For years, June’s Pride Month has been a beacon for brands to demonstrate their support for the LGBTQA+ community, often translating into vibrant advertising campaigns across various media outlets focused on these demographics. Historically, these initiatives have served as a celebration of diversity and inclusivity. They’ve also provided a lucrative opportunity for LGBTQA+-themed publishers who saw significant increases in advertising spend during this period.
However, recent trends indicated a significant shift in Pride Month advertising. Brands have increasingly and unfortunately retreated from public LGBTQA+ supportive ad campaigns, influenced by last year’s Bud Light backlash and growing anti-LGBTQA+ legislation. This pullback did not just take the form of a reduction in rainbow-themed products but was deeply reflected in advertising spend. Major players like Target and Starbucks scaled back their Pride-themed offerings and the ripple effect dampened the financial outlook for LGBTQA+-focused advertising this past Pride Month.
Trend analysis: beyond pride month
This retreat hasn’t been confined to June alone. While our data for this period is still pending – a more comprehensive analysis will be available by mid-July – we analyzed advertising spend across 18 LGBTQA+-themed media outlets including national TV, print publications, and online channels, revealing a broader trend that predates Pride Month. In the first four months of 2024 alone, there was a noticeable decrease in advertising commitment. Here’s a detailed data breakdown:
2023 overview
In 2023, the landscape appeared strong, with more than $63 million spent on advertising across selected LGBTQA+ media outlets, marking a 38% increase from the $45.5 million recorded in 2022. Top advertisers such as pharmaceutical brands Biktarby, Spravato, Dovato, Cabenuva, and Apretude significantly contributed, each investing more than $1.8 million.
Early 2024 trends
The momentum shifted in 2024. From January to April, these outlets witnessed a fairly massive 10% decrease in advertising spend compared to the same period in 2023, with $17.9 million spent down from $19.9 million. However, this still represented a 40% increase from the $12.8 million noted between January and April of 2022. Yes, this is better than 2022. But the numbers suggest a volatile advertising environment for these publishers.
Notable declines
Prominent advertisers like Spravato, My Pillow (surprise!), Vitamin Water, and Harlem (an Amazon Prime Video series) slashed budgets almost entirely. This contributed to a collective $2.2 million drop year-over-year. Similarly, Cabenuva and Virgin Voyages cut expenditures by at least 60%, tallying up to a $929K reduction.
Impact on LGBTQA+ publishers
This decrease in advertising spend could be dire for LGBTQA+-focused media outlets that rely on these revenues. These publishers undoubtedly faced a tough loss this year. As brands retreat, the onus falls on LGBTQA+-focused publishers to find new ways to attract and retain advertisers, ensuring they can continue to serve their audiences effectively.
A strategic reassessment
For brands and advertisers, this LGBTQA+ advertising pullback calls for a strategic reassessment. It is crucial to recognize that while immediate reactions to socio-political pressures might seem necessary, they can also undermine long-term brand loyalty and consumer trust, especially within the LGBTQA+ community.
To navigate this complex landscape, brands should consider more sustainable and genuine engagement strategies that extend beyond the confines of Pride Month. This could involve year-round support through consistent representation in advertising, sponsorship of LGBTQA+ events, and partnerships with LGBTQA+ organizations. By integrating inclusivity into the core of their brand ethos, advertisers can build deeper, more authentic connections with their entire customer base.
The road ahead
These advertising insights underscore a cautious approach taken by brands, reflecting a broader hesitation across industries to engage in what has become a politically-charged atmosphere. For LGBTQA+-focused publishers, the challenge will be to navigate this new landscape where traditional peaks in advertising spend are no longer guaranteed. Depending on the 2024 election, we could see even more volatility.
Publishers in this space must now innovate and perhaps look to diversify their brand customer base. With Pride Month shouldering less of the annual revenue, it may be helpful to consider higher impact media types like video and native advertising to help mitigate losses. Above all, media companies should focus on fostering year-round partnerships with brands willing to commit to diversity, equity and inclusion, regardless of the prevailing political climate.
This data not only sheds light on the challenges facing LGBTQA+-focused publishers but also signals a conservative shift across the entire brand landscape, especially during an election year. Heightened scrutiny and polarization have made advertisers more cautious about brand safety– focusing on where and how their ads are displayed. Publishers that provide content with universally appealing themes, such as family, lifestyle, and travel could attract more advertisers, as a result.
Regardless of how many times Google delays its cookie phase out, publishers need to understand what’s at stake for them in the advertising ecosystem post third-party cookies. Media companies also need to be aware of the various data operations strategies then can experiment with to position themselves for success as first-party data moves to the fore.
ArcSpan Technologies analyzed the extent to which the looming deprecation of third-party cookies in digital advertising requires publishers to revamp their audience data operations in order to maintain and grow their sales results. Through quantifying the expected data monetization disruption that digital media companies face over the coming 12-18 months, we found that there are proactive solutions that offer ways publishers can mitigate material revenue losses.
Publisher revenue impact
What’s at stake for media companies
CPMs on Google Chrome will decrease 42%: Based on the value of programmatic advertising over the past eight months based on the presence of third-party cookies (“3PC”) across browsers.
Google Chrome 3PC deprecation puts 25% of publisher’s total revenue at risk: The impact of a 42% decrease in Google Chrome CPMs translates to a 25% overall revenue loss for median publishers in the study.
ArcSpan’s study to measure the impact of cookie deprecation
To measure the potential impact of impending third-party cookie deprecation, ArcSpan analyzed data across a number of top-tier and mid-tier publishers. By dissecting publisher revenue according to channel, browser and cookie presence, we were able to identify the portion of revenue most vulnerable to cookie deprecation.
The analysis looked at the revenue distribution between Direct Sold and Programmatic channels, of which Programmatic is expected to experience the most pronounced revenue impact. ArcSpan observed an average distribution of 20% of revenue stemming from Direct Sales, while 80% was sourced through the programmatic channel.
Next, we analyzed the percent of programmatic impressions and revenue in which third party cookies were present. While these impressions comprised 68% of total programmatic impressions, they accounted for 80% of programmatic revenue. Finally, we isolated the revenue attributable to Chrome browsers in which third-party cookies were present.
CPM decrease with no third-party cookies present
Among the publishers analyzed, a median of 60% percent of total revenue was associated with programmatic impressions delivered via the Chrome browser where third-party cookies were present. This portion of revenue will thus be the most impacted by CPM decreases in the event that third-party cookie deprecation occurs without viable and scalable alternatives.
The analysis further quantified the potential revenue impact by observing CPM differences based on whether third-party cookies were present or absent. According to our research, impressions lacking third-party cookies cleared at 42% lower CPMs. To summarize, ArcSpan identified a potential scenario in which 60% of publisher revenue could decrease by 42%, netting a 25% decrease in overall revenue.
Revenue risk grows to 35% amongst heaviest programmatic and Chrome-driven publishers
While a potential revenue decrease of 25% represents the median in our research, the range of outcomes can vary greatly across the publisher spectrum. ArcSpan highlighted a quartile of publishers who were most at-risk as a result of cookie deprecation. Publishers in this quartile tend to have greater than 95% of revenue sourced via programmatic, and greater than 85% of programmatic revenue coming from Chrome programmatic impressions with third party cookies. For this quartile of publishers, the total revenue at risk increased from 25% to 35%.
