Comscore’s Halo Effect Research was one of the first industry studies to demonstrates that ads appearing on premium content sites deliver significantly higher branding effectiveness than the same ads in non-premium content. Now new research from Group M UK in partnership with Newsworks, the marketing firm for premium newspapers, finds that exposure to advertising on premium sites drives greater engagement, better brand response, and is also more cost effective than the same advertising on the run of the internet. The findings are based on over 28,000 survey responses across 84 campaigns in the UK and 398 million impressions.
Additional findings include advertising with premium publishers means that the message is:
14% more likely to be measurable
42% more likely to be 100% in view
58% more likely to be 100% in view for at least 5 seconds
83% more likely to be 80% in view for at least 30 seconds
98% more likely to be placed fully above the fold
165% more likely to be scrolled fully into view if placed below the fold
273% more likely to elicit a user hover
The study also shows that 48% of measurable ads on open exchange are never actually seen. This brings to question the cost per impression calculation. What is the value of an average impression? Perhaps a better calculation for advertisers is one based on the cost per quality impression. This measure is more accurate in identifying effective inventory. In fact, the research shows that advertising in a quality environment is 42% more cost effective than on the run of the internet
Importantly, the positive perception of quality content extends to the ads on the page. The more that readers engage with trustworthy information, the more trusting they are of the ads they see on the premium sites. This research should encourage marketers to think about the cost per quality impression and not just the purchase of low-cost impression.
Advertising is a fundamental part of news publishers’ revenue model. Within the digital advertising marketplace, programmatic and advertising technology are a large part of ecosystem. According to eMarketer, more than four of every five US digital display ad dollars is a programmatic transaction. Simply defined, programmatic is the automation of the buying and selling of desktop display advertising using real-time-bidding. Included in the programmatic is the usage of ad tech to collect and aggregate user data. A new research report, Guide to Advertising Technology from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, looks into programmatic advertising and the influence of ad tech on the practice, distribution, and perception of journalism.
User experience
The Tow report suggests that news publishers’ reliance on ad tech for user data is threatening both a positive user experience and trust in a news brand. News sites. like other sites, collect user data and tracking codes to offer advertisers targeting campaigns. The data is collected by the ads’ tracking cookies (i.e., Javascript and HTML code) and embedded inside ads. Digital ads also send data to and receive instructions from thousands of servers. The data embedded within these ads creates a heavy load on web browsers, often slowing down the site and negatively impacting the user experience.
Further, even though publishers require that ads on their sites contain no malware, the current ad tech setup can serve malicious codes to reader often compromising user security and privacy.
Social media fallout
The report also examines the impact of the plethora of user data collected by social media platforms on the advertising ecosystem. Unfortunately, publishers cannot compete with the unprecedented ability of Google and Facebook to collect data and in order to provide the same level of targeting opportunities and offerings. And, as stated above, publishers’ drive to collect more consumer data may have the undesired effect of negatively impacting their experience.
The exploit of fake news on social media has also had a significant impact on impacts news publishers. Of specific consequence is Facebook’s change to its News Feed algorithm, which de-prioritizing news articles and content from media brands in favor of content shared by friends and families. Unfortunately, as consumers are exposed to less trustworthy content, their overall sentiment around content being trustworthy declines.
Digital filter bubbles are also a concern as search engines and social media algorithmically tailor content recommendations according to a user’s consumption histories. The research found that this can get to the point that the users are only shown information that conforms with their preexisting biases. Thus, data collection – in the name of better targeting information – may actually lead to less-informed readers.
Advertising still fuels the media economy. That’s why it’s important for media professionals to understand the advertising infrastructural and the role ad technology plays in digital media today. We must keep a close watch on advertising technologies, data collection, digital delivery and continue to weigh their impact on the reader experience and our ability to deliver the news they need.
There are two opposing views on social media that are impacting digital marketing decisions:
Audience attention on social platforms offers a strong advertising environment (good for marketers).
