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.
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 averageat 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 theanalytics 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, youannounce 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 alsoreportedly 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Trending topics and current events
Matt Adams, engagement editor at NPR, has seen social audio really work for trending topics. He said NPR can quickly produce Twitter Spaces pop ups to discuss current events and issues, like Ukraine, Russia, or the State of the Union Address.
At Axios, Neal Rothschild, director of audience and growth, uses Twitter Spaces for major news discussions, product launches, or new initiatives within the company. “We do it around major events or a product launches. What we think is most impactful is you really need to make it about the topic that people care about,” Rothschild explains.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
Social audio creates opportunities to grow and engage with audiences. It also provides an ideal medium for tackling big issues. However, The Texas Tribune’s social audio experience reminds us about the importance of concentrating on key issues that affect the everyday lives of audiences.
Austin-based Texas Tribune keeps a tight focus on specific issues, events, and questions when using social audio. “Our approach to live social audio is to ensure that we’re talking about a topic or a storyline,” rather than a project or its journalistic process according to Bobby Blanchard, Director of Audience, who oversees Texas Tribune’s social channels.
Topical discussions
The Tribune has found that there are topics that resonate with their audiences and keep them more engaged over others, Blanchard says. “We generally lean towards service work — how to vote, to understand and follow elections, how to prepare for possible power grid problems. These conversations attract a wide variety of readers because they’re all impacted by what’s discussed,” he says.
For example, The Tribune held a Twitter Space on preparing for the winter in December 2021, which discussed how and why Texans should prepare for the winter ahead. The conversation centered around the power grid and safety, and it featured the president of the Austin EMS Association.
The following month, The Tribune held a Twitter Space on redistricting and voting coverage. The discussion focused on what citizens should know about voting in Texas in 2022, what redistricting is and how it affects the election, and what would be on the ballot. The event featured former Tribune executive editor Ross Ramsay and Alexa Ura, demographics and voting rights reporter of The Texas Tribune.
“The Texas Tribune helps its readers navigate and understand how Texas policy and politics impacts their day-to-day lives,” says Blanchard. “Answering reader questions and engaging with our audience is a key part of our service journalism work.”
In addition to providing critical information, social audio does help The Tribune build community by giving the audience the chance to engage directly with the reporters behind the news they read. However, their emphasis remains on using the new platform to provide readers with what they expect from the brand.
As Blanchard points out, people consume information in all kinds of ways — some via text, some via visual and some via audio. “I think giving our readers multiple ways to consume the news helps us serve all types of readers. I also think it strengthens our relationship with them. It helps our readers understand that, like them, we’re humans doing this work.”
Preparing to go live
While Twitter Spaces and other social audio platforms gives anyone the option to go live, it’s not something The Texas Tribune does on impulse. A lot of planning and logistics goes into preparing for an event and they leverage lessons they’ve learned over time.
The Tribune has a thorough process to be prepared before going live on social audio. Blanchard says that, prior to going live, they give everyone a chance to test their tech and make sure they’re in a space with a good connection and have the equipment they need to record good audio. Blanchard and his team prefer wired headphones to wireless headphones, for example.
“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,” Blanchard says. “We’ve just found the audio quality is better and there is a lower chance of technical problems with the audio when you use wired headphones as opposed to wireless. Best to remove as many chances for things to go wrong as possible.”
It is critical to ensure that the moderator is prepared and set up with everything they will need. “We write an introductory script for the moderator and prep questions ahead of time, just in case we get very few audience questions,” Blanchard says. “We pepper in a lot of reminders for the moderator to do a fresh table setting of what the conversation is about midway through, so folks who join late can easily catch up. We try to limit these conversations to 15-30 minutes.”
Blanchard noted they don’t open the mic to everyone. If listeners want to ask questions, they have to tweet at or direct message The Tribune. From a moderation standpoint, Blanchard says letting just anyone speak can become a minefield. If anyone can join the conversation, it opens up the possibility to trolls or bad faith actors trying to attack journalists or guests. “We don’t want that to happen — it spoils the conversation. There’s also enough of that online as it is. There’s no need to make space for anymore of it.”
As for timing their social audio events, the Tribune tries to schedule them when people are most likely to tune in, which is typically lunch time, according to Blanchard. Time of day affects how engaging a conversation is and how many people tune in. “If you do a live audio conversation at 4:45 PM, when everyone is driving home, you’re not likely to get a ton of listeners.”