Advertising success without third party cookies
Leading media companies are developing strategies to both prepare for a future without third party cookies and mitigate potential revenue losses under those conditions. These strategies typically take the form of a portfolio management approach and upgrading publishers’ revenue operations tools with a focus on first-party data quality, accuracy and scale.
These options can support both direct and programmatic revenue:
First-party revenue best practices
Develop a first party data strategy: Publishers are creating compelling first-party audience segments by processing and organizing contextual, content consumption, engagement, and offline data signals. Publishers are also investing in collecting first party data from their users by offering on-site engagement tools such as surveys and polls, while more premium publishers have been able to acquire registered and even subscription users. They can then develop differentiated data product offerings to both earn data premiums and grow direct sales.
Participate in audience curation opportunities: In this scenario, publishers with and without a direct sales team can feed audiences into curated deals that meet the buy-side needs to target consistent audience definitions at scale across multiple publishers. By partnering with the right platforms, publishers can leverage A.I. and machine learning to automate site content and data processing to create scalable audiences with accuracy and consistency.
Establish an identity framework: Testing different identifiers to determine open auction uplift is critical for publishers. There needs to be a consistent approach to onboard alternative identifiers and measure their incremental impact in programmatic transactions under different scenarios (type of browser, SSP, etc).
Incorporate first-party data signals in the bid stream:While still evolving offerings like Google PPS and Prebid SDA offer an opportunity to push high quality data signals into the bid request and potentially positively influence bidding behavior.
Explore dynamic flooring: Publishers can leverage machine learning in conjunction with their proprietary data signals to optimize programmatic auction prices.
These options have different degrees of impact and different levels of effort to implement. But as a portfolio, they will help drive incremental revenue in a changing environment.
Although Google has (repeatedly) delayed the timeline for Chrome third-party cookie deprecation, leading publishers are keenly aware that they cannot become complacent. ArcSpan’s research highlights the revenue at stake in the event publishers are forced to accept the level of CPMs that are associated with cookieless impressions today. Regardless of a publisher’s level of readiness, it is important that they identify tools and platforms that can comprehensively address the portfolio of strategies that will enable them to protect and grow their revenue.
Last month, I co-led a week-long journalism program during which we visited 16 newsrooms, media outlets and tech companies in New York. This study tour provided an in-depth snapshot of the biggest issues facing the media today and offered insights into some of the potential solutions publishers are exploring to address them.
We met with everyone from traditional media players – like The New York Times, Associated Press, CBS and Hearst – to digital providers such as Complex Media and ProPublica, as well as conversations with academics and policy experts. Based upon these visits and conversations, here are four key takeaways about the state of media and content publishing today.
1. Hands-on AI experience matters
Not surprisingly, AI dominated many conversations. Although recent research shows the American public is both skeptical and surprisingly unaware of these tools, the emergence of Generative AI – and the discussions around it – are impossible to ignore.
One mantra oft repeated throughout the week was that everyone in the media will need to be conversant with AI. Despite this, research has shown that many newsrooms are hesitant about adopting these technologies. Others, however, are taking a more proactive approach. “I like playing offense, not defense, Aimee Rinehart, Senior Product Manager AI Strategy at the Associated Press, told us. “Figure out how the tools work and your limits.”
With many media companies having to do more with less, AI can help improve workflows, support labor-intensive work like investigative journalism, as well as streamline and diversify content creation and distribution. By harnessing these AI-powered functions, smaller outlets may benefit the most, given the efficiencies these resource-strapped players may be able to unlock.
Reporting on AI is also an emerging journalistic beat. This is an area more newsrooms are likely to invest in, given AI’s potential to radically reshape our lives. As Hilke Schellmann, an Emmy‑award winning investigative reporter and journalism professor at NYU, told us “we used to hold powerful people to account, now we have to add holding AI accountable.”
Echoing Schellmann’s sentiments, “every journalist should be experimenting with AI,” one ProPublica journalist said. “We owe it to our audience to know what this is capable of.”
2. Demonstrating distinctiveness and value is imperative
One fear of an AI-driven world is that traffic to publishers will tank as Generative Search, and tools like ChatGPT, remove the need for users to visit the sites of creators and information providers. In that environment, distinctiveness, trustworthy and fresh content becomes more valuable than ever. “You need to produce journalism that gives people a reason to show up,” says Ryan Knutson, co-host of The Wall Street Journal’s daily news podcast, The Journal.
In response, publishers will need to demonstrate their expertise and unique voice. That means leaning more into service journalism, exclusives, and formats like explainers, analysis, newsletters, and podcasts.
Bloomberg’s John Authers, exemplifies this in his daily Points of Return newsletter. With more than three decades of experience covering markets and investments, he brings a longitudinal and distinctive human perspective to his reporting. Alongside this, scoops still matter, Authers suggests. After all, “journalism is about finding out something other people don’t know,” he says.
Media players also need to make a more effective case as to why original content needs to be supported and paid for. As Gaetane Michelle Lewis, SEO leader at the Associated Press, put it, “part of our job is communicating to the audience what we have and that you need it.”
For a non-profit like ProPublica that means demonstrating impact. They publish three impact reports a year, and their Annual Report highlights how their work has led to change at a time when “many newsrooms can no longer afford to take on this kind of deep-dive reporting.”
“Our North Star is the potential to make a positive change through impact,” Communications Director, Alexis Stephens, said. And she emphasized how “this form of journalism is critical to democracy.”
The New York Times’ business model is very different but its publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, has similarly advocated for the need for independent journalism. As he put it, “a fully informed society not only makes better decisions but operates with more trust, more empathy, and greater care.”
Given the competition from AI, streaming services, and other sources of attention, media outlets will increasingly need to advocate more forcefully for support through subscriptions, donations, sponsorships, and advertising. In doing this, they’ll need to address what sets them apart from the competition, and why this matters on a wider societal level.
“This is a perilous time for the free press,” Sulzberger told The New Yorker last year. “That reality should animate anyone who understands its central importance in a healthy democracy.”
3. Analytics and accessibility go hand in hand
Against this backdrop, finding and retaining audiences is more important than ever. However, keeping their attention is a major challenge. Data from Chartbeat revealed that half the audiences visiting outlets in their network stay on a site for fewer than 15 seconds.
This has multiple implications. From a revenue perspective, this may mean users aren’t on a page long enough for ad impressions to count. It also challenges outlets to look at how content is produced and presented.
In a world where media providers continue to emphasize growing reader revenues, getting audiences to dig deeper and stay for longer, is essential. “The longer someone reads, the more likely they are to return,” explained Chartbeat’s CMO Jill Nicolson.
There isn’t a magic wand to fix this. Tools for publishers to explore include compelling headlines, effective formats, layout, and linking strategies. Sometimes, Nicolson said, even small modifications can make all the difference.
These efforts don’t just apply to your website. They apply to every medium you use. Brendan Dunne of Complex Media referred to the need for “spicy titles” for episodes of their podcasts and YouTube videos. Julia D’Apolito, Associate Social Editor at Hearst Magazines, shared how their approach to content might be reversed. “We’ve been starting to do social-first projects… and then turning them into an article,” she said, rather than the other way round.
Staff at The New York Times also spoke about the potential for counter-programing. One way to combat news fatigue and avoidance is to shine a light on your non-news content. The success of NYT verticals such as Cooking, Wirecutter, and Games shows how diversifying content can create a more compelling and immersive proposition, making audiences return more often.