Consumer distrust of social platforms’ data and privacy practices detracts from their effectiveness (bad for advertisers).
Marketers and media executives discuss the social media advertising paradox ad nauseum in meetings, forums, and conference panels. Still, a whole lot of advertising dollars are being invested on Facebook regardless of its lack of transparency, data sharing, and stories of the company’s mismanagement and mishandling of data. In fact, Facebook’s Q3 2018 earnings cited a 33% year-over-year increase in advertising revenue while user growth remains stagnant in its larger markets.
Streetbees’ new research report, Re-positioning, reflects on this dichotomy. A full 86% of respondents follow brands on social media and 73% agree that a social media presence is necessary for brands to be successful. This research ranks Facebook as number one among consumers 25 and older for following brands (86%). Thus, the findings showcase Facebook as a positive environment for advertising placement.
Yet the research also finds that one-third of consumers in the US and India, Facebook’s two largest markets, do not trust the social network to keep their data safe. Further, nearly all users surveyed (98%) state that they continue to use Facebook even though they do not trust the service to protect their personal data. Yes, the paradox, a platform of users that do not trust its environment.
Facebook: friend or foe?
Streetbees’ consumer findings are analogous to advertising practices on the platform. Both consumers and marketers alike continue to use Facebook regardless of the mounting distrust of the platform. In October, Fortune exposed that Facebook inflated its video metrics for how long users were watching video content by up to 900%. Despite a steady stream of Facebook mea culpas, advertisers continue to purchase advertising on the platform.
The research also suggests that Facebook needs to focus on user retention. Younger audiences show limited interest in Facebook and older users’ attention appears to be waning. Only one in five of those under the age of 25 think Facebook is the “coolest” social platform. And when it comes to consumers reasons for quitting social media, the top two responses include “boredom” (51%) and “my friends stopped using” (22%). Eight percent also quit due to data concerns. As Facebook confronts user fatigue, growth in daily active user is significantly slow.
As social media challenges continue to emerge, advertisers need to hold platforms accountable. Short-term media strategies will not lead to marketplace sustainability. Audience attention is a critical commodity in the advertising paradigm and continued reliance on distrusted environments will undoubtedly harm the long-term success of the digital advertising model.
Seventy five percent of consumers report that, if content piques their interest, they’ll engage with it, regardless of whether it’s branded or not, according to Reuters. That’s the beauty of native advertising. Unlike display ads or banner ads, native ads don’t have to look like ads. They are non-disruptive and introduce the reader to advertising content without sticking out like a sore thumb.
Native was once one of the hottest trends in online ads. However, the total number of advertisers has stagnated, starting around the beginning of 2017. Only about 11% of online advertisers use native formats these days. And brands that buy native ads only run them across 10% of the sites where they advertise. What caused this shift?
Certainly, online ads should be fair, clear, and engaging. Unfortunately, at times, native ads can be almost too inconspicuous, as they weave seamlessly into the platform where they appear. Additionally, the process of crafting a native ad or campaign is a costly, multistep process involving a lot of collaboration and time. And, without unified standards, it’s especially hard to gauge performance metrics like return on investment (ROI), impact, and effectiveness. For these reasons, some advertisers see too many challenges with creating an effective native advertising program.
On the flip side, many would argue that the benefits of native advertising outweigh the negatives. Native display ads receive a higher click-through-rate (CTR) than typical display ads. According to an AppNexus whitepaper, CTR is actually 8.8x higher with native display ads. Moreover, two out of three GenZ, Millennials, and GenX consumers trust branded content more than traditional advertising, finding it more entertaining, thought-provoking, and impactful, according to a Time Inc. study. Furthermore, a Collective Bias survey found that one-third of Millennials say that they’ve purchased something as a result of a sponsored post and nearly 37% agree that useful and high-quality posts offset any objections they may have to branded content.