“It’s my working theory that people enjoy listening during lunch,” he says. “I’ve also seen newsrooms have success with this in the early morning or late evening. I consider 1-5 PM a bit of a dead zone, and typically avoid programming live conversations then.”
Monetize like a sponsored event
Beyond audience engagement and a new storytelling platform, media organizations can look to social audio as a potential new revenue source. The Tribune does not generally have sponsors for its social audio events. However, in some cases they’ve used social audio for what would have traditionally been a live event. As such, they secured a sponsor as they would for those events otherwise.
“Our conversation about our primary preview coverage on March 1, 2022 — for example — was sponsored by The Marchant Good Government Fund and Raise Your Hand Texas,” Blanchard says. However, he notes that “financial support plays no role in picking topics or guests for these conversations — or any of our journalism.” And, because The Texas Tribune is a not-for-profit organization, sponsorship is not a significant driver behind its social strategy. However, other organizations seeking to build a revenue stream on social audio might emulate the live-event model as one approach.
Certainly, monetization opportunities seem promising. However, social audio falls into a class of its own. It isn’t as neat and tidy as podcasts. Its immediacy and intimacy is one major differentiating factor, and it still seems to be space in which content companies are experimenting.
Takeaways
While Millennials might be digital natives, Gen Z are social natives, having grown up watching video and listening to audio instead of visiting traditional news sites, according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2022.
Thus, it seems likely that social audio will play an increasing role in their consumption habits, given Gen Z’s heavy reliance on social platforms. Digital content companies need to keep an eye on the changing needs and wants of this next generation, as they exhibit different behaviors than those who came before.
However, when conceiving a social audio strategy, it’s critical to think about what audiences need, and expect, from your brand. Priority number one is to figure out how social audio uniquely serves an audience and what you’re trying to accomplish. For this brand, having a narrow focus on service-based journalism works best.
At The Texas Tribune, social audio offers immediate engagement with audiences and the opportunity to provide useful, practice advice and trusted guidance, and address its readers’ needs in a moment. Their experience demonstrates how social audio can be used to help audiences make decisions, on what to buy, how to do something, answer specific questions, and solve their problems.
The January 6 hearings demonstrate a significant opportunity for streaming services – SVOD, AVOD, FAST – to provide public service and to engage new and existing audiences. Most people can’t take two hours in the middle of the day to watch the hearings in full. But they can time shift, binge, or play the hearings at 2x speed on connected devices. And in my experience (which includes running CBS News Digital and CBSN for more than five years) they will. This is: they will if video is available and easy to find.
In fact, at this point in the streaming evolution, it should be easy for viewers to find most major breaking news events live and on demand within each of the major streamers. Unfortunately, it is not easy enough. And, in some cases, it’s nonexistent.
The reality
Most of the major streamers either operate news divisions or incorporate numerous news streams into their products. Based on the numbers and the research, it’s well known in the streaming industry that live, breaking news is both in demand and an expectation among viewers. In addition, there are no significant technology or distribution issues blocking these companies from streaming live, breaking news coverage.
So, it’s a major miss for the streamers that, when there is a major, scheduled news event in which it’s in the public interest to provide access, they continue to make it hard to find news within their services. It seems that most choose to continue to heavily promote tentpole entertainment properties – even in the middle of the day – rather than promoting scheduled news events that their properties already are covering.
The January 6 hearings have been among the most riveting live news events in recent memory. The testimonies of Georgia election official Shaye Moss, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, and former Oath Keeper Jason Van Tatenhove were dramatic, compelling, and newsworthy. Yet the major streamers are generally opting out of the opportunity to serve their viewers by making the hearings accessible live and on demand.
The opportunity
The good news is that it’s not too late to fix this. Here’s how streaming services can make it easy to watch critical scheduled news, such as the January 6 hearings, using four simple, inexpensive tactics:
Use front door promotional “marquees” to drive in real time to the live hearings and to communicate the upcoming schedule.
Showcase on demand video of the full hearings prominently within said marquees and other promotional space.
Re-run the hearings on streaming news services and in VOD sections after hours and on weekends.
