I am traveling in the US so the normal schedule will be a bit abnormal through next week before I take a couple of weeks off. This week, there was a lot of movement both in terms of paid content and also the newsletter scene.

We start off with a bit of research in the UK about the types of calls to action that work in convincing people to pay for a subscription. The research carried out by Dr Neil Thurman of City University in London and Dr Bartosz Wilczek and Ina Schulte-Uentrop of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München surveyed 815 people in the UK.

The research tested four messages about why a person would subscribe to a newspaper that they liked:

• a ‘normative’ message that leaned into the idea of supporting independent journalis.

• a ‘price transparency’ message about the precarious finances of journalism

• a value proposition message about the exclusive content that people could get from buying a digital subscription

• a social message about being a part of a community.

No individual message would produce a ‘significant amount’ of subscribers, but a combination of two messages - the normative and price transparency appeals and a combination of price transprency, value proposition and social messages did produce a significant result.

This is important work considering the low rate of subscription adoption in the UK. According to the most recent Reuters Institute Digital News report. Only 9% of people in the UK had paid for news online in the past year, as opposed to 21% in the US or 39% of people in Norway.

Research reveals most effective paywall marketing messages for news sites

A study has found the best messaging to convert subscribers emphasises the importance of subscriptions for sustaining independent journalism.

pressgazette.co.uk/paywalls/paywall-marketing-study

Informing readers about journalism's societal importance could boost subscription revenues

A new study, led by Professor Neil Thurman, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at City University of London along with Dr. Bartosz Wilczek and Ina Schulte-Uentrop from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), and published in the International Journal of Communication, reveals how a sales pitch mentioning both the financial pressures faced by news outlets and how subscribers support independent journalism significantly enhances a reader's willingness to pay for content.

phys.org/news/2023-06-readers-journalism-societal-importance-boost.html

Major UK national-regional publisher Reach has tried a number of subscription strategies in the past few years, with none of them really delivering the results that the group wanted. But now they are testing a metered paywall for the MEN app. We - being Pugpig - will be watching closely because we have built a lot of Reach’s apps.

Reach launches first metered paywall experiment on MEN app

The Manchester Evening News has become the first Reach title to launch a paid-for premium membership offering, on its app.

pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/regional-newspapers/manchester-evening-news-men-trials-premium-app-with-metered-paywall

The tech majors have moved away from third-party cookies as user privacy has become a selling point, and publishers and broadcasters have moved to first-party data solutions because it means it is much more valuable than third-party data so there has been a push and a pull. The question hasn’t been about the why but about the how.

Like so many strategic efforts, you have to get executive-level buyin. After that, it’s really all about execution including making sure to ask the right questions from providers and still understanding that third-party data has a place as part of your audience funnel.

How broadcasters have moved away from reliance on third-party cookies

Nine broadcast companies were able to accelerate their first-party data collection strategies, as part of the National Association of Broadcasters PILOT’s accelerator program. Read more about how they did it in our Accelerate Local How-To series recap.

localmedia.org/2023/06/how-broadcasters-can-grow-first-party-data

The Online News Association in the US is having a newsletter how-to session packed with smart folks from the Wall Street Journal. It will include how to measure success and grow your newsletters.

Newsletter tips for journalists: Grow revenue, add subscribers – Online News Association

Expand and connect with your audience and send better emails using these tips from past ONA conference sessions.

journalists.org/2023/06/27/boost-your-newsletter-how-to-grow-revenue-attract-subscribers-and-polish-strategy

In another piece of research out of the UK, the News Futures 2035 project has released a report into its findings. The more than 300 experts have been looking at ways to build a more sustainable future for public increase news (rather than simply news that the public is interested in). Reading between the lines, the political orientations of the publishers in the UK make it difficult if not impossible to find a way forward on policy an regulation.

Building a better future for public interest news

The News Futures 2035 project brought together more than 300 experts in search of better ways to supply sustainable, trustworthy news in the UK

www.journalism.co.uk/news/how-to-build-a-better-future-for-public-interest-news/s2/a1048425

Google has joined Meta have now adopted a common front in the face of regulation in Canada that would require them to pay publishers for linking to their content. With passage of the Online News Act C-18 in Canada, it will mean that Canadian news content will disappear from Google Search, News and Discovery. If figures in Canada are the same as elsewhere, this could put about a third of their referral traffic that news organisations get from search in peril.

Google Joins Meta In Killing News In Canada

Tech giants object to bill that would require they compensate publishers for linking to their content.

www.mediapost.com/publications/article/386842/google-joins-meta-in-killing-news-in-canada.html

For professional and business content, LinkedIn can be a valuable platform for publishers, and they have just tweaked their algorithms. During the pandemic, users said that their feeds were flooded with “Facebook-styel” personal content. As they de-prioritise this content, they will also emphasise content from first-degree connections.

LinkedIn Shares New Insights into its Latest Algorithm Updates

LinkedIn recently updated its algorithm to put more focus on professional engagement.

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/linkedin-shares-new-insights-into-its-latest-algorithm-updates/654091

The podcast market definitely seems to be cooling, and the latest example is US satellite radio service Sirius XM deciding to shut down the Stitcher podcast app. I’m personally sad because I was a heavy user in the eight years that we lived in the States. It’s app was integrated into my Mazda’s car entertainment system, and it had a really good discovery service. However, I can see why it ran counter to Sirius XM’s business model, and the company will move podcasting content into its main satellite radio app. And that makes a lot of sense because most people only use a handful of apps frequently. Having two apps simply didn’t make any sense.

STITCHER FAREWELL — Stitcher Help Center

Are you looking for help with STITCHER FAREWELL for Stitcher?

stitcher.helpshift.com/hc/en/1-stitcher/section/151-stitcher-farewell-1687885657

The graphic at the beginning of this article lays out a problem that audiences are facing: information overload. And it strikes me that a number of the initiatives that publishers have tried in the past decade to attract new audiences have helped create the problem of information overload, not solve it. And AI sceptics talk about one possible, if not probable, outcome of AI: a tsunami of crap content. Volume publishers are looking to AI to reduce headcount even further while creating more content than ever. That will only exacerbate the problem of information overload, which technology companies will gladly solve by using generate AI. In the first quarter of 2023, 29% of referrals to news sites came from search engines, which is more than double the amount the amount of traffic that social media sent to news sites - only 14%. If AI disrupts search traffic to news sites, then it could cut into that third of traffic. But in this INMA piece, they break search traffic down even further between navigational, informational and transactional queries, which mean that possibly not all of this traffic is at risk. On the bright side, the piece says that due to computing costs, it will take Google and Microsoft about two years to roll out generative Ai so publishers have time to adapt but no time to lose.

