Tag: revenue-diversification

In the prior two posts in this series, we covered The Past, wherein publishers focusing too heavily on display revenue found themselves in a mighty pickle; and The Present, part 1, where we discussed a variety of methods for diversifying revenue, other than subscription-based, direct-to-consumer revenue, which is now the subject of this post.

Premium Content and Subscriptions

The meat of where publishers are focusing attention at present is around having some kind of paid content or premium play.   We’re familiar with implementations which have been in place for the past years on big name publishers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, etc.   More and more publishers of large and now medium sizes, however, are making an effort to get direct consumer revenue from their content.

There are several approaches to generating premium content, which vary in degrees of sophistication and investment required.  Here are a few.

• • Ad-Free
  • Metered Wall
  • Hard Wall
  • Behavioral Pricing
  • Membership
  • Free Registration Wall
  • Strategic Partnerships

Ad Free:  Handling Ad Blockers or offering an Ad Free experience

The advent of Ad Blockers to the mainstream market is another factor to complicate the revenue value chain.  Ad blockers work most effectively on desktop browsers, where most ad spam takes place. They are generally browser plugins, but some new browsers such as Brave have native ad and tracker blocking, and encryption, built in from the get-go.

What’s important to publishers here is a pretty simple determination.

1. 1. Find out how much of your traffic (desktop and mobile) is utilizing an ad blocker
   2. Calculate the loss of pertaining revenue due to that segment not seeing or loading ads
   3. Determine if that is a large enough problem to warrant doing anything about it

If you want to do something about it, your options are a) to engage with a company that offers “ad replacement” (very cheap usually text based ads that are not blocked by ad blockers), or, more often, to offer gating options to users of ad blockers, as follows:

Scenario 1:  “We see you’re using ad ad blocker.   Please deactivate it to continue to our ad-supported content.  It’s important for our ads to support our journalism.”

Scenario 2:  “We see you’re using an ad blocker.  If you’d like to continue to enjoy an ad-free experience, please register for our premium account…”

Both of these scenarios or others like them essentially use the detection of an ad blocker as a springboard for transacting a more advantageous delivery of content to the end user.  All of these scenarios take on the implicit risk that the visitor will walk away, removing both traffic and revenue. This is why the publisher should determine (as above) the size of the problem and whether it is worth doing anything, at all.

In scenario 2, however, the option is also open to offer users who do not use ad blockers, to get an ad free experience if they pay.   Anecdotally, I would offer that just offering users not to view ads, will not generate much in the way of subscription revenue conversion.  Consumers, accustomed to getting publisher content for “free” (with ads) often have a problem with paying for the same content, without anything extra to the value proposition.  Unless you are a staple brand (such as NYT or WSJ) some users just can’t do without, asking for users to pay simply to turn ads off, may not be quite enough. It follows that the other varieties of direct to consumer revenue generation add additional benefits, in a variety of ways.

Metered Wall

The New York Times is a great example of a Metered Wall.   Clicks from search into a NYT story will generally let you read the story, but only so many times per month.   A customized subscription elicitation will appear at the bottom of your story, showing you an offer to subscribe.  If you do not subscribe, and click to subsequent stories, eventually you will exhaust your count of free views. At this point, the top of the story appears, with the rest blurred out and covered by a large, blocking elicitation to subscribe.  You cannot scroll, or attempt to capture the story before the wall pops up. Yes, there are ways around it (use a different browser, try clearing your cookies, use a different computer or your phone) but it is inconvenient enough for a sufficient amount of interested readers, that the NYT has seen great subscription growth using this method.  Then again, they are the New York Times. Will your audience pay when they hit the wall? Or is your content not consistently important enough for them to do that? These are the questions you need to address. One approach to answering them is to do some customer research about price tolerance. In many cases (in my experience) you may find that the revenue returns you model based on that research, may not warrant the investment in a walled approach.

One significant benefit of the Metered Wall approach is that you may fine-tune the meter as time goes on.  For example in my own personal experience, the New York Times initially gave me 10 free views per month, and it later reduced to 5, and then finally, 2.  Then, I subscribed. This optimization of the meter can be done for all users equally, or differently for individual users (where they can be identified across devices, platforms, and browsers).  This approach verges into Behavioral Pricing (below).

