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Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of November 14, 2019

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Advertising | Perspectives

Let’s celebrate the decline of the third-party cookie

The “death” of the third-party cookie is a popular narrative shaping the advertising industry today. But while the usual story is one of doom and gloom for publishers the reality is altogether more positive. This is a headline we should celebrate. 

Consider this: For more than a decade, third-party providers have aggregated publisher data, packaged it and sold it to advertisers. This revenue should – and will – be reclaimed by publishers in the months to come. 

Today, third-party cookies are at the heart of the digital advertising economy, which is built on data. Programmatic has enabled advertising to be transacted based on rich granular user data and is now used to fuel 85% of all digital advertising. 

The promise for advertisers is that they can hyper-target their perfect audience. It’s little wonder the third-party data market is now worth $19bn in the US alone. 

A privacy-first world

However, it’s an unsustainable model, and one that is already breaking. Browsers and regulators are enforcing privacy restrictions that will change the very foundations of the internet. Tomorrow’s web is moving to a privacy-first model, where third-party cookies are no longer available for advertising. There are also legal implications for businesses that do not comply with consumer data rights. 

Take both Firefox and Safari, which this year has made significant changes to their browsers including the routine blocking of third-party cookies. To media buyers, these users are invisible. They cannot be served targeted advertising. With the two browsers controlling up to 40% of overall traffic to publisher sites, it’s easy to see why the doomsday headlines are coming in thick and fast. 

Yet there is another way. One in which publishers which change their business models can survive and even thrive in a world without third-party cookies.

Be prepared 

Currently, publishers are in two camps. They’re either ignoring the coming cookie-apocalypse, hoping that industry ID solutions will be their salvation – or they’re being proactive, rebuilding their businesses around first-party data instead. Let’s take a look at what it takes to be proactive.

Instead of putting their destiny in yet another external company’s hands, every publisher should see this new world as an opportunity, in which they are the primary, and indeed only, online advertising data supplier. Let’s call it the data 2.0 opportunity. 

Unlike third parties, publishers have the technical and legal right to process user data. That’s because they have a direct relationship with consumers. This opens the door to a huge $19bn opportunity for publishers, in the US alone. As third-party data disappears, advertisers will look to publishers to access targeted audiences. Below is some advice for publishers to succeed and take advantage.

Own your own data

The relationship that a publisher has with its audience via subscriptions and behavioral data is becoming much more valuable. But publishers must  shift their mindset and stop needlessly giving away their data. They must protect their advertising revenue by building a first-party data strategy to reduce their reliance on third-party cookies. 

Understand your users 

Third-parties have spent over ten years building and telling audience “stories”. Want to find a sports enthusiast? They could once build you an entire back story about these users, and allow you to target them all over the web. Not anymore, thanks to Safari and Firefox. By using third-party data today, advertisers have no differentiation between a CNN.com, and a NYTimes.com sports enthusiastic and have significant challenges with scale. Luckily, publishers are in a great position to start building their own audience “stories” with rich first party data, not relying on third-party data to do this work for them.

The best place for an advertiser to find and understand a sports enthusiast is directly from a relevant publisher. 

Educate your sales teams

Adapting to a first-party data strategy requires expertise in an area that some publishers may be neglecting. It requires marketing their strengths and repositioning their offering to media buyers. They will need new skills that mirror what adtech companies have been doing so well over the last ten years. If you prepare your sales force to sell with accurate first-party data, you will eliminate any gaps between audience creation and how this data is sold in the market.

Privacy-first = on-device

Chrome, Apple, Brave, and many other tech companies have recently discussed moving data-processing to the device, using ‘edge computing’. They suggest that in order to better protect user privacy, the amount of data leaving a device should be limited. As soon as any user data leaves the device (and is sent to the cloud), a user’s privacy is at risk of breach by a third-party.

It is critical to keep data on-device in the data 2.0 world because your method of processing data is scrutinized.

First-party audiences

There has been a lot of press recently about the rise of context. Instead of relying on profiling individual users, Advertisers are increasingly looking to leverage the context around what a user is reading and their behavior on-site as a replacement of third-party data. 

