Failing technology put daily print deadlines at risk at a major Dutch/Belgium media house, wasting time and resources better spent on its digital transition, until the group invested in new tech that not only streamlined production but saw digital ad revenues skyrocket.

DPG Media – which has more than 120 titles including newspapers and magazines – faced frequent software crashes while building and designing pages using a long-established print publishing software provider as part of its tech stack. 

These failures put a serious strain on the group’s core print operation, which serves 1.2m daily print subscribers in the week and 1.6m on a Saturday across a network of titles.

Erik Louwes, programme manager at DPG Media, said the group was reliant on its expert IT team and staff working overtime to keep things functional after “the whole system crashed”.

“We just had to hope that it would work again… and that we’d be on time for the printing press,” he said. “It was horrible… sometimes I called my publisher and said: ‘I’m not sure we’ll have newspapers for tomorrow morning.’”

DPG Media needed to find an integrated print and digital publishing system which worked and opted for Qonqord, which offers a modular platform that aims to optimise content creation and publishing processes. Netherlands-based Qonqord announced a major expansion into the UK market earlier this year with the acquisition of Evolved Media.

For DPG Media, this modular approach meant it could keep its existing tech solutions that were working, while switching to Qonqord and WoodWing’s modular approach for planning, workflow and digital asset management and Adobe InDesign for page building and design.

WoodWing Studio and WoodWing Assets are two of the solutions offered by Qonqord. Studio allows editors to create content in a media-neutral editor drawing in images, video and illustrations from the WoodWing digital assets management system. The studio allows editors to publish easily from one platform to website, Facebook, Instagram and apps. It is also integrated with Adobe Indesign allowing print pages to be quickly created using pre-set templates.

The new system has delivered significant efficiency gains across DPG Media’s newspaper and magazine titles and also in the digital production process.

Digital advertising revenue up 250% in five years

Since partnering with Qonqord five years ago, DPG Media has had a reliable and streamlined print process, allowing it to focus on making digital pay through a mix of subscriptions and premium paywalls across its newspaper and magazine titles.

Louwes said: “When you have a good print system that works, then you’re able to have more focus on digital. We are able to produce the newspaper more efficiently, with fewer people, and that’s very important for the future of our publishing house.”

In the five years to 2023 (the latest available annual figures), DPG Media’s digital advertising turnover grew by 250% to €207m, which the group, headquartered in Antwerp, puts partly down to the growth of its own platform for advertisers: DPG Network.

DPG Media reported total revenues of €1.7bn in 2023. Digital subscriptions were up 10% to €176m, making up for print decline. Reader revenue for the year totalled €859m, with 2.9m subscribers across print and digital. The group also offers TV, radio and streaming services.

Mainting print affordability and quality is key

In the Netherlands, there is still a strong tradition of people subscribing to a print newspaper, while in Belgium single copy sales are more prevalent. Both, like everywhere, are seeing digital news consumption increasing in the face of declining print circulations.

“We have to make that transition to digital and everybody understands it and wants to do it,” said Louwes. “WoodWing and Qonqord understand that… and they want to help.”

The group has shifted its focus to creating more “digital value” for consumers, DPG Media chief executive Erik Roddenhof said in a release accompanying its 2023 annual report.

“Digital value creation starts with the consumer,” he said. “A consumer who comes more often and stays with us longer is more willing to become a subscriber. We need to offer even more value to consumers.”

But while “digitalisation” is the group’s “key objective”, according to Roddenhof, he said “a lot is being done to maintain the quality and affordability of our traditional media outlets”. The group’s flagship national daily De Volkskrant has a circulation of more than 337,000, while regional tabloid daily AD, which covers Rotterdamm, puts out 349,000 copies a day. In 2021, De Volkskrant was named the world’s best designed newspaper, beating competition from the New York Times, Washington Post and Die Zeit.

Stories need to be edited just once, for digital and print

One of the major changes DPG Media is looking to make as part of its digital transition is to shift focus from print to digital in terms of editing content. The current process sees stories published online with some editing, before being fully edited again for the print newspaper.

“We want to change that,” said Louwes. “The editing has to be for digital [first], and then you don’t need to have editing for print. Right now we have double work – we’ll do the editing for digital very quickly, and not good enough, and then we have a lot of editors to make it perfect for the newspaper.

“We have to swap that so the editing at the beginning of the content process is perfect, and then we’ll have a lot of stories for the newspaper. And with those good stories, which they won’t need to edit [again], the team will make the newspaper.”

For Louwes, himself a former journalist, it’s the stories that are the key to success, not the format. “The journalism is the most important thing we have to do and… it has to be distinct from other [news] websites,” he said. “You have to be the best in journalism.

“And yes it differs when it’s for the [print] newspaper, because the subscription earns much more money, but for digital it’s always important to have better journalism that people want to pay for. We have to be better and quicker than other news sites.”

For DPG Media, the transition to digital isn’t simply a way to boost earnings, it’s existential – it’s about future-proofing the business against the long-forecast demise of print. Despite print still making up a sizeable chunk of the group’s annual revenue, Louwes admits: “I think there will be a time that we don’t print newspapers, but I’m not sure when.”

He said the act of reading a printed newspaper compared to a news website was different, not only as a physical experience but in the round-up versus rolling news coverage approach. “When you close a news website, you’re worried and think ‘I’m missing out on news’, but when you read the newspaper, you think ‘I’m up-to-date’,” he said.

But there’s also an undeniably romantic idea to print that still lingers.

“Every morning a subscriber gets their newspaper and there’s nothing else but tea or coffee on the table when they start their day. That’s so unique… I think people like to have it,” said Louwes. “I hope it is a long time [before print is dead].”

The post How DPG Media invested in print technology to help it focus on digital appeared first on Press Gazette.

Telegraph journalist David Knowles was just 32 when he died suddenly whilst on holiday in Gibraltar on 8 September. But his death has prompted an outpouring of tributes from hundreds of listeners worldwide to his daily Ukraine war podcast. Family and friends have remembered him as a “kind” and “cheerful” man with a “ceaseless curiosity”.

Knowles joined the Telegraph’s social media team in 2020, but made a name for himself with podcast Ukraine: The Latest, which he launched on Twitter Spaces after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Created, produced and hosted by Knowles, it has become the Telegraph’s most popular podcast and is the UK’s only remaining daily audio offering on the conflict, broadcasting nearly 700 episodes so far to a global audience, including on Youtube.

In a brief but emotional broadcast on 9 September, Knowles’ podcast co-hosts shared the news of his sudden and unexpected death with listeners. In response, more than 1,800 messages have been posted below a Telegraph report on his death, which serves as a digital book of condolences, and yet more have appeared on social media and podcast apps.

Podcast inspired listeners to help Ukraine

Listeners, from as far afield as Australia, Canada and Japan, have paid tribute to Knowles. Among them were those who shared how the podcast had inspired them to act in support of Ukraine and its people in their struggle against the Russian invasion.

“Your podcast encouraged me to become political and outspoken on the war on Ukraine,” said listener Peter Behrends from Germany. “Last week friends of my son asked me to accompany them driving… to [Lviv] to give to medics (as I have a background in mechanics). Would I have done that without your podcast? I doubt it. Thank you for inspiring me, David. Thank you for giving me a sense of what is right and of what is wrong.”

UK listener Alison Carragher said Knowles was “an inspiration to us all”, adding: “I sponsored, through the Homes for Ukraine scheme, a lovely young couple – the husband was Ukrainian and his wife was Russian. This was a direct result of listening to the podcast and wanting to do my bit.”