Lastly, language and tone matters. As one ProPublica journalist put it, “My editor always says pretend like you’re writing for Sesame Steet. Make things accurate, but simple.” Reflecting on their podcasts, Dunne also stresses the need for accessibility. “People want to feel like they’re part of a group chat, not a lecture,” he said.
Fundamentally, this also means being more audience-centric in the way that stories are approached and told. “Is the angle that’s interesting to us as editors the same as our audiences?” Nicolson asked us. Too often, the data would suggest, it is not.
4. Continued concern about the state of local news
Finally, the challenges faced by local news media, particularly newspapers, emerged in several discussions. Steven Waldman, the Founder and CEO of Rebuild Local News, reminded us that advertising revenue at local newspapers had dropped 82% in two decades. The issue is not “that the readers left the papers,” he said, “it’s that the advertisers did.”
For Waldman, the current crisis is an opportunity not just to “revive local news,” but also to “make better local news.” This means creating a more equitable landscape with content serving a wider range of audiences and making newsrooms more diverse. “Local news is a service profession,” he noted. “You’re serving the community, not the newsroom.”
According to new analysis, the number of partisan-funded outlets designed to appear like impartial news sources (so-called “pink slime” sites) now surpasses the number of genuine local daily newspapers in the USA. This significantly impacts the news and information communities receive, shaping their worldviews and decision-making.
Into this mix, AI is also rearing its ugly head. While it can be hugely beneficial for some media companies—“AI is the assistant I prayed for,” saysParis Brown, associate editor of The Baltimore Times. However, it can also be used to fuel misinformation, accelerating pink slime efforts.
“AI is supercharging lies,” one journalist at ProPublica told us, pointing to the emergence of “cheap fakes” alongside “deep fakes,” as content which can confirm existing biases. The absence of boots on the ground makes it harder for these efforts to be countered. Yet, as Hilke Schellmann, reminded us “in a world where we are going to be swimming in generative text, fact-checking is more important [than ever].”
This emerging battleground makes it all the more important for increased funding for local news. Legislative efforts, increased support from philanthropy, and other mechanisms can all play a role in helping grow and diversify this sector. Steven Waldman puts it plainly: “We have to solve the business model and the trust model at the same time,” he said.
All eyes on the future
The future of media is being written today, and our visit to New York provided a detailed insight into the principles and mindsets that will shape these next few chapters.
From the transformative potential of AI, to the urgent need to demonstrate distinctiveness and value, it is clear that sustainability has to be rooted in adaptability and innovation.
Using tools like AI and Analytics to inform decisions, while balancing this with a commitment to quality and community engagement is crucial. Media companies who fail to harness these technologies are likely to get left behind.
In an AI-driven world, more than ever, publishers need to stand out or risk fading away. Original content, unique voices, counter-programming, being “audience first,” and other strategies can all play a role in this. Simultaneously, media players must also actively advocate for why their original content needs to be funded and paid for.
Our week-long journey through the heart of New York’s media landscape challenged the narrative that news media and journalism are dying. It isn’t. It’s just evolving. And fast.
Publishers have faced intense headwinds in recent years when it comes to protecting and growing revenue streams. However, there are some equally powerful tailwinds that the industry needs to acknowledge and embrace to put publishers on a viable path forward. Perhaps the most significant one is predictive audiences.
Predictive audiences, supercharged by growing AI capabilities, offer publishers multiple paths to increased revenue. Even more importantly: sustainable revenue. Let’s explore why that is, and the ways in which publishers can incorporate these capabilities into their monetization plans.
A sustainable path within a landscape of crumbling identifiers
When Google announced its latest stay of execution for third-party cookies, some publishers breathed a(nother) sigh of relief. Third-party cookies have long been seen as an understood path to revenue thanks to their role in enabling cross-site ad targeting. However, this capability has been in decline for years. In fact, the reach and accuracy of third-party cookies has become increasingly limited.
Publishers don’t need a replacement for third-party cookies. They need something altogether better. And that’s where predictive audiences come in. By fueling growth based on the strength of a publisher’s first-party data, predictive audiences offer a path to revenue that’s both in a publisher’s control and can be strengthened over time.
The premise behind predictive audiences for publishers is fairly simple: By taking a publisher’s first-party data (i.e., everything the publisher knows about its audience), the publisher can build models capable of predicting likely behavior in current and potential new users. These predictions can be used to create better user experiences while simultaneously opening more and deeper monetization opportunities.
Here are a few areas where predictive audiences’s power to help publishers drive revenue has become most evident.
Growing ad dollars
For many publishers, the fastest path to revenue growth is to look beyond their sites to find additional high-value inventory for their advertisers. By using their audience data as seed data, publishers can leverage predictive audiences to identify users beyond their own walls who are likely to behave like their known audiences. Working with external partners, a publisher can make these models and their resulting segments available for advertisers on demand as an extension of their audience.
Growing Yield
Predictive audiences can also be leveraged to greatly help publishers make more from their inventory within their walls. By combining first-party data with contextual and engagement signals, publishers can fuel robust data models that predict which ads will perform best when served to a given audience. Such an approach tends to deliver far more relevant results than can be achieved with third-party data, enabling publishers to improve the yield on their inventory. Such models can also fuel ad personalization that drives better results for advertisers and higher premiums for publishers.
Growing Audience
Beyond direct revenue, publishers can also tap into predictive audiences to grow their user base. Such growth helps expand their first-party data assets and inventory, driving greater revenue downstream. The mechanisms for fueling audience growth are similar to those for driving more ad dollars: Publishers can model their data to help them predict the behavior of unknown users. By activating that data, they can drive interested audiences in hopes of converting them to loyal visitors.
A bright future paved with predictions
The ability of these predictive audience strategies to drive publisher revenue has a lot to do with the level of first-party data the individual publisher brings. Of course, not all publishers are on equal footing when it comes to first-party data assets. Some have been capturing and building their first-party data practices for years, enabling them to fuel strong predictive models and broader identity graphs that can reach across their properties. Others—publishers that have not invested nearly as heavily in their first-party disciplines—are looking for off-the-shelf solutions that can help them take advantage of predictive audiences’s power all the same.
The AI-driven future will favor publishers that prioritize robust first-party data practices, but the race is far from over. Regardless of where an individual publisher stands with its first-party data assets, there’s still time to build out the needed strategies that can fuel growth through predictive audiences. By doing so to capture the right data and signals to fuel the strongest models, publishers can chart a more sustainable (and monetizable) path forward.
In the age of artificial intelligence, it could be argued that the calculus of content is changing.
Since the advent of publishing metrics, the goal has always been more: more page views, clicks, keywords and SEO. And while AI can automate various aspects of content creation and production to save digital media companies time and resources, the convenience of the technology has also allowed for a firehose of low quality content to proliferate.
But, amid the sharp increase of these junk content farms, is there a new opportunity for quality journalism to quietly reclaim its place at the fore? It’s certainly on the minds of the leadership at The Atlantic.
In April, The Atlantic announced it had reached 1 million subscribers and become profitable, by investing in areas where the company had “fairly high confidence of good returns,” according to CEO Nicholas Thompson. The 167-year-old publication currently boasts financial stability and is well-positioned to think about where it is headed as it approaches its 200th birthday.
The Atlantic’s one-million milestone is just the foundation for further growth. In a recent memo to staff, Thompson and Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
“The key to continued success is to be constructively dissatisfied with the present, and so both of us believe very strongly that our 1 million subscriptions represent merely the foundation of future excellence and growth.”