As third-party cookies decline publishers hold the richest data sets on the web. We support initiatives like IAB Data Labels which begins to explore a common taxonomy around audiences, and not cookies. An advertiser can find their audience in a unified way. 

There is a better way

A recent study showed that publishers stand to lose around 52% of their revenue if Chrome also restricts third-party cookies. This should be a wake-up call to publishers to act now.

The proposed solution is not theoretical. This year we have seen publishers monetize their Safari traffic that lacks third-party cookies. Publisher Immediate Media has seen a 135% increase in revenue year-on-year, Stylist has doubled its advertising yield and Entrepreneur has recorded a 7.6x increase in targetable inventory which resulted in a dramatic boost in their revenue. 

Each is in control of their own destiny, unlocking audiences through their first-party data and monetizing it effectively – even when third-party cookies are unavailable. They are ready for the demise of the cookie. Are you?

About the author

Kristy Schafer works with publishers and top talent to grow US revenues for the industry’s only publisher-focused DMP. With deep expertise in advertising, data and analytics, Schafer spends the majority of her time understanding how changes in ad-tech, browser updates, and privacy impact publishers. She is helping to lead an evolution in the ad industry.

Innovation | Perspectives

How Disney+ and AppleTV+ are changing the OTT landscape

It’s a big month for streaming. The launch of Apple TV+ and Disney+ are finally upon us. So it’s a good time for an update on the state of the streaming wars. 

In this strange new world, tech companies like Apple are investing in content, and media companies like Disney are investing in technology. So how does? all this effort stack up? A closer look at the content and ad spend of these new OTT major players provides some insight into the future of streaming.

Content spending among new OTT services

At launch, Disney+ unsurprisingly boasts a sizable catalog of Disney-owned content. The company has also announced that $2.5 billion will be allocated to producing more original content for the platform over the next 5 years. 

Conversely, Apple has opted for a small but mighty catalog. At launch AppleTV+ was armed with considerable “star power” to entice subscribers. The platform will host entirely original content exclusively available to AppleTV+ subscribers. And pre-launch advertisements reveal some of the biggest names in acting and directing.

Although these two major players bring promising new content to the OTT lineup, they will have to continuously find ways to retain value in the eyes of consumers.  

Monthly subscriptions to the top seven streaming platforms will collectively cost $61. Consumers will more realistically pick and choose the platforms they actually want to pay for.  These leaves companies pitching both price point and content.  

Clearly, these numbers indicate that Disney and Apple are attempting to join the royalty of OTT, made up of existing streamers like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, which all have their own originally produced hits. With the launch of HBO Max in 2020, AT&T’s WarnerMedia may join the club soon. 

With content creation underway and platforms officially launched, OTT services can now shift focus to conveying value to win the favor of consumers, who have more options than ever before. And that is where marketing and advertising come in. What does advertising an OTT option in an already crowded space look like? 

Apple and Disney spend big ahead of streaming launch

For now, let’s look at the two headline makers: AppleTV+ and Disney+. 

Here at MediaRadar, we found that both platforms only started running ads in late August. AppleTV+ quickly overtook not only Disney+’s ad spend, but the entire streaming space. In the month of September, AppleTV+ was the top ad spender out of all streaming platforms. This includes established players like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video.

To date, Apple TV+ has outspent Disney+ five times over on paid media. What’s more, AppleTV+ has not slowed their efforts now that the platform has launched. Ten days into November, AppleTV+ is on pace to once again be the top ad buyer out of all the streaming platforms this month.

The two companies differ in strategy, as well. Disney has promoted its new streaming platform as a whole, using clips from owned content to pitch the breadth of the platform. While Apple has been promoting its original content in stand-alone spots. So far, it has focused ad spend around eight shows in particular.

AppleTV+ may be outspending Disney+ on paid media. However, that does not mean Disney’s marketing push has been insignificant in any way. In fact, Disney has been orchestrating a massive marketing push using all of their various channels. 

This push includes everything from on-air endorsements from Tom Bergeron (host of “Dancing With the Stars” on the Disney owned ABC network), to billboard and bus ads around Disney’s theme parks, to QR codes on lanyards worn by Disney’s 7,000+ retail workers at various Disney store locations. In one of the more interesting moves, Disney posted a video on YouTube titled “Basically Everything Coming to Disney+”, using snippets of movies available on the platform. The video was over 3 hours long.