Many of those posting messages of condolence mentioned Knowles’s voice – well-spoken with a tone of authority – which was often the first thing they heard as he delivered his “solemn introduction to the podcast”, as one listener put it.

“For more than two years my mornings in Melbourne, Australia, started with ‘I’m David Knowles and this is Ukraine, the latest’,” said listener Christiane Stehmann. “It seems impossible to believe I will never hear David’s voice again,” said listener Jane Edwards. “I have heard it almost every day for over two years. It feels like I have lost a friend.”

For others, the podcast offered more than just a way to catch up with the latest news on the conflict in Europe, but membership of a community. “At the centre of that community there was always David Knowles,” said listener Andrew Potter from Canada.

Family ‘astounded’ by outpouring of messages from around the world

Knowles’ mother, Kaye, told Press Gazette the family had been “astounded at the outpouring of messages” and were unaware “he had touched so many people around the world”. She said her son had a “calm, measured timbre when speaking which was simply pleasant to listen to” and an “intuitive ability to know the ‘right’ questions to ask”.

“So often, as I listened (while making the evening meal), he would make enquiries about people’s lives in a gentle, humane, way and they were often what I wanted to know. This was clearly recognised by those who listened to the pod on a daily basis,” she added.

Knowles comes from a long line of journalists. His father, Peter Knowles, was controller of BBC Parliament and is now Westminster correspondent for US TV network C-SPAN. Knowles’ grandfather was a journalist with BBC Manchester and his great-grandfather was a print setter on the Bolton Evening News.

Although he studied theology at Durham University, Knowles went on to complete a masters in Interactive Journalism at City University in 2015/16 and later regularly returned to speak to students. “His last visit, to talk to our MA Podcasting students, was as witty, insightful and erudite as ever,” said journalist and lecturer Adam Tinworth, who taught Knowles.

Knowles had a “ceaseless curiosity” and an “infectious enthusiasm” that could sometimes be “overwhelming for those on the receiving end of it”, his mother said. An avid reader, he would eagerly share what he had learned with friends and family, be it about the Aztecs or Napoleon, or his love of military history and the Master and Commander books.

His interests were many and varied, ranging from classical music (playing a number of musical instruments and singing in Geneva’s Holy Trinity Choir) and the performance arts (taking part in the Durham Revue and the National Youth Theatre) to learning languages (Czech and Hebrew among them) and playing cricket.

‘The happiest and most curious person I’ve ever met’

Journalist Marie Le Conte, Knowles’ friend and ex-girlfriend, said: “David may genuinely have been the happiest and most curious person I’ve ever met.

“He loved football and cricket; playing the viola and the mandolin; books about military history and books about everything else. He spoke a dizzying array of languages, some extinct and others rare, and couldn’t really explain why he’d learnt them. He was endlessly fascinated by life and all it could offer.”

She added: “Journalists are a famously cutting bunch, but I don’t think I ever heard anyone say anything even vaguely negative about him.”

Friend and former Telegraph colleague Ben Gartside, now senior reporter at The i newspaper, described Knowles as a “wonderfully talented renaissance man” and a “natural broadcaster”, having appeared as a guest on the Ukraine: The Latest podcast.

It was with Gartside that he set up the Larkhall Wanderers cricket team, bringing together some 50 players “none of [whom] would have been friends if it wasn’t for him,” said Gartside, who added that while Knowles’ enthusiasm was greater than his skill on the pitch “he became one of our most important and best players”.

Knowles was also keen on football, and, despite his “plummy west London voice”, supported Bolton Wanderers. “I remember going up to him at work and he had a Bolton Wanderers mug at his desk,” said Gartside. “I said: ‘Why have you pulled that out of the work cupboard?’ He said: ‘I really like Bolton,’ and was regaling me with stories of their players from 15 to 20 years ago, and I was like: ‘Okay, you really know your stuff!”

His fascination with lower-league football also took him on his holiday to Gibraltar, where he went with a friend to watch the tiny territory take on Lichtenstein in the UEFA Nations League, although he never made it to the match.

Family believe ‘foul play’ will be ruled out

While counter-terrorism police are investigating Knowles’ death, the family believe foul play is likely to be ruled out. Knowles was banned from entering Russia due to his reporting of the conflict in Ukraine. While police are investigating his death they have said they have no specific concerns as yet.

Gartside said Knowles was “humble” about the success of his podcast, adding: “David was doing it because it was something that was important to do, and any ego or any personal acclaim that he could claim from that he shrugged off.”

Ukraine: The Latest has had nearly 100 million listens overall since it began in 2022, with a large segment of its audience based in the US. It averages around four million plays per month.

Colleague and podcast contributor Colin Freeman said: “Many current affairs podcasts fizzle out after a few weeks or months – Ukraine: The Latest went from strength to strength.

“These days I bump into people all over the world who tell me they listen to it, including many in Ukraine itself. Sometimes it has even opened doors for interviews that might not otherwise have happened.”

Podcast gave ‘hope and strength’ to Ukrainian listeners

Knowles made a number of trips to Ukraine himself for the podcast, including a visit this summer when he travelled to Bucha and reported on how people there were rebuilding their community after the illegal Russian occupation left the town in ruins.

Knowles’ work won him plaudits from Ukraine itself. On hearing of his death, the Ukrainian Embassy in London tweeted: “We are deeply saddened by the tragic passing of the Telegraph journalist of ‘Ukraine: The Latest’ podcast @djknowles22. His dedication to reporting the truth about the war in Ukraine and his commitment to telling the stories of those affected by it will never be forgotten.”

Ukrainian listeners also shared messages of condolence online. “I live in Ukraine and I have been listening… for 1.5 years,” said Serhii Fartushnyi. “David’s voice has been a constant companion for me through these difficult times.

“For the past 1.5 years, his dedication to bringing the truth about Ukraine to the world gave me hope and strength when it was hard to find any. His empathy, intelligence, and unwavering commitment to telling our story made Ukrainians feel less alone in the world.”

Listener Ben Skolozdra added: “David’s legacy will be that of an English language voice for a free, independent, and democratic Ukraine. The Ukrainian diaspora across the world is mourning as one at this tremendous loss.”

In Ottawa, Canada, anti-war protestors put up pictures of Knowles on what’s called the Freedom Pole, which sits outside the Russian embassy, with the message “eternal memory”. “You taught us so much and gave inspiration to carry on our daily protests,” tweeted one protestor in tribute to Knowles and the Ukraine: The Latest podcast.

A pleasure to work with because he had no ego

It was through the podcast that Knowles met girlfriend Adélie Pojzman-Pontay, who produced reportage episodes in her role as narrative podcast producer at the Telegraph, accompanying him on a trip to Ukraine in February.

“David had no ego, so it was a pleasure to work with him,” said Pojzman-Pontay. “I’m not an expert on Ukraine… when we travelled to Ukraine it was the first time I would be going out there [but] he never made me feel that any of my questions were stupid, he was just so happy to share absolutely everything he knew and explain everything to me.”

She said she was struck by how many people Knowles knew in Ukraine. “Most of his sources were his friends,” she said. “Whenever we met someone, he was just so caring in the way he approached people, and so patient as well. He really had a sense of how to engage with people and I think that’s just because he’s incredibly honest in himself all the time. I’ve never seen someone who’s so true – he’s always 100% himself.”

She revealed Knowles had decided to learn Ukrainian after becoming a full-time audio journalist and presenter at the Telegraph this summer – “the first time in two years that his job title matched what he spent the majority of his days doing”.