Goldberg says that he would like The Atlantic to double, then quadruple its current size, saying the company needs to figure out how to reach larger audiences around the world. “I want to set a course as The Atlantic heads towards its bicentennial in 33 years. Now is the time for us to decide this is where we want The Atlantic to go and this is how we’re going to get there,” he said.
In terms of excellence, The Atlantic’s awards speak volumes to the quality of the journalism it produces. For the third year in a row, The Atlantic was awarded General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards. No one else has done that in this century, Goldberg remarks.
“So, we have the recognition of our industry that we’re doing something right, and I feel like this is the year when we need to really focus on: what are the next large steps we take?” Goldberg said. “Because we’re in a very good spot. But I don’t want to spend the next five years defending the hill that we’re on. I want to move to some other mountain entirely.”
And, that means not just defending their reputation for journalistic excellence, or growing iteratively. It means figuring out how to reach enormous audiences around the world – and getting a whole lot of them to subscribe.
Subscription strategy with an editorial focus
Prior to the pandemic, Atlantic Chair David Bradley and Laurene Powell Jobs decided they should move into the digital subscription space. They’d had a lot of success through scale – growing web traffic and advertising, Goldberg said. The company hired Alexandra Hardiman, (currently New York Times’ Chief Product Officer), as Chief Business & Product Officer in 2018-2019, to build The Atlantic’s digital subscription model.
“We launched basically six months before the pandemic started when advertising collapsed. And we did very well in those early months. There was a lot of demand,” Goldberg recalled.
The 2019 metered model offered three annual subscription plans for readers: digital, print and digital and a premium tier, which offered exclusive access to podcasts, product discounts and priority access to events among other perks. The Atlantic earned 300,000 new subscriptions in the 12 months that followed.
The following year, the pandemic impacted the publication’s in-person events and advertising, forcing layoffs of 17% of its staff, and losses in the millions.
Now, overall revenue is up more than 10% year over year. The company says advertising booked year-to-date is also up 33% year over year. And, subscriptions to The Atlantic have increased by double-digit percentages in each of the past four years. In fact, they’ve surged 14% in the past year alone.
By 2023, The Atlantic was back on the path to profitability. According to Axios, The Atlantic adjusted its paywall to be more flexible for subscribers and was working to add new revenue streams. Then, roughly 60% of its revenue came from subscriptions, which included print magazines and digital subscriptions through Apple News.
Flexible paywalls meet journalistic excellence
The strategy was to have the best, smartest, most dynamic, flexible subscription, acquisition and retention strategies, Goldberg said. “We’ve always believed that you can have the best systems in the world for acquiring people easily, but if you don’t have a quality product to sell them, they’re not going to come, they’re not going to stay.”
“We pivoted, I would say, to a total quality model on the web. We were doing good stuff on the web for years. We had a large team of young reporters doing news analysis and quick summaries and that sort of thing. But I’ve always believed that the aspect of The Atlantic that differentiated us from everyone else was a commitment to having the highest standards and producing the most complicated, interesting, aesthetically-pleasing, well-written journalism. I think that strategy has borne fruit,” Goldberg said.
The Atlantic focused on editorial excellence, publishing stories that exemplified depth and range and drove news cycles. It recruited high-profile writers including New York Times’ Jennifer Senior and Caitlin Dickerson, who won Pulitzers in 2022 for Feature Writing and Explanatory Journalism, respectively.
“My goal here is to build the greatest writers collective in the English language. We’re halfway there,” Goldberg said. “I don’t need the biggest one. I just need the best one. There are tremendous numbers of readers of English, who want access to our writers, and so as long as there’s an audience for quality journalism, quality non-fiction, we will be okay.”
Reaching new subscribers with newsletters
In addition to a flexible digital subscription strategy and editorial excellence, The Atlantic invested in new newsletters for subscribers in 2021, bringing nine newsletter writers into the fold. Newsletters help reach different audiences, build loyalty and repetition. And as Goldberg pointed out, The Atlantic is launching new ones all of the time. Thus far, the strategy appears to be a moderate success.
“One of the best things to happen out of that is we found more great staff writers, Yair Rosenberg, Xochitl Gonzalez and Charlie Warzel, just to name three and so, it ultimately brought their following,” Goldberg said. “They’re integrated into our writers collective in a way that’s great for our readers and great for our journalism.”
High-quality content reckons with AI
As digital media companies reckon with the changes artificial intelligence brings, deciding on how to adapt or adopt, it’s becoming clear that high-quality journalism retains immense value in the AI era. It offers authenticity, context, and deep analysis that AI-generated content lacks. It provides meaningful insights, informs people and counters misinformation.
Despite the one million subscriber milestone, Goldberg isn’t ready to relax. “It’s not like a breath out. We’re not breathing easy because you’ve got to run scared in this business,” he said. “But those three things, the subscription health, financial health, journalism health and recognition, give us a great place to have meetings where we can actually think through, alright, what are we going to do with The Atlantic on its approach to its 200th birthday.”
“Because it is a very unstable industry, obviously, and I worry about small mistakes or small missed opportunities snowballing over the years. I worry about missing the opportunity to do something newer and bigger.”
Few of The Atlantic’s contemporaries are left. As Goldberg points out, many venerable magazines that came after The Atlantic – like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post – have disappeared.
“So it’s kind of a miracle that The Atlantic has made it through the beginning of the internet age successfully. It survived the Great Depression and the Civil War and World War II. And, so we really have to focus on what is it that made it survive? And what do we do to increase its chances of surviving and flourishing into the next phase?”
As media organizations manage shifting consumer behaviors and economic uncertainties, sustainable revenue growth remains a top priority worldwide. Understanding the intricacies of subscription retention, as well as what resonates with your audience, has never been more crucial. Given the critical importance of retention, we are seeing revived interest in the lifetime value of digital subscribers, which requires robust renewal strategies.
These days, audience insights are powered by a combination of acquisition volumes, price points, and rebounding retention rates. We analyzed extensive data from the publishers we work with at Piano from the past five years and discovered a notable resurgence in efforts to retain subscribers. This signals a strategic pivot for many publishers, who are re-prioritizing retention-centric initiatives to build loyal subscriber relationships and fuel long-term revenue growth.
Annual vs. monthly subscriptions
Consumers understand the benefits of choosing an annual offer over monthly: discounted pricing, uninterrupted service, and premium add-ons. However, our benchmark data also outlines intrinsic advantages for publishers when focusing on annual subscriptions, which shows annual users sticking around twice as long as monthly subscribers. It also reveals their annual term retention rates are nearly double those of monthly users.
Further, the duo of better retention rates and higher overall spend only compounds over time: at the end of three years, these annual subscriptions are worth 60% more than their short-term counterpart. It is easy to see the allure of deploying this type of offer strategy and explains why optimizing retention is a pivotal driver for sustained publisher growth.
Source: Piano, Inc.
Paid trials and renewal strategies
In the not-so-distant past, free trials were all the rage. However, over time, this approach did not lead to the desired stickiness. On the contrary, paid trials can leave a lasting impact not only because they offer a compelling introductory price point for new subscribers, but also provide publishers with valuable insights into consumer behaviors. By taking this approach a step further, and combining paid trial offers with annual subscriptions, publishers gain long-term users of premium products, while driving more opportunity to build loyal subscribers. Piano’s data demonstrates that paid trial subscribers are more likely to renew in year three, ultimately driving a higher lifetime value.
