Month: February 2020

The Media Minute 02.18.2020

Barstool Sports launched as a print publication in 2003. Since then, they’ve become a multi-million dollar diversified sports and pop culture media company. Barstool recently sold to one of their advertisers, Penn National Gaming (owner of the Tropicana), for $450 million.

The report reveals that across the 5,000 titles that are available on Readly in over 50 markets, digital issues were read 83 million times throughout 2019.

With Flipboard’s newest venture, called Flipboard TV, the mobile reading app company will pay publishers — and aims to charge its 145 million monthly active users — for access to curated video content.

Publishers could get a bonus from Google. The Alphabet company reportedly is in talks with publishers to pay a licensing fee for news content.
The move would follow Facebook’s decision last year to pay news organizations to license their headlines and article summaries in its news tab.

No matter how much your core brand’s magazine, website, or event is thriving, building in back up revenue streams and maxing your brand’s recurring revenue is your safety net when things get rough.

The America East News Summit is set to return March 30 to April 1 in Hershey, Pa. at the Hershey Lodge and Convention Center. Administered by the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association (PNA), more than 150 people are expected to attend.

The Media Minute 02.11.2020

Consumers expect to get whatever they want, whenever they want it, delivered how they want it. You can credit (or blame) Amazon for setting expectations so high, but those same expectations extend to online publishing.

Branded content helps audiences connect with brands on an emotional level and is most commonly used to build brand awareness and increase brand loyalty.

In the past couple years, Twitter has worked to position its platform as a destination for livestreaming video. But some news publishers tell Digiday that Amplify’s brand safety rules make it difficult for them to monetize their breaking news videos there, forcing them to forgo revenue they can earn monetizing videos on the same topics elsewhere.

Consumer spending on media grew 4.3% in 2019, which is slightly slower than the 4.9% that advertising and marketing spending on media grew last year, according to estimates released this morning from media industry economists PQ Media.

Is your content just something you send out and call it good? Or are you strategically posting, reformatting, and sharing to drive website traffic, attract new audience, and drive conversions?

For news organizations, selling advertising has become a notoriously complicated endeavor as media companies, tech businesses, and platforms compete for a share of the revenue.

The Media Minute 02.04.2020

If you haven’t been following recent news, there’s a new marketing push in big media to unite audience data from different digital properties and sell advertising against the unified audience through proprietary ad-targeting platforms.

When we first covered TikTok and its half a billion users, it was to some collective brow-raising. Many felt the app was interesting, but hardly a serious contender in a mature market with well-established rivals.

Publishers’ efforts to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act have diverged as they parse one of its biggest ambiguities: whether selling targeted ads qualifies as selling California residents’ personal information.

Google’s researchers “evaluated ” a representative sample 273 Super Bowl ads shown from 2015-2019. It says in those ads, men were two times more likely than women to be portrayed as leaders, and guys were more than 2.5 times more likely to have speaking parts than women.

That “fresh start” feeling in the new year means it’s a great time to evaluate your audience data collection efforts — and make sure what you collect actually drives revenue and company growth!

Even today, much of the original reporting on the Trump administration originates at either the Times or the Post, thanks to reporters hard at work competing for scoops (and proudly seeking glory for their accomplishments on Twitter).

The Media Minute 01.28.2020

Data protection laws and privacy-minded browser updates are forcing publishers to rethink their digital business strategies and communication with users.

Republicans trust Fox News far more than any other news outlet, and Democrats, similarly, place their trust in CNN. These, according to the report, are “the two cable channels that most clearly represent the polarized media universe.”

Minute Media expects its newest acquisition will help it fuel a profitable year and achieve revenue exceeding $100 million…

The Washington Post is the media equivalent of Amazon’s chain of physical bookstores: it pretends it’s a cleaned-up version of a beloved old thing, but in fact that beloved old thing is now propelled by a new engine.

Serious marketers use multi-channel or omni-channel marketing because it works. The Association of Magazine Media tells us you can see as much as a 14% lift in ad effectiveness comes when you combine media in marketing.

In 2019, we saw Gannett and GateHouse Media merge to become the largest newspaper chain in the U.S. We saw more news organizations take a stronger stance against the spread of misinformation and lies.