The Future?
In this fourth and final post of the series on revenue diversification, we take a look at some movements that may forecast what the future may hold.
Platform Reckoning
In areas of “big tech,” leading companies are being called by critics “evil tech” or the social web “the toxic web” on account of the huge control and leverage companies in the FAANG nexus, and notably Faceook and Google, exercise on people’s everyday internet content and recommendation consumption. Government agencies are now playing catch-up. See the below table from Axios Research for a quick view into what’s going on there.
Will this result in more privacy legislation? Likely. Will it cause antitrust breakups of companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, or Google? Possibly. Will fines be levied at the very least? Probably. Regardless of what happens, the lens of government is now squarely on these big tech titans and this may help the plight of smaller publishers, with time. But it would be unwise to count on any of these possible outcomes as a part of your revenue strategy.
Meanwhile, platforms are showing signs of warming back up to publishers – at least outwardly – and even if because pushed. Google’s News Initiative is one example. Facebook’s engagement decline may have resulted from less quality content being surfaced, and may have resulted in their upcoming Surface News offering, which is inviting major publishers to negotiate content licenses from publishers, by Facebook – as Bloomberg CEO Justin Smith discussed in DigiDay.
Publisher / Platform Consortiums
To generate political and market leverage, many groups of publishers and journalists are banding together.
The Trust Project, and Civil.co
Sometimes this is done in collaboration with platforms to combat the proliferation of untrustworthy news, as in the case with The Trust Project, and Civil‘s blockchain registry.
The Trust Project is “a consortium of top news companies led by award-winning journalist Sally Lehrman, is developing transparency standards that help you easily assess the quality and credibility of journalism.” Its leadership council includes members such as Richard Gingras from Google’s News Initiative, Andrew Anker from Facebook (formerly Wired CTO), publisher leads from The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Hearst, Gizmodo, The Globe, Financial Times, and many academic luminaries. Their goal is to establish and maintain journalistic “Trust Indicators” which, when present on participating publisher sites, are “consistent technical standards” used by platforms including Facebook, Google, and Bing.
Similarly, the Civil registry uses blockchain technology to vet and certify (with blockchain tokenization) verified trustworthy news sources to include in their registry, which not only should help with trust factors, but also may be extensible to future forms of revenue / monetization (more of which below).
The News Project
The News Project takes the approach of offering a suite of best-in-breed publisher services which can help bootstrap smaller publishers into a sophisticated publishing and monetization ecosystem. Founded by Merrill Brown and augmented with an impressive team of digital experts and partner companies, they offer “the resources and expertise you need to launch, sustain and scale your news venture” including
-
- State-of-the-art editorial tools and high-performance display templates
- Revenue and member management for subscriptions, sponsorships, metered content, payments and programmatic advertising
- Audience development and engagement tools for social media, Apple News, Google News, email campaigns, push notifications and mobile-optimized layouts
- Enterprise-class managed hosting for scale, security and performance
- Dashboard featuring customized analytics and business metrics
- World-class news and features to supplement your original content
Their first implementation was announced this past July with CalMatters, as featured in Techcrunch, with Merrill Brown quoted to say “reader revenue is the future.” They charge a $25,000 up front fee and a monthly subscription, which may end up being far more affordable than a self-build scenario with individual partner contracts.
Newspack
Similarly to The News Project, WordPress.com is launching its own bundled news publisher services package called NewsPack. It provides essentially similar publisher service offerings from hosting, revenue, distribution, marketing tech, analytics, and revenue tools, and is currently rolling out a one-year pilot for selected applicant publishing organizations, with a cost starting at $1,000 / month (I believe this is the base offering, with add-on costs for email marketing, video delivery, etc modules). It would seem that NewsPack, spearheaded by WordPress.com under former NY Times executive Kinsey Wilson, and funded also by the LENFest Institute, Google’s News Initiative, and others, is a parallel but separate effort from The News Project headed by Merrill Brown and a different group of luminaries, and also funded by Automattic, via WordPress VIP enterprise managed hosting.