A great many other publishers have implemented or are implementing approaches to the metered wall.  Examples include Conde Nast, The New Yorker and local news groups e.g. Tribune Media.

Hard Wall

The Hard Wall is the easiest implementation of all, because it’s all or nothing.  Every single post requires a premium subscription. This is the approach the Wall Street Journal has taken (for the most part), and due to their stalwart financial audience, it seems to serve them well.  It works also for other audiences who have high tolerance for investing in exclusive content, such as trade publications or brands who release incisive analyst research which can potentially guide investors toward wiser decisions.

Behavioral Pricing

The concept for behavioral pricing is that the more data a publisher can gain, via first party user data all the way to 3rd party licensed data, the finer decisions can be made about what price to offer what users.  Fly-by users may be given free access, whereas regular visitors may have a good introductory price, with a lower price offered if they choose not to engage. Then, some users may be known as high-ticket users, and may be given the highest price point of all, for starters.  If a decent volume of these subscriptions can be sold, the recurring revenue can be material enough to justify the investment in the technology behind the behavioral price targeting.

Membership

Membership is a promising approach many publishers of middle-to-larger sizes have adopted.  The concept around membership is that while you capture a potential subscriber’s interest with excellent free content, you surround the content with a finely-merchandised array of membership benefits.  Membership benefits might include:

• • Premium Content (e.g. investor analysis)
  • Community Access (e.g. commenting, social networking features)
  • Exclusive Access (VIP event access, membership tokens or free member merch)
  • Events (e.g. tentpole offline events, online live streaming events)
  • Custom Features (e.g. UGC / authoring capability)
  • Mobile app (with custom features e.g. podcasts, calendar integration, etc

The diversity of publishers using this approach demonstrates its popularity.  You have got industry content creators such as DigiDay or TechCrunch (who have expensive exclusive events periodically through the year) and also have premium-only content.   There are individual thought leaders or pundits such as Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, or Jessica Lessin’s TheInformation, which both have member-only access and whose hugely popular newsletters are a staple to a great many, who may choose to subscribe to access all of their posts and analysis.  The Business Insider, now TheInsider, is largely built around premium analysis subscriptions. TheChive has an interesting spin on membership, offering the BFM (Bill F… Murray) coin, which members can show to get into Chiver parties all across the USA for free.

Free Registration Wall

Not ready with a sufficient value proposition to ask users to pay?   Well, it might be worth it to put up a wall just to collect email addresses and have users create free accounts.  Now more than ever as changes to browsers will affect the utility of 3rd party cookies to target ads. First-party data will always be the best, so get it where you can.  Just, as above, make it clear why the user should want to create a free account, with a pithy benefit statement, or an appeal to maintaining free journalism, as seen often on The Guardian or Wikipedia.   Max Wilens wrote in his 9/30 DigiDay post, “Even though the right value exchange will vary from site to site, each publisher should be able to come up with something.”

When you’ve succeeded in setting up an effective registration wall that doesn’t unduly impact your gross traffic, you’ve succeeded not only in generating an ongoing source of first-party user data; you’ve also laid most of the groundwork for later introducing premium offers, if and when you are ready.

Strategic Partnerships

Other publishers or content service platforms create partnerships with other companies to provide exclusive benefits to members (for example, 20% off on luxury auto rentals via Audi Silver).   Indeed, the bundling of Spotify with major wireless carrier contracts or new line additions is an example of strategic partnerships which are offered as a benefit of membership.

With a defined audience, publishers can offer much more than just original content to paying members as a benefit of membership.   Major publishers or content providers of all types have partner management groups whose main focus is on closing mutually advantageous deals with commerce, travel, financial service, career recruiting, or other value-added service providers, to help them convert more sales on their end, while the publisher converts more paid subscribers on their end.   This is akin to co-marketing grown up, to include financial conversions on a quid pro quo custom negotiated partner contract.

From Here to There:  Implementation of a Registered or Premium Content Strategy

All of these approaches will require some investment in either building or buying technology which enables the publisher to collect registrations and to segment or specifically target users based on what is known about them, for premium upgrade or general marketing or ad targeting purposes.  Are they unauthenticated visitors? If so, try to convert them using a free registration or paid subscription conversion flow. Are they authenticated registered free users? If so, continue to try to convert them to paid during site visits, but do so also via email marketing (where opted in).   Are they authenticated paid users? If so, do not hassle them with upgrade nags, give them what they paid for, and do your best to retain their paid accounts.