On top of this, Disney has rolled out packaged deal after packaged deal thanks to its extensive holdings and powerful partnerships. For example: Verizon announced a year of free Disney+ for both new and existing customers, and more impressively Disney announced a $12.99 bundle with Disney+, ESPN and Hulu (both of which are majority-owned and controlled by house mouse). Visa card holders who have a Disney branded credit card can even lock in a discounted price for 2 or 3 years. Apple, for its part, is including a year subscription to Apple TV+ with the purchase of any Apple product. 

Apple is almost on the defensive in this new world, playing as a tech company against media giants like Disney. No one says the best movies come from Apple today. They have a real deficiency in terms of changing perception that they are a place where you should go to watch your content.

In a bid to make that case, Apple has spent $20 million advertising its two biggest shows ahead of the launch. 

In contrast, Disney’s robust offerings, combined with constant messaging across Disney properties, may immediately drive Disney+ to the top. “Think of Disney like a giant pinball machine, with content and initiatives pinging between divisions in an effort to drive up the ultimate score,” Gene Del Vecchio, a marketing professor at USC, told The New York Times. 

With all this activity from the new platforms, and platforms like HBO Max and Peacock yet to join the fray, the streaming wars are heating up. It will certainly be interesting to watch how these companies market themselves as they fight for subscribers who will have many providers to choose from.

Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of November 7, 2019

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Innovation | Perspectives

Why winning means the race is never done

Remember the success of the Gameboy? It’s been 30 years since the first version came out in 1989, and Nintendo waited five years before releasing the next iteration of the product, The Super Game Boy, in 1994. This is a far cry from the pace of output of today’s Fortnite, which creates new missions on a weekly basis. Earlier this month, the release of its latest season was followed in real time around the world. 

It’s the new speed of change. Facebook went from a Harvard-only site founded in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room to a million-member social network available on mobile phones within two years. The first Uber ride was given in San Francisco in 2010; by 2011, the company had launched its international presence in Paris. Instagram grew so quickly that it was bought by Facebook within two years of its release. 

The pace of innovation has exploded over the past few years and shows no signs of slowing down. And this is not just change for change’s sake. This acceleration is a response to customer, market, and technology changes, and it’s an exciting time for both consumers and product developers. 

Keeping up with customers

However, it also means that companies can no longer take half a decade to develop their next product. In a world of such rapid-fire change, customers have come to expect products that evolve and change along with them. This means that companies that want to stay ahead of the market not only have to move fast, but they also have to realize that the race is never over. For companies to stay relevant to their customers, they have to excel at, and embrace, rapid fire change. 

Amazon is the classic example of this. Over the course of 25 years, Jeff Bezos’s trillion-dollar company evolved from being a bookstore for Seattle residents housed in a garage to our go-to online retailer and the producer of some of our most popular entertainment content. Bezos’s success lies in a certain kind of humility. He has a constant willingness to tweak his business model. He has not allowed any one path, design, product or program to be sacred. Instead, he listens to his customers and excels at creating the changes they crave, which in turn creates better business outcomes for Amazon.

Gaming the system

Back to Fortnite. Part of the reason players find Fortnite so addictive is because it renews itself a few times a year. Each new update is called a “season” and introduces a new map and new items for players to use. We couldn’t have imagined these game-changing forms of advertising a few years ago. And they only exist because the developers behind Fortnite are constantly looking for new ways to enhance the user experience. They find ways to push the boundaries of what players expect and redefine what “gaming” means. 

Other tech innovators have embraced similar tactics. Netflix and Spotify, for instance, not only keep users hooked by updating their content libraries regularly, but also by generating their own content, like original shows and playlists. Delivery apps like Grubhub and Postmates keep their eye out for new restaurants to ensure that customers have access to the food they want when they want it. Apple’s ongoing revisions ensure that we buy a new iPhone every few years to keep up. Harris Teeter allows customers to shop for groceries, place catering orders and reorder prescriptions on their mobile app. 