Based on these findings, it’s not surprising that the industry investing most in native advertising is Media & Entertainment with over $269mm. Top spenders include Comcast Corporation, Hulu, and Cox Communications. The Finance & Real Estate and Technology sectors tie for second place, both investing $75mm, with Professional Services and Retail not far behind, spending $57mm and $46mm respectively.
Overall, MediaRadar’s study found that, while the native market is maturing, there is still room for growth. In North America, where users have become accustomed to branded content, brand advertisers must differentiate themselves from competitors. They can do this by focusing on their most profitable products, reworking existing products that underperform, or refreshing their offerings with new innovations. While publishers must continue to perfect their offerings for native to reach its full potential, the advertising format still has plenty of opportunity for growth in the future.
Consumer engagement is a critical component of news publishers’ direct to consumer revenue strategies. According to the International News Media Association’s (INMA) new report, Unpacking the Reader-Subscriber Lifetime Customer Journey, every publisher component from content to membership programs and e-newsletters, must reflect a strong and unified value proposition to consumers in order to be habit-forming.
The report includes highlights of Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Power of Habit, explanation of the science behind a habit formation. Scientists refer to this as “the habit loop” and it can easily apply to reader engagement. Every habit has a cue, routine, and reward. Duhigg explains that people stop “thinking” when they perform habitual activities. In fact, about 40 to 45% of what people do every day are routine based decisions (habits) rather than conscious decisions. Publishers should aspire to their content being habit forming.
Rewarding behavior
However, to create a new habit, there needs to be a clear and distinct reward. It’s even better if the reward is immediate. Interestingly, Duhigg believes educating people about the “habit loop” helps to change their behavior. If the reward is clear, consumers understand the payback of their actions and accept them more easily. Rewards don’t just need to be monetary or transactional; they can also be emotional.
The report also identifies the importance in shifting focus from top of the funnel acquisition metrics to the consumer lifecycle and conversion metrics. The Wall Street Journal did just this and now trains its journalists to think about three key metrics:
Reach: How many consumers are reached by WSJ content at any given moment? Consumers are identified in two distinct groups a) subscribers and b) potential subscribers.
Quality: Are the consumers reached the ones who will return to consume more content? Will they promote WSJ content to friends and family?
Habit: Is the routine habit forming? When you build a reading habit, the consumption cycle continues.
Engaging strategies
The INMA report also features Matt Skibinski, from The Lenfest Institute, and cites his definition of engagement: “when readers find your content, products, and brands valuable enough that they are willing to pay for it.” Skibiniki believes publishers should look at the occasional reader, the regular reader and the one-time reader to classes of readers will help identify the different signals of engagement.
The INMA report finds consumer engagement to be the most important outcome of direct to consumer revenue strategies. It’s when habits and emotions create a pattern of repetition. It’s also when retention trumps acquisition in a publisher’s relationship with its audience. And INMA concludes that the greater the engagement, the greater the consumer revenue.
The DCN Quarterly Revenue Report (QRR) delivers a quarterly pulse of the premium digital marketplace. The report includes a quarterly trend analysis of display and video revenue and sales metrics across desktop, mobile and tablet. No other competitive reports like these exist in the marketplace. If you are interested in learning more about this report and other DCN benchmark reports, please contact [email protected].
The media M&A market is booming. PwC’s new report, US Media and Telecommunications Insights Q3 2018, finds that deal volumes have reached a two-year high in Q3, registering a 9% increase compared to the same time period one year ago. Beyond sheer volume, the strategic rationale underlying the deal activity highlights the continued importance players are putting on M&A to further their position in this competitive and ever-changing landscape.
This year, many companies put innovation and consumer engagement at the forefront of their acquisition strategy. Beyond the usual motivations, companies are also looking to make acquisitions that include offerings that help them attract, engage and retain customers.
Additional trends this quarter:
New deals do not surpass $5 billion dollars, resulting in a 43% decrease in deal value compared to Q3 2017.
F five deals this quarter are over $1 billion dollars, accounting to $12.4 billion dollars or 69% of total deal value.
