Automating advertising workflows can help news/magazine publishers save both time and money – maximising profitability and efficiency in a challenging media landscape – but many are still stuck in a culture of doing things manually.

In the face of declining readerships and a squeeze on ad revenues, publishers big and small often face a stark choice: cut costs or stop publishing altogether. Automating tasks is one way for publishers to make savings, while continuing to publish.

Mike Hoy, managing director and co-owner of Papermule, which offers automated workflow solutions for publishers, describes it as “intelligent plumbing”. But Hoy says office cultures relying on emails, phone calls, and even post-it notes, still persist in news publishing.

Papermule, founded in 2003, works with the likes of Telegraph Media Group, Bauer Media, and journal publishers Springer Nature. Its AdDesk solution streamlines ad workflows by automatically matching upstream actions (sales) with downstream results (content). The software sits behind any sales platform and aims to cut out manual human tasks.

“We can’t do without people, but we can take 1,000 little jobs away from somebody,” says Hoy, who likens it to the change in supermarkets from manned tills to self-checkouts.

He answered Press Gazette’s questions about the benefit of workflow automation to news/magazine publishers, how to make a profit with self-serve ads, the major challenges facing the news industry and the future of print.

What is the biggest challenge facing publishers today?

“Declining readership and the squeeze on ad revenues. And the inability to monetise the digital equivalents – what people have sold in print for lots of money, they’re not selling online for the same sort of revenues. That’s a challenge.”

“We believe print has a long-term place in the world, but it’s not going to survive as it is today – and I think a lot of publishers are coming to the same conclusion. Print products will be a premium product, and so will have a very interesting demographic to advertise to. The question is: how do we ensure that it remains profitable? For us that means streamlining processes, automation, cutting costs, reducing errors, and making it a very repeatable, cost-efficient process to still do.”

“That’s where our AdDesk solution comes in. We want to make sure that as few fingerprints are left on things as possible. Our view is, if you’ve had to take a PDF out of an email and put it on a file server and name it then you’re doing it wrong. Because although that exercise seems fairly innocuous it’s, one, been done by a human, who is fallible, and, two, taken 30 seconds to a minute to do, which it didn’t need to – it should have just happened.”

What is Papermule’s offer to publishers?

“Intelligent plumbing. Trying to get people out of the way, trying to get email boxes out of the way. Anywhere where there is a human involved in trying to move content around, or put it in a folder, or name it correctly, is fraught with errors. And it’s time consuming and not a particularly fulfilling job. People are better used with more skilled and creative things. We can’t do without people, but we can take 1,000 little jobs away from somebody.”

“As opposed to boosting ad revenue, if you like, we’re trying to reduce the production costs. If you sell a piece of advertising for £500 and spend £600 producing it, you really shouldn’t have done it. So if you can ensure that your production costs are well below your sale cost, then at least you’re running in a profitable way.”

What does advertising workflow automation look like?

“It’s the ability for somebody to change something in one platform and have that information reflected downstream. The simplest example is if sales kill an ad for some reason, whether it’s digital or print. How do you stop that content being published? How do you tell all the downstream platforms, as soon as you possibly can, that that content is now not to go? You can’t be relying on people to spot it, find the right reference number, go to Google, look at the previews to find the one it’s related to, and so on.”

“Automation means that when files arrive at the downstream platform, they are named correctly and consistently every time. Nobody types it wrong. Everybody knows whether the content is in or not. Everybody can see a preview of it. It’s all in one place. So it’s not a single magic bullet to solve a problem, but it’s going to polish everything.”

What makes Papermule different from other solution?

“I think there’s quite a lot of products out there that are sold as a workflow solution – think about pre-flight engine PDF – but our view is that it’s a workflow enabled unit. It’s one of many little blocks that makes up your overall workflow. It does one chunk of it. It has an input and an output. What we need to do is plumb maybe half a dozen or a dozen of these together so that overall you have one solution that is entirely automated.”

“We often end up drawing diagrams on whiteboards in the workshops we do with customers – system X goes to system Y, and then we draw stick men, because from system Y to system Z somebody has to get involved and there’s a human process. Why is it there? What is a human doing that we can’t do automatically? Why has somebody had to send an email, why didn’t that email get sent automatically?”

