Senior executives at Politico, Racing Post and the Financial Times have explained why they charge a high price for quality journalism and resist the temptation to offer heavy discounts.

Politico does not publish prices for its B2B “Pro” subscriptions (but they cost tens of thousands of pounds per year), the FT charges £59 per month for a digital subscription and the Racing Post charges £50 for monthly online access.

Speaking at the recent Press Gazette Future of Media Technology Conference, Politico Europe deputy editor-in-chief Kate Day (who runs the UK team) said: “We are unashamedly expensive. We charge a lot for our subscriptions, tens of thousands of pounds, and people pay it because it’s useful in their job.”

She said subscriptions now account for 60% of Politico’s revenue. Data on which content drives subscriptions and retention gives the editorial team focus, she said: “The biggest value from our journalism is the scoops… that is a very clarifying focusing goal.”

She added: “Where is the value for our readers? In our case it’s because it helps them do their jobs better. We have to keep the newsroom focused all the time on what is the journalism that is going to make a difference, or can they get the same information somewhere else?

“We talk a lot about who our readers are and what they need. The clarity when you know your audience very well is amazing for the newsroom. You need to build that into every part of how your newsroom talks about commissioning, editing and success.”

Day said subscription revenue funds Politico’s teams of specialist journalists who are “the cornerstone of our competitive advantage”.

FT: ‘Deep discounting is very tempting but not the right thing’

FT managing director for consumer revenue Fiona Spooner said the title tries to resist the temptation to offer deep discounts (although in the UK it is currently offering 50% off a digital subscription for the first year).

She said: “We have found that deep discounting is not the right thing for sustainable long term growth. It’s very tempting because you see the results straight away.

“The latest offer for the Washington Post is $29 a year and we are $50-$60 per month, so our pricing is quite significantly higher. We are in a market which is used to discounting. The internal pressure is why don’t we just drop the price?

“When we did that going back to Brexit we had a huge spike in subscriptions…but one year and two years later we saw a big spike in cancellations.”

She said that the FT prefers to offer different packages at lower prices: such as subscriptions to individual newsletters (eg. Inside Politics), or FT Edit (an app which offers access to a selection of FT journalism).

The FT also offers readers who want to read just one article the ability to pay £1 for a four-week trial.

Racing Post: ‘We are unashamedly premium’

Racing Post editor Tom Kerr told the conference: “We are an unashamedly premium product. It’s £5 for the newspaper, £50 a month for a top tier [digital] subscription.

“We realised a long time ago that with the changing economics of the industry, either we could charge people what we thought was a fair price for the quality of content and data we were providing or we would have to cut corners.

“We went down the route of quite aggressive price rises and have been on that path for some time now. If you are offering the quality of content, if it is distinct, if it is unique and if it demonstrably provides value to a discerning audience, people are willing to pay that.”

Guardian: Focus on lifetime value of subscribers

The Guardian currently offers access to the title’s digital edition for £149 per year (up from £99 a year ago). It also offers ad-free reading and unlimited access to The Guardian app for £12 per month.

Guardian chief supporter officer Liz Wynn said the language around reader revenue (which includes a large volume of donations) is different at The Guardian.

“It’s a contribution towards supporting the ongoing work of The Guardian.”

On the subject of retaining reader revenue, she said: “The best way to optimise your churn rate is to run no ads. Driving profitable growth while having the right level of retention is the art…

“For some or our readers they are really engaged and want to buy into premium products and subscriptions and that’s incredibly valuable for us.”

She said a good way to avoid a high churn rate is by focusing on the lifetime value to a business of subscribers (rather than acquisition numbers).

She said: “I am a big fan of running your acquisitions team with a three-year revenue target.”

She added: “If you have an immediate trading problem today, if you want to make a short-term difference, look at winning back lapsed customers.”

Krish Subramanian, CEO and co-founder of Chargebee, told the conference that publishers are increasingly using data science to head off cancellations much earlier.

He said: “It’s not about saving at the point of cancellation, it’s about understanding why they are coming to the point of cancellation. Which cohort of customers are likely to cancel in the next 30 days?

“We see more companies investing in data science to know who is likely to leave and we can pre-empt the motions that are needed to start saving them.

“At the point of acquisition, some companies are establishing transparency about how you can leave, not because a regulator says so but because this is the right way to treat a customer. Those are the businesses that are able to build that level of trust and think about it as a recurring relationship and not as a subscription.”

The post Because we’re worth it: Why FT, Politico and Racing Post charge big for online news appeared first on Press Gazette.

Just over a third of News UK staff are using AI tools on a daily basis, according to chief operating officer David Dinsmore.

Dinsmore said this appears to be in line with adoption of AI tools by the general public at work.

But he added: “I think what we’ve learned from that is we need to make it 75% pretty quickly.”

Dinsmore was speaking on a panel about “newsroom transformation in the age of AI” at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference in London on 12 September.

He revealed The Times developed an AI-powered content management co-pilot to help with headline suggestions, summaries and some “light subbing” which has now been rolled out to The Sun and other News Corp titles.

News UK‘s own “safe version” of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini chatbots, called News Assist, has been made available to staff so they can input sensitive documents, and the company’s engineers have access to a new coding AI.

Finally, Dinsmore said, the publisher has created News Transcribe, its own version of a speech-to-text tool like Otter or OpenAI’s Whisper.

Australian news website Crikey revealed earlier this month that News Corp had blocked the use of Otter.ai by journalists in the country.

Asked by Press Gazette why the company created its own tools – which are all based on existing large language models – rather than using what was already out there, Dinsmore said: “The reason you do some of your own iterations is security. I think there’s another well-known voice to text tool that may come out of China and you may not think that’s a great place to have all your information… But also we know our business best and I think we should be adapting these super-powerful models to superpower our products at the same time.”

Reach’s Guten AI rewriting tool is ‘continuously learning’

Reach, the UK’s biggest commercial news publisher, rolled out the use of its own AI product at the start of this year.

Articles written for one Reach website can be “re-versioned” for any of its other brands in their own house style by Guten.

This rewriting was previously done by Reach journalists who can now spend time writing original articles that are “distinct to their particular beat or their particular patch” instead.

Paul Rowland, editorial director of Reach’s Live network of sites, told the panel: “We know from referral behaviour that almost any story that exists on our network can drive enormous audience on almost any site on our network through third-party referrals at any time. What Guten does is allows us to do that at scale.”

He added: “It’s widely used across our organisation, it means that we can do things that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. It’s continuously learning so you edit within it and it means that… it continually becomes more focused and tuned to a particular house style. And we’re developing it all the time to increase its capacity and increase the language models as well that sit behind it.”

Reach also experimented with AI-produced bullet point summaries at the top of articles on its website Nottinghamshire Live.

Last year Swedish news website Aftonbladet found people were spending longer on articles with AI-generated summaries at the top. It appeared that people who got a more general understanding of an article upfront were more likely to read the whole text.