The largest deal in Q3 is Adobe’s $4.8 billion-dollar acquisition of Marketo Inc., a cloud-based marketing platform for B2B customers.
The Advertising & Marketing and Internet & Information sub-sectors continue to outnumber other categories in terms of deal volume with 82 and 71 deals, respectively, in Q3 2018.
Private equity deal volumes are growing strongly this quarter, representing 26% of all deals. However, the value of private equity deals shows a 21% decline this quarter.
Deeper Motivations
Significantly, many of the deals in subcategories such as Internet & Information and Advertising & Marketing show that investors are looking to acquire new platforms rather than building them. This is especially true of companies that can easily add a new service to an already existing platform in order to grow their user base. Many companies are also competing for advertising dollars and consumer engagement so they looking to invest in new platforms and new technologies to deliver personal and immersive experiences.
Importantly, new acquisitions this quarter show that companies are responding to changing consumer viewing and listening habits and shifting revenue streams. A new and notable area of growth includes podcasts. The podcast industry is growing substantially. In just five years the audience grew to grew over 325% to 98 million listeners so, or roughly 30% of the US population. In this quarter alone, there are nine podcast deals, four of which involved podcast production companies.
Additional areas for further acquisition exploration include virtual and augmented reality platforms, as well as egames (multiplayer video-game competition platform and alternative content formats created purposefully for smaller screens and shorter attention spans). As these areas continue to grow, the M&A scene is likely to keep growing and be reflective of organizations’ nee to continue to innovate and grow.
According to a new study by Forrester, many big companies struggle to develop and deliver advertising that is highly relevant and personalized. Whether it’s due to stodgy internal processes, bad data, or a dearth of appropriate technology, large organizations haven’t yet been able to make personalized advertising tactics a part of their marketing operations.
To gauge marketplace sentiment, Forrester talked with 100+ senior marketers at U.S. companies with more than $1 billion in annual sales.
While personalization has been a staple at marketing conferences and strategic planning sessions now for more than a decade, it seems to be one of those things that, while rather easily embraced by SMBs, is proving to be a major challenge for large enterprises. This isn’t surprising to Raquel Rosenthal, CEO at Digilant, a programmatic advertising company, who says there’s more to digital marketing than meets the eye. “To be sure, technology plays a big part in the digital advertising ecosystem,” she observes. “But I would argue that process and people are arguably more important than the tech component – especially when it comes to something complex like personalization – and it takes time for all three areas to gel successfully at large corporations.”
Three Tactics to Try
Personalization is one of the few issues in marketing that genuinely impact all three primary constituents – advertisers, platforms, and audiences – equally. The advancement of true customized advertisers will lead to better outcomes to everyone in the mix: Advertisers will improve ROAS, platforms will be able to charge more, and audiences will have superior experiences. It’s a win-win-win.
Clearly, the marketplace clearly has a ways to go before this becomes a reality. Publishers can pursue three tactics to help accelerate the movement:
1. Package & Promote Personalization Capabilities
Personalization, one-to-one marketing, customized messaging – call it what you will – but make it a bit part of your pitch, as soon as possible. If it’s already there, emphasize it more, and maybe even lead with it. Personalization is subjective, and means one thing to a startup and something completely different to a $10 billion category leader.
If you’re an established publisher, promote personalization even at the risk of putting mainstay features like superior reach and rich audience data on the back-burner. The marketplace already knows you have these offerings – that’s the benefit of being around for awhile – but might think you’re lagging in the area of personalization, like they are. Let them know otherwise, in no uncertain terms, and get aggressive about it.
2. Deliver The Personalization That Most Brands Can’t (Or Won’t)
Whether it’s because of bad data, lack of technology, regulatory restrictions (real or perceived), or stifling internal politics, many big brands aren’t able to manage personalized campaigns with internal resources. But most are able engage with external providers to do so.