She said the podcast came about “very organically” because “David absolutely loved history – his flat is covered in history books everywhere and most of these books are about war. Colleagues and I would sometimes tease him that he had the hobbies of a 55-year-old dad, you know, reading and war and naval battles and talking about Master and Commander and Hornblower all the time. And so that’s definitely a subject he was really interested in.”

Remembering Knowles, Pojzman-Pontay said he was “incredibly warm and happy” and “was never in a bad mood”. “He was incredibly cheerful and always making a joke, and if you weren’t in a good mood, he was always trying to cheer you up by being silly or extremely caring. So he would often, for example, leave chocolate bars on people’s desks,” she said.

“He was always joking and being silly or he would come and tell you about some nerdy obsession of his… He really loved Napoleon. I’m from France and I honestly have never heard as much about Napoleon since I started being friends with David.”

Although short, Pojzman-Pontay said their relationship had been “incredibly serious” and “within a few weeks we were talking about marriage and children”. She added: “I’m just really sad we only had six months together, when we were meant to have 60 years.”

A funeral will take place at St Bride’s Church, where a candle has been lit for Knowles, on a date yet to be determined. Knowles will be buried on the island of Islay in Scotland.

The post David Knowles: Telegraph journalist who made huge impact in a short life appeared first on Press Gazette.

PA Media is using its hard-won experience to help customers transition from being print to digital-led businesses.

“Five years ago we were in the same boat as some of these companies,” says Sam Follett, PA Media’s commercial director. “We’ve been through it, we’ve borne some of the scars that come with that, but we’re now ready to advise our partners on how to do it.”

The UK’s largest news agency now serves all of its content through digital channels with about a third of its output targeted for digital consumption, a figure that is only increasing. Considering PA copy often runs both in print and online, the total digital figure is likely closer to 80%, according to Follett.

This has impacted the way they produce content, making digital outcomes a priority, with our senior Editors taking a lot of time to explain to journalists why this is important to the business and to customers. That process has involved journalists being more tuned in to the needs of digital, and the content they produce.

PA Media produces some 120,000 news articles a year, which translates to about 10 million online articles. It not only serves its customers with “fast, fair and accurate” copy, but through upskilling of journalists on location and in the core operation, has enabled them to shoot video and capture images with greater frequency and in ways that enhance multimedia that performs well online and in social media.

“We’re potentially the rising tide that lifts all boats,” says Follett of PA’s unique position within the industry which allows it to share its knowledge with publishers, nearly all of whom are its customers. “If we learn it, we have the ability to offer that out through ripple effect in an unbiased way.”

PA Media has an in-house Analytics and Insights team that measures performance of topics, stories and multimedia assets, to enable journalists to target areas and serve content that Customers prioritise. Similarly, this data can be shared with cutstomers to advise on what PA Media content is being used and how within their organisation, so that decisions may be made on the correct balance for different types of content.

Here Follett explains how print-led news publishers can smooth their digital transition, and issues a rallying cry for the news industry to work together to face down existential crises – including AI – and protect robust news gathering.

What are the main challenges PA customers are facing in print?

“The majority of our customers like their print products – they are prestige products for them in some areas and also still incredibly important. The broader issue is that they want to retain these products, but costs are getting ever higher in terms of pagination, delivery, staffing and what have you, and revenues are dwindling. Circulations are one driver of that, but also advertising appetite. People now want to advertise through digital channels or other areas, so attracting advertisement into the print products, while still not impossible, is not as lucrative as it was.

“It boils down to having to make difficult decisions about the size and scope of your print newspapers, or print magazines, and where you keep them alive relative to the revenue they make. And whether old multipliers of what good looks like is still the way to measure success, or if they’re seen more as the ‘prestige piece’ – the market penetrator that drives revenue into your subscription areas. These are existential questions for a previously print-first organisation. How much of your operational resource do you devote to it? How much of your capex budget do you devote to it?

“This too has a major impact on the way the PA Media commercial team has to advise our customers and view our content – if monetisation is different across different channels, we need to know what types of products perform best in each.”

How do print-focused news publishers look at digital?

“We serve probably somewhere close to 100% of newspaper groups in the UK and Ireland. Are they print first? That’s debatable, but certainly print is important to them. Take the example of many of our longer-term customers – they’re family-owned, they’ve had newspapers for years and the newspapers are still very much the core of their business and the main driver of their advertising revenue. I reckon 90% of their meetings with us will be about ‘how do we get more of a digital imprint?’

“They are print first, but the main driver is digital. I think that’s probably a better way of seeing the market, it’s ‘here’s the bulk of the revenue that’s dwindling or plateauing, and here’s the real growth area’. You don’t want to just stop printing newspapers, because that’s still how a large strata of society gets their news, but ultimately all signs point to digital being where growth is in the future.

“This is where our teams need to be able to advise across multiple platforms, since 1:Many content may work well in print, but are harmful to SEO for example – our teams need to be able to show customers how PA Media can work to provide 1:Few content solutions targeting regional interests, or even 1:1 content designed to deliver on a specific metric that improves digital performance.’”

Why do you think some news providers have struggled to make the transition to digital?

“There’s a few different reasons. One is change is difficult and sometimes it’s not clear cut what the answer is to some of these monetisation problems. The likelihood is these groups are transferring away from print towards digital. What they’re trying to do is acknowledge that print is still important and you still need to drive revenues from it. You still want to reach as much news to as many people as possible, but if you don’t get the balance right between print and digital, then you are destined to have lower and lower circulation over time or become less and less relevant. The needle is probably only heading in one direction [and that’s towards digital].

“We are seeing greater and greater volumes of requests for advice in this area, with projects being piloted to deliver greater SEO, access to evergreen content to drive affiliate revenues, even the ability to serve video in different vertical formats to support different social channels like TikTok.”

What are some of the biggest challenges presented by the digital transition?

“Budgets are tighter. You have to play with scarce resources. Do you take a major punt or keep going with the status quo and the odd tweak? I think people tend to veer towards the latter.

“I would also say we as an industry tend not to work so well together in terms of solving some of these challenges. Take AI, for example. If you speak to anybody in any news organisation, but also society at large, there is concern about unfettered access to generative AI producing its own news. No one would see that as a net positive. That means that news companies have to be able to be part of that story.

“I would compare it to what happened with search decades ago, where the news media lost out to Google and lost advertising revenue because they didn’t react as an industry. The same thing the industry is facing with AI is probably also the same thing it faced with the digital transition.

“Ultimately news offers value to society and news organisations being able to police what is produced as news offers value to society. We as an industry need to work together to make sure we’re at the forefront of that otherwise someone else will come along and plug that gap for consumers, and by that point, you’re lost.”

How does AI fit into the digital media landscape?

“I think for AI to form a part of the media landscape, media companies need to be involved and probably the driving force in front of it, because we are the ones who understand this industry, we’re the ones who understand the values that underpin it, we’re the ones who understand the pitfalls if you get it wrong. If we represent that and drive that, whether it’s AI, whether it’s digital first, whether it’s monetisation, whatever it is, I think we potentially have the solutions for that.”

What’s something news providers can do now to smooth their digital transition?

“They should be looking at what good looks like and what return on investment looks like in a digital world. When you were selling a newspaper, figuring out the cost per article was very simple because someone paid a certain amount for the newspaper and there are a finite amount of articles in the pages, so a quick bit of maths tells you what the cost per article is. In a digital world it’s not that simple and if you use the same metric it will appear as if what was a pound is now a penny.

