropayments model, although this may be more beneficial for creators than publishers. Between full subscriptions and pennies for pieces, there is a middle ground. Media analyst Mark Stenberg suggested Monthly Access Payments as a low-commitment digital equivalent of a newsstand purchase, but this has not gained traction either.

Sesamy might be the Goldilocks solution. There are still hurdles the company has to overcome with both podcasting and article payments. But if Sesamy’s co-founders are right about the consumer appetite for single purchase payments, we could well be witnessing the start of a revolution.

Five actionable lessons for publishers

1. Harness the value of niche

2. Learn how creators are growing their businesses

3. Understand it isn’t just about flashy new social networks

4. Reach new audiences where they are

5. Unlock the potential for partnerships

What’s next? Two trends to follow.

Short-form video

Private communities

Like and subscribe

The gender gap is closing — slowly

Driving diversity with data

Equity at every level

Closing the pay gap

Representation leads to engagement

The escalation of enforcement

Litigation, legislation, and learning

Full court press

Antitrust is in the air

The multiple remote e-waste factor

The personalized feature set

The unfamiliar TV panic

Let’s fix the consumer experience

Streaming is not too far removed from cable’s history

Streaming is not an extension of cable — it’s an evolution of television

TV 3.0 is a chaotic landscape that will stabilize with time

Social sport

Sports clubs reap the benefits of streaming

Opportunities for smaller leagues and networks

New audiences, new approaches

1. YouTube is too big to ignore

2. YouTube is a versatile platform

3. YouTube effectively reaches younger audiences

Roll credits

The ruling

Impact on data-centric ad businesses

Marketplaces and the shifting data market

CPRA follows suit

Future focused

Social audio use cases

Trending topics and current events

Large investigative pieces

Service journalism

Benefits of social audio

Building audience

Engagement and feedback

Exposure and experience

Evergreen content

Best Practices

Repeat yourself

Mind the trolls

Planning and logistics

Is social audio right for you?

The largest niche on the planet

Storytelling

Eyes on the prize

Selling expertise

Interesting times

Scalable skills

Expertise in the niches

The foundation of a consultancy strategy

Strong reputation

Demonstrable expertise

Clever staff

Process

Consulting as part of diversification

Open, Sesamy

Next up: content payments

Countering the skeptics