Reduce active churn
Once paid trials are in place, the next step is to prevent active churn, as cancellations can often occur early. As an example, auto-renewal cancellations are about 14% on day one and can rise to 38% within the first sixty days of a trial. To reduce this, immediate onboarding and communications should take place to build engagement between the subscriber and the product. Sending a welcome email, reminding users of the benefits, and highlighting top content are a few ways to keep consumption high.
In fact, even when a price increases at the renewal phase, building rapport with the subscriber can improve retention. Our aggregate client data reveals that implementing price increases of 15% to 20% for annual digital subscribers drove an increase in overall revenue of 6% to 14%. Even with a slight dip in retention that a price increase may spur (typically around 5% to 8% churn), it can still be offset with the revenue gains earned from the overall higher price point. Leveraging a grace period message that alerts potential access loss, has helped many media companies earn worthy renewal success rates.
Another fundamental of churn reduction is an interception at the point of auto-renewal and providing an offer to retain the customer when the churn behavior begins. As an example, The Daily Beast began integrating a “save” notice when the subscriber clicked on “cancel auto renew” where the customer is shown a downgrade offer to interrupt the cancellation and attempt to save the subscriber. When implementing this functionality with several publishers, we have seen up to 16% save rates on would-be lost subscribers.
Smart, effective renewal strategies are critical to capturing active subscribers and overall revenue growth. Through targeted retention efforts and personalized outreach, including regular touchpoints during a customer’s lifetime, publishers can nurture subscriber relationships and encourage continued loyalty, while reducing churn.
Renewal strategies retain customers
This is not meant to imply that the path to sustainable revenue growth will be simple. However, by refocusing on paid trials, retention, and active churn prevention—all while adopting a comprehensive approach to subscription management—publishers can approach their subscription models with confidence and build strong long term relationships with audiences.
Despite the fact that the industry has been discussing the importance of revenue diversification for at least a decade, news media organizations remain largely undiversified. In a recent study examining the financial sustainability of the industry, we found that publishers (on average) recorded 84% of their revenue from just four sources: print consumer revenue, print advertising, digital subscriptions and digital advertising. Although publishers anticipate growth in other verticals, specifically events and eCommerce, these revenue streams are negligible. Therefore, they are unlikely to be a like-for-like replacement to falling print and digital advertising revenue in most markets.
That being said, few media companies would object to multiple revenue streams that complement their core business model. In practice, however, media revenue diversification can prove difficult (and expensive) to execute, dilute your brand/value proposition and divert attention away from the core product or business unit. In this article, we will explore how news organizations can structure their thinking about diversification initiatives and explore common best practices when it comes to execution.
How media organizations can think about the path to diversification
We find it helpful for news organizations to think of diversification on a spectrum, where there is a continuum of options for news organizations both in terms of the audience segments they can target and the products they can create. These news media companies can (and often do) concurrently pursue multiple diversification initiatives, which can be plotted at different intersections on the spectrum. This spectrum is visualized in the first image.
On the x-axis is a spectrum of product options. The furthest left on this axis are the products that the organization is most known for. For news organizations, these are typically products that fulfill the core news need: accurately informing people of what is going on in the world or their community in real-time. These products include daily newspapers and news websites (such as ft.com). As you go further right across the x-axis, you expand to other products that meet other needs.
On the y-axis is a spectrum of audiences. At the bottom of the axis are core target audiences. For news organizations, these are typically people who are deeply interested in knowing what is going on in the world on a regular basis. As you go up the y-axis, you expand into audiences that don’t fit your existing or target audience demographic.
To bring this framework to life, we plotted a selection of the Financial Times’ diversification initiatives to give a sense of how news organizations can expand within and beyond their revenue diversification frontier (second image).
Best practices when it comes to media revenue diversification
As we mentioned previously, successfully executing a news media diversification strategy is hard. There is no single playbook for how to successfully execute a diversification strategy in the news media industry: success is dependent on the organization, its current position within the market and the overall market context. However, there are a few common traits that we observed when looking at the most successful organizations:
Speak to target audiences/clients and understand their needs
You need to have a good grasp of the needs within your target segment. Never start from the perspective of your own objective – e.g. “Let’s expand into America”, “let’s build a subscription mode” – as this could lay waste to product market fit.
Understand and leverage your distinctive edge
Your distinctive edge is something that you can provide your audiences or clients with that few or no other organizations can. A distinctive edge might be access to a leading journalist, knowledge of a specialist topic area, ability to produce content in a particular style or format, being home to a difficult-to-reach audience, having a well-respected and trusted brand or something else.
Acknowledge your diversification frontier
Every news media organization has its own revenue diversification frontier. We define a diversification frontier as the “comfortable limit” within which an organization can credibly and effectively expand, based on its brand and internal capabilities. Although companies can expand beyond their diversification frontier, these initiatives are risky and should be approached with caution.
Consider your optimal timing
Media organizations should avoid only exploring diversification initiatives when they become imperative. Rather, organizations should be continuously exploring opportunities for diversification, especially if they are in positions of high revenue concentration or they are experiencing systemic market decline in one of their revenue verticals.
Start small, iterate, gate investment and track key performance indicators
Not all revenue diversification initiatives are going to work. News organizations must avoid exposing themselves to unnecessary risk as a result of overconfidence or overinvestment. Instead, news organizations should run experiments to test new products or their ability to serve new audiences. Gating investment, creating independent advisory boards and setting and measuring performance against key performance indicators are all established ways of ensuring this in practice.
Underwrite new initiatives via upfront payments if possible
Often the best ideas can garner financial support at the concept stage, helping to underwrite the cost of the new initiative, reduce the upfront investment and risk and reveal demand. In practice, this involves reaching out to the most engaged audience members or most loyal advertising clients and asking them to support a new concept. Although this is not a possibility in every instance, it can be extremely effective.
Manage the wider business and be more than the sum of your parts
Once a diversified business model is achieved, the work does not stop there. In fact, successfully managing a revenue portfolio that is equal to more than the sum of its parts is very challenging. Brand uniformity, operating models, organizational design, culture, incentives, investment and financing are all critical aspects to consider and manage.
The future of revenue diversification in the news industry
Revenue diversification will remain top of mind for the news industry as concerns around declining referral traffic, gen-AI disintermediation and a challenging advertising market persist.
We anticipate that successful media and news companies will increasingly diversify into adjacent revenue streams and products. We believe that this offers news media organizations the ability to develop more resilient and sustainable business models that fund quality journalism. You only need to look so far as Schibsted’s success and their mission statement to see what this extended future might hold: “We empower people in their daily lives.”
If you were fortunate enough to have a grandmother like mine, who served as both a protector and a source of wisdom, count yourself among the blessed. Recently, I’ve found myself reminiscing about her, particularly thinking about a bittersweet memory from my teenage years. I spent a few weeks at her Missouri home when I was about 16, seeking a haven from life’s tumult. During the visit, I became fixated on revitalizing her dilapidated basement.
My grandmother’s home was built in the early 1900s and it bore the marks of time, including structural issues and flooding. Amidst the turmoil and events following my parents’ divorce, I yearned for a project to occupy my mind and hands. Armed with carpet, paint, screws, and lumber, I set to work, determined to transform the basement into a sanctuary of sorts. My goal was simple: to bring a smile to my grandmother’s face.
In retrospect, that time holds a mix of emotions. While the project provided a temporary escape and a sense of purpose, I now recognize its limitations. Despite my efforts, the temporary facelift I offered couldn’t mend the home’s deeper issues. Over the following 25 years, the house fell into disrepair, succumbing to floods and neglect after my grandmother’s passing.