Rowland said this was the hypothesis behind Reach’s experiment, which he said was “modestly successful” although they have not continued with it.

“I think certainly in terms of where we’re going next with that, with Guten and with versioning there’s also a big opportunity for us in repackaging particular stories and pieces of content into formats, summaries that are relevant, that are customised to different audiences, different age demographics, different platforms, so we can get multiple value out of one piece of content in a more efficient way.”

Are AI disclaimers always necessary?

Initially, Rowland said, every piece of content that went through Guten carried a disclaimer about its use of AI.

However he explained why this has changed: “My view is that that’s an AI-supported editing process. I think it’s different.

“That’s a piece of content written by a human, reorganised by AI, re-edited by a human. I think that is an entirely different situation to a piece of content generated from scratch… from asking ChatGPT to write me a new story.

“And I think absolutely we would always, if we were doing that kind of thing, would absolutely, always declare that. But I think AI-supported editing is a different matter.”

Dinsmore agreed, saying that “the customer will decide” but that he is unlikely to care if a human or an AI has written a football match live blog, for example.

“Because all I want is that information as quickly as possible: ‘Man kicks ball, scores goal’. That’s it.

“Whereas if it is an opinion piece or something like that, if that is written by a bot – although why you would get a bot to write it, I don’t know – then I would want to be told.”

Similarly Graham Page, head of media at consultancy Q5, suggested AI involvement should be labelled in a similar way to sponsored content.

He said the publishers with whom he works are looking at the use of generative AI for tasks like tagging, transcription and summarisation but that it’s largely still in A/B testing and not being seen by audiences.

“The more adventurous are starting to think about where they can take really structured data and turn it into a news article,” he said.

“So the obvious place to start is weather. You can take the weather data, turn it into a news article. Sport might be the next place to go, especially a data-heavy sport like cricket, [a journalist] might not want to sit through four days of test match, but they can create an article about it. And you can imagine other things if the data gets better… so could you take your council minutes if the data structure improves and turn those into news articles for local publishers.”

AI and subscriptions: We are just getting started

Nina Wright, chair at Harmsworth Media which is the division of DMGT which runs the i and the New Scientist, said she is “particularly interested” in the potential of AI in subscriptions and personalisation: “helping to take a customer on a journey, serving them what they want, when they want it, how they want it”.

She said this could “help our businesses be smarter subscriptions businesses, and so I think we’re just starting to scrape the top of the iceberg on that”.

The post How News UK and Reach are using AI in the newsroom appeared first on Press Gazette.

Can publishers cope with being software companies?

This was the question experts addressed at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference on a panel about the role tech plays in finding new revenue streams.

Senior leaders from The Times, Haymarket and the Mail shared their insights on using tech to reduce subscriber churn, sell corporate subscriptions and introduce a partial paywall.

Payal Sood, director of technology at Haymarket Media Group which has built new products as it moves away from a reliance on advertising revenue towards subscriptions and corporate customers in particular, said she likes “going for a build option” where possible.

“For Haymarket, we have built our own CMS,” she said. “Of course, we are not a software company, but we partner with the software developers to build the way we would like things to work.

“The CMS is quite core to create our content and give the editorial the workflow they would like and it also gives us the scale because at Haymarket we keep relaunching our brands, we keep acquiring new brands, and we do launch new brands as well.

“If we are on somebody else’s platform then it’s difficult, and sometimes it’s not even economically viable, because you are just launching a new brand which may not be generating that much revenue to start with, but you’re paying the same amount in the SaaS [software as a service] platform.”

Sood added: “We have got a single platform and our smaller brands also get the same enriched platform features which our bigger brands are getting. So for us, it makes more sense to keep building and keep upgrading that CMS.”

Sood said the key principle at Haymarket for answering the build or buy question is: “If it is core to your business: build, or at least have the complete control over your systems and your data. You don’t want somebody sunsetting the system you are working on and the customer data platform you have just migrated.”

‘Having great partners is the way you get success’

Mail product director Simon Regan-Edwards said: “My view: always buy, although we’ve built quite a lot of stuff… But I would say look for great partners.

“Having great partners who have invariably done this before you, and working closely with them, is the way you get success.”

In response to Sood’s point about software businesses sunsetting a product, Regan-Edwards responded that “you can also have internal employees who give three months’ notice and suddenly you’ve got an unsupported platform. So there is a downside.”

But he agreed that the crucial point is deciding “what is differentiated and core to your business, and then yes, you may have to go and build that yourself if you’re big enough and it can be supported, but that total cost of ownership is often higher than you think it is.”

Regan-Edwards also emphasised the importance of a “cross-functional, co-located working team within editorial”.

When rolling out the Mail+ partial paywall on Mail Online at the start of the year, making about ten to 15 stories a day available to paying subscribers only, Regan-Edwards said they brought together marketing, product and tech people to sit together with the journalists in the newsroom.

“I think having that connection between editorial, product and tech, working directly with your preferred partners – that is the glue, that is the secret sauce.”

Times focus is on churn reduction and mobile performance

Edward Roussel, head of digital at The Times and Sunday Times, agreed on the importance of cross-functional teams.

He said the success of The Times is “at the intersection of three things. It’s, first of all, brilliant journalism, so thinking very deeply about every story needs to be distinctive and differentiated and needs to perform well on a mobile device.

“Secondly, I think it’s about the newsroom working very closely with the product team and with the marketing team, because if that connective tissue isn’t working well, it’s like a three-legged stool. If one element doesn’t work, then you’re not going to be able to continue to build your audience and build your subscriber base.

“And I think the most important thing from a business point of view, is churn reduction. So what are the elements that ensure that you can retain those hard won subscribers?”

On that point he revealed there is a “very strong correlation between daily habit, getting people to come back every day, if not every day certainly every other day, and the propensity to churn. So if people come back more than 16 times in a month, what we see in our data is propensity to churn drops off dramatically.

“And so to that end, we work very hard on getting people to use our app, because if you use our app, propensity to churn drops by about 50%.

“We work very hard on getting you to subscribe to a newsletter because if you subscribe to a newsletter, the propensity to churn drops by about 11%.

“And we look at other ways, like puzzles is a big thing for us, and if you’re what’s known as a solver and do the crypto crossword, the propensity to churn drops by 22%.”

The Times has “completely modernised” its newsroom including a new website CMS, Roussel revealed, which includes elements like AI headline suggestions and easier mobile optimisation via dragging and dropping elements of a story.

He said this meant people can “now focus on the journalism, as opposed to manipulating complicated bits of software”.

But of the creation of this tech, Roussel said: “We’re very much of the view that we should not be a software company.

“Candidly, when we were trying to do our own software, we were really bad at it, and that was clarifying. So we select tools that we then integrate and augment.

“But that in itself is a skill by selecting the right providers, the right suppliers: augmenting their off the shelf products to make them more relevant to how we operate is in itself a skill and not to be dismissed and we need very talented technology and product teams to be able to do that.”