Change your mindset

So what does this mean for your company? It means you have to adopt The Product Mindset, with change becoming an integral part of the way your company operates. The most successful companies don’t fund research and development on a case-by-case basis. They incorporate it into their annual and monthly budgets, the same way they budget for sales or HR. That way, when a competitor releases a new model, or when research reveals unexpected consumer needs, a company is ready to respond. Its teams don’t need to wait for endless approvals or push forward on obsolete or ineffective initiatives. 

At first, this might sound overwhelming, even exhausting. We’re wired to appreciate certainty and clarity. If the product is never done, instability and change become the new normal. But with that instability and change comes opportunity – the opportunity to deliver on consumer desires more rapidly and effectively than ever before. And the good news is that any company, no matter its size or industry, can embrace this approach. All it takes is the humility to accept that there’s always room for improvement and the courage to chase that improvement, wherever it might lead.

About the author

David DeWolf is founder and CEO of 3Pillar Global and the author of the new book The Product Mindset: Succeed in the Digital Economy by Changing the Way Your Organization Thinks. 

Featured Post | Perspectives | Policy

TikTok: How China concerns highlight the lack of US leadership on data

Last week, US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) sent a letter to the Director of National Intelligence to request an assessment of the national security risks posed by TikTok. As you may know, TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is based in Beijing. With TikTok’s popularity surging worldwide, the Senators expressed concerns about the Chinese Communist government’s ability to access consumer data collected by TikTok, censor speech, or even influence elections.

Of course, these concerns are not new. In the past, other policymakers have expressed similar concerns about the Chinese government when there is news about a US company operating in the Chinese market. Recently, Apple and Google among others were criticized for removing apps from their app stores that the Chinese government did not like.

A unified front

Chinese censorship has long been an issue that runs contrary to American beliefs and policy. Across the board, American policymakers agree that free speech is an important principle that should be protected. And this political consensus informs our stance with regard to China. There are questions about the best way to strategically engage with China, but there is no question that America supports the right of people to protest and speak freely.

The Chinese government has also been heavy handed with its use of data for surveillance as well as to monitor public (and private) sentiment. Though it has GDPR-like data regulation, what companies can do and what the government can do under Chinese law are quite different. This becomes a more complicated issue for the U.S. as we lack a federal standard or consensus for what constitutes ethical use or reasonable protection of consumer data by corporate entities or the government.

In 2018, Europe began to enforce the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which provides a framework for the proper collection and use of consumer data. And, in the last year, a handful of states (California most prominently) have adopted consumer privacy laws. For years, individual states have maintained separate and different data security and breach notification requirements. However, federal policymakers remain divided over a national standard for how consumer data should be protected, collected and used. This lack of consensus hinders America’s ability to lead the global conversation about data. And it certainly prevents our ability to take a unified stance on China’s data policies.

Competitive behavior

This year, we have seen multiple investigations opened into the anticompetitive behavior of Google and Facebook. Some have argued against breaking up Facebook and Google because these two companies need to be big enough to compete with China. For me, that argument runs counter to the core American values of democracy and capitalism. Ignore for the moment that monopolies (or duopolies in this case) tend to grow stagnant and stifle innovation. Our answer to China shouldn’t be “let’s be more like China!” Rather, we should be focused on enabling a fair marketplace where small and large businesses can compete, where consumers are protected and empowered, and where ideas and speech are protected.

DCN has long supported the passage of a federal standard for data security and breach notifications and a comprehensive consumer privacy law. Having a single national standard for the protection and use of consumer data would benefit consumers, who currently have no or different laws that apply. It would also benefit businesses, which would prefer to avoid having to comply with multiple and sometimes conflicting state laws.

Now, we have one more reason to unify our policy. A national standard on data security and use would get the US off the sidelines and enable American policymakers to lead the global conversation about data.

Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of October 31, 2019

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Perspectives

Marketers want to reach GenZ. Is TikTok the place to do it?

TikTok is the latest rage in social media, and there are some compelling reasons why it could emerge from fad status into a viable long term player. However, advertisers will be well-served by taking a measured approach to the platform. 