Reflecting on this experience, I can’t help but draw parallels to the state of the news media industry. We, too, seem focused on mourning a historic structure that is no longer sound. While it is better to take some action than none, we can’t restore news media revenue through superficial updates. It’s high time we find the confidence to undertake a radical remodel.
The news media’s confidence gap
Despite producing valuable content and abiding by high journalistic standards, trust in the news media has eroded in the face of rampant misinformation. In the wake of this decline, consumer engagement plummets, subscriptions struggle, and advertising revenue dries up. This is underpinned by a stinging irony. We possess the potential to be bastions of truth, yet our message lacks resonance with both subscribers and advertisers because of a fundamental question: Do we truly believe in our own value?
A recent study by the Pew Research Center paints a concerning picture. Public trust in news media is declining, mirroring a broader trend of declining trust in institutions. Several factors contribute to this erosion, including the rise of misinformation online and a shift in news consumption habits. Consumers are bombarded with information from various sources, making it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.
However, the study also offers a glimmer of hope. People are more likely to trust news outlets they feel a personal connection with. This highlights a crucial strategy for the news media to rebuild trust: fostering a sense of community and focusing on local stories that resonate with readers.
Here’s the crux of the matter as we seek to rebuild news media trust and revenue: confidence is the missing piece. We can’t project strength externally if we doubt it internally. We resemble a once-grand home, its foundation weakened, its purpose in some ways forgotten. It’s time to rediscover our core values and embark on a comprehensive renovation, one built on a foundation of unwavering confidence.
It is time for the news media to take action
Throughout my tenure in the industry, I’ve noticed a pervasive tendency to operate solely on the defensive. However, a recent insight from an editorial leader resonated deeply with me: it’s time to stop playing defense and start playing offense.
This call to action struck a chord because it underscores our urgent need to break free from conventional approaches. Too often, we find ourselves caught in the whirlwind of day-to-day operations, constantly putting out fires and mitigating losses. This reactive mindset inevitably leads to painful layoffs and compromises the quality of our journalism.
My grandmother’s basement would have fallen into dilapidation even faster if I hadn’t taken action. And it helped me regain some of my personal confidence at a challenging time because action breeds confidence. As an industry, going on the offense will help us seize control of our destiny.
This proactive approach requires us to move beyond simply reacting to challenges. It demands we undertake a strategic shift that empowers us to stop only playing defense and start playing offense. We must confront issues head-on and unlock the full potential of revenue strategies that lie dormant within our news media organizations.
Revenue experimentation and diversification
One strategy that has captured my attention in rebuilding revenues is sponsored content. When executed effectively, sponsored content can be a powerful tool that serves audiences and the bottom line. For example, partnering with local businesses to sponsor informative content about financial literacy or health generates revenue and provides valuable, niche content to our audience. That in turn builds trust and strengthens our community focus. Sponsored content should be clearly labeled and adhere to strict editorial guidelines to differentiate it from traditional reporting. This transparency illustrates our commitment to ethical journalism and further builds trust with audiences.
Going on offense also means consistently communicating the narrative of what we represent to our core audiences, to our communities, and to democracy itself. We are the watchdogs, the truth-tellers, the vital link that empowers citizens with the information they need to participate. This is a story we need to tell consistently and with unwavering conviction.
The same proactive approach applies to our role as advertising partners. Sponsors aren’t just a revenue stream – they’re potential partners in progress. By demonstrating the engaged demographics we reach and the lasting impact advertising can have within our platforms, we become trusted allies in achieving their marketing goals. This shift in perspective – from passive recipient to active collaborator – is key to forging mutually beneficial relationships.
This type of strategy should also lead to increased audience engagement, positive feedback on content, and a rise in subscriptions or memberships – all indicators that we’re moving in the right direction to improve news media trust and revenue. Ultimately, we can measure success through our ability to regain public trust, elevate our journalistic standards, and secure a sustainable future for our organization.
Reflecting on my grandmother’s home, I can’t help but feel a sense of regret for what could have been. Yet, I’m reminded that in our industry, we have the chance to make a real impact, to enact change, and to revitalize our role in American society.
More than half of the global population will vote in 2024, marking a massive year for politicians, voters, and the media. However, trust in the news is waning, news avoidance and news fatigue are on the rise, and brands express reluctance to advertise around election coverage. Connecting with audiences and deriving value from election coverage is becoming harder. But by reframing and augmenting how news organizations already approach political reporting, we can meet audience and advertiser requirements in a way that benefits all.
Traditional horse race reporting does, of course, continue to have a role, but it has limitations. If the reader does not understand a candidate’s policies and their relevance, will they care if they win or lose? Election reporting needs to meet audiences where they are. It must provide them information and analysis of the issues that matter to voters to impact reader engagement and subscription conversion and bring advertiser revenue back.
Moving beyond horse race journalism
With their digestible format, social media-friendly user experience, and great SEO, liveblogs have increasingly become an established means of covering developing stories like elections because they meet the “update me” audience need. Yes, liveblogs are still a useful medium for horse race coverage. However, they have evolved to enable much more.
With the Citizen’s Agenda model also trending away from politician-led election coverage in favor of the issues and topics that voters want to hear about, there’s real potential for publishers to go beyond typical horse race liveblog styles by integrating other types of coverage. By harnessing liveblogs’ multimedia nature, publishers can leverage audience-first direct interaction strategies that drive better results. It’s all about creating a wider narrative.
Enhanced storytelling with liveblogs
Liveblogs can be used to build an array of election coverage that strengthens the narrative, ensures relevance, and drives engagement. While they have become synonymous with real-time updates, it’s good to remember that liveblogs can take different formats to help tell the broader election story.
For example, the German title Zeit Online used interviews with 49 individuals representative of German society in the run-up to the 2021 national elections to build a picture of citizens’ concerns about everyday and election issues. By sharing interview excerpts, video clips, and imagery, the publication harnessed a wide range of electorate voices to build trust and engagement with its audience.
User-generated content, from user polls to comment functionality and information requests, can also foster a sense of community and inclusion. Including the readers’ voice helps them feel socially connected and keeps them coming back for more.
Stuff New Zealand invited readers to have their say on how the Government handled the cost of living crisis. It also flagged another article and included a poll and further comment opportunities. This approach keeps readers on the site for longer by allowing them to participate in relevant conversations. And, by including clear UGC and comment terms and conditions, it builds transparency and trust.
Providing context for better information delivery
A core issue in election news avoidance and fatigue is also related to the complex nature of the topics. If readers are not already conversant with the landscape and issues, they can easily switch off. Liveblogs can counter this by providing contextual information that complements core election coverage. On their politics liveblog, Stuff includes a “what you need to know” section that helps readers make sense of events. It also links to related articles on the site, which increases session duration. Other publishers, such as Spiegel and Stern use a highlight feature to spotlight the most important updates.
Graphs, diagrams, and maps add helpful visual aids to illustrate concepts that are harder to convey in words. Live Q&As with third-party experts can also deliver helpful information in response to reader questions, as used by mdr during the Covid-19 pandemic. By providing readers with the chance to directly ask a medical expert questions, they were able to help dispel some of the myths and disinformation contributing to panic.
