Revenue Diversification for Digital Publishers – The Present (Part 1)

With all that was mentioned last week as a backdrop, it is clear why publishers should never again put all their eggs in one basket.  Focusing too heavily on one source of revenue is like stacking your investment portfolio with only one company’s stock.  If that company has a bad year, so do you. So like good investors, publishers have taken to diversifying their portfolio of revenue-generating channels.  Here are some approaches to doing so.

Branded or Sponsored Content

Branded content, or sponsored content or “native ads” are pieces of content, usually very clicky or appealing, with great headlines and enticing thumbnail images.  They can be trafficked just like display ads (in fact often are ad served) and several businesses have been made around doing just that. They can often feel like “just another ad” or an “ad in disguise” to consumers, but they have an important place in the ecosystem, particularly where social placements bar outright advertising, and sponsored social posts must be more strategically crafted.

Sponsored content continues to be a great approach for publishers who have good newsletter lists and open rates; some publishers (such as Quartz or Axios) have begun eschew display ads entirely and tend to have one sponsor per experience.  It is generally less intrusive than the multiple spots and dots of display placements and is considered more exclusive therefore earning a higher premium in rate card.

Audience Amplification

Audience Amplification revenue.   We’re all familiar with the array of related content items that appear below most posts, or to the right rail, or even in the middle of content, on major publisher sites.   The major players in this business have been Outbrain, Taboola (Outbrain and Taboola just merged), Zergnet, and there are many others.  Generally their promise is that their algorithm, keying off of natural language processing of your content posts, plus what they know about individual users from their network and via their cookies, to populate their recommended content with the most “clicky” content.  Some of it can be of low quality “clickbait” variety, but some companies e.g. Zergnet make a point of driving toward quality. Most will also give you the option to circulate your own content through their recommendation network, and your deal with them can be for inbound traffic to your site (driving engagement driving ad or other revenue) or revenue directly to you for traffic you drive to their network.

Audience Engagement 

Audience Engagement in particular is worth addressing in and of itself.   If your site could be more engaging to visitors, creating a session of 5+ pages per visit, versus the low internet average which is usually just above 1 page per visit, you’ll not only increase advertising or other revenue associated with this traffic, but you’ll also gain (usually) a better relationship with your visitor, increasing the chances of a return visit.

Ways to increase engagement vary.   The best way is to provide the very best content first of all, and secondly to recommend the very best (usually related) content for next-steps.  But there are other ways, such as adding comments, and adding other opportunities for users to engage with content, such as adding emoticon reactions, or liking or sharing the content.  The use of an engagement analytics platforms can help editorial staff know what is trending so they can capitalize on success — for example, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, and Google Analytics’ Realtime dashboard.

Vuukle’s Audience Engagement Ecosystem offers a unique combination of all of the above, providing:

  • Related content
  • Commenting (including anti-spam “toxicity” meter functionality)
  • Emoticon Reactions
  • Share, like, and following bar functionality
  • Real-time analytics showing top engaging content (cf. Chartbeat, Parse.ly)

Vuukle also drives revenue to publishers via one single ad placement above their comment well, thus lifting revenue both by lifting engagement, and paying publishers directly a cut of the ad revenues from their ad unit.

Newsletters

A good Newsletter strategy is key for any publisher, since the inbox still is a great place to be and most people check it regularly.   It takes work (editorial, deliverability, campaigning) to make newsletters work for you, but it can become a great source of quality, loyal traffic, and a great source of revenue, either from site-generated revenue, or via newsletter ads, or better, newsletter sponsorships.   What’s critical to consider here is that most people will never think to go to your site, you need to be where they are, whether that be on platforms (if you can get indexed/ranked/featured there, or via your social publishing), or via inbox through newsletters, or increasingly, via desktop and mobile notifications.   Good companies to look at for newsletters include Mailchimp and Sailthru (now part of Campaign Monitor), but there are dozens of excellent partners.  Same applies for push notifications. In the past I’ve used Airship and Moengage, but there are literally dozens of options.  You should get recommendations from others, and shop around!

Platform Distribution

Before moving onto direct consumer revenue options, it’s worth mentioning how you can gain greater audiences by participating in the latest offerings from the major Platforms, namely Google, Facebook, and Apple.  The revenue upside on each of them differs but all have one thing in common – the publisher cedes some level of control to the platform’s terms of service, or at the very least, to the platform’s technical specifications / requirements.  

Google AMP & Google News

Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) was invented to make mobile content consumption faster and better.   It’s worthwhile (in my mind) investing the smallish effort to make published content AMP-compatible. An AMP plugin is available for multiple CMS’s and a self-implemented approach is not at all prohibitive.  Essentially a different template with Google-AMP-compliant specifications is used for mobile user agents. There are various allowed and disallowed ad formats, however, so be aware of the tradeoffs if your audience is heavily mobile and you rely heavily on advertising.