Large publishers such as NYT and Dow Jones (WSJ) have invested millions in their metered wall, hard wall, or behavioral pricing technology.  Luckily, the market of publishers for solutions in this area is a fast growing one, and many partner options exist. They are usually structured on a SaaS model, and generally take on the burden of financial account processing so that the publisher does not need to worry about hosting customer credit card details or other personally-identifiable information beyond the profile basics of name, email address, etc.  My recommendation is to choose a solution that is cost-effective but which also includes some element of strategic consultation for the implementation itself. Asking for an ROI analysis of the SaaS costs is always a good idea, even if you don’t get it.

A few examples to look at, with no particular preference given, are:  Chargify, LaterPay, Piano, Pico, Recurly, Zuora. It’s easy to find others via comparison sites such as G2.  Another very turnkey option with likely lower flexibility, is Google’s Publisher Subscriptions product. And more recently, WordPress.com announced integration of Stripe for recurring subscription payments.

Summary

It’s clear that there are many ways to approach direct to consumer revenue via premium content, membership benefits, etc. – most all of which require some subscription mechanism to process payments, and some product marketing work, all of which is hoped to result in the much-sought revenue.   Finding a turnkey solution for such solutions will come at a cost, so be sure you believe your value proposition and benefit statements to users has a good chance of generating sufficient subscriptions to offset those costs on a planned timescale.   I’d suggest doing some research about price tolerance and benefits to assess your target market’s willingness to pay, at all, and if so, for what.  Or, if you’re certain that subscriptions are necessary for continued survival, go ahead and implement quickly and cheaply, then iterate.  Every publisher’s business is somehow different, so your approach will require some thought, analysis, and planning.   I am hopeful the above guide will be informative and useful toward that effort.

Continue on to what we may see in The Future…

NOTE: This post was originally published in the Vuukle Blog and is reposted here.

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.

Introduction

The digital publishing industry has gone through quite a lot of change in the past decade, largely in its ability to grow revenue or even maintain steady revenue.  Publishers have come from an industry largely built on display advertising revenue, to one which is struggling to make cents on the dollar in 2019 vs 2009, that way.   There are many reasons for the deterioration of this revenue channel, but primary are changes in the “big tech” of social and search platforms, which have reduced the amount of referral traffic to publishers from their sources.  In addition, the onset of “big ad tech” in programmatic advertising, and a bewildering array of ad tech companies, has added a bevy of entrants to the publisher advertising value chain, each exacting its own percentage of ad revenue, leaving publishers with a seemingly ever-smaller piece of the pie.

Publishers with foresight have been working on this quagmire for some time, under the rubric of revenue diversification, which is the subject of this series of posts.   After all, display advertising, even with the addition of video advertising, isn’t the only way to run a business around quality original content. There are many other approaches, and a well-rounded, diversified portfolio of revenue channels, each continuously optimized, is recommended for all such digital businesses.   In what follows, I outline the past, present, and possible future of this landscape, in some detail drawing from my own experience leading platform products for major digital publishing businesses, and in advising clients. I hope it is useful to many looking to gain a cohesive view into the challenges surrounding revenue for digital publishers today, and might help some to improve their outlook.

The Past:  Publishers, Advertising, and Platform Disintermediation

A Simpler Time

There was a simpler time.  Some ten years ago, making a business out of digital publishing was easier, and display advertising led the way.  Sure, a digital operation needed to shell out some decent initial investment to host and manage its publishing stack, ensure it could scale, optimize for search engines, and equip a sales team to get before brands to secure campaigns bearing large ticket prices for direct insertion.  But once that was done, it was fairly uncomplicated and the game became in getting larger audiences (measured by Comscore) to speak the language of media buyers, and collecting revenues on renewing or new advertising customers.  

Getting Away With It

Businesses could get away with many sins, or at the very least take advantage of a formative value chain.  Ad targeting was elementary, measurement limited, and audience quality quite often rather suspect. Publishers could to some extent rest on their laurels, as brands did not have many other or better options in digital advertising.   And even better, traffic was quite often literally free. Organic search referrals were the leading source of traffic for many, and soon, social referrals began to take equal share with search, as Facebook strove to build the largest online audience, possible.  It was all free. Until it wasn’t.