Publishers ‘need to decide if they want to be software companies’

Stewart Robinson, managing director of web and app software company Full Fat Things, said publishers “need to decide whether they want to be software companies.

“It’s a bit scary to become a software company and to grow all that skill. And there are many phrases like ‘we are all developers now’ as we look to just embrace every technology that led you to do more and more and more. But is it something core to the business? Is it something that they really want to do? And I would say that as someone who sells software, but I genuinely think there’s something there. “

Robinson added: “I think the great challenge for the publishing industry is having really good glue between your systems, not just making them connect, but making your data flow across all of your systems in a meaningful way.”

The post Winning technology strategies shared by Times, Mail and Haymarket appeared first on Press Gazette.

Commercial staff at leading publishers have told Press Gazette they’re still set on transitioning to first-party data despite Google’s landmark decision in July not to proceed with its long-promised deprecation of third-party cookies.

Although the tech giant’s about-face caused grumbles in the news industry, executives at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference agreed the threatened death of cookies on Google‘s dominant Chrome browser provided the impetus necessary to get their houses in order on user data.

That change, they added, appears to already be reflected in increased ad sales.

‘I definitely used the word bastards’ when Google made cookie announcement, says one executive

Asked by Press Gazette editor-in-chief Dominic Ponsford how he had reacted to Google’s July cookie announcement Morgan Stevenson, the digital transformation director at Newsquest, said: “I definitely used the word bastards.

“Simply because we put a lot of work in, preparing. I think it was a good industry kick up the arse to better prepare for leveraging our first-party data.”

But he said he felt Google had at least been “trying to create a solution to the challenge, unlike Safari and Mozilla, who just said ‘see you later, publishers’…

“I think there was a part [of me that] would have liked to just carry on with it, pull the plug, let’s see what happens. But there is so much still within the consent challenge to truly be confident that, if they pull the plug, we know what’s going to happen.”

Cookies are packets of data that give websites information about their users. If a website knows about its users it can sell ad space for higher prices, so Google’s planned deprecation of third-party cookies left publishers scrambling to develop strategies to get users to hand over their data directly.

Ultimately, Stevenson said, “it was a bit of reprieve, actually, just to get a bit more time with so many challenges to be ready for it if they really do pull the plug”.

Kyle Vinansky, the senior vice president of global sales at Forbes, had a similar view, saying: “I think everyone on our team really groaned when we heard that news. It was just one more thing in that saga.

“But I think what Google did, and others that were focused on this cookieless future, is they really got us thinking more about our first-party solutions, about the way that we could better understand our audiences…

“The biggest thing for us is it put focus on an issue where, ten years ago, despite our size and our scale, we didn’t know that much about our audiences. Now we know an awful lot.

“We’ve been investing more, even outside of first party data, and looking at ways with research panels and other levels of engagement that really allow us to dive into those groups that are most core to the advertising partners that are spending with us.”

Gareth Cross, the senior director for digital solutions at The Telegraph, said he had been less shocked: “To say it wasn’t the biggest surprise of the year is probably an understatement.

“I think the good thing from the Telegraph perspective was it hasn’t really affected the way we go about day to day, or our strategy, in any way. We were always doubling down on our first party data.”

Newsquest sees success with subscription model for advertisers

Despite their frustrations, the publishers said things appeared to be going in the right direction on ad sales.

Stevenson said Newsquest had “done very well pushing our direct sales with lots of local businesses. That’s predominantly what the Newsquest model focuses on”.

Although most of its concern was with its digital direct-sold advertising, he said “we’ve done significantly better this year at holding on to print revenues.

“One of the diversifications that we did six to seven years ago was to start introducing digital marketing services, as a reseller of those, to the same businesses that we sell our direct audiences to. That’s helped us become much stickier, for customers to stay with us.”

Services offered within that package included “SEO advice, PR copywriting, website building as well – so a whole one-stop shop and helping them to really navigate how they better improve the marketing of their own brand”.

He said Newsquest had “invested very heavily” in metrics like view time that help prove the value of their services to small business owners, and that they have improved client retention by rolling out a subscription model for ad sales.

“We looked at the best-performing campaigns for different industry styles and turned them into such good value you can’t afford to turn them off,” he said.

“You need to give three months’ notice if you want to turn it off, effectively… I’d say probably now 16 or 17% of our ad revenue is coming from a subscription model for advertisers.”

Nuno Brilha, the CMO of attention management platform Insurads, said they were looking into a similar ad subscription service as part of a recently-launched strategic partnership with Mather Economics and its content and analytics platform, Sophi.

Telegraph: Direct-sold advertising revenues up and ‘they will grow again this year’

Cross, from The Telegraph, said that over the last year “we have seen our areas of focus, our direct-sold, grow. We’ve seen our partnerships grow, and digital revenues, from an advertising perspective, are up. And they will grow again this year”.

He said the “beauty” of a subscription-first business was that “the things that come with that are all the things that help you face some other challenges” around advertising.

“So there’s a hell of a lot of first-party data – whether it’s declared, inferred – and the way we use it, we no longer need to rely on third-party data sources for our direct-sold.”

More broadly, he said, “we do things now that we would never have done before. A good example of that is if an ad format isn’t working, we remove it.

“Often what would have happened in the past – you [wouldn’t] lose that yield, you’d just add something else, and before you know it you’ve got something incredibly cluttered, diluted…

“One of my colleagues says the ad experiences are designed to engage, not enrage.”

Forbes ‘creates scarcity’ on sponsorship opportunities to add ‘exclusivity’ for partners

Forbes executive Vinansky also said he was pleased with the year – but sounded a note of caution.

“From an audience standpoint, I think we’re doing better than ever: almost 100 million users on a monthly basis, consistent growth from that regard,” he said.

“From a revenue standpoint we’re pacing ahead of last year, but Q4 for us is an incredibly important time of the year. We’re expecting a lot of information in the next month or so that’s really going to decide where those numbers fall on an annual basis.

“And we’re still up against a very challenging political landscape, as we all know. There’s a lot of economic uncertainty still, and it’s a question for us of whether or not our largest advertising partners are in a position where they want to be a part of those conversations, or they want to wait and they want to stay out of the market.”

Forbes has a partial paywall, but Vinansky said “the majority of our traffic” does not come through it.

“We continue to grow our registered users, but we view that as multifaceted – it’s people that attend our events, it’s people that subscribe to our newsletters, it’s people that subscribe for digital or print access.”

He said that direct-sold advertising is “our largest business segment”, with ads sold via the open exchange second.

Forbes SVP of global sales responds to revelation the site had been running ads on a low-visibility subdomain

Press Gazette editor Ponsford also asked Vinansky about a story that broke in March which revealed that some ads Forbes had been paid to run had appeared not on the main site but on a subdomain that could not be accessed through regular site or search engine navigation. (Forbes has denied that it had been running a so-called “Made for Advertising” or “Made for Arbitrage” site.)