Generative AI search puts one-third of digital news business at risk in next few years

One-third of digital news business is at risk with the competition generative AI search offers. Research about generative AI search and reader behaviour sheds light on what media companies are facing and how they can counter.

www.inma.org/blogs/reader-revenue/post.cfm/generative-ai-search-puts-one-third-of-digital-news-business-at-risk-in-next-few-years

Poool looks at an analysis by the Press Gazette on what drives conversion and adds their own data. The Press Gazette said that conversion depended on variables such as the amount of time that the publisher had had a paywall in place, the brand reach (national vs local brands) and whether the publisher relied solely on paid content or balanced subs revenue with advertising.

Poool added their own data and also found that conversion success also depended on whether a registration wall was part of the conversion process, whether a single or multiple offers were displayed at the paywall and whether the paywall has good mobile usability. They go through other issues affecting conversion success. It’s a good resource for those of you looking to optimise your conversion experience.

What explains subscription conversion success? A new formula and study seeks to find an answer | The Audiencers

Does the paywall model impact conversion success? A study and a new formula for evaluating subscription success aims to answer this question

theaudiencers.com/decisions/what-explains-subscription-conversion-success-a-new-formula-and-study-seeks-to-find-an-answer

In the recent Reuters Institute Digital News report, they showed how news fatigue is continuing to affect engagement with digital news content. As the report found, most people who avoid news do not avoid all news but often specific subjects or anything but major news. Some of those who avoided news were looking for more positive takes on the news.

US broadcaster CBS is finding success with solutions journalism. This is an approach that not only highlights issues but also covers different approaches to solve the problems highlighted.

CBS News effort shows the growth in solutions journalism to combat bad news fatigue

Following the news can be relentlessly depressing, so much that some people use that as an excuse for avoiding it. To combat that feeling, there's been a growth in the idea of “solutions journalism,” or stories that emphasize efforts being made to solve some of society's problems. For the past year CBS News has been training journalists at its locally-owned stations to look for these kinds of stories. Network news chief Wendy McMahon says it's time to look beyond what is happening to figuring out ways to help. Proponents of the idea say it takes rigorous reporting to work — that it's not just looking for good news.

apnews.com/article/solutions-journalism-cbs-watchdog-4fb1d1f4818e2f6f11f9e3446f0a1b62

WAN-IFRA looks at how a coaching approach can help news publishers adapt to the changes that digital disruption has brought to the media business. It covers how a coaching approach works to understand the publisher’s problems and guide the participants towards a solution.

Helping news publishers become audiences-first: a coach’s perspective - WAN-IFRA

2023-06-20. We spoke with Stéphane Mayoux, one of the coaches in WAN-IFRA’s Table Stakes Europe programme, about how coaching can support news publishers as they work to transform their companies into future-proof businesses: “Understanding problems, making changes, carrying out experiments: this is what media companies need to do to survive in the digital environment.”

wan-ifra.org/2023/06/helping-news-publishers-become-audiences-first-a-coachs-perspective

A look at newspaper circulation in the US by the Press Gazette. The bigger they are the harder they fall with the largest print titles seeing an average drop of 14% in their print circulation. And I think it’s important to stress the drop in print circulation. The New York Times saw its print circulation drop by 10%, but in May, it reported that in its latest quarter, digital circulation had grown by 190,000. The New York Times boasts 9.7 total subscribers, with 710,000 of those being print subscribers.

Top 25 US newspaper circulations: Largest print titles fall 14% in year to March 2023

The largest US newspaper circulations fell 14% in the year to March 2023, new figures from the Alliance for Audited Media show.

pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/media_metrics/top-25-us-newspaper-circulations-down-march-2023

Podcasting is seeing consolidation, with Spotify retrenching its podcasting strategy. The changes have meant a decline in Hollywood stars and other big-budget talent and a focus more on audio specialists.

Hollywood is leaving podcasting to podcasters | Semafor

The new conventional wisdom in podcasting is that A-list celebrities and big-budget audio narratives are out, and that medium is closer to talk radio or daytime television personalities than with Windsors.

www.semafor.com/article/06/25/2023/hollywood-is-leaving-podcasting-to-podcasters

If you want another Twitter competitor, your wait is over. Sensing blood in that water, Meta is only weeks away from launching its answer to Twitter. Forget about the Musk v. Zuck cage fight, this is where the real action is.

Meta Targets Mid-July Launch for New Twitter Challenger App

And the launch could be preceded by an actual fight between Elon Musk and mark Zuckerberg.

www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-targets-mid-july-launch-for-new-twitter-challenger-app/653970

Apart from a number of stories about AI in today’s, the theme for the top two stories is about the evolution of paid content strategies. The first piece looks at a model for segmenting users based on loyalty – VORF for Volatiles, Occasionals, Regulars and Fans. While Volatiles account for the vast majority of traffic, the same cannot be said for revenue. As I often say, the goal is to increase habit and loyalty leading to membership or subscription, and Madeleine White of subscription and membership suite Poool writes about how to achieve this by focusing on ARPU. One way is to introduce a ‘cookie wall’, giving loosely attached readers a way to support your content. 

This is just one example of the increasing sophistication of paid content strategies, and Brian Morrissey writes about the evolution of dynamic paywalls. For a while, paid content seemed to be a binary choice between hard and metered paywalls, but now we have registration walls, cookie walls, dynamic paywalls and more. And that is just the evolution of the paywall models rather than the content strategies. Morrissey points out that there are also new subscription bundles. 