“One of the phrases we quite often talk about is event-driven workflows. By simply doing something, something else should happen. It’s those events that trigger all the other actions downstream that need to be appropriately applied at that point in time. Within moments, it should all be on the same page.”

What is the biggest workflow problem publishers face?

“It’s manual tasks – and it’s often the most insignificant manual tasks.”

“We have a module of AdDesk that integrates with Google Ad Manager. Probably the biggest user of that we’ve got is Springer Nature… one of the biggest journal publishers in the world.”

“We look after all of their digital integration to Google. So once something’s booked on their sales platform, it’s how that order and line item is created in Google and how the content is collected and submitted to Google. Bluntly it’s about removing clicks.”

“We did a flow diagram and worked out it was something like 56 clicks through Google to supply the content, which is bonkers. We got it down to eight or nine clicks.”

What’s the biggest barrier to change you see within publishing?

“We did a project once where the sales team used to write on post-it notes and put them on somebody’s desk. It was a cultural thing. A people thing. That’s quite often the hardest thing when you do these projects – it’s not the technology, it’s changing people’s perception and trying to persuade them that they’re not doing it the right way anymore. It might have been good 20 years ago, but maybe you shouldn’t still be doing it that way.”

“Some ten years ago now we put a platform into the Irish News. The IT director just really wasn’t for the project and didn’t really get it, but about six months after we went live, we sat down and he said ‘I get it’. He said: ‘You’re not doing one big thing to improve things, you’re doing 1,000 little things. You’re saving five seconds here and there, all over the place for a dozen people.”

How can publishers profit from self-serve advertising?

“Our media sits behind the sales platform, so doesn’t actually sell the advertising space, but it allows people to submit either finished advertising content or components for makeup. So you can build up a Facebook carousel ad, for example, by uploading the content. It allows you to crop and scale your images on submission, provide your headlines, your banners, your links.”

“What it means from a publisher’s perspective is that they get a package that clearly defines what it is that the advertiser wants to put in, as opposed to an email that’s a bit loose and woolly with some attachments that might or might not be what the customer wants to use. So it’s the ability to drive a templated request form, for want of a better description.

“It’s not about bringing classified revenue back, it’s about clinging on to what’s there and making sure it’s as streamlined and as profitable as it can be.”

What publishers are using self-serve advertising?

“The Telegraph make a seven-digit number out of [reader] announcements every year. They’re not cheap, and there’s a certain clientele that advertise or like to put their announcements in the Telegraph. It’s revenue they don’t want to lose, but we needed to streamline for them.

“They had a platform in place, but the problem with lots of these platforms is they don’t get maintained, and then suddenly you’re falling foul of GDPR or security issues. We replaced it with our own platform nearly three years ago. Instead of having two or three people taking telephone orders and typing it in, [the client] books and pays for it online themselves.

“The Telegraph has a very high editorial standard for their announcements. They’ve got a team of three behind this that check and sub them, but as soon as they’re subbed they’re on the page and printed – there’s very little manual input other than that.

“At Bauer Media we run our AdPortal, which takes a mixture of finished ad content and digital media content to build a variety of print, web and social ads. (AdPortal is an aspect of AdDesk specifically for ad submission).”

“Where before they were taking content via email, often in dribs and drabs with back-and-forth messages to sort it all out now they receive it through a streamlined submission process, quietly pushing responsibilities back on the advertiser – simple things like having them crop images on submission removes later arguments about choices and a task the publisher would have had to previously make. All Bauer’s got to do is proofread it and check it’s legal, decent and honest, then publish it.”

Visit Papermule to inquire about their workflow automation solutions.

The post How publishers can escape email boxes and embrace automation appeared first on Press Gazette.

Journalists and newsrooms are being called on to submit proposals for AI tools that could be used to tackle critical issues facing news publishing, including making news pay.

Publishing technology experts Atex have laid down a challenge to the news industry with the launch of its AI Accelerator Program, which it hopes will be a “starting point” for changing the way journalism and artificial intelligence interact with each other.

AI can be viewed with suspicion by journalists over fears that it will replace human workers and lead to widespread job losses, as well as a decline in the quality of news content.

Atex has said it wants to hear ideas for “the strategic and conscious use” of AI to solve problems for the industry, with proposals that “support and improve” all areas of news publishing – from gathering and production to distribution and monetisation.