“I think it’s really caused us to think about transparency in a different way,” Vinansky said.

“From a data compliance standpoint, and some of the verification partners that they were using, we taught our partners how to actually identify any advertising that ran with us on that subdomain. It just wasn’t something that they were looking for.

“The primary issue that we were dealing with there… was a matter of the page templates that we were using, and them being gallery-style templates.” (The ads on the subdomain appeared while a user clicked through slideshow-format content.)

He continued: “Once we had that conversation with our partners about why these pages existed, the way that we were using them, the way that they supported some of our most deeply-reported editorial, it had a very different outcome than the article alone that really put us in a spotlight and had us on our heels in a pretty negative way.”

A specific change following the incident, he said, was that Forbes now provides “a templated lookbook of every single page design that we use on Forbes and every single place that an ad could theoretically run.

“It was nothing that we had done before. We’ve provided screenshots before after a campaign went live, but now we’re getting to granular detail as to where your ads might run before a campaign happens.

“From a reporting standpoint, we are dialed into all of the ad verification partners and have direct relationships with them ourselves. So we encourage our partners to use that data. We encourage them to use our first-party data. We encourage them to use third-party data segments that are outside of those.

“It’s the mixed approach to making sure that everyone feels the highest levels of confidence in that reporting and where the sources are coming from and being able to tell a more complete story with it.”

The post ‘Bastards’: Publishers remain focused on alternatives despite Google cookies U-turn appeared first on Press Gazette.

DMG Media chief executive Rich Caccappolo has said that monopoly lawsuits against Google and the prospect of new UK tech regulation could bring huge benefits to news publishers.

In August, a US judge ruled that Google’s $26bn-plus annual payments to companies like Apple and Samsung to secure prominence for its browser were illegal and monopolistic. A second US case, which began on 9 September, argues that Google created an illegal monopoly in the world of adtech – harming publishers and advertisers.

In the UK, Google, Facebook and other US tech giants are facing tougher regulation as a result of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, which was passed in May.

Speaking at the Press Gazette Future of Media Technology Conference in London this month, Caccappolo said he expects the major tech companies in the UK media market to get designated as having “strategic market status” by December this year, with new rules likely to be put in place by the Competition and Markets Authority governing their behaviour by next August.

He said: “Unfortunately, I think that we as publishers are not doing enough. We’re sort of sleepwalking and waiting to see what comes out of it, instead of being there every day, knocking on the doors, arguing about what should be in there.

“It’s not just payment for content – and by the way, whatever the payment for content is, it’s not going to be enough to save us. The way that the payments get allocated needs to be decided, whether it’s number of journalists, number of stories… and the ramifications to that have to be understood.

“It could be so much more though. We should have a role in understanding when changes are coming and how they’re going to impact us.

“We should have a role in saying that they impacted us, perhaps unfairly, like this thing that’s killed off white labels for publishers in the most recent Google algorithm update [which, in June, stopped discount vouchers advertised by publishers from appearing in search].”

Reach chief executive Jim Mullen has also spoken out about big tech in the past week, arguing regulation is needed to ensure free, advertiser-funded online news can thrive.

Google monopoly cases mean ‘things are going to get sold off’

On the subject of the monopoly cases against Google in the US and elsewhere, Caccapoulo said: “There are going to be things that get sold off. There are going to be changes in the way money flows. There’s going to be investment, private equity and venture.

“We’re going to see new browsers, new search engines, new ad servers. And those of us in the space who have traffic are going to be key partners for these new initiatives. This is a chance to fix a lot of of things that are bad in our space.

“But the fights we choose, the options we make, the decisions we make, are going to have an effect on us, not just this year, but long term, and they will affect our fortunes and our ability to survive.”

DMG Media revenue and profit up

The Daily Mail and Mail Online boss said the company had finished up its financial year, which runs to the end of September, in a “strong” position. Last year DMG Media parent company DMGT reported adjusted pre-tax profit of £41m on turnover up 2% to £997m. Consumer media revenue fell 5%, largely due to a hit to advertising revenues.

On this year’s figures, which won’t be published until next February, Caccappolo said: “We’ve grown our digital revenue, we’ve grown our profit, and we made some changes that I think are really crucial to our long-term sustainability and success.”

Asked about the success of Mail Online’s partial paywall, launched in January of this year, he said the revenue contribution was “fundamental” but declined to be drawn on exact numbers for subscribers.

He said the Mail Online subscription, coupled with expansion into podcasts and original video on Youtube, had made DMG Media a much “healthier” and more “diversified” business”.

“We rolled out a subscription product, actually a subscription platform, and there’s an important differentiation there. It’s a product with the ability to test pricing, to test bundling, to test ads on, ads off.

“We’ve still got 1,000 to 1,500 free articles we do every day. Ten or 15 of them would be what we call ‘more from the Mail’.

“Those are available as part of a membership or subscription. And that has worked really well. We haven’t lost the traffic, and we have a very large number of people who are subscribing, and the churn rates are lower than we anticipated, so we’re really excited about it. It is a foundational component of our revenue. It’s very profitable.”

He added: “It changed the way we think about content, the value of content. It changed the way newsroom plans their day. It gives us feedback into what people are are interested in reading and what is good enough for people to pull out a credit card.

“This was an initiative that crossed over functional areas and I’m really proud of how we did that. And I mean, if you launch something like that and it works, it raises the morale, gives everybody a sense that we can do big things.”

Attribution for publishers on ChatGPT will bring revenue for news publishers

Caccappolo said DMG Media has no current plans to sue ChatGPT and other AI companies for using its content without permission but confirmed that it does block AI scrapers from accessing its websites.

However he said there was an opportunity for news companies to get paid by generative AI companies on the basis of attribution.

“You ask [an AI company such as Perplexity] for the news of the day and a response is given that’s five paragraphs long. We need to figure out how much of that came from each publisher, and they have to be attributed. And there is movement to that, and we’re supportive of that and that’s going to happen.”

One AI start-up, Prorata.ai, has so far signed deals with major publishers such as the Financial Times and Axel Springer with a plan for revenue sharing based on attribution of this sort, although its platform has not yet launched.

Caccappolo continued: “When that happens, I think there’ll be this amazing rush to suddenly unlock, and everybody wants to be scraped, and it’ll be just like search today. We’ll all say: ‘Hey, how come my account’s not being used there?’

“I don’t think any amount of citation of the sources is going to drive a lot of traffic. I think that’s going to go away, but I think there’s a real chance at getting some attribution.”

Google Privacy Sandbox could be a good thing for publishers

DMG Media was among the publishers arguing against Google’s plan to ban third-party cookies on Chrome at the end of this year and replace them with its own Privacy Sandbox technology.

Caccappolo was asked by Press Gazette whether Google’s July decision to keep cookies and instead introduce a new experience on Chrome which allows users to make an “informed choice” about privacy was good or bad news for publishers.