“What you’re actually trying to drive with digital engagement is brand loyalty for an advertiser or yourself – you’re trying to get people into the funnel so they go and subscribe in other areas, or they engage in whatever way. You’re trying to capture as much audience attention as you possibly can. The metrics for delivering that will be totally different to a print brand. It doesn’t start and end with someone buying something from you.

“Your print strategy is one thing, your digital strategy is another, and they should both feed up into your wider commercial strategy. You have to know what your business model is. If you want a very targeted audience that you can monetize off the back of it, maybe subscriptions are the way to go.

“If you want to reach as broad a digital audience as possible you’re going to have to be ungated, so how do you monetise behind it? Do you have affiliate links? Do you have SEO content that drives you up the Google search so that you can place programmatic advertising? All of these questions are answered if you have a very well defined digital strategy where you know how you are trying to monetise it.

“But it’s not just monetisation… it’s also understanding how at the core of what media companies offer to the broader public in digital is still that really robust, trustworthy, fact-driven news. And you still have to serve that in order for the news media to retain its value to customers. Otherwise, if it’s all just which article generates the most advertising return, you’ll turn people off quickly and you can’t compete with Google.”

Is there a future for printed news journalism? And what might it look like?

“Print may serve a different purpose in future – it might serve smaller and smaller niches over time – but I don’t see it dwindling down to zero because the point is there’s still a market for it and people still prefer to consume their news that way.

“I think the only thing that could cause it to go completely out of existence will be if people focus too heavily on the commercial model and forget the other driving forces behind what makes a newsbrand. I don’t know of a single media executive that I speak to who thinks print is going to go away completely, but there is an acknowledgement that monetisation is probably going to be driven from other areas more and more as time goes on.

“The fact of the matter is, whether you focus in on print or digital or whatever, at the core of what used to drive print was really robust, trustworthy news gathering – and I don’t think that’s done yet. That is fundamental to who we are as an organisation and that will not change whether we serve that via social media, or to deliver affiliate revenue, or to drive web engagement, or in print.

“News still has to be valuable, still needs to be unbiased, still needs to report facts, still needs to hold up under scrutiny, otherwise it breaks down.”

Contact PA Media

Find out more about PA Media by visiting the agency’s website here, or emailing: info@pa.media

Read 2023 In Content, a 32-page guide showcasing an extraordinary year for PA Media.

The post How PA Media is helping newspapers make the digital transition appeared first on Press Gazette.

Publishers are losing out on digital advertising revenue by failing to get to grips with key issues at a time when the ad market slowdown means they should be making every penny count.

According to a report by Enders Analysis, the UK online display ad market is “growing much slower after a giddy two years”, with a number of large platforms affected by the drop-off. (Although the long-term trend of society and the economy moving online continues.)

Ad-tech provider Opti Digital’s chief executive Magali Quentel-Reme (pictured) highlights three key challenges facing publishers in making the most of their programmatic ad revenues – and offers solutions.

Lower consent rates for cookies and irrelevant ads

With the move to GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in the UK and Europe and the demise of third-party cookies across web browsers (Google will plans to finally phase out publisher cookies on Chrome in late 2024) – users are increasingly declining cookies when visiting websites.

“In Europe, an everyday lower consent rate is causing major harm to publishers’ revenues,” explains Quentel-Reme. The fewer cookies accepted, the less information advertisers have to target users with more valuable relevant advertising, ultimately hitting publishers’ revenues.”

One solution is Opti Digital’s cross-consent stack that delivers ads dynamically according to the user’s choice: through Google Ad Server or through an alternative ad server that meets privacy legislation and “allows the delivery of campaigns without using any personal data”.

“However,” adds Quentel-Reme, “since we receive many more campaigns using cookie-based targeting that perform better and have higher eCPMs, our strategy is to help publishers improve their consent rates.”

Research carried out by the Chilean government last year found that how cookie prompts are displayed to users can drastically change the level of consent given. In tests it found that an “opt-in” pop-up approach led to a high level of rejection of additional cookies among users at 87%. But when an “opt-out” approach is taken, with additional cookies pre-selected, 94% of users accepted them.

To improve cookie consent rates for publishers, Opti Digital uses a “test and learn approach”.

“We test several different CMP layouts and messages to see which ones collect the highest consent rate,” explains Quentel-Reme. “We also implement consent recovery models to invite users to change their mind and meet a higher profitability again.”

When it comes to the relevance of the advertising displayed on a publisher’s website, Quentel-Reme says “the subject has become a bit more complicated with the end of third-party cookies,” but adds:

“For the time being, publishers should optimise consent rates on their website so that advertisers have enough data to target relevant users.

“In order to do this, we verify that publishers have set up the best consent storage options: the longest storage possible for positive consent and the shortest one for negative consent. In the second case, this means that the user will see a new request for consent within a reasonable time.”

Poor website performance

Poor web performance, leading to slow-loading pages, is a common gripe among users, but it has a real-term impact on digital ad revenues for publishers as well. “Web performance plays a critical role in optimising the effectiveness and efficiency of advertising campaigns,” says Quentel-Reme.

“A slow-loading website can result in a decrease of visitors and negatively impact on key performance indicators, such as viewability [a metric for ad impressions actually seen by users].”

To boost web performance, Opti Digital offers so-called “lazy loading” ad units. A lazy-loading ad appears only after the main elements of the page have loaded and, if placed further down the page, only loads when the user scrolls to it, responding to how they navigate the content.

According to Opti Digital, lazy loading ads “reduce the weight of the page [and] the loading time”, making for an improved user experience and better search engine rankings.

Quentel-Reme says these ad units “allow us to achieve viewability rates of over 75% cross-device on all the inventories we optimise, but that also considerably improves the overall performance of the media, especially their loading speed”.

She says Opti Digital also encourages publishers “to switch from a client-side auctions technology to a server-side one, as it requires less processing power from the user’s browser” to boost web performance. Opti Engage is Opti Digital’s own plug-and-play ad format, based on a server-side model.

“In this configuration, Prebid.JS does not call the SSPs directly, but makes a call to our own Prebid Server, which then calls bidding partners. The computing power needed to run the auctions is then outsourced, which greatly improves the overall performance of the media,” says Quentel-Reme.

Low quality ads

Publishers provide a guaranteed quality audience for advertisers, with content typically regulated and always curated, so adverts should be of a quality to match – but this is not always the case.

Rejecting brands that don’t fit with a publisher’s ethos or audience, known as “blacklisting”, is one way to improve the quality of the ads on display.

Quentel-Reme says Opti Digital “monitors the quality of ads up front by blacklisting brand lists and categories rejected by the publisher”. The team also educates publishers on how to blacklist brands even after the ad has displayed on the page.

Another solution to ensure quality ads for a fair price is dynamic price flooring. Setting a price floor – a price limit below which ads cannot be sold – guarantees a minimum revenue per ad impression for publishers. Dynamic price flooring “enhances the overall quality of the ads displayed on the sites by challenging bidding partners to pay the real value of the inventory,” says Quentel-Reme.

Opti Yield, an AI-based plug-and-play solution that automatically defines the best price floors for ad inventory, calculates more than one million price floors every day for client websites, with an average uplift of 20% in digital ad sales – but which can rise as high as 40%.

Opti Yield “provides a fairer auction environment for all demand partners,” says Quentel-Reme. The product is transparent and has been developed “to push the competition even further, and in response to Google’s monopoly,” she added.