Other Publisher Platforms: Chorus, ARC, and more
Clearly there are many groups who identify with the challenge of managing operational overhead for publishers. There’s a great breakdown of the entire landscape in the presentation recap from Davis Shaver’s WordCamp for Publishers Columbus 2019 presentation “Real Publishers, Real Problems, Real Opportunities,” which outlines the offerings not only from News Project and Newspack but also makes mention of other systems such as INN’s Largo Project and LION Publishers, which includes access to the Civil Blockchain trust-verification system. And if you’re a substantial publisher there are also the Washington Post’s ARC publishing system, and Vox Media’s Chorus, as enterprise focused publishing platforms, to consider.
Google Publisher Subscriptions
If you’re comfortable going all-in with Google, Google Publisher Subscriptions, part of the larger Google News Initiative, may be alluring. It offers a turnkey method for adding two major services: a metered wall and a subscription conversion funnel. Pricing is not disclosed on their main site but according to one recent post, publishers retain 85%-95% of the subscription revenue and Google’s publisher implementation has raised subscriptions for many by 30% because it is a “friction-list” experience.“ Also check out their guidance on Flexible Sampling (configuring the metered wall).
Publisher Subscription Networks
Some companies are making it their mission to bundle one-time subscriptions into premium access to multiple publishers’ content, or to create a whole new value chain which will reward both consumer and publisher company in some equitable arrangement.
Scroll, a forthcoming subscription service founded by Chartbeat founder Tony Haile, intends to provide an ad-free, very fast-loading mobile and desktop experience for multiple partner’s content (see from their site below). They also plan to offer “pick up where you left off” functionality to make reading on the go easier.
Other companies have attempted this approach, including Texture, which was acquired and taken off the market by Apple.
New Value Chains and Virtual Currency
What about virtual currency? There’s much in play there as well. Some companies are looking to disrupt the content value chain entirely with new and often virtual-currency enabled ecosystems.
Invisibly, founded by Square founder Jim McKelvey and formerly called “The McKelvey Project,” which (on last understanding) seeks to create a new publisher value chain of atomic content purchases, incentives, ads, and virtual currency.
Brave is another example of an alternative monetization value chain. Their Brave Browser, a browser which incorporates ad- and tracker-blocking natively, asserts that its future includes the utilization of an Ethereum-based “Brave Attention Token” rewarding users for their attention given to individual pieces of content, with a portion of the value of that attention paid back to the content creator. This value system is sufficiently nascent to any recommendation speculative at best, but it’s worth noting directionally to publishers interested in revenue diversification and comprehensive revenue capture. In short, it’s worth being aware of and, if the lift is not great, entertaining partnering in a pilot program with these kinds of players. But it shouldn’t be at the top of your list from a near-term revenue perspective.
Summary
To sum up, it’s a brave new world, but still a pretty bleak one in the immediate term for many publishers. In the words of Bloomberg CEO Justin Smith, “The reality is that the industry is not dying, it’s not going extinct, but it’s actually just going through a process of slimming down.” Near-term revenue will continue to be down due to the disintermediation of publishers by platforms that has taken place, and the reduction in effective revenue potential by programmatic ad tech. Many brands do not have the kind of content people are ready to pay for. Options are materializing and some companies are making good use of them.
But progress is not made fast enough for many; major publisher networks are deciding to merge instead, to recognize efficiencies to offset ongoing revenue shortfalls. For example, Vox Media’s acquisition of New York Media, and the even more recent acquisition of Refinery 29 by Vice Media.
If I had to predict anything, I’d say there will be more of these M&A consolidation moves between major players, while the real utility of emerging publisher subscription networks may allow content consumers to accept the value of a single subscription to pay for content from multiple content sources. So it’s worth watching these as options.
This overview of the landscape for publisher revenue diversification has been extensive but by no means comprehensive. There are whole areas left out and many important companies involved, missed. But I am hopeful that with the past, present and future partly helpfully outlined, readers with a stake in content publishing will raise their apprehensions, and possibly find new opportunities to reward their quality content with commensurate revenue.
Missed the previous posts in this series?
This post was originally posted on the Vuukle blog, and is reposted here.