If you have a teenager at home, chances are good that you’ve become familiar with TikTok. It’s a highly-addictive social media video app for creating and sharing short (fewer than 60 seconds) videos, which is currently huge with Gen Zers. If you’re not familiar, a couple of examples will help: Here’s a video from Tom Brady, trolling himself to Whitesnake. And here’s one from the obligatory overnight social media sensation Maverick Baker, an 18 year old from Oklahoma who has an eye-popping 11 million followers. 

Big time

Launched in 2016, TikTok has half a billion global users. That makes it bigger than Reddit and Twitter, though half the size of Instagram and one-fifth of Facebook. But 500 million users in three years means it demands attention. It is also worth taking a look at its deep-pocketed owner, China’s ByteDance, which is valued at more than $50 billion and a key player in the country’s increasing app penetration in the U.S. 

At the same time, the social media landscape is littered with high-profile fatalities and crushing corrections. Think Google Plus, Vine, and Meerkat for the former, and MySpace and Tumblr for the latter. Either as the result of changing consumer preferences or being squeezed by the large established players, all of these platforms were either shuttered or pushed to the fringes of relevancy. So, while it is exciting to find an engaged audience on TikTok, it is essential for marketers to take an informed approach the platform.

Marketing that makes sense

Here’s how I’m advising brands to approach TikTok:

  • If The Gen Z Demographic Is Vital, You Have To Be There In A Meaningful Way: This means doing all of the things you’ve done with other social media platforms, even the ones that fell by the wayside. Define a strategy and goals, establish a presence, build an audience using both organic and paid media techniques, identify how other digital content can be repurposed on the platform, and figure out how to be successful as quickly as possible (which might require recruiting and sponsoring star power).
  • Assign The Platform To A Millenial. If you’re not a consumer products brand or one of the largest 100 advertisers, a more measured approach is the way to go, but formalization is key. Make TikTok account management and growth a part of someone’s job description,otherwise it won’t get done. Establish reasonable goals. Even 5 to 10 hours per week will be adequate to establish a beachhead in a few months and help you build a following (if you don’t already have a large social presence to build upon). 
  • At Minimum, Work The Platform Into Analytics & Reporting. The old chicken-or-the-egg theory will apply here. (Are you not getting any TikTok activity because you’re not on the platform in a meaningful way?) However, pursuing the baseline step of incorporating TikTok into regularly viewed reports will keep it on your radar. Over time, this will help to inform strategies and tactics. But if you don’t have the information forced into the discussion via reporting, it’ll be forgotten in the sea of all of the other digital channels that you’re already worrying about. 

By nature, I’m a skeptic. And inevitably this informs the way I think about how to approach new developments in the digital marketing industry — whether it be the so-called latest and greatest advertising tool from Facebook or Google, or the emergence of a brand new platform that seemingly popped up overnight. Given its numbers and parentage, TikTok deserves marketer attention. But given that many brands are still learning how to maximize performance in well-established digital channels, it makes sense for most of us to tread carefully on TikTok.   

About the author

Tim Bourgeois is a marketing advisor who helps brands optimize ROI on advertising, technology and agency investments through digital marketing audits and strategy engagements. 

Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of October 24, 2019

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives

Ad effectiveness measurement doesn’t scale, and it’s failing advertisers

Market research is big business: The top 50 research firms generated an estimated $11 billion dollars in 2018, with Nielsen and Kantar/MillwardBrown at the very top of the list. But it’s even bigger than that. Adding in expenditures to the other third-party providers that measure fraud, safety, viewability, and outcomes, and any national “ad measurement expenditure” figure increases by hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.

Given the US spend on measurement, not to mention how many digital innovations have taken root over the past two decades, it is disappointing to know that most branding campaigns are still not directly measured for ad effectiveness and impact in real time. This is not to say that monitoring for fraud and brand safety, evaluating viewability, tracking impressions, and counting clicks aren’t valuable efforts. They are. The issue is that while all brand advertising campaigns are measured for their quantitative impression delivery, only a fraction are measured for their effectiveness at changing consumers’ hearts and minds. The result? Measurement that doesn’t scale.

Rethink the panel

Here’s a modest proposal: We need to critically reconsider our industry-wide reliance on panel-based sampling as a means of measuring brand lift. Conventional lift studies that use panels are expensive, typically do not collect enough data. Thus, they aren’t informative enough early on in the campaign flight to be highly actionable. With access to real-time technologies, we can leverage considerably better alternatives.