An Atex spokesperson said: “The advent of Generative AI has profoundly transformed various industries, including content production and media. For instance, AI can now help analysing large amounts of data much faster or assist journalists in rewriting the same content in different formats, e.g. from newsletters to social networks.

“However, it’s not always easy to understand how to best use these tools, and not all newsrooms have the time and resources to do so. The goal of the Atex AI Challenge is to offer this opportunity by leveraging our expertise in the technology and media sector.

“In a long-term vision, the Atex AI Challenge aims to be the starting point for a structural change at the intersection of journalism and the advent of Artificial Intelligence.”

The call comes as the Evening Standard published its first weekly edition which had an AI-generated cover image of Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The title also used AI to write a review of an art exhibition in the style of its former art critic, who died in 2015.

Journalists, newsrooms and publishers are eligible to apply to the AI challenge, along with journalism students and associations and organisations that are active in the media industry.

Atex and a team of media experts will choose the best ideas for development. Those chosen will receive support for their projects, as well as resources to build pilots to test their idea.

Only one proposal per candidate can be submitted. Submissions should be made in English to challenge@atex.com by 20 October 2024.

The post AI challenge asks journalists to pitch for help to solve industry challenges appeared first on Press Gazette.

Denmark’s biggest-selling national newspaper, Politiken, has boosted engagement and page views with the creation of what it calls “super articles”.

These online features use all the features of its CUE content management system to create articles which incorporate images, video, graphics, animations, pictures and video.

Over the last two years, Politiken’s digital storytelling group has published about 100 super articles. On average a super article records triple the amount of page impressions – about 12,000 compared to about 3,800 for all other articles published by the newsbrand.

Engagement metrics are also through the roof, as is the likelihood for readers for readers to be persuaded to take out a subscription in order to read the pieces.

Politiken has been in publication since 1884. Alongside a daily broadsheet it publishes rolling news at politiken.dk, which sits behind a paywall. The title has long put visual storytelling at the heart of its output and in 2017 established a six-strong specialist digital storytelling team to drive innovation.

The team was inspired by the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning feature article Snowfall, published in 2012, which was widely seen as a watershed moment for digital journalism with its multimedia approach to storytelling, incorporating images, video and graphics with chapters of text.

“We decided that we wanted to do more of it and we wanted to make it possible for many more people to do it in the newsroom,” says Politiken digital director Troels Jorgensen.

The digital storytelling team is led by editor Johannes Andersen, who describes it as a “nexus for cooperation between the visual departments and the journalists at the newspaper”.

Digital beauty: Storytelling is key

But what is “digital beauty” and how does the team at Politiken achieve it?

“A lot of people talk about digital beauty being just the result of some technical functions,” says Andersen. “I think it’s very important to state that you can’t really make digital beauty without having the whole workflow made for it.

“Basically you can’t just sprinkle some nice crisp digital artwork on top of an ordinary news article. If you do that you will not create digital beauty, you’ll just create visual beauty combined with text – and that’s not full digital beauty.”

He adds: “Storytelling is key – that is indeed true – but the workflow should adapt to it. You should always have your workflow designed according to the actual storytelling you want to do because you cannot sprinkle digital beauty on top of something, that doesn’t work.”

Andersen says at Politiken “everything starts with the idea”. “From the idea we try to involve all sorts of different people in the newspaper – it could be the infographic department, staff photographers, the journalists, editors and so on. So we co-create the stories.”

Politiken calls these stories that strive for digital beauty and maximum reader engagement “super articles”. They are built from a workflow and template that Politiken created itself in CUE, a headless CMS platform from StiboDX. Adding so-called “super elements” to an article in the CMS transforms it into a super article, adding white space at the top and bottom, background media that sits behind the text, interactive video that moves as the reader scrolls, and other multimedia elements.

This super-articles template has allowed Politiken to quickly put out digital stories that “unleash the beauty” of its digital journalism and has opened up new creative possibilities, says Andersen.

“Before we launched the super article back in 2017, video was something that was in a frame on the website, just like you will see on YouTube or on television. Now video is just another form of illustration,” that he says can be used to build a narrative or to set the visual mood of the story.