Use their vast promotional and marketing capabilities including emails, mobile notifications, social, promotional trailers, etc. to put this coverage front and center.\
Audiences are intelligent, curious, and interested in making up their own minds. They want facts and are hungry for knowledge, not just opinion. Offering them the opportunity to easily consume these kinds of news events more easily provides a satisfying solution.
Delivery and growth
Every time CBS News streamed a major live news event, it increased our viewership base. When we made the full video of major news events available on demand, our viewers watched in large numbers. We created loyalty by delivering service and meeting viewers’ expectations for trusted news coverage.
Simply by focusing on, and delivering solutions for these needs and expectations, our CBS News team grew the live streaming news service to more than 1 billion views in both 2020 and 2021. As the digital audience grew, we saw no evidence of cannibalization of the linear audience. In fact, we saw brand loyalty strengthened in multiple research studies conducted during a period of six years, starting in 2015.
Major streamers can do the same by showcasing news when viewers expect it, such as during major live breaking events such as the January 6 hearings. Considering the investment that these organizations are making in their content and delivery optimization, it is an oversight in terms of serving consumers’ information needs. In an increasingly competitive streaming environment, streamers who take the opportunity to engage and grow audiences interested in breaking news will experience a payoff in long-term loyalty.
DCN’s editorial director Michelle Manafy interviews Nicole Carroll, the Editor-in-chief of USA Today and Aja Whitaker-Moore the Executive Editor of Axioson Newsroom innovation: What’s the future of storytelling at the Collision conference, which was held in Toronto, Canada June 22-24, 2022.
[Full transcript below.]
WATCH/LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Michelle Manafy
I’m back! But I’m in good company. I’ve got some terrific speakers here joining me to talk about newsroom innovation. If we could, I feel like the topic is just huge. If maybe you’d like to kick us off with what the heck does it even mean?
Nicole Carroll
You know, I think innovation now, in the olden days, it was always tech and what’s the next product? And what’s the next thing? And I think now honestly, it’s about engagement is like how do we truly authentically engage with our audiences. And that could be tech that could be in person storytelling, that could be, you know, lots of different ways. I also think innovation always is just about to keep moving forward, you know, every generation of journalists is going to do it a little bit differently. And I think we’ve got to find our way. So, I think about innovation, not just in a technology sense, but literally everything we do in hiring, and how do we fund our journalism? How do we connect with our audiences? We’ve got to keep moving forward.
Michelle Manafy
Aja, anything you want to add to that?
Aja Whitaker-Moore
No, I mean, I think you’ve covered a lot of it. And from the actors perspective, you know, we’re a startup. And so everything that we do is kind of innovative, in our opinion. And we were born of, you know, we thought a problem, which was, there’s too much information, and people don’t know how to keep up with it, they don’t know how to access it. And, you know, we think that our promise is innovative in the sense that we came up with a new format, came up with a new delivery mechanism, and are coming up with new ways to reach an audience on an everyday basis. So that’s our version of innovative, I think.
Michelle Manafy
So let’s go back to Axios then for a second. How do product and editorial work together in your organization, and how do you drive innovation in that relationship?
Aja Whitaker-Moore
Yeah, I mean, pretty closely, because, you know, like I said, you know, we are focused on smart brevity and packaging things in a way that people want to digest them. And that means that we’re mobile first. And that means that everything we do has to be looked at from a product perspective, how are we delivering lists in a mobile friendly format? How is our app working? How are we delivering products to people, you know, in the way that they want them. So we work really closely together with a product team that I think understands journalism and understands news in a way that is really important.
Michelle Manafy
I mean: easy for you to say, “built from the ground up.” But let’s talk about USA Today. Like, is there a tight integration of product and editorial, editorial, huge,
Nicole Carroll
we’re, you know, we’re one of the OG startups, but we were actually smart, brevity 40 years ago, and we’re pretty, you know, made fun of because of that. So I’m you know, I’m glad to see the world has, you know, come around to that you can get good information in smaller amounts of words or video. So I, I’m really proud of the work we’ve done. But yes, we are really tight with our product teams, the fact that we just want to call with them this morning. You know, we’re constantly looking at not here’s what we should do. But what is the outcome you’re looking for? And then working together? How do we get to that outcome? We try not to go into it with the solution you go into it with what’s the outcome you’re looking for, and what do we need to bring to that equation?