How to improve your Engagement Funnel and increase ARPU – The Fix

A study reveals the adapted engagement strategies to put in place for each user cohort, ensuring you maximize ARPU at every step of the conversion funnel.

thefix.media

The new subscription bundle

Informed is bundling premium subscription content

www.therebooting.com

From failure to success: How to make your old product initiatives earn new revenue – Local Media …

We’ve seen it more times than we want to admit. The publisher, general manager or CEO spearheads a new initiative: “We are going to do [fill in the blank].” The newsroom and sal…

localmedia.org

Sometimes you are too early. Streaming audio was a bit too early in 2002, but audio on demand (aka podcasts) has exploded now. I think that there is a broader point to this piece. Sometimes successful products are a matter of timing, and I think that one of the arts of product management is knowing when to retire a product. I like the idea that some product managers have introduced product retirement parties. 

What is a newsletter?

Rethinking how we conceptualise newsletters, why you should ignore the podcast doom-mongers and more in today’s updates.

onemanandhisblog.com

Adam Tinwoth looks more deeply at newsletters. Yes, they can be audience development tools, but they can also be products unto themselves. 

Industry News: Security as a paid feature and UK publishers lean into Ozone ad platform

For the tech giants, security is increasingly a paid feature

Identity verification on social platforms used to be a matter of trust and safety. Now for Twitter and Facebook, it’s a new line of revenue.

www.niemanlab.org

It is great to see Josh Benton take aim at both Twitter and Meta as they start to make security and identity protection paid features. I don’t begrudge either platform trying to find new revenue streams as advertising goes soft during a period of economic uncertainty, but making users pay for security and identity protection is a stupid idea. And it shines a light on how badly both platforms have managed these issues, with Twitter’s paid blue check debacle and rampant impersonation and spam accounts on Meta. 

Leading UK publishers increase investment in Ozone share advertising platform

News publishers announce new investment in the Ozone Project.

pressgazette.co.uk

How the YouTube algorithm works: What marketers need to know

This guide will help you get the most out of YouTube, understand the platform’s algorithm and gain visibility for your best videos.

searchengineland.com

Whether you’re a publisher or a marketer, understanding how the major platforms work is critical. This is a good one to bookmark. 

AI in media stories reaches a fever pitch

How chatbots can change journalism. Or not. | Semafor

The trick is to focus on the tasks they can do well — which is to work with language, rather than on gathering or verifying facts.

www.semafor.com

Gina Chua, the executive editor for Semafor, has been interested in the intersection of media and technology, particularly with respect to what she calls ‘structured journalism’ for years. Here, she looks at what AI chatbots can and can’t do, and actually how this changes quickly, often without much transparency. 

The FT’s CEO on why ChatGPT can’t replace good journalism – Raconteur

John Ridding joined the FT as a reporter in 1988. He believes his journey from the newsroom to the boardroom helps him better understand the business and guide its future

www.raconteur.net

This article spends much more time discussing Ridding’s rise through the ranks at the FT and the history of this storied brand than AI, but they manage to hook the reader with a headline that actually only addresses two paragraphs of the story. 

AI’s threat to Google is more about advertising income than being the #1 search engine | What’s N…

Google’s dominance as the most visited website has been undisputed since it rose to prominence as the leading search engine in the early 2000s. However, that position could now …

whatsnewinpublishing.com

What this story highlights is that while technology can be awe-inspiring, it is the business model behind it that actually determines whether a company is a footnote to history or a major paradigm shift. Why did Google best Altavista in the battle for search engine supremacy in the early part of the century? Well, yes, it delivered more relevant search results, but it also developed an incredible business model, nay, a paradigm-shifting business model that not only monetised search but actually created an auction system that reinforced its model of delivering better results. 
Now, all that could change with AI. The question becomes whether any of the AI-search providers can develop a business model that will best Google’s model based on search intention. Watch this space. 

ChatGPT launches boom in AI-written e-books on Amazon

Until recently, Brett Schickler never imagined he could be a published author, though he had dreamed about it. But after learning about the ChatGPT artificial intelligence progr…

www.reuters.com

Ugh. 

Sci-Fi Mag Pauses Submissions Amid Flood of AI-Generated Short Stories

Clarkesworld speculates that people are using AI to make ‘a quick buck’ since the sci-fi publication pays 12 cents a word for accepted stories.

uk.pcmag.com

And ugh. Both of this and the story about e-books and Amazon demonstrate how people are more than willing to use technology in an arbitrage game. Can they use AI to drive the cost of creative production down to almost zero? 

PLUS: Being a creator might force you to grapple with your limitations and a tweet thread about an important US court case

A good piece from the Reynolds Journalism Institute about how a solopreneur had to deal with work-life boundaries. I’m grappling a lot with boundaries right now and priorities. I think that talk about side hustles; learning violin, and a second language all the while raising perfect children during the pandemic is actually corrosive. We have so much performative workaholicism on social media that it’s easy to give in to head trash about inadequacy. (Head trash is a wonderful term for negative self-talk coined by Charlie Gilkey. I find it very useful.)
This piece is a wonderful corrective to all of this. 

And lastly, an excellent bit of public service from Jonathan Stray. 

Gonzales vs. Google SCOTUS briefs megathread!
Yesterday a dozen briefs arguing that Section 230 properly protects “targeted recommendations” dropped, from groups all across the political spectrum. I read a bunch of them. Here are some common themes and juicy excerpts.

1/

— Jonathan Stray (@jonathanstray)
Jan 20, 2023

Artificial intelligence continues to be one of the major themes of the year after ChatGPT became the application of the technology that made it accessible and its potential understandable for consumers and business leaders alike. Peter Bale of INMA says that AI search will provide a new challenge for publishers because they will struggle to attribute content. We’re now definitely at the innovation trigger of Gartner’s Hype Cycle. 

As if to prove Peter’s point, publishers are already lawyering up to challenge generative AI providers for using their content to train AI. In the current regulatory environment, I can imagine that licencing knowledge for the training of large language models could become a lucrative revenue stream for publishers, especially those like Dow Jones that produce a lot of valuable business intelligence. Regulators are much more likely to compel tech companies to share their wealth with content companies. 

One of the themes of the past several years has been newsletter growth, and the Post and Courier in the US has three lessons from its Google News Initiative newsletter project. One that leaped out at me was how they focused on ARPU, which actually helped reduce churn by not setting up a meager introductory price. 

This plus a few bits of social media news including podcast management tools testing in YouTube Studio. Something that makes my blood boil a bit is that Meta is testing a verified account service. I don’t think I should be paying for Meta policing copycat accounts. That seems to me to be their responsibility. And a story on the ad side about how supply-side platforms have become a low-cost commodity service. 