An even better canvas for photography digitally

Graphic design, data and infographics can become interactive, reacting as readers scroll. “Instead of having a graphic and a text again, we try to integrate it”, says Andersen. “Suddenly the graphic design actually plays a role in the story, it’s not just the frame to place it in anymore.”

And this new approach to digital journalism, one which strives for beauty, has actually changed the language around photography in the newsroom.

“We always valued photography,” says Andersen. “Politiken is a broadsheet newspaper; it’s this large canvas and it’s almost poster size when you take the whole newspaper. But what we tried to do is create an even better canvas for photography digitally.

“And this not only influenced the way we see photography as an integrated part of our stories… we actually managed to influence the whole language of how we do bigger stories digitally, by writing directly to and on the images.”

This change in perspective began within the digital storytelling team at Politiken, but is now widely used across the newspaper. “A good template for digital storytelling can unleash the creativity of the whole organisation by creating a good example from the expert group,” says Andersen.

But it’s not simply a matter of digital beauty for beauty’s sake. Jorgensen, digital director at Politiken, is clear: “We wouldn’t do this if it didn’t matter to the business.”

Driving engagement, loyalty and subsriptions

Politiken’s own in-house engagement metric, which is visible to every journalist and is based on a number of different KPIs fed into an algorithm, scores articles out of six.

“We see a super article engagement score, on average, of 5.4 compared to 2.8 on all of our other productions,” says Jorgensen. “The sales are better too,” he adds. Politiken sits behind a strict paywall, with readers prompted to pay for individual articles through a digital wallet or sign-up to a subscription package.

“On average, [super articles] perform a lot better on sales from people coming to the page, seeing the stop sign and converting into a customer,” says Jorgensen. “Some of them are really, really good at creating single article sales, but on average [they do] a lot better than the [standard] article.”

In fact he says that publishing just one super article during the weekend “could save the whole weekend digital sales on politiken.dk. So why then produce 70 other stories? What is worth more?”

And it’s not just acquisitions, super articles are making an impact on retention too.

“We have a loyalty score, and it’s also a one to six score. And if we look at the data on our subscribers and assign a score to them as to how loyal they are, we see that subscribers who’ve read at least one of these super articles during the last 30 days have a much higher loyalty [score] compared to the average of all of our subscribers,” says Jorgensen.

“So I’d say in total, we’re really happy with the effect of doing this, not just from a data perspective and business perspective, but mostly because it drives innovation in the newsroom. The fact that Johannes’ group is able to inspire and show off stuff that is possible within CUE CMS, or within digital storytelling… makes people want to try it out.”

Click here to find out more about CUE by StiboDX, the CMS powering digital beauty at Politiken.

The post How ‘super articles’ boosted online engagement and subscriptions for Politiken appeared first on Press Gazette.

Partner content*: Publishers should take a holistic approach to monetising content and look at the lifetime value of a customer if they want to understand how to make publishing news online pay.

Business consultancy Mather Economics – which counts Le Monde, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal among its many clients – said publishers should align the three biggest parts of their organisation (the newsroom, technology and consumer marketing)  in setting out their monetisation strategy.

“Execution is about how well those three groups can work together,” said Arvid Tchivzhel, managing director of digital consulting at Mather.

The company formed in 2002 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Dutch media group Mediahuis took a 35% stake in Mather in November 2019, expanding its services outside the US for the first time, including an office in Amsterdam. It is now looking to take on UK clients.

For many UK publishers, the pandemic accelerated a move towards reader revenues, reacting to a declining advertising market, as events dried up and companies faced financial difficulties, and readers actively seeking out trusted information on Covid-19, lockdowns and vaccines.

Tchivzhel said the answer to the question of how to monetise content is usually to put up a paywall, but, speaking at a webinar hosted by Mather in April, he said it’s really about “how do you match the content you’re producing with the value readers will find from it… how do you holistically, as a company, come together and hit your goals on monetising your content?”

For Mather, the “North Star” is customer lifetime value, which it assesses at the customer level.

Tchivzhel said lifetime value is the “combination of the entire customer funnel”, from attracting readers through SEO and social media at the top, down to converting readers into subscribers at the bottom, and engagement (personalisation, newsletters, data walls etc.) in the middle.