“We were concerned that if it went live and cookies were retired, that it would be practically unbuyable,” he said. “We worked with other publishers, with Google themselves and with the CMA, and we showed that it wasn’t ready. It couldn’t be done…

“I actually hope that they continue to work on it [Privacy Sandbox] because I think it is an important alternative, because when cookies go away there is not going to be one solution there is going to be five, six or seven solutions and one of them is going to be Sandbox.

“I had a meeting this week with a bunch of publishers in our office and Google talking about Sandbox. I hope it continues.”

He said one of the benefits of Sandbox was that it offered a way to attribute the success of advertising to publishers.

“One of the big mistakes we made is that we allowed ourselves to be a commodity. We allowed our inventory to be bought at scale, cheap, and part of that was that we never put in place an attribution engine to close the loop.

“People buy Meta, they pay £1, they believe they’re getting £1.20 in return… We, as publishers, were never big enough to solely to do that.

“I think that we should band together and do that. I think Google Sandbox, if you look at it underneath, had a lot of attribution and measurement that I think we can use as an industry. So I hope it goes forward, and I hope Apple adopts some of it.”

The post Daily Mail CEO on Google lawsuits, AI and why future of news is bright appeared first on Press Gazette.

Publishers have been urged to “band together” to challenge big tech’s power over news industry revenues as an executive revealed the impact of recent Google updates at Mail Online.

Speaking at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference last week, a group of industry experts warned there is a mismatch between how the news industry and tech platforms calculate value that means publishers are powerless addressing them alone.

Carly Steven, the global head of search engine optimisation (SEO) at Mail Online, said a June anti-spam update rolled out by Google had hit affiliate revenue from, for example, publisher voucher code and betting offers, which she said “effectively turned off a very significant revenue stream for a lot of publishers”.

“All of that content – that was really valuable, and we genuinely believe our readers find it very valuable too – it was just gone overnight.”

She said it spoke to a broader trend wherein publishers have less control in an increasingly unpredictable online landscape.

“We used to have a lot of control, as SEO editors or people working in this industry… We used to be able to tweak a headline, add some links and get something back. It used to be so easy… All that control is gone. I could not do that anymore.

“If an editor says to me: ‘I want this story to rank at the start of the top stories rail’ – I cannot make that happen in the way that we used to do.”

Googe deployment of AI Overviews varies wildly from week to week

Referring to AI Overviews, the artificial intelligence-generated summaries Google has begun deploying at the top of some search results, Steven said “the challenge that we’re facing… is that it does keep changing.

“We’ve taken part in studies where we’ve analysed our own keywords and seen that AI Overviews have been present for 23% of all the keywords that drive traffic to our website. And then the next week that’s 5%.

“So it’s very hard to be able to make decisions right now based on the data that we have.”

AI Overviews concern some publishers because they are displayed above links in Google’s search results, pushing publishers further down the page and potentially answering user enquiries without sharing any traffic.

But Steven said for now their impact on traffic was unclear, asking: “Do people ever click if you have a link within an AI overview? Probably not, but right now, we just don’t know…

“What’s taking up my time at the moment, in terms of trying to understand the AI landscape, is developing the tools to enable us to track it on an ongoing basis.”

SEO consultant Barry Adams said from what he’d seen AI Overviews “don’t really present a threat, yet, to publishers – at least not in the context of news, where AI Overviews are mostly absent from news topics”. He said they are presented more often for “evergreen” information.

Last month research by consultancy Authoritas that found AI Overviews were being offered for 17% of queries in the UK and US on the top keywords. Earlier, Press Gazette-commissioned research by Authoritas published in June saw AI Overviews offered for 24% of the top keywords driving publisher traffic.

Adams said overviews did not “seem to be cannibalising as much traffic as maybe some had expected – it tends to be low single-digit percentage traffic losses, which basically makes AI Overviews just another search feature like you had before… So it’ll be just another thing to optimise for. Which means more work for everybody, yay.”

Mismatch between how publishers and platforms assess value

Denis Haman, the chief executive of Glide Publishing Platform, described the relationship between publishers and platforms as “abusive” and questioned whether big tech could ever meaningfully value news.

“We’re not friends, we’re not even frenemies,” he said. “That’s the reality… it doesn’t matter whether you’re exposing corruption or whether you’re telling life stories, the media plays a role in society which has a greater value than what some random number cruncher at Meta will assign to it.”

Madhav Chinnappa, a senior executive consultant at AI data marketplace Human Native and previously the director of news ecosystem development at Google, said: “The reality is that the tech companies, from their California headquarters, look at the industries that they touch and they value them based on the revenue that they bring in.”

In the news industry’s case, he said “it’s de minimis, right?

“I actually was on a panel with an ex-Facebook person who talked about it, and he said: ‘Look, actually, the value of news to Facebook is zero if not negative, because when they took news off, their revenues went up.’

“So they’re valuing it based on dollars in. But I think the news industry and news people value the news industry on societal value…. I think that’s actually one of the fundamental factors about why this relationship has been so difficult.”

‘Green shoots’ resulted from collective industry attempts to cajole big tech

On a more optimistic note, Mail Online’s Steven said that “a really positive unintended consequence” of June’s Google spam SEO update for publishers was that “it’s forced us together a lot more”.

“While that was a terrible thing that happened… publishers all came together to put pressure on Google, to insist on having conversations with them.

“I’m not saying that we’ve got the solution that we wanted to, but it was really productive, and not just because it’s a bit of a therapy session.”

She said there had been “green shoots” from those discussions.

“I feel like, personally, our relationship with Google – while it can be frustrating because we don’t get answers – I feel like there’s been some small victories. 

“And maybe I need to be more ambitious with my targets, but on the back of some of the things that we collectively as publishers have raised, Google… clarified things, they tweak the rules.”

Steven said Google is “not really interested in you individually as a publisher”.

“But when you have a whole industry coming together and being able to provide evidence and proof that ‘you made this change, and something collectively happened to all of us, and the consequences of that are really bad for your users who are searching for this information on Google’ – then they pay a little bit more attention.”

SEO expert Adams said: “You need to hold them accountable, because if you just let them get away with it, they aren’t just going to care about us.”

He added: “It is not true that all of Google search results are purely algorithmic. There are some specific aspects, like for example, around Covid information, where Google will manually whitelist websites…

“We need to lift that veil off of it and understand these are just human-coded algorithms – coded by people who make editorial decisions on what works and what doesn’t work, and it is okay to hold them to account.”

Chinnappa agreed that publishers needed to work together to influence big tech, saying tech companies are “culturally different” from the news industry and that the way to sway them was “at scale, with data”.