Thanks for the photo from mikemacmarketing from Flickr and on WikiMedia Commons. 

Generative AI search will challenge all news publishers

ChatGPT was all well and good when it was cutely spitting out paragraphs, but what about when it upends search by not directing users to news media Web sites and other important…

www.inma.org

Peter not only identifies one of the challenges that AI search will pose, namely attribution, but his post is a good overview of how that is being handled by different providers including Microsoft’s Bing and a service called Perplexity.ai. 

I think that Peter is right when he says that Microsoft isn’t targeting the profits of publishers with its AI search but rather those of Google. But we’re definitely in a disruptive phase of AI innovation, and it’s during these times when potential winners can quickly rise and then fall to become a footnote to history. 

Dow Jones’ general counsel says OpenAI lacks a deal to use WSJ reporters’ work to train its AI; s…

By Gerry Smith / Bloomberg. View the full context on Mediagazer.

mediagazer.com

This Bloomberg story proves Peter’s point that attribution and compensation are going to become very important for all kinds of generative AI as the companies behind them seek new sources of knowledge to train their LLMs. 

Post and Courier shares 3 lessons from its newsletter growth strategy

The Post and Courier collaborated with the Google News Initiative to explore the efficacy of paid newsletters as a viable growth strategy for the news organisation.

www.inma.org

Social Media and Industry news

YouTube has become a major podcasting platform, and podcasters have been uploading simple videos that remind me of a lot of studio cam footage. So it comes as no surprise that YouTube is testing tools for this market.

Meta hops on the verification bandwagon. I think they need to fix the cloning of accounts on their own as an act of good faith rather than charging for this privilege. This is affecting not just brands but regular people. It’s not a good look. 

And lastly, as I mentioned last week, with the economy going through a soft spot in the US and several places really, the ad market is shifting quite a bit. 

YouTube Tests Podcast Management Options in YouTube Studio

YouTube’s gradually evolving its podcast elements.

www.socialmediatoday.com

Meta Announces Initial Test of ‘Meta Verified’ Paid Verification Scheme on Facebook and IG

Meta’s following Twitter’s lead with a paid verification program.

www.socialmediatoday.com

Yahoo Shuttering Its SSP Is Evidence That Ad Exchanges Are Becoming Interchangeable | AdExchanger

Yahoo pulling the plug on its SSP demonstrates how difficult it’s become for supply-side platforms to prove their value in a commoditized marketplace.

www.adexchanger.com

I am starting to do some user needs work with consulting clients at Pugpig, and I’m keen to do more. I think it’s an excellent audience-first framework that provides a way to refine a content strategy and also develop new products, and we’ve got a great example from The Conversation, which publishes pieces from academics on topics in the news. They used the model to achieve a goal that many publishers are trying to achieve – attracting a younger audience. 

My friend Damien Radcliffe continues to provide some excellent coverage of commerce media, which is a range of approaches that merge content and retail. These tactics range from affiliate marketing to brand extensions, and he provides an update with one of his signature pieces showing how a digital media trend is playing out in five charts. 

Rounding out our top-featured pieces are two items about the newsletter space, which has and continues to be a very active focus for publishers because they are key across a wide range of editorial from stand-alone products to elements of conversion and retention strategies. That plus industry news. 

How The Conversation is attracting younger readers

The academic news website created a user needs model, a new series and a text messaging service to engage with the under 30s

www.journalism.co.uk

A detailed on how to run the user needs playbook and also how it leads to some really interesting product development. 

eCommerce and Publishing in 2023: 5 key charts | What’s New in Publishing | Digital Publishing News

After enjoying a giant leap forward during the early stages of the COVID crisis, eCommerce is increasingly ingrained in the shopping habits of consumers around the world.  …

whatsnewinpublishing.com

Damian looks at the rapid rise of social commerce and also something I just flagged up this week, which is how Amazon is starting to bite into Facebook’s ad business with better targeting. 

3 newsletter formats to expand publisher lineups | What’s New in Publishing | Digital Publishing …

Almost 70% of publishers see newsletters as an area for investment in 2023 Newsletters are having a moment: this year’s Reuters Institute Predictions report showed that 69%…

whatsnewinpublishing.com

Briefings, deep dives and summaries. The newsletter that you’re reading falls solidly into the briefings segment. It gives me a chance to share some what I’m paying attention to, and it also serves as a good archive for media intelligence. 

A 22-year-old minimalist newsletter with 300,000 subscribers: Popbitch (case study) | What’s New …

The case study today is a successful plain text newsletter that shuns pictures, graphics and emojis. Yet this 22-year-old weekly has 300,000 free subscribers, and advertisers qu…

whatsnewinpublishing.com

And this piece is definitely not a summary but a deep dive, an in-depth case study of the low-tech newsletter that has been going for 22 years. It’s a detailed look at its editorial and commercial strategy. 

78 percent say AI-written news articles would be a bad thing: survey

A new poll found that while most Americans expect there will be a time when entire news articles will be written by artificial intelligence (AI), a majority said that would be a…

thehill.com

I have to keep up with the unbroken string of AI headlines. Again with the focus on AI-written stories as opposed to all of the other applications for AI in media!?

Industry news: Media startups and eco-systems

Launching A News Ecosystem Hub: Lessons From New Mexico – Local News Ecosystem | Democracy Fund

ecosystems.democracyfund.org

The biggest news media start-ups from the post 2000 era

Press Gazette research has uncovered the biggest media startups since 2000. Includes revenue data and founding years.

pressgazette.co.uk

GQ’s First NFT Collection Offers Buyers Exclusive Products And Access

Buyers of the inaugural token will claim a GQ magazine subscription, a box of selected products, a ticket to the first GQ3 party in New York City and branded merchandise.

www.mediapost.com

I am a little surprised that we’re seeing an NFT collection in 2023, but I think the bigger story is the brand extensions. 

Twitter is removing free API access and no one is excited – Poynter

The API has been used by researchers to identify content that is going viral and to quickly map out disinformation networks

www.poynter.org

This story has been bubbling up for weeks now, and finally, we have some details on what exactly what Twitter will be doing with their API. 

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki steps down after nine years

One of Google’s earliest employees, she rented out her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they founded the company

www.theguardian.com

One of the earliest of Google’s employees decides to step down. 