Killer Penguins 

Midway through the 2010s publishers noticed some troubling trends in their traffic volumes, and asked their product teams what the problem was.  Nothing had been changed in their site operations to cause this drop – the dropoff came entirely, and suddenly, from Google search referrals. And it didn’t happen just once – there followed a long and still ongoing history of Google updates with friendly sounding names like Hummingbird, Panda and Penguin.  “They changed the algorithm, and it killed our traffic,” was the conclusion. Many strenuous efforts were made to adapt to these algorithm changes in ways Google (sometimes) (rather vaguely) suggested. This work continues and all those responsible for SEO are watchful for algorithm changes to adapt to them quickly, however possible.

No More Free Facebook Traffic for You!

Facebook was the same story but worse.   The early 2010s had been a bellwether period for free Facebook traffic, and whole businesses were built on it (many no longer exist).  But the effect of Facebook ads and their (valid) promise of “custom audiences” became painfully apparent to Publishers when the Facebook’s algorithms began also to change, no longer sending free traffic to publishers.  Most notably a large change to Facebook’s EdgeRank took place in January 2018 to focus on prioritizing “friends, family and groups” and caused a huge decline in most publisher traffic. Publishers, beaten by their dependence on Facebook, joined them by beginning to invest in Facebook traffic buys – that is, buying Facebook ads to drive to their own sites.  This was great for a publisher when in a bind to meet an impression commitment to an advertiser, but then the cost of the Facebook buy, as as cost of sales, counted negatively against the ad revenue, lessening the net profit. And to make matters worse — far worse — brands which formerly bought ads on publisher sites now began to buy direct from Facebook because larger and more highly targetable audiences were there.   The platforms had disintermediated the publishers.  

Programmatic (Diminishing) Returns

Ad tech was doing the same thing at the same time.  Indirect advertising through Google DFP had been a good way to fill unused traffic avails with low-CPM inventory, but that also reduced the average CPM hugely and in some cases, brands would buy indirect vs working with direct sales teams from publishers.  That was only the start, though; soon, the programmatic ad stack any given publisher needed to set up included DSPs, SSPs, Header-Bidders, and all manner of 3rd party data aggregators and resellers. Ad targeting became better, CPMs dropped lower, and every new entrant to the party took its piece of the pie while the publisher’s piece grew ever smaller.   Publishers responded by adding more ad units. The customer experience became ever worse. Customers responded by adding ad blockers or just not coming back, so impressions dropped further and organic traffic took the hit on customer reprisal.

Pivot to Video!

Video became a much larger strategic importance to publishers because the CPMs were off-the-charts higher than display.  It was a lot more work, though, which came with costs. Targeting and inventory were a problem. Getting people to click play was a problem, and publishers added insult to their existing ad-spam injury by setting up auto-play on all pages, which worked to inflate preroll revenue, except where modern browser updates blocked autoplay.  More ad tech businesses arrived to solve the inventory and targeting challenges,, but they were for-profit businesses, too. Some publishers went all in and “pivoted to video” between 2015 2017 – laying off most of editorial, and building large video production teams. Some of them, like NowThis and Mic.com, lost their way in the process.  And at the same time, OTT platforms were on the rise, with more customer time spent on SVOD or AVOD video platform offerings than ever before. Consumer tolerance for ad-spammed webpages was lower than ever while, ironically, consumer tolerance for additional premium subscriptions grew to its highest point yet. As such the “duopoly” of platform disintermediation expanded into “FAANG” aka Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (including YouTube).  Digital publishers might be able to get distribution on these platforms, but seldom on their own, or very advantageous, terms.

 The Publisher Pickle

Therefore by 2018 you could say that publishers were thoroughly in a pickle.  Efforts were made by news consortiums to negotiate with platforms. Litigation and more recently extensive government investigations were started.  Platforms began making heartfelt gestures about doing right by content creators. But reacting to the pickle publishers were in,was only exactly that, a reaction.   

Proactive measures would have been far more effective to near-term revenue recovery and return to growth. 

Continue on to read about “The Present:  Revenue Diversification.”

Note: this post was originally published on the Vuukle Blog and is reposted here.