Opti Yield’s price floors are adjusted daily and hourly and these are communicated to all ad exchanges connected to Google Ad Manager, including Prebid, Amazon, Google Ad Exchange and Open Bidding, “providing a fairer auction environment for all demand partners across all inventory types: Display, Video, Web, AMP, app”, says Quentel-Reme. The prices set take into account not just historical bid data but also a publisher’s ad inventories – pages, placement, ad size, etc. – and a user’s browser history: (he more cookies the better the ad targeting capabilities for buyers who will pay more for a highly qualified user.

Click here for more information on Opti Digital’s ad-tech solutions for publishers

The post How publishers can address three key online ad revenue challenges appeared first on Press Gazette.

Despite publishing online content behind a hard paywall, one of Finland’s oldest regional newspapers has seen web traffic grow after moving to a new content management system.

After making a strategic decision to go truly digital-first, the 148-year-old Karjalainen committed to a paid subscriber-only digital model in 2019, with 90% of its content behind a paywall. A partial paywall has existed since 2012 at the title, which first went online in 2000.

“We have seen the decline of the print edition for years, and we decided it was the proper time to start focusing on our content, not delivery channels,” said Arttu Romo, technology development manager for digital services at the Karjalainen.

“The main focus had been print for years, but the world has changed drastically. The younger audience, from 35 to 55 years old, does not really care about the print edition anymore. Some of the younger generations haven’t even seen a newspaper.”

About Karjalainen

Romo said the title, which is based in Joensuu, North Karelia, a region in the southeast of Finland that borders Russia, had “unique local content” that couldn’t be found anywhere else on the web.

Rising print and delivery costs for the newspaper also pressed the title into taking action.

Going to a digital-first publishing model

“The hard paywall was a strategic move,” he said. “We changed the whole editorial process from a print-centric approach to digital first. If a customer is ready to pay for the print version, why shouldn’t they be ready to pay for the digital version that is richer in content?”

The Karjalainen, which is owned by the PunaMusta Media group, was first printed in October 1874. It has a print circulation of about 24,000 and about 6,700 digital subscribers (a monthly digital subscription costs €18.20 a month). It receives up to 40,000 daily users on its website.

Between the beginning of June 2021 and the end of December 2022 – a period of 19 months – the Karjalainen grew page views by more than two thirds (68%). The traffic boost followed the title’s move to Quintype Bold CMS a month earlier, in May 2021.

Quintype Bold is a headless, cloud-based content management platform. A headless CMS is one that operates as a back-end content builder and repository which can be connected to any front-end (e.g. a website, app or voice assistant) of the publisher’s choosing through an API.

‘Big shortcomings’ with former open-source CMS

Romo said he had personally tested different content management systems throughout 2020 and the Karjalainen had been using an open-source CMS since 2010, which had “some big shortcomings”, but chose Quintype Bold because “we wanted a system that is built for journalists”.

“There were many content management systems that had lots of functionality and possibilities, but Bold’s [content] editor was one of the reasons we chose it as we wanted a system journalists could use as easily as possible,” he said.

Quintype Bold ‘extremely easy’ for editors to use

“Quintype Bold is extremely easy to use for our editors. It was quite easy to sell to our editorial team, because journalists have the ability to decide how the story looks online – what content is there, how it [fits in with] images, galleries, videos etc. By using different templates, it is really easy to change the way content is displayed.

“Our editors can find all related content in one system and easily implement more rich web content to stories. So, editors can focus on writing stories and creating the web view without thinking about the technical aspects or using many different components.”

Romo added that with Bold the editorial team can “instantly see how an article looks” in a mobile format, something that is a priority for the title as within the week most of its subscribers read its content on mobile devices, with the number only increasing at weekends.

Romo said his team also liked that Bold was a headless CMS and so they were not “bound by a certain web framework”, adding: “Bold acts as our content management system and we can then deliver the content through APIs to anywhere we wish.”

Quintype offers publishers a suite of platforms for digital publishing, including native mobile apps on iOS and Android and a page builder tool to design and build websites without coding.

The Karjalainen uses React.js and Nexus.js javascript solutions for its front-end and because Bold is headless “if someday there is a better framework, we can easily change”, said Romo.

Focus on quality content and analytics drove increased subscribers

Romo said that by focusing on “quality content” and “publishing stories that serve the interests of people in our area”, readers were “ready to pay” for it. He said understanding the target audience – when they are likely to visit the site, what they want to read – is key to digital publishing success.

“Analytics is really important to gain knowledge of the behaviour of the readers,” he said, adding it was possible to try out “what works and what doesn’t”.

He added: “Content is king and by enabling the vast possibilities for our editors to create quality content, we will also have more digital subscribers.”

Quintype Bold CMS uses first-party data (obtained with a user’s consent) to build story analytics, helping publishers boost engagement and monetisation, while also future-proofing them against the imminent demise of third-party cookies and the shift to a more privacy-focused web.

Like other media houses, the Karjalainen is facing the twin challenges of continuing to develop digital away from print and engaging with younger readers. As a subscription business, it is also looking to grow its subscriber base while reducing churn. “We are battling for user time with many other services. How can we get the user to sacrifice precious time on our site or services?” said Romo.

“As the world is changing in the way content is distributed and consumed, we also need to think of different business models.”

Quintype Bold is available from $100 per month. Visit quintype.com/products/bold for more information.

The post How Finland’s oldest regional daily boosted page views and subs by changing CMS appeared first on Press Gazette.

Publishers looking to unlock faster digital product development should ask “where’s the value”, focus on an “amazing minimum product” and allow for experimentation, says the Daily Mail’s digital product chief who has led the rapid growth and transformation of Mail Plus.

Mail Plus (or Mail+) is the Daily Mail’s enhanced digital offering for subscribers. It first launched in 2013 as the digital page-turning edition of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, but in 2019 “started what you might term as many experiments”, says digital product director Simon Regan-Edwards.

Three daily newsletter-style briefings that were free to read and contained exclusive content were abandoned because they weren’t driving new subscriptions – the ultimate goal for Mail Plus, which stands apart from its free-to-read sister title Mail Online.

The Mail Plus offering was revamped again in 2022, with an interactive website-style format alongside a page-turning digital edition that includes bonus digital content. It also has a dedicated puzzles page and recently launched a recipe finder and TV guide.

The Daily Mail now reports more than 150,000 digital subscribers. And it reports an average of 75,000 daily users and a “highly engaged” audience.

Regan-Edwards, who joined the Mail from his role as head of technology at The Times in 2013, says Mail Plus is “always developing”, adding: “If you’re not constantly developing, you’re moving backwards. You have to constantly change and follow the audience.”

Here he offers six insights into the ongoing development of Mail Plus.

“Where’s the value?” – Create more value for subscribers

“What we’re looking to do is create more value for subscribers – something more than just a newspaper,” says Regan-Edwards of the Mail Plus offering, which adds tools, services and features to “enhance the newspaper experience” for digital subscribers.

While it doesn’t compete with rolling news sites, including Mail Online, Mail Plus runs regular news updates throughout the day (up until 11pm when subscribers get a first look at the next morning’s newspaper) to give value to readers and pull them into the app or website “where they can read that news story, but also then go on to consume the rest of the content,” says Regan-Edwards.

“Ultimately what drives it is: ‘Where’s the value?’.”

Build an AMP and “look for signals in the noise”

A “constant challenge” at Mail Plus is not trying to design and create the perfect product or feature before launch, but rather launching what Regan-Edwards calls an “amazing minimum product”, or AMP.

