Month: June 2020

The Media Minute 06.17.2020

According to the Forbes Coronavirus Cancellation Tracker, more than 83 million would-be event attendees have been affected by the pandemic. And that’s just those who’ve had their events canceled or rescheduled so far. Even once large gatherings resume, there will inevitably be attendees who will decide not to go due to lingering concerns about the virus.

Email newsletters, once thought of as low-tech and unfashionable, are proving increasingly valuable to publishers looking to build strong direct relationships with audiences, says this year’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report.

The third quarter in the most normal of times is a media lull, landing smack dab in the middle of languid summer months, used more as a preparation for the critical fourth quarter to end the year. This summer, advertisers have their plates full as they settle into the most unusual summer in memory.

In an open letter being sent to the ad industry today, a group of publishers and tech companies are calling for a fundamental change in the way their audience data is accessed during open programmatic trades.

In response to Monday’s Day of Solidarity, which saw more than 1,100 publishing workers demanding that the industry take action to diversity its workforce and to publish more black authors, three of the Big Five publishers issued statements saying that they will do just that.

It’s been rough out there in sales land during this health crisis. And yet, web traffic is spiking for media companies. So, what do we do to leverage that and take a bad situation and make it better for our advertisers?

The Media Minute 06.09.2020

Depending on their age and stage of life, the nation’s two youngest generations are getting a first taste of what it’s like to be a remote worker, home-schooling parent, or web-only shopper. Within a very short period, the way Millennials and Gen Zs buy products and consume media also has changed dramatically.

Puzzles, games and comics have long been a staple of newspapers and beloved by their most loyal readers, and I’m sure most editors can relate to how angry subscribers get when the results of the previous day’s crossword doesn’t appear in the paper.

The uptick is driven by increased video production, higher viewership and, crucially, the resurgence of advertisers looking to reach a large audience. As quarantine restrictions loosen, advertisers are running video ads to raise product awareness, providing a much-needed boost to advertising demand.

Publishers that post articles on Facebook have a new worry. An Australian court ruled this week they are liable for defamatory comments that other people make about those posts.

The social network’s parent company, Facebook, recently revealed that it was not sublicensing Instagram images used in website embeds—which could create headaches for associations and others that share their social images.

Business owners were still optimistic when COVID-19 started its relentless march from opposite ends of the country to eventually coat the nation. But with reported cases rising higher every week and the death toll in the U.S. creeping toward triple digits, projections of businesses reopening grew later and later.

The Media Minute 06.02.2020

Over the past two decades, companies of all stripes have embraced affiliate marketing as a way to drive quality sales, attract new customers, and generate high-value leads. What’s more is that the model’s pay-on-performance compensation structure has made it possible for brands to cost-effectively test campaigns.

Want to make marketing a competitive advantage for your business? You’re gonna need a flywheel. No individual hack, no short-term set of investments, can compete. Likewise, growth hacking in its classic form is often plagued by short-term returns, and processes that quickly stop working once the hack is popularized.

Over the last few months, virtual events have been used as an incentive for people to subscribe to publisher paid-for programs. Since launch in April, Verizon-owned TechCrunch has hosted 10 members-only investor Q&A series events, Extra Crunch Live, via its subscription tier, Extra Crunch.

Publishers have seen a surge in web traffic and paid subscriptions among homebound readers during the coronavirus pandemic. With lockdowns gradually ending in the next few months, a key strategy will be to retain those subscribers by reminding them why they signed up in the first place.

Four major book publishers have filed suit against the Internet Archive for copyright violations relating to the Open Library project, setting the stage for a major legal fight over one of the internet’s longest-running ebook archives.

In the span of just a few weeks, the entire world has been plunged into an inconceivable ordeal. A global pandemic has led to an unprecedented collective psychosis. The fear caused by uncertainty about the present and the future amplifies the turmoil. People get sick, and others unfortunately die.

The Media Minute 05.26.2020

In a digital world where audience attention is stretched thin, content marketing is one way for brands to stand out and engage potential buyers. And because 50% of all B2B marketers outsource part of their content marketing, such as content creation and distribution, B2B publishers can step in to help while generating revenue for themselves.

The Meeting Professional was also able to distribute the digital edition not just to MPI members, but to anyone who has signed up for a webinar or an online course or attended an MPI conference in the past, doubling its distribution from 50,000 in print to 100,000 for the digital edition.

The curve in subscription growth is starting to flatten for some but still remains higher than before coronavirus. Still, publishers including Bloomberg, The New York Times and The Guardian anecdotally say they are seeing signs of stronger retention rates from subscribers who have signed up since February and March.

Publishers that complain about losing advertising revenue to Google can now support those claims with a new academic paper that argues the search giant has abused its power.

Quarantined with a six-year-old child underfoot, Megan Frederickson wondered how academics were managing to write papers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns implemented to stem coronavirus spread meant that, overnight, many households worldwide had become an intersection of work, school and home life.

They were easing into it before coronavirus and an economic crisis happened. Now faced with an unprecedented fight for survival, we can expect newspapers across the country to reposition themselves as a public good and seek philanthropic funding.