Either through the application of creative (“innovative”?) techniques that rely on data segmentation and labor-intensive methods, or via the litany of ad technology flooding the marketplace, publishers of every stripe and size are in a favorable position to deliver targeted marketing solutions. Getting there might require an unorthodox product design strategy, but it’s there for the taking.
3. Fortune Favors The Bold
Personalization is an area where traditional publishers have a unique window of opportunity these days. While the eyes of the world remain fixed on the duopoly’s every move, there isn’t a lot of interest or bandwidth to cover the rest of the marketplace, affording other players more room to maneuver.
These market conditions won’t last favor, but a window currently exists. And for publishers interested in making bold moves, personalization could be a appropriate fit.
Many Big Brands Are Lagging, And Publishers Can Help
Forrester sums up its core findings of this research effort neatly, and in a way that highlights both new market realities and the underlying opportunities: “To differentiate themselves and provide value for increasingly demanding customers, companies must become obsessed with delivering relevancy and value in all their customer interactions, including their advertising.”
Knowing how valuable personalization can be for brands, and how significantly many are struggling to employ the tactic, publishers that find a way to help advertisers quickly and easily incorporate personalization into marketing operations will be able to meaningfully differentiate themselves from the competition – including the duopology.
Last month, YouTube experienced an outage for about an hour and the internet got a taste of what would happen if the platform disappeared. The results were surprising: Internet behaviors shifted immediately and fiercely. There was a huge overall traffic surge, with some of the largest increases seen on app and search traffic.
Chartbeat analyzed the YouTube outage using global traffic data across a sample of more than 4,000 sites. Overall, this outage resulted in a 20% net increase in traffic to publisher sites. Just over half of this increase (11% of overall traffic) went to general articles on publisher sites, while articles about the YouTube outage comprised a 9% lift.
Huge surges in search and app Traffic
It makes sense that since 45% of the traffic lift came from articles about the outage, we saw a large boost in search traffic, with readers likely searching for answers regarding the outage.
Specifically, we saw a 59% increase in search traffic. Across other referrers types, we saw a consistent lift—notably also from platforms within the Google ecosystem:
Direct +9%
Links +28% – of total link traffic during the outage, Google Chrome Suggestions made up 19% and Google News 14%
Internal +13%
Social +11%
As we look at how and where people read during this outage, we saw app and Google AMP traffic seeing the largest surges, with 78% and 67% lifts respectively. We also saw boosts across desktop, but mobile and tablet saw even larger increases.
Web +15%
Facebook Instant Articles +6%
Desktop +13%
Mobile +26%
Tablet +26%
Not all platforms are created equal
We compared this traffic boost to the Facebook outage on August 3rd, 2018, which brought a 2.3% net increase to publisher traffic in the 45-minute outage window. Similarly, the late August Reddit outage didn’t even make a blip to overall publisher traffic. In the Facebook case, only a negligible amount of that traffic went to articles about the outage.
There are a couple potential reasons for the vast difference in traffic increase in the YouTube outage vs. the Facebook outage.
YouTube is not normally a traffic driver to publishers: Unlike Facebook, YouTube does not refer a great deal of traffic to publishers. Thus, the effect of people moving from YouTube to publisher sites during the outage had a dramatic impact and was purely additive.
Day and time difference: Facebook’s outage occured on a Friday afternoon (US time) / evening (Europe/Asia time). Thus, the majority of people were likely at work or out for the evening. It wasn’t prime news-reading time. The YouTube outage, on the other hand, was on a Tuesday evening (US), which is prime couch time.
So far, we’ve seen there’s no single reaction when a platform goes down. Sometimes people are more apt to search for answers, sometimes they go directly to a news source they trust. The one thing we do see is that when Facebook or YouTube goes dark, the rest of the internet comes alive.
The Facebook’s News Feed, introduced in 2006, was once a strong source of traffic for many publishers. News organization utilized the intermediary platform to grow their audiences. The social sharing of news also altered the direct-to-consumer paradigm.