In boom times, profits come easily, and dumb money flows into the latest media shiny thing. In lean times, profits come to those who work hard and smartly, and dumb money dries up. We’re entering a lean time, although one that doesn’t feel right now like a washout like the dot.com crash or the Great Recession. Publishers are focusing on retention now, and our first two featured articles focus on different techniques to keep subscribers paying. Gannett presents its onboarding process, and the folks at Media Voices speaks to the head of the newsletter team at the Financial Times about various roles that they play including retention. 

But we also have a couple of features that look at how companies are grappling with the issue of the challenges of running a digital business in a downturn. One article looks at Canadian local news startup that is realising that the market is harder than they thought. It’s a great corrective for critics on the sideline who think that meeting the challenges of local news media is easy. And the New York Times says that the era of ‘dumb money’ is over for podcasters. Ouch. 

Plus, LSE has an excellent overview of what AI means for new, and we find out how the Super Bowl drove app downloads. Vice gets a bailout, and US states are considering subsidising subscriptions for local news. 

And for today’s photo, thanks to Jp Valery on StockSnap

Gannett’s fresh onboarding process indicates new subscribers are more engaged

Gannett’s new onboarding journey ranges from 10 to 15 e-mails, depending on the type of subscriber that starts. The results are impressive.

www.inma.org

This overview from INMA is full of actionable insights. As we have seen from Piano data, onboarding needs to start immediately at checkout because you’ve got hours not days or weeks to engage new subscribers. Those morning newsletters are a major tool in onboarding, and subscribers want ‘actionable benefits’. 

Financial Times’ Sarah Ebner on the varied role of newsletters

Sarah Ebner, Executive Editor and Head of Newsletters at the Financial Times tells us about her role leading the newsletter team at the FT, and more.

voices.media

Newsletters operate at all stages of your conversion funnel and as Gannett has found are important in your retention efforts. I think it’s important to note that for a brand like the FT, they also see newsletters as an important two-way communication tool. 

AI is in the news. 7 thoughts to reflect on what that means

Artificial Intelligence is permeating newsrooms worldwide, and the conversation around the use of AI in news organisations has gained increased prominence with the arrival of Ch…

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Of the many important thoughts here, I think the idea that small newsrooms can use AI and that there needs to be accountability rank highly on this excellent list. 

Data: US app installs surge on Super Bowl day

Super Bowl LVII on February 12th brought in an average 113 million TV viewers, according to Nielsen. But consumers weren’t merely tuning in, they were also tu

advanced-television.com

The Super Bowl supercharged app downloads as people ordered food, placed bets and shopped. 

Industry News: Local news is hard, Footballco leans into social video breaking news and ‘dumb money’ is done with podcasting

Startup aimed to reshape media – and learned ‘news is hard’ the hard way

Two-year-old Canadian local news startup had heady plans when founded, but now trims jobs while execs snipe at workers on Twitter

www.theguardian.com

Ouch, the startup Overstory got millions in investment but has found it much harder going than anticipated. How much of this is timing and how much of it is arrogance? 

Footballco plans to cash in on growth of video breaking news via social media

Footballco says its appointment of Joe Strange as Goal’s UK managing editor reflects a ‘pivot’ in where football news is breaking online.

pressgazette.co.uk

Footballco is an interesting company, and it’s interesting to see how they are keeping a close eye on market and audience trends. 

Podcast Companies, Once Walking on Air, Feel the Strain of Gravity

“The dumb money era is over” as layoffs, budget cuts and scuttled deals challenge a long-booming industry.

www.nytimes.com

The opening line says a lot. This is what happens when a format gets overheated sadly. When it starts to cool, it not only takes out those who capitalised on the hype but also some solid performers. That being said, recent coverage suggests that money is still flowing into podcasts, but it might not be flowing into podcasting quickly enough to support all of the investment. 

States Consider Bills To Subsidize Local Newspaper Subscriptions

Massachusetts and Oregon would provide a $250 tax credit to residents who subscribe to local media.

www.mediapost.com

Local journalism continues to be under pressure in both the US and the UK, and both countries are now looking into policy responses. In the US, I see blue (Democrat-controlled) states considering these efforts while red (Republican-controlled) are resistant to taxpayer support of media. 

WSJ News Exclusive | Vice Media Gets $30 Million-Plus Lifeline From Fortress as Bills Pile Up

The new-media company owes millions of dollars in overdue payments to several vendors, some of whom have resorted to debt collectors.

www.wsj.com

This is unsurprising. Once a media darling, Vice has been struggling for several years now after being seen as a rising number of Millennial-focused outlets. Note, a lot of them have suffered similar challenges including Buzzfeed. They were supported by investments for a while, but those investments have not paid out. The question for me is whether they can find an exit or will just shutter. 

There are times when a theme seems to emerge from the random stories that are published in a day across the media industry, and today’s theme is definitely advertising. Economic uncertainty always leads to a softening in advertising, and when it comes to digital advertising and the media that rely on it, this is causing ructions. Honestly, it’s long overdue a pretty fundamental realignment in digital advertising, but as often happens, the first stage of a disruptive period is that incumbents will lean into their models even harder. That’s why the New York Times has a story about a coming pandemic in junk ads, and the Press Gazette takes aim at Taboola and the news industry’s co-dependent relationship with it.  

Before we get to that though, I have my usual collection of smart thinking about the industry. Peter Houston has a great piece for What’s New in Publishing, about his wishlist for 2023. I especially like his call for publishers to focus on value and revenue diversification. 
The Audiencers look at how The Conversation has a ‘decision-first’ approach to user research. The thing that is attractive about this approach is that it is action-oriented. 

And in the next featured story of the day, we look at a Reuters Institute piece about an Italian digital news outlet the refocused away from investigations to opinion. It carved out a unique position, and it is focusing on digital but also print and events. It’s an intersting case study about positioning and branding. 

A publishing wishlist for 2023 | What’s New in Publishing | Digital Publishing News

I’m so happy that publishing’s prediction season is over. Don’t get me wrong, I love reading predictions. Making them? Not so much. It’s a thankless task. Life comes at you fast…

whatsnewinpublishing.com

Peter Houston offers up his very clear-headed analysis of the direction that he hopes publishing will take in 2023. His reference to Mix of Six, a rough guide to how many revenue streams a publishing business should have, speaks to the focus that successful publishers have on revenue diversification this year. 