Google News is a kind of certification for verified news sources.  If you pubilsh content which you believe is news, and are willing to adhere to certain standards you an apply to be crawled, indexed, and ranks in the News section of Google (news.google.com).  Here are some tips from Moz.com on how to do it.

Both Google AMP and Google News are probably good things to do if you can, because they will likely increase your inbound, free, organic search referrals.   AMP in particular will sometimes land you in the coveted “Google Carousel” of thumbnailed results at the top of the page.

Facebook Instant Articles

Facebook Instant Articles (FBIA) are similar to Google AMP in that they are designed for very fast loading content with a great user expeience.  They have similar technical specifications and requirements you must follow for inclusion in Facebook results and also can be featured as an instant article particualrly for mobile users.  The investment in setup is low (a plugin can be used for CMSes like WordPress), but the monetization potential is much lower as ad executions are more limited in scope (only N placements per Y words, for example), type, and yield.  Thus there is a strong business decision to make around modeling how much, when, or if at all, to send content over to your FBIA feed. Many publishers have tried it and discontinued it; on the other hand many send all of their content through FBIA.  Whatever determination is made, be sure to consider the editorial workflow and, where possible, automate the criteria for inclusion in FBIA, so that editors won’t forget to flag it, or flag content incorrectly.

Apple News

Apple News is quite similar to Facebook Instant Articles and was lagging behind (because arrived last) for some time.  However, the number of people who start their day with Apple News has increased since the comprehensive integration of it to MacOS and iOS.  Implementation is very similar to AMP or FBIA. A plugin can be used. Ad executions are similarly constrained. The same business decisions should be made, and the same attention paid to content inclusion workflow.  It’s worth noting that many major publishing brands have embraced Apple News, including premium stalwarts such as The Wall Street Journal. However, the WSJ you get on Apple News is not the WSJ.com in total. It’s a sampling – determined by whatever modeled strategy and content inclusion workflow the WSJ business and editorial staff have landed upon.  The New York Times, on the other hand, has been very cagey about Apple News inclusion, with CEO Mark Thompson cautioning any content creating company about giving access to its entire library, to any one platform distribution channel which they do not control.

Commerce and Affiliate Revenue

Many publishers do not have e-commerce as a critical element of their revenue strategy, but all publishers can add commerce revenue to supplement other revenue channels.   There are two primary ways, depending on whether or not you manage any of your own ecommerce inventory.

Without inventory:  Affiliate links. If your content pertains often-enough to merchandise of any sort (think, a post on top 2019 tennis racquets, or a post a celebrity and discussing the sneakers they’re sporting), then you can make money for every click-to-purchase with affiliate links.  An Amazon Associates account can be set up and earn you around 5% of each purchase referred.  There are also affiliate networks like Commission Junction which bundle multiple major retailers into one affiliate linking scheme.   Most of these require your content creators to take the time to create links with your affiliate ID in them, however.   To solve for that, some time ago smart companies inked their own deals with Amazon and other e-retailers, and provided a middle-man service by automatically detecting and rewriting all e-commerce links in your entire site, to include your account ID with them, which then generates revenue back to you (less the middle-man cut).   This is the easiest way to achieve scale without the risk of editors forgetting, or incorrectly adding, one of possibly many affiliate account IDs to their URLs, so it’s probably worth the middle-man cut. For these services, check out SkimLinks and Sovrn \\commerce (formerly VigLink).  For most publishers, adding an affiliate URL rewriting product like Skimlinks is so easy to do, it’s worth doing, regardless of how much you post content with product links in it.

With inventory:  Simple e-commerce stores can be added to sites using services such as Shopify and WooCommerce.  They provide guidance on setup and merchandising and often can be as easy to set up as installing a CMS plugin.   Then the process of selling can be as easy as populating your catalog, taking orders, and fulfilling.

Up Next:   Direct Consumer Revenue via Premium Content & Subscriptions

In our continuation of “Revenue Diversification – The Present” we’ll dive into some of the areas pubishers are starting to focus most – namely, in obtaining affiliate or direct subscription revenue from consumers.   Here’s a taste of what will be covered:

  • Premium Content and Subscriptions
    • Ad-Free
    • Metered Wall
    • Hard Wall
    • Behavioral Pricing
    • Membership
    • Free Registration Wall
  • Strategic Partnerships
  • From Here to There:  Implemementing a Registered or Premium Content Strategy

Continue on to Part 2: Premium Content Strategies

Note: this post was originally posted on the Vuukle Blog on 10/16/2019 and is reposted here.