‘Don’t get split up by bits of money here and there’

On the question of whether publishers should licence their content to artificial intelligence companies, Chinnappa noted that away from giants like Google and OpenAI, “there’s actually an entire AI developer ecosystem of small and not so small developers who also need access to content, and they want it for specific reasons, whether it’s niche content or it’s hard to find in a big data set, or, quite selfishly, they don’t want to get sued into oblivion…

“I think we need to be helping get that ecosystem that’s sustainable for both sides. Because I hope that data licensing becomes a sustainable revenue stream for publishers going forward, but we need to push in that direction together.”

And Haman, similarly, said “there’s an opportunity nowadays, with a new crop of big tech companies emerging, where we should come together as an industry and see whether we can influence the governments, band together, don’t get split up by bits of money here and there.

“Because it’s not just the big guys. News Corp will do a deal, Axel Springer will do a deal, of course they will – as they should, people should pay for the content.

“But what about smaller publishers? Who’s going to compensate them for the content that’s been taken from them without permission?…

“I don’t think that they’re going to have a breakthrough and all of a sudden see the value that that media industry [adds to] society, and it’s something that needs to be protected.”

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Press Gazette’s flagship Future of Media Technology conference returns on 12 September offering media leaders an essential briefing on how to tackle the disruptive themes shaping our world.

The conference features sessions on paywall strategies, newsroom transformation in the age of AI, whether to sue the tech giants or sign, how to build the perfect publishing tech stack and how to fix advertising on the open web.

Confirmed speakers include:

• DMG Media chief executive Rich Caccappolo
• Guardian chief supporter officer Liz Wynn
• Politico deputy editor in chief Kate Day
• News UK chief operating officer David Dinsmore
• Harmsworth Media chair Nina Wright
• Reach plc chief digital publisher David Higgerson
• Global head of SEO Steve Wilson-Beales
• Former head of news partnerships at Google Madhav Chinnappa
• Head of technology at Haymarket Media Group Payal Sood
• Times head of digital Edward Roussel
• Mail Digital Publishing product director Simon Regan-Edwards
• Telegraph chief commercial officer Karen Eccles

Publishers showcasing their success stories include: the Racing Post, LBC and the Financial Times.

The day will also give publishers the opportunity to meet many of the world’s leading technology providers who support the news and media industry.

Joining us in the exhibition hall will be:

• Ancoris
• Atex
• Catch Metrics
• desk-Net
• Digital Manager.ai
• FT Strategies
• Flip-Pay
• Full Fat Things
• Glide
• InsurAds
• Limio
• Norkon
• Papermule
• Pugpig
• Q5
• Stibo DX
• And Stripe.

The conference takes place at the Hilton Bankside Hotel in London and tickets include networking breakfast, lunch and after-event drinks.

Combined tickets are available which include entrance to the Future of Media Awards being held at the same venue in the evening (see full list of finalists here).

Last year more than 500 attended the Future of Media Technology Conference and Awards (see Press Gazette reports from the day here).

Tickets for 2024 are as follows:

• Conference: £295 +VAT
• Conference plus awards dinner: £495 +VAT
• Conference tickets for service providers (rather than publishers): £2,495 +VAT.

The post Future of Media Technology Conference line-up for 2024 appeared first on Press Gazette.

Five months on from taking as CEO of Future, Jon Steinberg still has a mountain to climb in terms of restoring the company’s market value to anything near its former heights. At its peak three years ago Future was valued at more than £4bn, today the share price gives it a market cap of around £885m. That’s less than what Future paid for GoCo (£594m) and Dennis (£300m) in 2021.

I began my discussion with the American former president of Buzzfeed and former CEO of Daily Mail US at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference by asking why investors are still so down on media and if there are any signs of, well, the future looking brighter for Future?

The full discussion can be heard on the latest edition of Press Gazette’s Future of Media Explained podcast.

Steinberg said: “I’m a big fan of this book called The Score Takes Care of itself by Bill Walsh, who is the coach of the San Francisco 49ers American football team. His basic philosophy is if you put your uniform on the right way, if you do the work, if you show up at practice on time, if you answer the phone a certain way, the score takes care of itself. And ultimately, you know, that is my view.

“If we do the things that we need to do, if we operate the business effectively, if we innovate, if we grow, everything else will take care of itself and the stock price will take care of itself.”

The company behind brands such as Tech Radar, The Week and Go Compare has fallen out of favour with investors because of a dip in profits in the first half of this year and a warning that full-year results would be at the bottom end of expectations. Future’s revenue (like for like) and profit were both down year-on-year in the first half at £405m and £66.4m respectively.

The dip in media share prices is not confined to Future. Talking about the general picture, Steinberg said: “I think traffic and generative AI is a big question right now. How will publishers get visitors to their articles and their videos over time? That part is in flux.

“I think that the overall performance of our business and the underlying financials are incredibly strong, with the half-year we threw off £130m operating profit of which all converted into cash flow. So the business is remarkably strong. At a time when we had traffic declines, we also had the average revenue per user up double-digit percentages so advertisers were flocking to the inventory.

“At this time of traffic and AI uncertainty, advertisers are flocking to high-intent audiences, people that are decision-makers and the like.

“I like to call it high-intent media. Everybody who goes to one of our magazines, one of our sites, is passionate about a topic they want to read about, or they’re passionate about a product they want to research and study.

“They spend hours on Tom’s Hardware, researching graphics cards and cooling engines and the like, and make purchase decisions off of our affiliate network on that. So I think that differs a lot from what I term low-intent media, which I think is where there’s a lot of pressure right now in the media ecosystem.”

[Read more: Jon Steinberg and other media leaders share insights into how generative AI is used at their companies]

Why affiliate marketing revenues will hold up

Affiliate marketing (through which commission is made when readers click on links to buy products) makes up a third of Future’s revenue, a third is digital advertising and a third is a mix of print (both cover price sales and advertising).

That affiliate advertising fell by just over £5m year-on-year to £133.3m in the first half of 2023.

I asked Steinberg whether affiliates were particularly vulnerable to Google algorithm changes and what other revenue streams Future was developing.

“I am confident that when people are researching a $500 graphics card, a $700 dress to wear for the spring on one of our fashion sites, like Marie Claire or Who What Wear, they’re going to want to read product guides and reviews and not just rely on a bunch of Google boxes. I mean, yeah, maybe for a £5 lipstick, that will be adequate. But from what our users tell us and from what we see, people want to do deep research.

“I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a Google Shopping result for anything of a substantive price and just clicked ‘buy’. People want to read multiple reviews. So I think that our affiliate business is surprisingly resilient.”

Steinberg noted that financial services comparison sites Go Compare and Mozo were up 4% in the first half

“I think that comparative shopping engines and affiliate review guides and the like are unbelievably resilient, especially at a time when the consumer is pressured, and every pound has to go further than it went before.”

‘What would Zillah do?’ versus ‘to thine own self be true’

Steinberg’s predecessor Byng-Thorne stepped down after nine years in charge in April of this year.