User research: How The Conversation used a decision-first approach to inform two key products | T…

Make your research process more efficient, unlock collect valuable data-points, and inform multiple products through this decision-first research approach

theaudiencers.com

How to make sure that your research results in action.  Consider the action that you want to take, and then design the research around that goal. 

This is a classic case study in positioning and branding as a response for how to compete in a crowded market. You have to be unique not only to stand out but also to be valuable and unique enough to audiences that they might to pay. If you want to reach a mass audience, be prepared to produce as much lowest common denominator content as possible. 

21 Basic SEO Tasks All Business Owners and Marketers Should Learn [Infographic]

Some handy pointers for your SEO approach.

www.socialmediatoday.com

This a solid and simple guide to SEO with a number of steps you can take to improve the SEO of any site. Some of these are baseline tactics that you need to be successful while others are next-level things to do to make you stand out. 

Politico launches new Pro subscription product on UK tech policy

Politico is launching a new Pro product based around UK tech policy, following in the footsteps of its work in Washington and Brussels.

pressgazette.co.uk

Politico’s strategy of moving up the value chain is by providing high-value research for lucrative verticals for lobbyists and policy shops willing to pay. It’s expanding that overseas. 

The major shifts in the advertising market already in 2023

European telecoms’ advertising venture against Big Tech wins EU antitrust nod

Deutsche Telekom , Orange , Telefonica and Vodafone on Friday secured unconditional EU antitrust approval for their advertising joint venture to take on Big Tech.

www.reuters.com

This speaks to concern about the large US digital advertising companies that the EU would brush aside antitrust-anticompetition concerns to allow major mobile phone companies across Europe to join together in a joint venture to take on GAFA – Google-Apple-Facebook and Amazon. 

The amazingly easy hack which is making millions for UK news websites

After the Manchester Evening News was accused of clickbait on the Today programme, we examine the Taboola suggested content boxes.

pressgazette.co.uk

The Press Gazette highlights how news publishers are using services like Taboola to net millions in ad revenue. The piece walks up to the line but doesn’t answer the question of whether such services degreed the brands that use them. 

Why Are You Seeing So Many Bad Digital Ads Now?

Scrolling past ads has rarely been enjoyable. But in recent months, people say the experience seems so much worse.

www.nytimes.com

And that leads to the next item from the New York Times about whether we’re seeing a junk ad epidemic. 

Amazon is the latest threat to Facebook as ad targeting suffers

Brands are shifting ad budgets away from Facebook and toward Amazon now that targeting users across social networks has become more difficult.

www.cnbc.com

And even amongst the platforms, the ad landscape is shifting. Amazing is taking business from Facebook. 

More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers stopped spending on platform, data show | CNN B…

More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers in September were no longer spending on the platform in the first weeks of January, according to data provided to CNN by digita…

www.cnn.com

And Elon is taking away business from Twitter, while obsessing about how many impressions his tweets get. 

Using personas for design and product development work is part of the practice, but Better News highlights how the Detroit Free Press is using multi-dimensional personas in its retention efforts. This example touches on two themes of this newsletter for the year: product development and retention. The underlying idea is pretty obvious that people can’t be pigeonholed into simple demographic or even psychographic categories. They demonstrate how they took this idea and put it in service of building loyalty and habit in their audiences. 

And, of course, in 2023, almost any idea seems to be touched in some way with AI, and frankly, this is also pretty obvious. How can AI be put into service to serve up rich related stories for a reader based on their individual interests rather than metadata-based related content modules? 

And The Audiencers at Poool review a new series of benchmarks to measure subscription performance. 
Plus, in addition to a bit of industry news, I highlight a few practical pieces that flew by including one about the big shift for Google Analytics users from UA to GA4. The deadline is looming. And some of the shift is down to privacy issues, which is highlighted in another piece on how media agencies are building privacy expertise this year. 

And thanks to David Boyle for the photo of a man reading a newspaper in New York City. 

Next-level persona work

How the Detroit Free Press is using personas to better gauge readers’ interests

Consider your readers not just as political junkies or sports nuts, but as multi-dimensional people who love politics and are enamored with baseball (or both). When you do that,…

betternews.org

This is a deep case study that highlights exactly what this team did with their multi-dimensional persona work. They not only developed personas based on interests but also used a basic retention model that tied specific KPIs to their likelihood to keep their subscriptions. The result was data that challenged some basic assumptions about a core audience, readers who followed the local baseball team. 

Reader personas and the future of AI recommendations | What’s New in Publishing | Digital Publish…

Work is underway to understand the relationship between algorithmic recommendations and reader personas AI recommendation systems are being used by almost 70% of news publishers…

whatsnewinpublishing.com

AI recommendation systems are being used by 70% of publishers, according to the Reuters Institute. This is a good summary of some research done into how personas were affecting recommendation systems, and it highlighted the personas that publishers are using to surface more relevant content for audiences. 

Benchmarking Digital Subscriptions: An improved framework | The Audiencers

Markus Schöburl presents how digital reach & number of visits can be combined to better benchmark the success of digital publishers’ subscription model

theaudiencers.com

An analysis of digital subscription success using a digital subscriber/1000 pageviews metric. After explaining why he used that metric, he goes on to compare the performance of different subscription models such as freemium, metered paywall, hard paywall and voluntary payments. 

Get smarter: The switch to GA4, challenging the narrative around AI and why ad shops are focusing on privacy

The switch to GA4 is happening in July, and the executive editor at a newspaper in the US reviews what they learned in the switch. 

It’s time to challenge the narrative about ChatGPT and the future of journalism – Poynter

Don’t let these tools dazzle you beyond reason. Don’t anthropomorphize them. Ask hard questions about what they’re purported to do.

www.poynter.org

The narrative about generative AI has quickly devolved into one driven by moral panic about it replacing journalists, and this piece challenges us to think more deeply about AI from an academic perspective. 

Why media agencies are prioritizing building privacy expertise this year as a host of new laws ro…

With privacy restrictions tightening, agencies are faced with having to step up their privacy practices this year.

digiday.com

Privacy is one of the major regulatory themes this year as it has been for the last several years. Media agencies are beefing up their privacy talent to respond. 