Let’s look at the cost and examine whether we’re really getting our money’s worth. It is unheard of to purchase a completed survey from a sample vendor for less than $2 per interview. And we’d need to collect 500 control and 1000 exposed survey observations, which enables researchers to address different types of error while still empowering them to slice and dice the data. So, this would cost ~$3,000 per study. The reality, however, is that most brand lift studies cost magnitudes more. And yet responses are still very slow to field, and collection levels typically hover at 100 control and 100 exposed.

Some issues

Collection cost, yield, and timeliness aren’t the only barriers to progressing sample-based effectiveness measurement. Actually, representative sampling and quality can be even thornier issues. Surveys have a big problem with straightliners (people who select the same response option at each question), speeders (who take the survey too fast to be credible), and cheaters (who do not respond truthfully). You’ve probably done this yourself, but you can’t be faulted, as “good” panel-based surveys take ~8 minutes to complete. However, most sample providers don’t even blink when asked to fulfill 20-minute studies or longer. Considering the challenges of holding consumer attention these days, if you were in the 7th minute of a survey about the Gap, what type of quality response would you likely to provide?   

Quality control concerns are bigger still when you ask the question: Who are these “panelists”? Do you personally belong to a panel? Did you click a banner ad to “get paid mad cash to take online surveys”?

The reality is that even though the “best” panels market their pools as containing millions of Americans, there is very little transparency around these and who actually participates in them. Given the cash approach to attracting panelists, it feels fair to question their practices and how representative these panels are of the populations they aim to mirror. How panels engage, recruit and incentivize respondents matters, as it is highly likely to affect data quality and the resulting inferences.

Measurement matters

When academics contribute to the scholarly literature around ad effectiveness measurement, convenience sampling from panels is rarely, if ever, portrayed as a best practice. A 2006 comScore study in the US concluded that fewer than 1% of panelists in the 10 largest panels were responsible for 34% of completed questionnaires.

Things haven’t necessarily gotten better since. Most sample providers today cannot use a single panel to field a study. That’s because the findings aren’t sufficient. Instead, they stitch together a network of suppliers to source respondents. This introduces serious sampling challenges.

Moreover, in the last few years sample suppliers have energetically embraced programmatic technology. This means that while sourcing sample is more efficiently connected to demand than ever, the promise of randomness is critically upended by the economic benefit of finding the cheapest possible respondent to answer your brand study.

Explore the alternatives

In short, there are many issues with panel-based ad effectiveness measurement that should compel us to explore better alternatives. Thanks to digital technology, these alternatives exist. While it might sound surprising, the next generation of brand lift measurement should consider returning to the tradition of random sampling. It is time to reinvest in sampling technology that enables respondents to be drawn from audiences that are truly representative of the populations exposed to brand advertising campaigns and of those who could have been exposed (control holdouts).

Imagine if large random samples could be drawn quickly from the very same sites, channels, devices, and platforms where advertising occurs. So, if a Toyota campaign runs while streaming an episode of the Bachelor, the surveys used to measure and optimize this campaign also run during episodes of the Bachelor.

Here are some ideas to make measurement better:

  • Make survey placements match the placements where the ad campaign is flighted.
  • Surveys should be served according to the same logic and targeting that steers towards a specific addressable campaign audience.
  • Surveying should be completed with one or two questions by dual-purposing the very same ad and targeting tech that underlies how we serve ad campaigns today.

Just imagine how much better measurement would be if survey serving spoke to ad serving in real time.

Yes, we can advertise better. We can also measure better.

Audiences | Industry-Research | Perspectives

Mobile aggregators: The opportunity for referral traffic we’re not talking about

Referral traffic to content has risen in recent years due in part to a largely unknown channel — mobile-first aggregators. Here’s what we know about mobile aggregators, why they matter, and importantly, their growing influence over reader traffic.

What is the mobile aggregators story?

Mobile-first aggregators present a growth story — the referral traffic they send to publishers has doubled in the past two years. A significant portion of this growth is driven by Google Chrome Suggestions and Google News, which each grew more than 50% this year (and drives significantly larger shares of referral traffic than Twitter).