Asked how he has handled the challenge of putting his own mark on the business, he said: “First of all, Zillah’s shoes are unbelievably large to fill. And what she built over nine years is nothing short of miraculous, in terms of taking a company that was so tiny and building it into a multi-billion pound enterprise. So I do sometimes think, what would Zillah do? But most of the time, I like the Shakespeare line ‘to thine own self be true’ and I try to adhere to that.

“My preferred way for working is to be in the soil, working in the garden, side by side on products and efforts that require a great deal of innovation, and then hand it off to the individual that’s responsible for it.

“Be a partner to them initially during times of great innovation, and then allow them the autonomy to go forward and do it.

“And also, I believe in what I call a thousand flowers blooming, which is I really want our senior leadership team and our executive leadership team to be part of the decision and the creation of ideas so that they can push it forward.

“People are bought into things when they’re part of making the decision. They’re not part of things as much when they’re just told what to do. And you also don’t really know if they bought into it if you’ve just dictated or mandated it.”

Digital subscriptions: Future at start of journey

Asked how digital subscriptions fit into Future’s revenue strategy, Steinberg admitted that the company is still at an early stage.

“We’ve done a brilliant job of cultivating print subscriptions. Print subscriptions are a sixth of our revenue. We need now to begin the journey that has been pioneered by the likes of The New York Times, the FT and others and start on that journey of developing paid digital subscription products.

“I don’t know right now as I sit here today how long it will take for it to be significant, but I know that it’s a journey that we must get started on and we are started on that journey.

“We have our own technology at Future called Kiosk which is our own paywall technology. We’ve rolled it out in small order on a few sites. The numbers are very tiny right now. But it is one of a handful of strategic initiatives that is very top of mind for me.”

Full disclosure: The author of this piece owns some Future shares.

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DC Thomson‘s chief brand officer, Ella Dolphin, told Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference how having a clear purpose and giving something back to communities is leading to business benefits for titles ranging from the Beano to 275-year-old regional daily the Press and Journal. This is an edited version of her keynote presentation.

I’d like to introduce our thinking around the community sector, which is incredibly diverse, often transcending politics and social challenges. In the simplest form, it could be like a Neighbourhood Watch scheme, or it could be the gardening gangs that don’t go around shooting people, they go around weeding and picking up the litter.

What’s interesting about this sector is it’s a sector that’s just getting on with just doing things and is actively looking for enablers and supporters to help along the way.

DC Thomson is the holding company of Stylist, Beano and lots of other titles that are reorganising around communities.

We’ve got a legitimacy to play in this space because of our local news and lifestyle coverage. The ambition is to become advisers, advocates and connectors for the communities that we serve.

Within the company, we have created common infrastructure for these communities: one CRM, one data lake, one technology team – so that we can build once, and then roll out.

These are the communities that DC Thomson is organised around:

For example, Local. We have two of the biggest regional newspapers in the country. They happen to be in Scotland, The Courier and the Press and Journal. We’ve got The Scots mag and local radio stations, so that is our Local community.

Mental Agility would be our puzzling empire, as I like to call it. We own The Puzzler magazine business, which is doing phenomenally well and is actually growing a younger audience.

Advocacy for DC Thomson is leading the charge for women, which Stylist sits behind, and then we have our kids’ magazines like Unicorn Universe, which is just amazing. Beano leads the charge for Gen Alpha.

The question of purpose has become fundamental to the growth of these communities because at some point not very far down the line we’re asking for an exchange, and that involves participation and a financial transaction. The ability to do that exchange is greatly enhanced when people know what you are doing for them, what you are doing for the community. So, for me, performance and purpose are never really far away from each other.

I’m going to show you a few examples of how purpose is really driving the performance of these communities. I’m not able to show it on a pound-for-pound ROI spreadsheet that the CFO would like. But it’s slightly more scientific than my other method of snog, marry, avoid – which I do tend to use quite a lot in my decision-making.

In its very basic form, the link between purpose and performance, high levels of participation and engagement through purpose-driven initiatives are driving the lifetime value of your subscribers, so there is an absolute correlation between those two.

How the Beano became cool at 85

Beano launched in 1938 as a comic with a whole bunch of IP that spun out of it. It was rebellious, it was funny, it was kids, it was a comic business. It celebrated 85 years this year, and within those 85 years, there have been dark periods where it has not been growing. But in the last five years, we have seen supercharged growth.

Yes, there has been clever use of IP in the digital space. Yes, a TV series commissioned with the BBC. But the main revenue and profit is coming from subscriptions to the printed comic. [Beano weekly sales have grown from 37,000 in 2017 to 55,000 at the end of 2022.] And this I’m putting boldly down to purpose.

So, what is the purpose? It’s quite simply literacy for children. It’s reading for the sheer fun of it, the sheer joy of it. Not because you have to, not because you’ve been given a book to read, but because you enjoy it. And research shows that children who read for the sheer joy of it have the greatest lifetime outcomes.

What we did with Beano six years ago was launch Beano for Schools, where we provide lesson plans for schools like how to tell a good joke and comic writing and programmes like Bouncebackability. Thank God we launched that before the pandemic because that was one of the most downloaded free programmes for teachers that they use online.

The other thing that we did was we sent boxes of Beanos to schools. And the teachers said that when you see children literally just laughing because they are reading something, it’s amazing.

Four in ten of our subscribers now come because the kid has asked for it. So, it’s not parents necessarily buying it for the kids. That’s been a massive, massive change for us.

The Beano doesn’t look like it did in 1938. We represent all children across the UK and our sales went up on the back of that. If you can see yourself in the Beano, of course, you’re going to ask for it.

Behind every community, we’ve got an insight engine that actually helps us understand what people want.

Beano Brain is the insight engine behind the Beano. It’s informed a lot of our decisions and we’ve seen our ability to be able to reach kids improve. In fact, it’s done so well that we flipped it to a B2B, so it is an agency that consults with the biggest brands in the world.

We’ve got Lego, Natwest, Mattel… and we’re consulting with them. Every year, Beano is now so cool that we publish a list of what’s cool according to kids. We get every single CMO on this list contacting us going, ‘How do I get my get my brand to be cool for kids?’.

Persuading readers to pay for online local news

We believe that local news happens on the local streets, and that’s where all our journalists are. So, we have them in the local regions and their job is to accurately and fairly represent the stories in the local regions. There is a business of local news and we’re very much in that. But ultimately, we’re looking at how we can strengthen and support the community.

The insight engine behind Local gives our data journalists some stories to play back to the community.

One of my favourite things that we do is we track the retail units on the high streets and how long they’ve been empty, because obviously when a high street looks like they do – desolate – it has a real impact on the psyche of that community.

We’re particularly focused on Union Street in Aberdeen at the moment. We’ve got a heat map and if something’s been empty for like three months, six months, a year, we get the local councillors together, business leaders and the community to come up with solutions around how we can use these units because otherwise they’re just sort of sitting there.