“Launch your amazing minimum product and actually start to get that [audience] feedback as quickly as possible and then change from that point onwards,” he says. Regan-Edwards calls this process “looking for signals in the noise”. With so much data, the Mail Plus team can look to see what is driving engagement and respond accordingly.

“What we’re always trying to do, our whole goal is to build a daily habit. And a newspaper is a habit-forming product – it comes out daily, at the same time. Puzzles are habit-forming products because they come out daily; we have more than 45 puzzles a day.

“You build something that’s useful to somebody in their life – they get some entertainment from their puzzles – and therefore they engage with that on a daily basis. What we’re always looking for are the signals in the noise of what is it that’s forming a habit, what are people coming back for?”

Subscribers are then segmented between core users, occasional users, and not engaged users and looks at how to move people towards becoming more engaged. “If they are becoming more engaged, that means that your product has more value in their life,” says Regan-Edwards.

Get a CMS that can work with you

Mail Plus started working with Glide Publishing Platform in 2019, and it is this partnership that has enabled so much experimentation and innovation, including nine major updates between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2022 that has seen subscriber numbers quadruple.

“We’ve used Glide to help us do many different things over the last few years – and it’s changed many times over that time and continues to evolve,” says Regan-Edwards.

With Glide, Mail Plus is able to update and edit content on its app for mobile and tablet as well as its mobile-friendly website simultaneously from one CMS. “That’s good for us as the business, but also for the subscribers because they get a consistent [reading] experience,” says Regan-Edwards.

“It’s actually the Glide team that’s allowed us to move quickly. We’ve worked very closely with their team, who are continually developing their product. We were able to do live reporting on the Queen’s funeral and during the World Cup because Glide had developed a live reporting module…

“It’s the capabilities that they’re adding to their platform that allows us to then build products off the back of that.”

Print is agile too

Print and digital are usually regarded as two distinct and separate approaches to news publishing, but at Mail Plus Regan-Edwards has applied a print mindset to the digital offering to subscribers.

“People often talk about being in an agile environment or always learning what people are doing and then building from that… actually that is what newspapers have done for decades.

“The Mail’s been running for 126 years, so that’s now a finely tuned process of putting the paper together, but every day it’s a blank sheet and they come in and invent that day’s paper.”

Regan-Edwards says Mail Plus has been taking that “speed of change” in the building and rebuilding of a print product and trying to bring it into the digital world. But, he warns: “Don’t have a moonshot project – little and often is how you get those incremental improvements. What we’ve been doing over the last few years, with Glide, is trying new things out without having to do a big tech build.”

“Cross-functional, co-located working teams”

A term Regan-Edwards says he has used so much that he now hears other people saying it back to him – which he considers a good sign – is “cross-functional, co-located working teams”. Translated this means teams who work together in a close environment. It’s old advice, but it works.

“Although it’s a little bit of a cliché, once you get those different disciplines together, you actually move so much faster. We work hand in hand on the editorial floor – we’ve got the editorial team, the product team, the developers, the marketing team, all working together, so you don’t have those silos or people who can’t ask a question,” says Regan-Edwards.

“Allowing all those different people – who’ve got different skills and have a voice – to be involved in that process actually helps us all move so much faster.”

The rise of video meetings during the pandemic, now a staple of most working lives, has meant that even when teams can’t physically be in the same room (Glide’s developers are based in Bosnia and the Mail’s newsroom is in London) they can still meet virtually three days a week.

Focus and don’t be afraid to experiment

Regan-Edwards says having a single focus is key for fast digital development, as well as “not being afraid”, a mindset he says should run throughout an organisation from the top level down.

“Allowing people to experiment is key, but the way you move fast is by being focused… so the team can all focus on ‘this is what we’re going to deliver’,” he says. “As soon as you try and do everything – what we sometimes call cognitive overload – you end up thinking about too many things and achieving much less than if you had been focused.”

Regan-Edwards says Mail editor Ted Verity, who replaced Geordie Greig in November 2021, has “allowed us to drive that focus” and he says his own role for his own team is to provide the “space to allow people to focus”, adding: “If you try to do everything, you achieve nothing”.

The post How the Daily Mail built an audience of 150,000+ digital subscribers appeared first on Press Gazette.

Too many digital solutions can hinder rather than help publishers who should consolidate their tech stack to “grease the wheels of storytelling”, according to a new white paper.

Publishers are increasingly looking to subscription growth to make up for the squeeze on digital ad revenues, but simply bundling more tools together may not be the answer.

“The more tech solutions publishers deploy in the name of digital storytelling, the harder that mission becomes,” says Nina Juss, co-founder of global digital subscriptions platform Evolok.

In her white paper, One For All: Six Reasons Why Digital Publishers Should Consolidate Their Tech Stacks, she warns of the temptation to “keep up with the Joneses” in digital, which has left publishers running multiple tools, both old and new, across different areas of the business.

“The danger of this approach is that publishers become weak by attrition,” Juss warns. “They may have plenty of insights, but they lack the know-how to connect everything together. And a lot of time, money, and hard-to-hire tech talent can be wasted on plugging the gap.

“Powerful, unique journalism in a digital sphere instead relies on a compact tech stack: one which slims down and amalgamates resources in one, centralised place.”

With disparate tech solutions not only will media publishers waste time and resources trying to bring them together to work as one, they will also face additional hurdles when trying to bring a new product to market or even when deciding to introduce a new tool into the mix.

“Say you, as a publisher, want to introduce a popular payment solution like GoCardless into your subscription model,” says Juss. “The whole process takes so much longer if you have to integrate that plug-in into an unwieldy tech stack, making it fit within hundreds of back-end systems (all of which cost money to licence). You may even have to build a custom-made connector.

“With fewer tools under one roof, any change or addition becomes much more fluid. There’s less call for expensive tech talent. In fact, many tools within a self-service platform are automated. Teams can manage an update in two or three steps for next-level speed and agility.”

In a tough digital climate it’s tempting for publishers to grab on to new technology in the pursuit of new pathways to monetisation and growth, but this “scattergun” approach to tech can have the opposite effect, according to the white paper by Evolok.

“Design tools, cloud-based CMSs, traffic platforms and more create a dizzying influx of options, but when the sheer level of deployments starts eroding journalistic cause – to produce good stories – the pendulum may have swung too far in tech’s favour,” says Juss.

Having too much tech in your stack can also impact readers and subscribers by diverting money and attention away from the production of quality digital content that will engage them, as well as potentially making for a frustrating user experience on the front end.

“Before you know it, your potential user will have unsubscribed in search of the more seamless, instant experience they’re familiar with,” warns Juss. “That’s poor performance, quashed engagement and lost revenue, all counted in the knock-on from disjointed tech.”

She adds: “A compact stack is the grease on the wheels of storytelling; used smartly and strategically, it should build efficiencies as the cornerstone of long-term revenue – leaving journalists free to focus on the job at hand…

“Decluttering your stack into a one-stop platform is the first step to resetting the balance, enabling publishers to maximise the first-party data that makes all good journalism sing.”

For more insights read Evolok’s white paper One For All: Six Reasons Why Digital Publishers Should Consolidate Their Tech Stacks.

The post How and why digital publishers should consolidate their tech stacks appeared first on Press Gazette.

Hello! magazine chief technical officer Andrew Macharg, who joined in February last year from Dennis, has spoken in depth about the brand’s digital transformation.

He said he found a publisher whose tech stack was old, disjointed and unautomated, with a CMS hosted and supported on the premises.