The field of global mobile aggregators is also growing. Tokyo-based SmartNews and China-based news aggregator TopBuzz have shown rapid expansion, driving an increasing amount of traffic to sites. More importantly, their growth has changed the traffic landscape. Smartnews and TopBuzz are both now sending as much traffic as Yahoo.

Why content creators should pay attention to mobile aggregators

Digital-first organizations are still in the early stages of understanding the primary drivers of subscriptions. However, effective strategies rely on identifying the behaviors content creators can (and want to) encourage that will ultimately lead to more reader revenue.

From our research thus far, publishers have had far  less success in converting readers from mobile-first aggregators compared to more traditional channels such as email. Connecting the dots is crucial.

Therefore, a deeper understanding of mobile-first aggregators can open up a whole new level of engagement, and by extension, a new reader revenue channel.

Next steps: Demystifying mobile aggregators

Based on what we currently know about mobile aggregators, here’s what content creators  should keep in mind:

Strategize around these new mobile referral sources

Overall, we see the mobile-first aggregators as more of a missed opportunity than an unsolvable problem. We believe content creators can take advantage of this mostly untapped source of traffic by understanding their unique impact and optimizing content accordingly.

Audience development tactics are needed

For too long, mobile-first aggregators have been categorized as a subset of the larger platforms (i.e., Google search) we know well. However, we believe they should be seen as their own channel, which would get publishers closer to segmenting (and therefore optimizing) key drivers of traffic.

It’s all about attribution

Segmentation of traffic leads to better attribution. The ability to uncover mobile aggregator-specific patterns and better track their impact. Moreover, it can clear the path towards leveraging the channel for higher engagement, loyalty, and conversions.

Our data shows that the growth of mobile-first aggregators has significantly upended the traffic source landscape. Publishers would be remiss to take this shift lightly, as they may be missing out on a major source of referral traffic in the long-term.

This also coincides with a trend we’ve long seen — the fact that mobile-first readers are demanding better experiences. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that aggregators have become this increasingly influential source of traffic.

Advertising | Featured Post | Perspectives | Revenue

Local news: Forget national metrics and focus on your strengths

Regional papers depend on building communities based on geography. But younger people prioritize interest-based communities. So, how can local and regional papers build new relationships with digital natives?

At the latest World News Media Congress in Glasgow, the publisher of The Globe and Mail Philip Crawley spoke about the unsurpassed value of an engaged local audience. He argued that—while digital engagement metrics provide invaluable data about audience funnels and propensity to convert—there are metrics that are unique to regional media they consider just as important.

He used the example of the paper’s packed obituaries pages to illustrate how a local title can measure its tangible engagement with an audience through non-digital interactions. Ultimately, Crawley made it clear that the worth of a local title cannot be measured through ones and zeroes alone.

Regional titles have long been experts in measuring engagement. These metrics might be tallying attendance at events they organize, counting submissions to the letters pages, or by less concrete metrics like the willingness of the public to interact with their journalists.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily translate to sustainability, even for publishers that have the same drive to reinvest in news products. Whether it’s due to quirks of geography, unpredictable societal differences, or for any number of reasons, local news publishers have been hurting. Investment in the print product is no guaranteed panacea either.

The key issue for many is that they have struggled to find ways in which digital products can serve as a focus for local engagement as print editions once did. Another factor is the often top-down approach from regional publishers who try to use national-level engagement metrics for their regional titles. Crucially, they largely miss those specialist ‘obituary pages’ engagement measurements that are an indication that audiences are invested in a community with a news brand at its center.

What does local engagement look like?

The race, then, is for local titles to discover what local engagement looks like in the platform age before their business models become unsustainable. To the industry’s great credit, it has been quick to launch research projects designed specifically around that.

One, the Community Listening and Engagement Fund (CLEF), was co-founded by a group that includes the Knight Foundation and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism. The goal of this initiative is to develop tools that measure that engagement (as opposed to the many approaches around finding funding or cost-savings).