Michelle Manafy
So one of the things you touched on in like your “what is innovation” was: staffing, diversity, leadership, those those issues… Can you tell me a little bit — let’s start with USA Today — about how you’re approaching leadership and recruiting with an eye to fostering innovation to fueling it.
Nicole Carroll
It’s never been more important to recruiting and what we’re doing right now. And I don’t know if how many of you are in the industry. But there’s the great journalism shuffle going on right now. I mean, everybody is moving somewhere else. Right now, there’s a real fight for talent and leadership. And I think people want to be part of authentic companies, who are really trying to again, I always say our job is to spread truth, you know, to engage with our audiences. And so showing a path having mentorship programs showing an opportunity for leadership, showing industry leadership is really important to creating the culture that will keep people in our organization. We’ve made the pledge at Guenette, that we want our newsrooms to reflect our communities by 2025. And we measure ourselves every year against that benchmark around racial diversity. I measure it every quarter at USA Today and report that to the staff. I think it’s really important we hold a mirror up to ourselves and be really honest about how we’re doing.
Michelle Manafy
How about Axios? What what what is the approach? How are you thinking about like, what is this newsroom? What is the staffing what does the leadership mean, to our ability to be innovative?
Aja Whitaker-Moore
Yeah, I mean, I think we we agree at that at the start the diversity of our newsroom should reflect the diversity of our audience. And that will then you know, result in diversity of coverage and that’s really what we’re striving towards. You know, our founders are committed to that goal as well. You know, in the fall, we’re releasing a smart brevity book. And they dedicated the proceeds the advance from that book to fund a fellowship program that we’re really proud of where we’re focusing on hiring from diverse communities in underrepresented backgrounds, to mentor them into Axios. And focusing on developing a beat developing the next generation of leaders that we think is, you know, missing from journalism right now. And it’s something that is a part of, you know, our newsroom recruiting our newsroom leadership. Axios is led by two women of color. And myself, and our editor in chief, Sara Gu. And it’s something that we you know, walk, talk, live, breathe and think, is the future of innovation at our company and everywhere, so we’re really focused on it.
Michelle Manafy
Alright, so let’s shift gears a little bit. We there’s been a kerfluffle, of late around the social presence of journalists online, rather spectacular, blow up, in fact, quite visibly on social media. For for Axios, let’s start there. How are you balancing the desire for reporters to have a social presence to leverage that social presence? With your standards?
Aja Whitaker-Moore
Yeah, and when I think we’re, we’re not like, any, you know, we’re similar to every other media organization out there, that’s figuring out, you know, how to balance that, but we’ve been really proud of our track record so far, you know, in the past five years, you know, we we’ve really just said to our staff, we trust you. You arer adults. Represent yourselves represent Axios the way that you, you know, would expect to in public. And that’s actually what’s happened. So I think we are, you know, proud of how we’ve done it so far. And we’ll continue to act accordingly on social platforms, and still be able to share our journalism with the world engage with people in a responsible way. And I think we’re all doing that.
Nicole Carroll
I know that at USA Today, the social presence is a big part of the work. So how are you setting your standards and communicating to your staff that this is important? But you still have to represent our brand.
Right? I mean, we know that, you know, our integrity and our fairness. And all of that is just the bedrock of what we are. And so we want to make sure that we represent our way ourselves that way. On social, we tell people, we want you to bring your authentic selves, we want you to bring your lived experiences. But obviously, we can’t slip into advocacy. And I say this all the time: The power you have as journalists, to choose stories to tell stories to spread stories, is so much more power than you’re going to have in that tweet. And so you know, again: Bring your true selves, bring your authentic selves, but but let’s not tip into advocacy that could harm the integrity of our brand.
Michelle Manafy
So I think another issue digitally in particular is the 24 hour news cycle, right? We’re all facing this kind of pressure to constantly be online, constantly be informing our our consumers. But how are you balancing the 24 hour news cycle with your again, with your standards and your goal to provide actual, trustworthy news?
Nicole Carroll
Well, we’re really lucky and that we’re spread across the country from, you know, Washington all the way to LA. And then we also have a London bureau. So, we really are on 24/7, which, which makes things a little bit easier. But you know, I tell people 100 times out of 100, I’d rather be second than wrong. 100 times out of 100. So if you’re ever in doubt, don’t do it. Double check it triple check it, I’m going to be fine. If we’re last as long as we’re right.