“It’s very expensive to maintain,” Macharg said. “We’ve got four engineers – all they do is pull out discs and put new discs in to make sure the network is working.”

Hello! is a globally recognised brand famous for its access to high society. The weekly celebrity lifestyle magazine arrived in the UK in 1988 from Spain, where Hola! magazine has been in print since its creation in 1944. In 2000, Hola.com was launched, followed a year later by hellomagazine.com.

Both titles are owned by Spanish publisher Groupo Hola. Although the group has a strong print tradition, Macharg said its two websites attract about 85m unique users a month, with a guiding metric for Hello! of about a million daily unique users for the UK and again for the US.

But Macharg said the digital operation had been running without a technical ‘North Star’. “For the 20-odd years we’ve been online, we’ve just had an audience,” he said. “We get lots of people, they enjoy the website, but we haven’t focused enough on outcomes such as : ‘What is the technical strategy? What are we trying to achieve?’ So we’re trying to rethink now what that looks like.”

“What we’ve had to do is modernise,” said Macharg, who’s chosen Glide Publishing Platform, which offers a cloud-based software-as-a-service CMS for publishers, as the solution.

“In Hello! and Hola! we have two CMSs at the minute and actually Hola! uses two CMSs to publish content. One’s bought, one’s custom built. Absolute nightmare.

“So ideas in my head were: how do we simplify? How do we make things easy to move forward? For us, it’s going be a built CMS. It takes out a load of the complexity, we don’t think about upgrades and I can really concentrate, as a publisher, on what we do best: we write content.”

At the heart of Hello!’s tech stack transformation has been a focus on editorial.

“Editorial… is in some ways our number one audience that we need to look after,” said Macharg. “If an editor can’t write content quickly and get it out quickly then something is very wrong. That then became very important in our decision-making for our CMS.”

He added: “I wanted to give our editors the ability just to write a piece of content, tag it and just forget about it. They don’t need to think about where it’s going to go. Is it going to be syndicated? Is it going to be on this page or that page?

“Just write your content, in the format that the editorial team want and forget about it.”

In choosing a new CMS, Macharg, who has built CMSs, as well as worked with open-source and paid-for solutions during his career, said he “wanted a hosting environment out of a box”.

“For me, I don’t want to have to have an engineering team that’s supporting WordPress or Drupal or content for all those guys. I just want us to concentrate on what we’re really good at, and that’s content and getting that content out. Why go through that extra effort?”

On the benefit of an out-of-the-box solution, Glide chief executive Denis Haman, also speaking at the conference, said: “If you’re a sushi chef you wouldn’t buy a Swiss army knife, then spend your time pulling things apart and honing it so you can get a sushi knife. You’d buy a sushi knife. What we provide is a very focused editorial platform, as opposed to a generic CMS that you have to beat into shape.”

Ongoing changes to Hello!’s website include putting up a registration paywall, automating ad placement within articles and sections, and being able to control the density of advertising.

But it is “recirculation” that Macharg said is “the thing that everybody is missing the trick on right now”. Recirculation is a metric measuring how many readers are on a page compared to the number clicking off. A successful recirculation strategy helps to keep readers on the website by giving them more opportunities to engage with it through clicks and avoiding leading them to so-called “content deserts” or dead-ends that would interrupt their experience and ultimately see them leave.

Reflecting on Hello!’s digital publishing transformation, Macharg said: “We’ve gone from a place where it’s very manual, to hopefully a very automated platform that will allow this brand that has this huge audience to go to the next level over the next few years.”

The post How focus on recirculation is helping Hello! reinvent its website appeared first on Press Gazette.

Digital chiefs at the Independent and Telegraph have been cutting the number of ads on web pages as the impending demise of third-party cookies forces publishers to rethink their approach to reader data and online advertising, Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology conference was told.

It comes as Google has pushed back its phasing out of third-party cookies on Chrome – widely seen as the final nail in the cookie coffin – to the second half of 2024, and as the UK’s data watchdog begins to bare its teeth over data protection and privacy compliance for online advertising.

Publishers still relying on adtech vendors whose solutions are built on cookies are “gambling”, according to Markus Karlsson, chief executive at digital publishing platform Affino.

“You have no idea what that experience is going to be like or if you’re going to get the data if you rely on cookies in the way people do now,” he said, adding the publishing industry is “at a changing point”.

The UK Information Commissioner’s opinion report on data protection and privacy expectations for online advertising proposals, published in November, set out that “continued use of intrusive online tracking practices is not the right way to develop solutions” and said the commissioner “does not advocate for alternatives that use the same fundamentally flawed approaches”.

Cookies that identify users are considered personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation, which only allows companies to process users’ data with consent.

[Read more: How Google is building an internet without cookies – and why publishers are concerned]

Publishers need to be ‘more vigilant’

Jo Holdaway, chief data and marketing officer at Independent Digital News and Media, which publishes The Independent news website, warned that publishers must be careful not to fall foul of the UK data watchdog and should audit adtech partners for compliance – something IDNM is doing.

Holdaway (pictured, second right) said: “There are ID vendor companies or content verification companies that are collecting publisher data on the sly, building their own contextual segments and selling them on down the market. And publishers either don’t know about that or can’t do anything to change it.

“Well, we are changing that. It’s giving the adtech landscape a bad name and publishers need to be a little bit more vigilant, which is what we’re trying to do, but it’s very easy to say: ‘Be vigilant. Audit your partners, make sure that they’re compliant, make sure that they’re giving you a decent return in a responsible and accountable way,’ when you need to hit next month’s revenue budget.

“It does require transformation internally, from a cultural perspective, to try and educate your commercial team and say: ‘Look, we don’t want you to lose revenue, but we think if we have less weight on the page, and if we try and make our site performance much better and we sort our pricing strategy out, valuing our data as we should, we should be able to get away with fewer partners on the site.’

“That means better engagement figures, better [user experience], more engaged readers coming back to the site, and you could probably make more revenue that way.”

She said publishers need to have a “mid- to long-term view on this because the regulators have got teeth and they are getting more vigilant. If you’re a publisher that signs a contract with an adtech vendor that gets stung, you’ll also get stung.”

Markus Karlsson of Affino and Jo Holdaway of The Independent at the Future of Media Technology conference. Picture: ASV Photography Ltd

She added: “It’s all about trust. [Readers] trust you with their data because you’re a brand they really love. So you have to do them that consideration by taking care of it on their behalf.”

The Independent, which runs an ads-first model complemented by subscriptions, went from collecting 20,000 registrations a month to 200,000, according to Holdaway, after putting a registration gate on all of its content, prompting readers to sign up for free to continue reading (although they can defer doing so).

Holdaway said the gating decision required board approval and was a “big hurdle to overcome”, but is now driving most of its first-party data acquisition together with lead generation from newsletters.

“There’s no point having, as we will by the end of the month, four million registered users if you can’t get them back on the site to learn about them or monetise them,” she said.

Bravery will pay off

Also speaking at the panel on the so-called “cookie apocalypse”, held at the Waldorf Hilton Hotel in London on 21 September, was Karen Eccles, managing director of digital, partnerships and innovation at Telegraph Media Group.

Eccles explained why the Telegraph had been reducing its ratio of digital ads on the page.

“Categorically one ad on the page that is well targeted using first-party data – preferably where you know the client so there’s a fit with the overall brand – if that is worth to an advertiser five times more than being one of five ads that are competing with each other on the page and creating a bad user experience, you might as well go with the one because you will be having that direct relationship with an advertiser,” she said.