Industry News: Publishers still seeing growth but layoffs continue in 2023

“Evidence of growth everywhere”: Publishers of all sizes, from global to local, continue adding n…

“Publishers will continue to see growth in 2023 despite economic headwinds.” Publishers across the world are growing subscriptions despite economic challenges. New report from F…

whatsnewinpublishing.com

A FIPP report from the end of 2022 found that publishers continue to see digital subscription growth. My wife has just launched a newsletter on Substack, and it’s very intriguing to see growth figures broken out by the platform. 

Yahoo will lay off 20% of staff, or 1600 people

Yahoo is laying off 20% of its staff, impacting 1,600 employees in its ad tech business.

techcrunch.com

They are reorganising their ad business to focus on the demand side and getting out of the supply side, which makes a lot of sense. The ad and adtech space is so crowded. It is the epitome of a red ocean space, which is why the cuts so swiftly in a downturn. 
While Yahoo feels back of mind these days with the rise of other platforms, it still pulls in $8bn a year in revenue. Although this reporting triggers one of my beefs about business reporting: Saying that the company is profitable and then quoting a revenue figure is conflating two things. A company can pull in $8bn in revenue and still not break even. 

News Corp to cut 1,250 jobs after missing second-quarter estimates

Reduced ad spends due to rising inflation and higher interest rates have battered Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate

www.theguardian.com

This amounts to a 5% cut in their headcount. The company missed their quarterly estimates due to all of the usual suspects in the news business in a softening economy. 

When we were speaking to publishers for Pugpig’s State of the Digital Publishing Market report, one theme that I heard was that they were looking for other sources of revenue in addition to ads and subscriptions. In another example of a publisher diversifying its revenue streams, The Athletic’s chief commercial officer told Digiday what other revenue streams the site was exploring to drive revenue past the break-even point. 

While several outlets have covered the decline in new podcast creation, the picture is more complicated than declaring podcasting in decline overall. Podcast advertising remains robust. But then advertisers can often be late to arrive at a party and late to leave. They tend to be a conservative bunch looking for guaranteed returns from their investment.

And What’s New in Publishing summarises research from data platform provider Lotame about how publishers are preparing for Google’s end of supporting third-party cookies.

In industry news, Penske invests in Vox, and Google is ending a feature to allow users to play podcasts directly from search results. UK’s Reach has named the editors of its foray into the US as it continues to look for scale. 

Housekeeping 

And thanks to Christine Roy for the image for this edition of the newsletter. (I’m doing this because I’m not happy about how Beehiiv shows attribution for photos.) And one other housekeeping note. The newsletter has had a rather uneven publishing schedule, but now that life is settling into a bit more of a routine post the move, I’ll be publishing on Monday, Wednesday and Friday apart from when I’m on holiday. 

The Athletic’s Sebastian Tomich is looking beyond ads and subscriptions to reach profitability

The Athletic’s path to profitability is set for 2025, and to achieve this goal, chief commercial officer Sebastian Tomich is focused on more than just selling ads directly to pr…

digiday.com

We already covered brand extensions and now The Athletic’s chief commercial officer lays out the range of revenue streams that the sports news service now owned by the New York Times plans to reach profitability by 2025. 

Podcast ad buyers have yet to see a slowdown

Ad buyers have yet to see clients cut their podcast budgets – though the time of podcasts as the shiny new medium may be coming to an end.

digiday.com

As long as there is money to be made and publishers have success with podcasts, we’ll see resources pour into audio on demand. As I have said before, people have less time to create podcasts now that pandemic lockdowns have mostly ended. But commuting is one of the prime times of the day to listen to podcasts so consumption for those types of podcasts might bounce back. If I were still a product director for a broadcaster (which I was until April of last year), I would look at how podcast listening habits have changed as my audiences have exited lockdown, and I would look at how my stable of podcast products may or may continue to fit into new habits. 

As urgency to find post-cookie solutions surges, how are UK publishers shuffling their tech stack…

Lotame’s recent ‘Beyond the Cookie’ report examined how marketers and publishers are addressing customer acquisition and retention in the run-up to a post-third-party cookie lan…

whatsnewinpublishing.com

The biggest publishers and broadcasters like Bloomberg have already started to shift away from third-party cookies and have used first-party user data as a competitive advantage, but for a wider range of publishers, it has been easier to kick the can down the road, especially since Google already has. But publishers, particularly in the UK, are now having a greater sense of urgency. 

Industry news: Google winds down a podcast search feature, Reach names US editors and Penske’s investment in Vox

Google winds down feature that put playable podcasts directly in search results

Google Search will stop showing podcast carousels by February 13.

techcrunch.com

Reach names launch editors for Mirror and Express in US

Reach has named the launch editors for its expansion of the Mirror and Express websites into the US as Alex Wellman and Karl Holbrook.

pressgazette.co.uk

Vox Media Is Raising $100 Million From Penske Media

The deal is the latest in a series of acquisitions and investments made by Penske Media, the owner of a swath of entertainment and trade publications including Rolling Stone and…

www.nytimes.com

Today in AI: Getty sues Stable Diffusion maker and Google gets into the AI chatbot game

The AI headlines continue to come at a torrid pace as ChatGPT and AI image generators such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney allow anyone to create jaw-dropping images with a few text prompts. However, this space is also contentious with experiments highlighting the need for editorial standards needing to be applied to this new technology. 

Speaking of ChatGPT, Google has released its own chatbot, and Josh Benton of Nieman Lab asks what that means for publishers. 

Getty Images sues AI art generator Stable Diffusion in the US for copyright infringement

Getty says Stability AI stole 12 million images without permission

www.theverge.com

Google now wants to answer your questions without links and with AI. Where does that leave publis…

A dozen years ago, Eric Schmidt forecast the AI pivot that’s playing out this week. And the questions it prompts — around the link economy, fair use, and aggregation — are more …

www.niemanlab.org

Google trials its own AI chatbot Bard after success of ChatGPT

Technology will be added to Google’s search engine after explosion in use of rival backed by Microsoft

www.theguardian.com

Journalism Headlines: Green shoots in a news desert and how to get stories from company data

Santa Cruz ‘news desert’? An industry guru’s digital startup challenges local rivals

Prominent new-media guru Ken Doctor promised to help replace disappearing newspapers. His 2-year-old startup, Lookout, is fighting for a foothold in Santa Cruz.

www.latimes.com

Here’s how the ‘8 data story angles’ can help you get stories from company accounts

A couple of years ago I mapped out eight common angles for identifying stories in data. It turns out that the same framework is useful for finding stories in company accounts, t…

onlinejournalismblog.com

And last but not least: the exit to Mastodon seems like a flash in the pan. I have to say, decentralisation without usability is never going to work. Crypto and decentralisation divorced from user needs and usability will always fail. At that point, they become ideologies not technologies. 