Michelle Manafy
I see a lot of scoops and exclusives at Axios. So how about you? Is there a difference there? Is there pressure?
Aja Whitaker-Moore
Yeah, Imean, I think that our philosophy is a little bit different. We’re not there to deliver you every piece of news. We’re there to deliver you what you need to know, and the things that are important. And so I think that our model is a little bit different in that we package our version of the 24 news cycle into a newsletter suite. So if you’re getting Mike Allen’s AM, and PM and Finish Line newsletters, that’s what we call our daily essentials. And he’s set a really diverse kind of breakfast table for you in the morning. Happy Hour, four in the evening. And he’s telling you the stories that you need to know and so we’re curating that and packaging that I think in a different way than you know, a news wire or or a news organization that’s giving you breaking news 24/7.
Michelle Manafy
It’s interesting. We used to call those “newspapers” where we curated what you need to know i the course of a day. I do think it’s interesting. The last panel was very much touching on this deluge; this fire hose, and how we can discern. And of course you know, I advocate for trustworthy sources like y’all.
Nicole Carroll
Yeah, absolutely.
Michelle Manafy
All right. So, innovation in delivery and formats. I know you specifically mentioned Axios being mobile first. And I think that’s for a little while there that was almost a cliche industry. But I think it’s, it’s a given, is it not? Are you thinking a lot about innovating in terms of say, Tik Tok? Let’s just throw out like, are you looking at new formats?
Aja Whitaker-Moore
Tick Tok? Not so much. Not yet. I mean, we have experimented, I think on all the platforms, you know, we do Twitter spaces, we do curated videos on You know, on Instagram, I think Tik Tok is an amazing platform. And a lot of I think publishers have figured out a great way to do it. But I think it actually is we, you know, right now, you know, we really are interested in podcasts, we’ve found a way to tell long form stories in smart brevity, through audio, which, you know, is is challenging, but we’ve done it with our How it Happened podcast series. It’s got, you know, 3 million downloads, and it’s really resonating with the audience. And we also have, you know, a daily podcast that we think is, you know, really innovative and how we’re telling stories in, you know, 10 minutes a day, and our audience is telling us, you know, they can’t get enough of it. So, I think that’s definitely interesting to us. You know, we just hired our first SEO editor and we’re really focused on you know, packaging our stories for social and, you know, making sure we’re we’re meeting people where they are.
Michelle Manafy
I know that social audio has been really good for you guys too. How about USA Today. What do you do?
Nicole Carroll
Well, it’s funny: I was just checking or TikTok I think we’re just checking to see how many followers I think we’re over a million somebody check me so we’re over a million and when we you know, I love it. My son’s 16 He gets all his news on Tik Tok. So whenever we show up in his feed, he’s really proud. He’s like, there’s my mom. So I mean, we’re gonna be in the spaces where people are, we’re doing Twitter Spaces, we were on Clubhouse, we were doing all the things. Really, it’s because we just want people to know that we’re there with the information they need, again, whether it’s Instagram, or Tik Tok, or a newsletter, or a podcast. And it just helps the overall reach and hopefully, you know, to your point about trust and media, if they see us enough, if they see that we’re right enough, if they see that we’re responsible enough, I want to develop that trust. And so I think it’s not just about the audience. It’s about developing that relationship and trust and like, Oh, I’ve seen you three or four times now. You know, I I know your real I know, you’re a trustworthy news source. And that’s really important to me.
Michelle Manafy
Yeah and that’s interesting, because you both mentioned, you know, being where they are.
Nicole Carroll
Yeah.
Michelle Manafy
But then your values like perpetuated values and your ethos there to build that trusted relationship.
Nicole Carroll
Well, it’s funny when the last join some of the January 6, and we made some decisions about, you know, we didn’t errors, certain of Donald Trump’s speeches, because I did, they were misinformation, and we chose not to air them live. We would go back and we would package them so we could fact check them before we did it. I actually went on Tik Tok. And I told people why we were doing that. And I did a video like: Hey, here’s we may be hearing about this. And this is why we’re doing that we think it’s important to fact check before we put information out there. So it was kind of fun to be able to talk directly to that audience
Michelle Manafy
Addressing that that demand for immediacy. Head on,
Nicole Carroll
Right, exactly.
Michelle Manafy
We want it now. But here’s why we’re not.