The same tactic can help explain and simplify complicated election concepts and policies to make them more accessible. Gaining direct insight from readers on what they want to hear about by using live Q&As also aligns with the Citizen’s Agenda model. While it suggests journalists go out and ask in person, liveblogs’ comment functionality enables this to also be done online. Publications can then tailor content to suit audience needs and expectations. This, in turn, shows that a media brand values its readers and is invested in building a trusting, two-way relationship.
Engaging liveblog features to enrich revenue opportunities
By harnessing liveblogs’ full potential to effectively engage readers, publications can also change the perspective of advertisers who have been reluctant to put budgets alongside political reporting. With the integration of contextual adverts at custom rates between posts, and the opportunity to advertise in an even less intrusive way through sponsorships, liveblogs represent a win-win for publishers, readers, and advertisers alike.
In today’s media landscape of news fatigue, avoidance, and short attention spans, election coverage can be a hard nut to crack. To be successful, editorial teams need to make reporting more dynamic, meeting audiences where they are with tailored content, easy-to-consume formats, and true two-way interaction. Liveblogs provide a solution to this challenge, enhancing the reader experience, building greater engagement over political reporting, and demonstrating to advertisers that there is value in spending money around election season.
We recently hosted a discussion with a panel of industry experts from some of the UK’s biggest publishers. Panellists included Karen Eccles, Chief Commercial Officer at The Telegraph; Nick Flood, Global Ad Product & Revenue Operations Director at Future; Katie Le Ruez, Director of Digital at The Guardian; and Matthew Rance, Head of Commercial Data & Analytics at Immediate Media. Here’s what they have to say about building first-party strategies and direct relationships with advertisers to grow revenue.
Direct relationships
As we (finally) wave goodbye to third-party cookies, publishers are perfectly positioned to provide brands and agencies with the data, insights, and audience addressability they’re looking for through more direct relationships. In fact, they’ve been ready to offer that to advertisers for a very long time, according to Eccles.
“All the publishers on the panel have been putting in place the technology, the products, and the story, for this year for a really long time, and it’s finally here,” he said. “My worry is revenue moving to walled gardens. But my hope – and we’re seeing it borne out in our revenue and the conversations that we’re having – is that there are more conversations between publishers and agencies, but also with clients. At the moment, 75% of our digital ad revenue is transacted as direct-sold or PG,” explained Eccles.
“We can work with clients to help them answer questions that they might have about ‘why isn’t this particular product landing? How do I connect to the target audience? Can I test creative to understand what really resonates?’”
Data-powered
Even while the world still has Chrome’s third-party cookies, exploring these direct partnerships could be very beneficial for advertisers, because only 30% of the open web is currently addressable (even with them still around). Half of consumers already use browsers where third-party tracking is blocked, and 40% of people using Chrome have disabled tracking.
That’s one of the reasons why Immediate Media was an early mover with its data proposition, which focuses on telling a story with its data and presenting this to clients, according to Rance. “Something we’ve found as the most important thing is the story that we tell with our data. It’s so important,” said Rance.
“We launched our data proposition back in 2018, which was, all things considered, fairly early… at the time, it was really interesting and innovative tech, because there were all of these buzzwords that we were mentioning that no one had heard about like cookieless and on-device.
“What we found over time is that it was really interesting to clients and certainly helped get a foot in the door. But it wasn’t the most important thing. The most important thing was the story we articulated with our data.”
But, for any publisher to form an effective data strategy, they need to be willing to put the money into making that a reality.
“It requires investment in the data infrastructure and resources,” said Le Ruez. “At The Guardian, increasingly, we’ve been investing in digital experts, audience experts, data analysts, working very closely with our products. We’re trying to ensure that connection between sales and expertise is really considered and always-on.”
Part of that also means being “more proactive” with advertisers and internally, Le Ruez continued. “So, making sure that we understand not just advertising data, but also the data that other departments within The Guardian have. We try to identify opportunities from sign-ups or review ratings, etc., to get a better holistic view of everything. And then, from there, work out what has value for advertising purposes. It’s an enormous job, but it’s something that we’re really excited about.”
Driving better conversations
While the changing ecosystem, and recognition of the importance of first-party data, are helping to drive more direct conversations between publishers and advertisers, it’s also having a significant impact on how “grown-up” those conversations are, as Flood sees it.
“Two years ago, you would never get a question from an agency about what the audience’s make-up was. Now, especially in the US, I’d say 50% of responses that have some data element, you will get follow-up questions. What’s the source? How have you made a cohort? Are you using third-party? Is it a seed? All those questions,” said Flood.
“I think agencies have increased their knowledge in this sphere, which is good because you can have bigger, more grown-up conversations about better relationships and partnerships.”
These conversations are being driven by agencies now being “held a lot more accountable to their clients,” and understanding that there is more to marketing than just the viewability or clicks numbers. Nonetheless, while those conversations are now more knowledgeable, there is still room for them to start happening much earlier in the process, Flood concluded.
A pivotal role for publishers
Our recent panel discussion shed light on publishers’ pivotal role in shaping the future of digital advertising through data, especially given the open marketplace’s addressability challenges and the decline of third-party data.
The insights shared by Karen Eccles, Nick Flood, Katie Le Ruez, and Matthew Rance underscore the preparedness of publishers to harness first-party strategies and establish direct relationships with advertisers but also highlight the growing accountability of agencies to their clients.
As the industry adapts, publishers remain poised to deliver valuable data, insights, and audience addressability through direct and meaningful collaborations.
With the imminent demise of third-party cookies, the digital media industry stands on the brink of a seismic transformation that will create pressure for publishers to adapt quickly and efficiently. In my role at Dow Jones, as head of advertising product and technology, the urgency to transition towards first-party data and contextual advertising wasn’t just about staying ahead; it was a necessity to ensure our continued success in the digital realm.
This urgency is underscored by a stark reality: according to a 2023 Teads survey, only 16% of publishers felt prepared for the cookieless future. When Google announced the Chrome Cookie Deprecation in Jan. 2020, it became abundantly clear to us at Dow Jones that decisive action was needed to navigate this uncharted territory.
Facing the dual challenges of maintaining our revenue streams and upholding audience privacy, we envisioned a future where we relied exclusively on robust first-party data and developed a comprehensive game plan to bring that vision to fruition. This wasn’t just about adapting to a new set of rules; it was about reimagining our approach to digital engagement and advertising in a way that respects our readers’ desire for privacy and control over their own data.
Building an advanced advertising strategy
As a leading global business and information company that publishes trusted brands like The Wall Street Journal, our strategic vision was predicated and relied upon our subscription business, including the core high-quality audience of dedicated subscribers that serve as our core readership. We evaluated every aspect of our digital footprint, from the ways we engage with our audience to the methodologies behind our ad targeting. This wasn’t a simple process. It required a fundamental reshaping of our operations, systematic execution sustained over time, and a significant investment in new technologies and skills.
By focusing on the wealth of data generated by our direct and long-standing relationships with subscribers, we’ve not only prepared ourselves for the post-cookie world but have also unlocked new opportunities for growth and engagement. We’re now in a position where we can offer our advertisers targeted, effective ad placements based on direct audiences composed of known users and enriched with real, meaningful insights into preferences and behaviors, all while maintaining the privacy standards that our customers (not to mention regulators) expect.
Challenges and opportunities in cookieless digital advertising
However, this shift hasn’t been without its challenges. It’s been critical to strike a balance between maintaining innovative forward momentum and overcoming technical hurdles in a privacy-compliant manner that requires a judicious and collaborative approach to data.