“We look now sometimes at are we going too light [on ads]? Should we be reintroducing some advertising and increasing our ad ratio? And all the maths we do says it’s just diminishing returns. As soon as we put additional ads on the page our overall yield decreases.

“So I say if publishers can be quite brave… and if we understand the value of what that quality ad experience means to the reader and to the advertiser and that that is then going to be paid back to the publisher, it’s really well worth it. I think letting the controls for monetisation sit with the open marketplace, we’re just not going to see the returns as publishers from that.”

Karen Eccles of The Telegraph at the Future of Media Technology conference. Picture: ASV Photography Ltd

The Telegraph has a subscriptions-first model complemented by advertising revenue. It launched its subs-first strategy in 2018, putting content behind a strict paywall, and now has several million registered users and almost 740,000 paying subscribers in print and digital.

“All of that growth has come pretty much from digital subscriptions, which we didn’t have three or four years ago,” said Eccles. “And what that means is we had to commit absolutely, ruthlessly to a subs strategy.”

‘Data isn’t just for the big guys’

At The Spectator, chief technical officer and director of digital Peter Barr-Watson said the title is in the process of “re-platforming everything digital”, driven by the installation of its own data management platform.

“Data has to drive us,” Barr-Watson told the conference.

“We’re going through that process now where we’re making everything about the data, that’s forming the basis, and then we can make decisions off the back of that when it comes to segmentation and activating that data.”

He said there was a misconception in the industry that data is something only large-scale publishers should be taking seriously. “The smaller companies out there – the SMEs if you like – perhaps don’t take data as seriously, from what I’ve seen. And they need to.

“You need to be coming up with this data strategy for your own business moving forward, and acting on it sooner rather than later is definitely the key. Data isn’t just for the big guys.”

Picture: ASV Photography Ltd

The post Independent and Telegraph websites cut number of ads in reader data rethink appeared first on Press Gazette.

Partner content*: NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens – which have made millions for some sellers – should not be dismissed as a “flash in the pan” but rather a “prime opportunity” for publishing businesses.

Publishers moving into the digital space can use NFTs to strengthen their business and make digital pay, according to leading digital subscriptions platform Evolok.

The global NFT market is estimated to be worth $35bn (£30bn) in 2022 and more than $80 billion (£68bn) by 2025, according to investment bank Jeffries.

In a new white paper Evolok sets out 8 Ways Publishers Can Use NFTs To Boost Revenues.

But first, what exactly is an NFT, or Non-Fungible Token?

NFTs and publishing: the basics

An NFT is a unique digital certificate that records ownership of a digital asset. Importantly the transaction is registered in a blockchain (the same used for cryptocurrencies) which is “a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets”.

In short, if you own the NFT you own the original digital asset (even if it’s freely available online) and this fact is recorded in a secure online ledger that cannot be forged or deleted.

NFTs are either one of a kind or have multiple copies, like collectors’ cards. They have mostly been used in the realm of digital art, with the holder owning what is essentially an “original” copy of the artwork, although crucially for creators – and publishers – this does not confer copyright.

The NFT bubble suddenly blew during the pandemic, making headlines for the astronomical sums paid to own digital artworks. The singer Grimes made $6m at an auction selling NFTs for ten pieces of original digital artwork last year, including short videos. People have even bought memes.

But while recent headlines have been less jubilant – daily average sales fell 92% in May from a peak of 225,000 in September last year – Evolok says “the underlying principles of NFTs remain sound”.

In its white paper, Evolok points to the “underlying promise of the technology in the longer term”, adding that “despite all the technological sophistication that underpins their origins, [NFTs] represent another exciting new market for the publishing industry to leverage to its advantage”.

8 ways publishers can use NFTs to boost revenues

Download Evolok’s free white paper here.

Reach a new ‘young and affluent’ publishing audience with NFTs

As the NFT market skews “young and affluent”, with interest often from “tech-savvy consumers looking to invest disposable income”, NFTs offer a chance for publishers to reach “precisely the online communities that have been lost to traditional publishing”, says Evolok, with this audience simply “waiting to be activated by digital publishing that chimes with their interests”.

“NFTs represent a prime opportunity for expanding the overall demographic of a publisher and unlocking a cohort that is extremely attractive and notoriously elusive to advertisers,” Evolok says.

NFTs make ideal rewards for readers, offering them either as a publically tradeable asset or as tokens that can be traded within a closed in-house system.

Rewarding readers with NFTs for signing up for newsletters or sharing articles on social media, for example, can add a “valuable element of gamification” says Evolok, increasing engagement at comparatively low cost as all assets are digital.

A publisher of a different type, DC Comics (the home of Superman and Batman etc.), gave away free NFTs of its comic book covers to fans who registered for its annual online event, FanDome, last year. Those who posted about receiving their first free NFT on social media became eligible for a second. DC Comics appealed further to collectors by making some covers rarer than others.

News and magazine publishers can do the same with their own events, incentivising people to sign up. “Individual digital tickets for an event can be created as NFTs… each one becoming a unique tradable commodity in its own right, providing the sort of draw that can prove a hit with sponsors,” says Evolok.

What can publishers offer as NFTs?

Recent Press Gazette analysis of a selection of top news publishers found they had sold nearly $12m (£9m) worth of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) since March 2021, of which $10m, by far the largest amount, was made by Time, with the New York Times following at $560,000 (£430,000).

Creating an NFT is known as “minting”, and any digital asset can be minted. The NYT made its six-figure sum from the sale of a single column at auction, paid for in the cryptocurrency Ethereum.

Time magazine auctioned off NFTs for three of its iconic covers in March last year, including one created especially for the auction, all of which sold for the equivalent of $435,000 (the sale was also made in Ethereum). Time’s embracing of NFTs, which has included creating its Timepieces initiative selling collections of digital artwork, helped it to achieve its highest revenue growth in over a decade at nearly 30 per cent last year, Press Gazette reported in January.

Publishers may have a wealth of valuable content sitting untapped in their archives that could be auctioned off as NFTs, without losing copyright. “Only originators of content or holders of intellectual property rights are allowed to create NFTs from digital assets,” says Evolok.

“Because an NFT does not involve a transfer or copyright, publishers for instance can offer seminal images from their archives as NFTs while still retaining all usage rights.”

As such NFTs “open up new possibilities for exploiting old IP that previously was too difficult to organise or monetise”, such as material revealing the process behind creating an iconic headline, cover, or front page story, and pictures or videos that made an impact.

NFTs help build data picture of readers

NFTs are also a way for publishers to learn more about their readers, by adding valuable data insights into their behaviour to build up a clearer picture of their interests.

“By offering NFTs to your subscribers you are accruing valuable data about who is interested in them, who purchases them, what sort of NFT in particular they are interested in, and more,” says Evolok.

“All those eyeballs come back to your data operation and can be used to further engage with your existing readership by way of personalised content featuring NFTs or specific calls to action.”

Publishers can then use reader interest in NFTs in the same way they use it in any other subject, be it sports or politics: “to drive further specialised content and maximise engagement”.

“Once the NFT audience is segmented within your data, you can start addressing affinities within that audience to further maximise the impact of your content,” says Evolok.

“A tech savvy sub-section of that audience may well be interested in a pop-up offer regarding new smartphone developments, while those more interested in the investment angle of NFTs could be receptive to a financial news newsletter.”

*This article was sponsored by Press Gazette commercial partner Evolok.

For more on making digital pay, read Evolok’s white paper: 8 Ways Publishers Can Use NFTs To Boost Revenues.

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