Why don’t you tell me each of you just very quickly, a project or product that you’ve done recently that you feel is particularly innovative?
Aja Whitaker-Moore
Sure. I mean, I think Axios local is probably our biggest project of the year. And, you know, talking about rebuilding trust, we want to meet people in their communities, and talk to them about the economic situation where they live, the lifestyle opportunities, where they live, also, the political landscapes where they live. So we’ve stood up in 17 cities, and we’re going to be in, I think, another 25 by the end of this year. So, we’re really proud of that expansion and trying to recapture some of what’s been lost in the local news landscape. And, you know, it’s really resonating with audiences, we’ve had over a million subscribers in those local markets, generated, you know, 5 million in revenue last year from loca. And so we think that’s, you know, a really big part of the future of Axios. And hopefully the future of restoring trust and journalism in America.
Michelle Manafy
No small feat.
Aja Whitaker-Moore
Yeah, just a little, just a little project.
Michelle Manafy
Just a Tuesday. How about at USA Today?
Nicole Carroll
Sure. Well, I really hope you guys will check out some of the AR we’ve been doing. And again, this leans more into the tech, but it’s really cool tech. So you can we did a series this past year on 1961 and the importance of what happened in 1961, around voting rights to what’s happening today. And our AR team built this amazing experience where you could actually ride the bus as it was being attacked by rioters and you can hear the story and you can you can you can hear we brought in historical video and audio. And you really feel like you can see the flames around you and you are really immersed in that experience. So, you know, again, we’re trying to bring the truth to people and help them understand news that empathy that you get from immersive storytelling is really important. Not just reading it; you’re experiencing it. So really proud of some of the work we’ve done on AR.
Michelle Manafy
That’s a great example. Just before we’re done here: How about something that you think that everyone is talking about in media right now, that maybe is hype or that maybe you’re a little skeptical about?
Aja Whitaker-Moore
Just in general?
Michelle Manafy
In the digital media industry. Hype cycle?
Aja Whitaker-Moore
I don’t know,
Michelle Manafy
Alright, we can do NFTs? [laughter]
Aja Whitaker-Moore
Well, we do have a newsletter that covers crypto and I think we do talk about that, you know, quite a bit. And NFTs have their place in the crypto world.
Unknown Speaker 15:48
Oh ho ho. No, it doesn’t have to be NF T’s. Metaverse can do another one. You guys bullish?
Aja Whitaker-Moore
I mean, I think the Metaverse is interesting. If you think about it from the standpoint of like, we’re just building it now. You know, we don’t actually know what it’s going to be.
Michelle Manafy
Is it going to be the Facebook-averse. Is that? Or is it going to be an open platform?
Aja Whitaker-Moore
I guess it depends on who you ask.
Michelle Manafy
We’re not going to ask Mark. Apparently, he didn’t want to talk to us about this.
Nicole Carroll
Which is weird. So weird. I mean, I think we just have to keep moving forward. Like I said at the beginning in all these spaces, and here’s the cool thing, we get to invent them, right? We get to say what they’re gonna be. So that’s awesome. We’re like, you know, I know, there’s a lot of stress in media right now. But I’m really excited about where we’re at right now in media, we’re, we get to invent the future. And that’s pretty cool.
Michelle Manafy
All right. The very last thing: leadership, like if you are looking out into the industry, and you want to just impart one piece of wisdom about leading an innovative team, no pressure. Aja: pressure.
Aja Whitaker-Moore
I mean, I think it’s really just about having a culture of activation and being able to experiment with an idea and nurture it from experiment, you know, to fruition. I think we do that, you know, every day at Axios. And really, every day in media. Every day, we’re writing a story. It’s like, you know, where’s this going to take us at? Where’s this gonna go? And just continuing, you know, to do that?
Michelle Manafy
I love that.
Nicole Carroll
Yeah. I think it’s all about the people. No matter what you do, you’ve got to create the culture. You’ve got to believe in people you’ve got to have, I think I call realistic optimism. We are in a tough world. But you realistically have to think “we can do these things.” And you have to impart that to people. You have to have a culture of “yes, let’s try it.” What can you do? What can you do in a month? What can you do in two months? We have to keep moving forward.
Michelle Manafy
Love it. Well, thank you both. I sincerely appreciate this. It was a great conversation and went to fast.