In its white paper on premium content models, Mather said it tracks the “path to conversion” (how many times an article was read by a visitor in the 30 days prior to starting their subscription) and “core score” (an index measuring readers in the publisher’s core audience) metrics to assess the value created by an article, both in terms of acquisition and retention of subscribers.

“You have all this data on that one article and if you were to summarise that into one magic score, it’s really a ‘lifetime value’ score,” said Tchivzhel.

He said using a lifetime value metric helps align a publisher’s best interests in the long term, rather than “this frantic going back and forth” between acquisition and retention.

Mather serves more than 200 clients across over 600 markets, with more than 50 employees worldwide made up mostly of economists and data scientists.

Tchivzhel said the company helps client publishers optimise their “article mix” by looking at the purpose of an article, be that driving revenue or simple journalistic value, rather than simply thinking “we have to publish this crime story that’s just a paragraph long”.

He pointed to the “five user needs”, as set out by former BBC World Service digital editor Dmitry Shishkin, as a guide to publishers on optimising content. Ensuring an article either updates, educates, inspires, keeps someone on trend, gives them perspective or diverts them.

“It’s not just the content or taxonomy of the article, but it’s also what is it actually doing. What user need are you fulfilling?” said Tchivzhel.

Publishers should also consider supply and demand. Tchivzhel said: “Sometimes we see this problem where [a website] might publish 200 articles on sports, but half don’t even get read because there’s so much content being produced that there’s not enough space on the homepage…

“So in some cases you want to reduce the supply of that content, or be a bit more diligent about when you publish, how frequently and which channel you’re pushing it to.”

When it comes to pricing, Tchivzhel said “the days of one price working for everybody” are “long gone”, adding: “Every other industry, to some extent, has dynamic pricing.” Customers are used to paying different amounts for a can of Coke from a vending machine or a restaurant, he said, and similarly access to news can be strategically priced according to who’s buying.

“We know that some customers are going to be more highly sensitive to price. For those folks, you can extend the discount and focus on achieving a certain level of engagement first,” Tchivzhel said.

“If you get a subscriber on a three-month trial at a discount, but that customer still hasn’t really engaged the way you want them to, they haven’t logged in too much, well extend that trial, maybe three more months, and really focus on personalising the homepage for them or curating a custom newsletter for that user based on what their interests are, what they what they read initially.

“There are ways you can use data in pricing to figure out what’s the right price or even the timing of that price change. If you were to price that customer who is disengaged too soon, you’re probably going to lose them, but if you engage them then you can price them more aggressively.”

*This article was sponsored by Press Gazette commercial partner Mather Economics

Premium content models, customer lifetime value add necessary layer to monetization strategies

Download this data-led report from Mather Economics to understand how premium content attracts subscribers with different lifetime values.

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Partner content*: News publishers are losing out on “easy” revenues by failing to enhance their digital advertising offer for existing small and medium-sized business (SMB) print advertisers, says a company offering a “hassle-free” adtech solution for publishers.

Smartico’s Smartads service takes any print ad sold to a small or medium-sized business and turns it into a “mobile-first, swipe-able, high quality ad with the landing page that goes with it”.

The service offers publishers a way to help mitigate the ongoing decline in print advertising that has followed declining newspaper sales amid the disruption caused by digital, a situation only exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic as lockdowns hit circulation figures.

“What we’re doing is giving the publisher a tool whereby they can add revenue at no cost to them whatsoever,” says Smartico’s UK lead Justin Lello. The service works on a revenue sharing model – about 30% of new digital ad sales – or publishers can opt for a fixed fee.

[Read more: How news publishers can instantly grow their direct-sales display ad business]

Smartico’s own creative team builds the digital ads from existing print versions, adding content from relevant sources, and landing pages, as well as training up a newsbrand’s in-house sales team.

It’s a solution that has already been taken up by local publishers in German-speaking Europe, where Smartico trades as Transmatico since its creation in 2013 chief executive Christian Scherbel.

How to unlock £100k of local display revenue

Promoted whitepaper from Smartico details how publishers turned print advertising into online display revenue using smart automation.

Client Schwäbisch Media has seen revenues of €300,000 with a circulation of 200,000 using Smartads.