Despite this, the shift away from third-party cookies has presented numerous opportunities. We’ve been able to forge deeper relationships with our advertisers by offering high-quality audience signals, innovative new products and services built on those audiences, and the analysis that demonstrates value and outcomes.
A future built on trust and transparency
As we look to the future, it’s clear that the key to success in the digital media space is a combination of innovative technology and a commitment to user privacy. By focusing on first-party data and contextual advertising, publishers can navigate the post-cookie landscape.
Moreover, the importance of systematic and open collaboration cannot be overstated; engaging with experienced partners and technology providers, especially those who have proactively tackled the challenges of this new digital ecosystem, can provide you with fresh perspectives and new opportunities for growth. For digital media executives navigating this shift, remember: the future belongs to those who prepare for it today.
The proportion of people avoiding news content is alarmingly high. According to the latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report, the public self-reports high levels of selective avoidance: 36% of people in the surveyed markets avoid the news “sometimes” or “often.”
That has implications for news organizations seeking to grow, engage, and inform audiences. That, in turn, limits the ability of those titles to hold power to account.
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is Director at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. He is also the co-author of a new book entitled Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism, which delves deeper into the causes of and solutions to news avoidance in greater detail.
In an interview about the book, he tells me that the idea arose from his work on the annual Digital News Report. “We noticed that in the United States almost 10% say that they use news less often than once a month or never. And as someone who believes firmly in the importance of journalism, and who used to think that everyone engaged with the news… I just kept staring at that figure.”
So, he set out to learn more, asking “Who are these people? Why do they say they use so little news? And how do they navigate the world without it?”
He found that, while the impact of public disengagement with newspapers’ missions are the most obvious consequence of news avoidance, it has less immediately apparent implications for media business models. It presents challenges around propensity to pay for news, keyword blocking – and that does not begin to account for the societal impact of citizens choosing to avoid essential news and information.
His research also found a variety of causes for news avoidance among the public, whether that was selectively or constantly. Nielsen says that the majority of news avoiders do not avoid media in general. Rather, there is something specific about news content that repels them.
The psychological impact of negative news
One of the most prominent is that news content can create psychological stress among sections of the audience who are ill-equipped to deal with it. Whether that is as a result of wider social pressures in their lives or simple exhaustion from work, Nielsen says a proportion of respondents believe they have no mental availability to engage with news content:
“What they often seek from the media is something pleasant, something that can help them recharge and renew, as they face another day of often very demanding tasks that they have to take on to provide for themselves or families.”
That is exacerbated by a perception that news content is primarily negative. The adage that “if it bleeds it leads” is undeniably true – perhaps ever more so in the age of social media. However, the trade off for news publishers is that a subset of the audience will disengage from negativity entirely.
So when the news is perceived to be overly negative audiences will choose to avoid it. That feeds the perennial problem of keyword blocking among advertisers, who also seek to avoid association with that negativity – even when the coverage is entirely warranted by a need to inform the public.
Blacklisted, by readers and advertisers
Nielsen acknowledges that news avoidance is not a phenomenon that exists in a vacuum. It feeds into those other issues like keyword blocklists: “We could probably write a whole separate book about advertisers avoiding the news. But at the end of the day, publishers who are relying on advertising will have to consider the reality that much of the public and many advertisers aren’t interested in being next to pieces of journalism that they regard as being divisive and depressing and perhaps not that valuable.”
In Avoiding the News Nielsen and his co-authors acknowledge that, in the case of people’s attitude to media, “perception is reality.” But in line with their recommendations to publishers, they also suggest potential solutions to these issues, one of which is to take a more positive approach to coverage to prevent that disengagement:
Neilsen says that “there is a good case to be made that that media literacy has been very focused on helping people be critical, which is important. But there is a companion [argument] that it’s about helping people be affirmative, about making decisions about what’s good enough in a world of imperfect choices of information.”
Payments, perception, and representation
Another prominent cause of news avoidance is that the public – still – does not feel represented by the news. They do not believe it is either by or for them. Nielsen explains: “There is a very clear sense amongst many of our interviewees that news isn’t for people like them, that news is for people who are older, who identify as male, for people who are well off.”
He likens it to the way that some people say classical music or contemporary art is something that’s “perfectly fine for other people, but it’s not really for people like me.”
That, too, has implications for media business models. An increasing number of media organizations seek to build out subscription models. However, the perception of a lack of representation shrinks the total addressable audience, limiting the potential for converting significant numbers of readers to members or subscribers.
It goes back to what Nielsen describes as a discussion around “identity and ideology.” He notes that the belief that news is not representative is not universal, nor is it unique to either left- or right-leaning audiences. Instead it comes from a wider societal sense of disenfranchisement: the perception is stronger among right-leaning people in the U.S., but among left-leaning people in the U.K. Nielsen attributes this in part to the fact that the U.K .press is perceived to skew right more generally.
However, he points out that “In the U.K., in the U.S., large parts of the public are disenchanted with politics, and they see news as intertwined with politics not in an independent from it. And that sense of alienation from politics in turn informs their relationship with journalism.”
As a result the authors of Avoiding the News say that one potential solution is that the industry needs to recognize that it currently does not speak to as wide an array of people as it could: “It is within the power of journalists and editors to think about ‘what are the sources that we feature?’ ‘What are the topics that we feature?’ ‘How do we write about communities near and far?’ And ‘is it worth more proactively trying to address these very vocal and consistent and long standing concerns many parts of the public have?’”
Community engagement and games we play
Another factor in news avoidance lies in sections of the public not being part of any “news communities.” Nielsen explains that “They don’t get any social affirmation or reinforcement, the way that many white collar people with high levels of formal education move in circles where they’re constantly affirmed that engaging with the news is important and it makes us kind of a better person. It’s not only right, it’s also righteous.”
For news organizations whose audience acquisition and retention strategies rely on bringing audience members into their own news communities, that presents a problem. It is one thing to introduce someone who already interacts with other people around news content into the fold; it is another thing entirely to create that behavior in people.
Membership-based organizations like the U.K.’s “slow news” brand Tortoise rely in part on using their engaged members as ambassadors for the brand.
However, as the success of the New York Times’ cooking and games apps make clear, news content is not the only thing that draws new audience members into the fold. Adjacent products like crosswords – which make community high scores etc. part of their appeal – are ways to sidestep this issue and potentially engage those audiences at a later date.
This time, it might really be personal
News avoidance has risen in priority among media companies’ priority lists over the past few years. On February 27th in the U.K., a House of Lords committee into the impact of technology on news saw it raised as a problem that needs to be overcome, for example. While much of that concern is predicated on the impact on the efficacy of journalism, the subtext is that news avoidance is contributing to media companies’ revenue woes.
Nielsen says that while a lot of the reasons for news avoidance are societal and structural rather than as a direct result of media companies’ decisions, there are still actions editors and journalists can undertake to mitigate it:
“I know that many journalists and news organizations feel a bit uneasy about ideas of personalization. [But] if news media and journalists want to serve everybody, they probably need a more differentiated offer including packaging things for people who may want to hear some things that did not go wrong in the world yesterday before we get to things that [did].”
Ultimately many of the potential solutions presented in the book lie in doubling down on journalism’s promise: to represent the whole public, not just the most affluent members of society, and to ensure that readers and viewers feel that representation.
Nielsen says: “I also would just invite journalists and editors to read some of what citizens told us in our interviews as we feature in the book, because I think on closer inspection, some journalists and editors may admit that people have a point about some of their criticisms of journalism.”