The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump

Active users have fallen by more than 1 million since the exodus from Elon Musk’s Twitter, suggesting the decentralized platform is not a direct replacement.

www.wired.com

How do you design and build a new app? It’s something that we think a lot about in my new(ish) role at Pugpig as their consulting services director. INMA highlights a couple of frameworks used by successful publishers, Schibsted’s Aftenposten and the Financial Times. The first thing I would highlight is that product development needs to involve your entire organisation – editorial, commercial,marketing and technical. These examples are important and useful in that they cover two important elements of the product process, organisational alignment efforts and voice-of-the-user efforts. 

Speaking of apps, Mediapost.com has highlighted a report from the US Department of Commerce that calls on Congress to pass legislation that opens up app stores by forcing Apple and Google to open up additional paths for app developers to get onto users phones. Both in the EU and now the US, we’re seeing efforts to allow for alternative app stores or sideloading. 

App product development and opening up the app stores

Financial Times, Aftenposten share best practices for launching new products

During this week’s Webinar, Hilde Maartmann-Moe Sommerstad, senior product manager for Aftenposten/Schibsted, and Dilyana Evtimova, senior product manager for FT, shared their e…

www.inma.org

Two great case studies on how to develop successful apps from Schibsted’s Aftenposten and the Financial Times. Product managers represent the voice of the user, and in the best managed organisations are empowered to bring various internal stakeholders into alignment through a clear set of goals that help them manage trade offs. That sums up quite a bit about what I learned in master’s in innovation management. It can sound like a simple process, and once an organisation has a structure in place, it can run quite smoothly. But as multiple studies and the experience of product managers in media companies have found, it is this transition to an orderly process that is a tremendous challenge. Schibsted and the FT are the promised land, but for a lot of publishers, product management can definitely feel like an arduous journey in the wilderness. 

Apple Should Be Required To Allow ‘Sideloading,’ Biden Administration Says

“Developers face significant hurdles to get a chance to compete for users in the ecosystem, and these users in the ecosystem, and these hurdles are due to corporate choices rath…

www.mediapost.com

In a report by the US Department of Commerce, the Biden Administration says that developers face “significant hurdles” to compete with their mobile apps and that these choices are largely due to decisions made by the companies that control the platforms rather than legitimate technical issues. It has called on Congress to create legislation to open up the app market, which Democratic senators tried to do with proposed legislation in 2021. The upshot is that Apple and Google might be forced to be allow more sideloading, and with Republicans gunning for the major platforms as much as Democrats are, it might be one of the few areas of agreement by fractious parties in the US. 

Digiday’s outlook for the events sector for 2023 and what drives retention more: annual or monthly subs?

Digiday has a couple of excellent pieces today looking at the events pillar of media businesses. While anxiety still persists, publishers in the US are seeing a healthy opportunity for a revived events business. The US economy definitely looks in good health, and if it can manage to tame inflation, then 2023 can be quite a good year.

And retention is definitely a major theme this year for publishers. In a media roundup, they briefly look at whether monthly or annual subscriptions are more effective. 

Despite Q1’s slow start, publishers are bullish about events revenue for 2023

Publishers like BDG and Apartment Therapy are banking on events revenue to give them a leg up in 2023.

digiday.com

Media Briefing: The case for and against monthly and annual subscriptions in the battle for reten…

There are no one-size-fits-all solutions for improving retention in a subscriptions business. While annual subscribers might stick around longer for some, other publishers will …

digiday.com

Media News: A retrospective on algorithms, the podcast winter and Gannett kills comments (with little notice for its publications)

Journalistic Lessons for the Algorithmic Age – The Markup

A farewell letter from Julia Angwin

themarkup.org

Markup editor Julia Angwin looks back at her tenure at the helm and offers up a meditation on Algorithmic Age. It’s actually not just about algorithms but also her approach to journalism, especially data-driven journalism. 

Podcasts in pivotal moment as number of new shows drops by 80%

Analysts uncover dramatic worldwide decline, even though demand for content remains high

www.theguardian.com

The drop off in the creation of new podcasts has been reported before. Frankly, I think that this speaks as much to a decline in disposable time once pandemic lockdowns ended – not just for listening to podcasts but more important for creating them. It was easy to launch a new podcast when we were all home bound. Now that life is returning to normal, who has the time? Discuss. 

Gannett ends online comments for a majority of its news sites – Poynter

Previously, Gannett journalists moderated online comment spaces. ‘Changes in staffing’ have made that difficult.

www.poynter.org

Social Media Roundup: TikTok outlines new ‘strikes’ system for moderation and a day in the drama around Twitter

TikTok has a new way to manage ‘repeat offenders’. It’s not just a game of whack-a-mole about each case but looking for a pattern of behaviour. 
Twitter might have yet another new competitor, T2, that wants to take its crown. I think it speaks to the space that Musk has opened up as he runs Twitter in such an unfocused way. He has given existing competitors and new entrants the space to challenge the platform. 

Speaking of its lastest ‘let’s throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks’ idea, Musk is now floating the idea of charging brands up to $1000 a month for their golden tick. Well, if he can come up with a way that it can’t be hijacked easily, he might have a business model. 

TikTok Goes After Repeat Offenders With New ‘Strikes’ System

TikTok has announced the rollout of a new strikes-based system. Instead of only pursuing individual cases, users will now be penalized based on their cumulative actions.

www.mediapost.com

Startup T2 Wants to Terminate Twitter

Cofounder Gabor Cselle says his upstart social network can offer a “2007 Twitter” community vibe that Elon Musk’s platform no longer supplies.

www.wired.com

Twitter’s Considering Charging Brands $1, 000 Per Month for its New Gold Checkmark

The gold checkmark is Twitter’s new verification variant for brands.

www.socialmediatoday.com