Earlier this year, Facebook announced that their News Feed would prioritize posts from friends and family over news content. While some news publishers faced modest declines, others reported significant ones. Chartbeat, a content analytics platform, provided data showing Facebook traffic to publishers declined 6% since the beginning of January. However, LittleThings, a publication focused on feel good stories and other content for women, claimed they lost 75% of their referral traffic due to changes in Facebook’s New Feed and subsequently shut down.
In its latest research, The Shorenstein Center on Media Studies explores the impact on non-profit news brands. Non-profit news organizations rely heavily on social interaction to help encourage donations. A traffic decline could negatively impact donation revenue. Shorenstein’s new report, Facebook Friends? The Impact of Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm, offers a custom analysis of eight non-profit news publishers.
The research divides the publishers into two categories: investigative and single-subject. The investigative group focuses on producing investigative journalism on a wide range of topics. The single-subject group produces investigative journalism in the context of a single subject. The three investigative organizations include The Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica, and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. The five single-subject organizations include Chalkbeat, The Hechinger Report, The Marshall Project, The Trace, and The War Horse. The analysis focuses on two key metrics – total users and total sessions – looking at the three months prior to and after the News Feed change.
In the three months after the News Feed changes, in terms of overall traffic, the investigative organizations saw small changes in both the number of users and the number of sessions. In contrast, the entire single-subject cohort registered growth for these two metrics.
The analysis also looks at the composition of traffic, where the traffic is coming from, by using the Google Analytics channels Direct, Email, Organic Search, Other, Referral, and/or Social. Referral traffic was most consistent; increasing both in users visits and sessions. Only two of the eight non-profit publishers show social referral increases. Not surprisingly, Facebook referrals closely follow in line to social.
Given some of the non-profit news publishers registered small to moderate traffic increases, the Shorenstein research hints to Facebook’s potential growth path for non-profit news publishers, even with the algorithm changes. The difference between larger commercial news publishers and non-profit may be due to how non-profit new organizations’ stories are shared on Facebook. More research on this is needed to understand the consumer experience sharing content from commercial news publishers compared to non-profit news publishers.
Often top referrers to articles in our network include a mix of the usual suspects: Google search, Google News, Facebook, Twitter, Flipboard, Drudge Report. But one day at the beginning of October I was looking at a story in Currents and noticed another referrer in the mix: SmartNews.
SmartNews is an app that aggregates and serves “impartial, trending and trustworthy” news through machine learning algorithms. And for the story I was looking at, about the FDA and e-cigarettes, SmartNews was the second highest external traffic referrer, right after Google Search.
Then later this month, another colleague was keeping up with the Mega Millions lottery news (she didn’t win) and noticed another unusual referring domain: discover.google.com. We’ve written about trends in non-search Google referrers before, including non-search AMP traffic and Google Quick Search Box, but this was a whole other domain.
We couldn’t help but wonder what was going on with these mobile referrers, and how they affecting were traffic to publishers. I took a closer look at the traffic trends to find out.
SmartNews revs up traffic
My colleague who owns an Android phone said she’s used to seeing SmartNews alerts pop up.
However, she didn’t realize how many people had the app pre-installed on their devices or were opting in to the same experience.
SmartNews has been growing as a referrer, with VentureBeat reporting 200% growth year-over-year in the U.S. and 10 million monthly active users. Looking at page views to articles since April, it’s clear that there’s an uptick.
The highest peak in referral traffic from SmartNews happened this month. In fact, SmartNews has even edged its way into the top fifteen overall referrers so far in October. Though it drove under 1% of traffic, SmartNews ranked 11th, right behind Yahoo and ahead of Apple News.
The Percentage of all network views referred from October 1 – October 26, 2018.
The top stories with traffic from SmartNews this month are about Law, Government, and Politics, News, Business, Health & Fitness, and Science.
