Month: September 2020

The Media Minute 09.15.2020

Instagram is opened a “staggering 35 times per day” by The Economist’s followers, according to Kevin Young, the publisher’s Head of Audience. The photo and video sharing platform “has become a key platform for The Economist’s digital growth” and is enabling them to “reach and retain new audiences.”

The presidential election is still more than a month-and-a-half away, but publishers are building their own voter registration hubs and launching informative campaigns around issues. In past, these editorial pushes have made a real impact in not only driving people to the polls — but also in driving engagement with the brand.

We’re living in a world where people are limited in cash, limited on funds and certainly limited on patience. For the most part, I think everybody right now is actually limited to some degree in their cognitive abilities. So how do we expect someone we’re selling to to actually understand what they need vs. what they want?

The contentious issue of whether or how much digital media companies like Facebook and Google should pay news publishers for content this week was tucked into in a report on possible changes to America’s internet decency law. It’s a novel argument, but doesn’t get to heart of the issue of what value is being exchanged between publishers and digital platforms.

If you’ve published your branded content through a local business journal, we take care of promoting it to our audience through headline promotions, social media posts, adding the headline to our daily email newsletters and all the other ways we bring your content to our reader’s attention.

Scale is an issue, of course, but putting that aside, the benefits of email are clear. For years already, email has enabled advertisers to market directly to customers and to create Custom Audience on Facebook and Instagram. Publishers big and small, from The New York Times to local newspapers, can reengage site visitors and woo them into subscriptions.

The Media Minute 09.09.2020

Global paid digital circulation volumes of newspapers increased by 307% to reach 31.5M paying subscribers between 2013 and 2018. Print circulation figures fell by 0.5% during the same period, according to Australian Media Landscape Trends, a new report by AlphaBeta.

The presidential election is still more than a month-and-a-half away, but publishers are building their own voter registration hubs and launching informative campaigns around issues. In past, these editorial pushes have made a real impact in not only driving people to the polls — but also in driving engagement with the brand.

Here is the hard truth. The current state of local journalism is dire. The devastating impact of COVID-19 has made advertising dollars plunge and closed more than 50 local newsrooms around America, according to Poynter’s Kristen Hare, who has been tracking the closures since March. But before COVID-19 hit the industry, local journalism was already in need of help.

Apple soon will give publishers another way to offer subscriptions to readers who use apps to read newspapers and magazines on their iPhones and iPads. The company last week announced the upcoming rollout of “offer codes” that publishers can create for a variety of promotional efforts.

Ten years ago, display advertising made up 58 per cent of digital publisher revenue and subscriptions only 7 per cent. Subscriptions now account for 22 per cent of total revenue; with display advertising having shrunk to 42 percent.

Since web browsers were released over 25 years ago, they have amassed a significant amount of power. They’re sources of both supply and demand, all while holding the key to user data.This power gives the browsers huge influence over how users will access the internet in the future.

The Media Minute 09.02.2020

The fixed mindset believes your abilities are fixed, so you stick with what you have, and you believe your potential is predetermined by circumstances beyond your control. As a result, you don’t sharpen your skills and ability to identify opportunities, improve efficiencies, and make futuristic decisions vs. short-term choices.

Revenue was higher by 62% compared to January 2019. February saw a 79% increase over the previous year. The growth continued across March (27%), April (9%), May (17%) and June (17%) as the pandemic spread across the world, shrinking digital ad revenues and pushing many countries towards a recession.

With uncertainty continuing to hang over the American economy and advertisers continuing to face pressure from CEOs who want to see ad spending drive results, it has gotten harder than ever for publishers to start relationships with advertisers, executives at five different media companies told Digiday.

Apple is getting close to releasing the next version of the software that runs the iPhone, which will give people more control over the data they share with apps. Those changes will affect advertising revenue for publishers, but shouldn’t be considered a death knell for the industry.

For years, news organizations around the world have been pushing for fairer profit-sharing between themselves and the likes of Facebook and Google on news content distributed on social media platforms. Some of the industry’s leaders, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, have won government support to propose relevant regulations.

As opposed to Facebook, which yodeled from the rooftops about the negative impact Apple’s IDFA changes will have on publisher monetization through Audience Network, Google quietly updated its AdMob Help Center last week with information on the steps developers need to take before iOS 14 rolls out.

The Media Minute 08.25.2020

Few marketing channels get more attention these days than TikTok — and for good reason. Between January and March, the app was downloaded 315 million times, bringing the total to more than 2 billion downloads. Unique visitors have also been on the climb, nearly doubling in a matter of six months.

In spite of the ensuing outrage, Apple initially dug in, insisting that in-app purchases are required whenever apps “allow users to access content, subscriptions, or features they have acquired in your app on other platforms or your web site.” Nevertheless, after continued surprise and outrage, Apple backed off, issuing a rare on-the-record apology, saying that WordPress will no longer have to add in-app purchases.

For the past several weeks, audiences have begun to come back, some of them lured by content that is more focused on safety or staycations. Last month, publications including Travel Insider and BringMe each posted more content on Facebook than they had at any point since the pandemic started; BuzzFeed’s Bring Me posted more than it had at any point in 2020.

The New York Times has been an exemplary model of a newspaper that has worked to offset declining advertising revenue with gains in subscriptions — especially digital. A key question is whether local newspapers can mimic that strategy on a smaller scale than The Times, which has a national and global reach far beyond its namesake city.

Major US news publishers have joined the list of companies and app developers criticizing Apple’s App Store terms as unfair and potentially anti-competitive. The digital media trade association Digital Content Next — which includes newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post and numerous magazines, broadcasters, and websites (Vox Media, parent company of The Verge, is also a member) — sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday.

Google has said it will release a default setting to block advertisements that violate its heavy ad intervention policy by the end of August. Sources tell AdExchanger those new policies coincide with the release of Chrome 85, which is scheduled for Tuesday.