Meanwhile, Poynter launched the Table Stakes initiative, which focuses on diversifying revenue for local newspaper, public radio, or digital news organizations. And the recently announced Project Neon is explicitly focused on finding ways to intensify audiences’ engagement with regional publisher Archant’s titles. We can look forward to seeing useful findings from these efforts in a few years’ time.

Investment in an uncertain future

Those efforts are welcome—and exactly what the industry should be doing. The unfortunate reality, however, is that while regional publishers have the expertise and history of engaging regional audiences in print, digitally they are playing catch-up. This is particularly significant given their need connect with younger audiences—and from something of a standing start.

This is not a consequence of a lack of effort in engaging audiences. In fact, there has been plenty of excellent work done to discover how young audiences interact with news digitally. However, that hasn’t always helped local publishers build engagement with young people.

For instance, Research from Flamingo on behalf of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism demonstrates that, as a result of having grown up with ready access to the internet, younger readers do not necessarily share the same values or expectations about the purpose of news:

“They still need and want news to connect their world to the world – and fulfil an array of different social and personal needs – but they don’t necessarily see the traditional media as the best or only way to do that… They don’t need to seek it out, news comes to them.” As a result, the reality of engaging young audiences is that it is much harder to build a community around a geographical rather than an interest-based niche.

The Flamingo study also found that no news app was in the top 25 most-used app in their respondents’ phones. This implies that local publishers must have a presence on social platforms to reach those young audiences on which they are increasingly going to rely.

To make matters more difficult, social platforms do not typically offer user data or tools that are of value to local publishers. (Although Facebook’s most recent endeavor in this area is reportedly better in this respect than past attempts). Local publishers are stuck between a rock and a hard place, then, trying to build communities on platforms that don’t necessarily cater to them.

In an excellent thread on Twitter, The Los Angeles Times’ engagement editor Adriana Lacy argued that publishers having a presence on even the recently-launched platforms like TikTok will eventually help with that engagement issue. However, she also notes it might take precious time – something local publishers particularly are often short of – to see any real return.

Part of the solution

Local and regional titles have always relied on creating a community out of their local readers. Efforts like comments sections on pages are useful for eyeballing the levels of community engagement, but without a print title to provide those ‘obituary metrics’, and with younger audiences increasingly finding ‘news’ content through platforms and intermediaries, regional publishers have struggled to demonstrate they have the heart and trust of a community.

One potential solution is for regional publishers to double down on what the BBC World Service Group’s head of editorial partnerships Emily Kasriel has termed ‘Solutions-focused Journalism.’ As Kasriel put it:

“Another factor driving our SFJ initiative is the desire to better serve our audiences, particularly young people. According to recent BBC Audience Research, 51% of 16-18 year olds and 47% of 19-24 year olds in the UK ‘agree or strongly agree’ that they want news to also provide solutions. The figures were even higher in the developing world: 75% of Indians, 78% of Nigerians and 82% of Kenyans of all ages want their news to provide solutions and not just problems.”

Solutions-focused journalism, centered around local areas, are potentially how publishers can marry the interest-based communities of the internet to the local areas they cover. Here, they can happily use those platforms on which they have established themselves as both a place for discussion and to provide calls for action around those proactive, solutions-based causes they are championing. The UK’s Pink News, though an interest-based title, grew to be the largest LGBTQ+ publisher in the world as a result of its campaigning journalism, for instance.

In the city of Hull in the UK, that focus on providing solutions journalism appears to be bearing fruit for one regional digital publisher, for instance. Journalism.co.uk reports: “Constructive journalism project Hull Is This launched in November 2018 with early promise, reaching 37k hits in its debut month and 45k in January 2019. While page views alone are not always the best metric for measuring the success of editorial content, it does at least suggest demand for local, positive stories.”

Similarly, the Yorkshire Post’s high levels of trust in the community have been attributed in part to its campaigning journalism around loneliness in the region.

So, while there may not be a direct digital successor to the ‘obituary metrics’ that demonstrated there was a community around local print titles quite yet, it isn’t to say that it is impossible to recreate those communities in the age of platforms. Instead, it could be that regional publishers will find a new path by shifting from being passive but present in the community to a much more pro-active and campaigning force around which a new, younger community will form.

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