Google Discover makes an appearance
Though the referring domain discover.google.com didn’t make it into the top overall traffic sources in October, it appeared seemingly out-of-the blue. Traffic from the referrer to our network begins suddenly on October 18.
So where exactly is this mysterious traffic coming from? Turns out it’s coming from the artist formerly known as Google Feed. In September, Google Feed rebranded as Google Discover.
Google reports that more than 800 million people use Discover every day. From Google’s blog: “Think of it as your new mobile homepage where you can not only search, but also discover useful, relevant information and inspiration from across the web for the topics you care about most.”
So far according to our nine days of network data, the information Google Discover users cared about most included these top five categories: Law, Government, and Politics, Technology & Computing, Business, Sports, and Science.
News aggregators appeal to a younger demographic
Given that U.S. adults are spending an average of 3 hours, 25 minutes a day on mobile devices in 2018, according to eMarketer, it may be no surprise that more and more readers are finding news through mobile news aggregators.
In their 2018 digital news report, Reuters Institute found that over half of respondents got news through interfaces that use ranking algorithms, including search, social media, and news aggregators. The same amount of respondents (6%) treated email, mobile alerts, and news aggregators as their respective main gateways to news.
What does this mean for publishers? It might be worthwhile to keep your eye on growing news aggregator referrers, especially if you’re trying to reach a younger demographic. According to Reuters, aggregators are most popular among 25 – 34 year olds and 18 – 24 year olds. Compare that to email and direct access, which are most popular among 45 – 54 year olds and people aged 55+.
Have you noticed any mobile referrers take off lately? Let us know—we’re keeping our eyes peeled.
Publishers use social distribution to keep up with consumers’ news consumption habits.Anddespite the annoyance and uncertainty of platform policy changes (e.g. Facebook news-feed changes), publishers continue to align their business strategies and social practices.
To better understand this alignment, the Reuters Institute explores distribution strategies across 12 news publishers in six European countriesin their new report, Digital News Project.
Strategic objectives
While distribution strategies may vary in approach, they center on one of three core objectives:
driving on-site traffic through referrals
driving off-site reach through native formats, and
driving digital subscription sales.
Based on this sample,social platforms offer limited opportunities for publisher monetization. Nevertheless, news organizations can receive indirect benefits in terms of traffic, off-site reach, and/or subscriptions.
Platform differentiation
Understanding and differentiating between platforms is important for social diversification:
Facebook accounts for the largest share of publishers’ social media traffic. It also delivers higher levels of audience engagement and is considered more cost-effective at driving digital subscription sales.
Twitter offers the most value for generating off-site reach and greater visibility with breaking news.It’sthego-to platform to reach journalists, opinion leaders, trendsetters, and influencers.
Instagram hasthe potential to deliver high audience engagement and promote news brands, especially to younger audiences. It’s a great fit for light content like entertainment news. Publishers view Instagram as experimental.
Publisher practices
The Digital News Projectalso examines publisher practices on Facebook after the January 2018 policy change to deprioritize news publishers’ contentin favor of family and friends’ posts. Analyzing these practices provides a performance review ofnews sites’social platform strategies.
For example,Iltalehti, the Finnish tabloid,continues to publish as often on Facebookafterthe policy change.However, Facebook’s new policy resulted in a 28% decline inIltalehti’saverage daily interactions. Unfortunately, Iltalehti’s bottom line is severely impacted since the publication relies heavily on social traffic referrals for monetization.
In contrast, the French publication, Le Monde, decreased the frequency (13%) of their Facebook posts after the policy change. The decline in Le Monde posts resulted in a 29% decline in average user interactions. Le Monde is deliberating on their long–term Facebook social strategy since they too use traffic referrals as a significant part of their overall monetization strategy.Insert le monde chart
It’s important for news publishers to identify their objectives before implementing social distribution strategies. The social approach should allow publishers to experimentwith new opportunities to driveon-site traffic, orto build awareness and brand recognition or to engage users to subscribe to paid service.
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