We have 30,000 digital subscribers now and growing, and most of those subscribers are what we call “mission-based subscribers” rather than transactional. When we test our messaging if you say “subscribe” or if you say “join”, “join” works. So, they want to support the work we’re doing.

Taking Stylist from free weekly to cross-platform community

Stylist launched as a free magazine 13 years ago, and it was half a million magazines a week handed out at travel points. We had no data and no exchange because it was literally just handed out, but what we did at the beginning was really set out our stall, that we have a specific purpose, which was to advocate for women in all areas of their lives.

It started with how women were represented in the pages, and we challenged our advertisers to represent women better across all media channels. Obviously, the pandemic came along and that was a little bit challenging for Stylist, but actually, because of the mission that we had set out to do, we have moved that advocacy promise across other platforms.

So, Stylist is a very participative brand. We run multiple events throughout the year where we’re connecting women with other women, like-minded women, either through careers or workshops or talks. And now we have people subscribing, we have people logging in to a free web platform, we have people signing up and we have people buying tickets.

If that purpose had just been fashion and beauty, you can get that anywhere. It was very much around what we were doing for this community, and by moving Stylist from the biggest free media title you could have, which actually served us very well, we were able to articulate that into a membership model, which is the next move for Stylist.

A very clever woman at the FT, Finola McDonnell [chief marketing officer] talked about community being the next phase of media; how at the FT, the comments section is as good as the editorial. It’s not a ‘nice to do’, it is absolutely fundamental, as many publications move to those recurring revenues and commitments from the audience.

The post How DC Thomson turned community + purpose into a winning publishing formula appeared first on Press Gazette.

Live blogs are working “better than ever” for publishers like The Guardian, BBC News and Sky News.

Nick Sutton, head of digital output at Sky News, told Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference that the broadcaster still sees “massive audience interest” for its live blogs, despite growing competition from other publishers and newer social media platforms like Tiktok.

Sky’s live blog about the air traffic control chaos on 28 August was fired up “very quickly”, beginning at 12:11 pm. It ended up being the “most-read article by some way on the website that day,” Sutton said.

“We find that the audience like being able to just dip in and see the updates they want.”

But breaking news is not their only use: Sky News is one of a number of publishers that continues to live blog updates from the Ukraine war every day.

Sutton said: “Even now, 18 months on, it’s often the most-read article on our website and drives a lot of search traffic as well.”

In August, he said, around 1.5 million clicks came from Google to the Ukraine blog – often through major search terms like “Ukraine news” and “Ukraine war”.

The Guardian has also live-blogged updates from Ukraine every day. The title’s head of digital (live) Claire Phipps told the conference: “We haven’t seen audiences dipping overall in terms of our live coverage. You do see peaks and troughs obviously with something like Ukraine… The extraordinary peaks of readership in those initial days of the invasion are not what we’re seeing right now. But then you get an event like Prigozhin marching on Moscow and those figures take off again.

“So, as with all sorts of news articles of whatever format, there’s a certain element of being a slave to the news cycle.”

But Phipps added the key question is “what works for the story – if the best way to tell a story is a live blog, then a live blog is the only thing that’s going to do that”.

BBC News executive news editor Nathalie Malinarich said the live blog format “works better than ever” for the corporation, as the audience has come to expect them immediately after an event breaks. “We’ve worked quite hard to get the newsroom to feel that way.”

They are continuing to see a “big growth in audiences coming to our live pages,” she said, including among younger audiences.

But live blogs are not just for news, Malinarich added, citing a recent blog sharing photos of the blue supermoon and events like Eurovision.

Similarly, The Guardian’s Phipps referenced the title’s successful Strictly Come Dancing and Bake Off blogs that coincide with the programmes airing on TV, resulting in an engaged community of users chatting in the comments.

Sky News frequently runs a cost-of-living blog, even on days without a specific news peg. Sutton said, instead, it can feature consumer news and money-saving advice – but the trickiest thing can be letting people know about it.

Each of the three panellists spoke about the developments in tech that have allowed their live blogs to stay fresh. For example, Sky News now allows users to toggle into a view that shows the oldest updates first, which can be useful for stories like court cases or awards ceremonies. The Guardian similarly has pinned posts and a carousel of key events.

Phipps said The Guardian first started live blogging sports 25 years ago (as “minute by minutes” in the late 1990s) before using them for news (from 2008 – with Andrew Sparrow later providing live updates on the 2010 election).

Phipps said: “I think that’s part of the reason why they haven’t lost their relevance – because they’ve diversified so much in terms of the things we can cover, but also the way we cover them.”

Meanwhile, BBC News sees ever-growing success with live streams as well as its live blog pages, with the live stream video also being frequently used on Tiktok.

Malinarich said that on the BBC News site, there has been 40% growth quarter-on-quarter in people watching live streams so far this year.

“We are seeing more and more of that behaviour, again, of people thinking something’s happened, [so] there will be a live stream, and so we work very closely with the news channel to make sure there is a dedicated live stream for events.”

For example, BBC News ran a live stream and live page during the rescue of eight people from a stranded cable car in Pakistan last month, using footage of the events alongside experts found by journalists at BBC Urdu. Malinarich said this live stream was one of the BBC’s best-performing in August.

Eirik Næsje, chief executive of panel sponsor Norkon, told the audience that live blogs are also useful for reaching new audiences from the young Gen Z age bracket, citing their preference for shorter bitesize pieces of information.

He said that although live coverage has been prominent for about a decade, “it’s constantly evolving and what we see now is it constantly picking up the patterns of social media and so on and reaching out to talk with new audiences especially for traditional media”.

Live blogs draw on personalities and expertise

All three publishers are finding continued success with live pages. But how do they differentiate themselves?

Malinarich said all of them are “excellent at live blogs” and offer “slightly different things”. She went on to suggest that users may use BBC News to benefit from the knowledge and newsgathering of its bureaux around the world but may go to The Guardian’s daily Politics Live Blog for Andrew Sparrow or elsewhere for other particular personalities.

Sky News’ Sutton said: “That’s something that live blogs have enabled us to do – to break away from a sort of traditionally written news lead, which is what a large amount of our content is, and let the bloggers – whether it’s in politics, Ukraine, cost of living, whatever – to be able to just show a bit more personality and also try and be honest with the audiences about how much we know and we don’t know.”

The Guardian’s Phipps added: “I think the key thing is just to have a clear sense of why you are doing a live blog, and what the purpose of that live blog is and that’s how you’re distinctive, because you know why you’re doing it. You know you’re not reacting to [what other publishers are doing].

“Having a really strong sense of purpose about why you start a live blog, what that live blog is, how that live blog speaks to an audience. And then I think we’ve each got quite distinctive brands without setting out to be different to each other.”

Back in 2020, Press Gazette highlighted some top examples of publishers live blogging the Covid-19 pandemic, including BBC News, The Guardian, the Financial Times, The Independent, The Sun and The Telegraph.

[Read more: Q&A with Norkon: Live-blogging will move to freemium model]

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