Swiss regional publisher Somedia has said the solution will grow ad revenues by £100,000 in 2022. It is already selling 100 Smartads per month and plans to expand them across the group.

Publishers typically auto-bundle the digital offering alongside print, but others choose to upsell.

Smartico is now looking to bring is Smartads solution to publishers in the UK.

“The print ad decline is happening, but we can provide a solution to slow it down, to give newspaper publishers more revenue from some of their really important customers,” says Lello.

“It’s about how do we maximise the relationship that we have with the small medium businesses – the hairdressers, the restaurant owner, the plumber. How do we take that existing relationship and turn it into revenue? That’s the problem we’re helping to solve.”

Creating incremental value by turning print advertisers into digital ones

Lello says finding a new customer is harder than upselling or retaining an existing one. He says Smartico is helping publishers target the “huge long-tail of existing advertising customers” already buying print ads. “We’re providing a product that helps solve the problem of converting a print advertiser into a digital advertiser to create that incremental revenue.”

[Read more: Smartico – Print to digital advertising automation technology]

While it might be worthwhile for publishers to spend time and resource creating digital advertising for their largest clients, the SMBs, many of them loyal print advertiser, are often left behind because it is seen as too expensive and too difficult to enhance their offer.

“We’ve come along with an efficient process that does make it worthwhile doing because it’s zero effort [for the publisher],” says Lello. “We look after everything with full service.

“We train up the salespeople and put a lot of effort into making sure that they have the right tools and use the right language to sell the campaigns. Once they’re trained up and once they realise how easy it is to either auto-bundle the ads or sell them as an add on to the print ad, then it starts working for them and they start seeing revenues.”

Through its experience working with clients, Smartico has found that it only takes about a month of selling for the sales team to be fully on board. “We’ve got a huge amount of experience of working with local newspapers across Europe, where we see time and time again that the sales teams embrace this product,” adds Lello. “It’s a solution that makes their offering look better.”

Publisher adtech to rival Google and Facebook

Much of the ad market decline in news publishing has been the longer-term result of Facebook and Google swallowing the lion’s share of digital ad spend and new money. But Lello says that Smartico’s Smartads solution offers something neither tech giant does.

“To advertise on Facebook or Google, effectively they’re self-service platforms so you have to have a degree of knowledge and understanding of that type of marketing to be able to utilise their tools… whereas we do everything for you. All you have to do is tick the box or say ‘yes’.

“We create the ad. We create the landing page where we put call to actions for the potential client for that advertiser. We take away the complexity that there is in booking self-service campaigns. We provide the full bundle.”

He adds that in building the landing page for the ad campaign, Smartico is “able to understand what people are doing when they click on the ads, which is something Google and Facebook can’t do”.

“What we’re trying to do is change the dialogue here and move away from banners, clicks and click-through rates to attention. So how much attention have people paid to your ad?

“And because we own the value chain, from the ad itself through to the landing page, we’re able to report that back to the advertiser in a way that they can understand and they can see the success.

“We can actually say: ‘Look, these are the actions people took when they saw or clicks on your ad.’ So it gives them a much better and efficient way of analysing their ad spend.

“That’s a really key differential between us and Google and Facebook. That sets us aside.”

Future-proofing publishers for the cookie-less web

Building stronger relationships between trusted brands and loyal advertisers is something that looks all the more enticing for publishers as we head towards the Cookie-less web.

Third-party cookies are set to be phased out altogether when Google stops using them in 2023. Other browsers have already taken action. The result will be an internet that puts privacy first for users and one that will reward first-party relationships – those direct between brand and customer.

Lello, who has worked in media sales since the 1990s, says it is “fantastic for publishers that the cookie is dying” as focus will return to content from trusted brands.

“Rather than targeting an audience where you don’t know where your ad is going to appear, as you do in programmatic advertising with Google, for example, suddenly being able to target the context of your product becomes so much more important.

“With local advertisers, what they’re interested in is reaching their local communities, people in small areas, they’re not so interested in reaching people outside of that area. So, contextual targeting and trust becomes key again and, of course, local newspapers can offer that in abundance.”

He adds of the death of cookies: “I think it’s a great opportunity for them to maximise their revenues. And what we do is we take this long tail of small medium businesses and say ‘maximise your revenues with them, we’ll give you the tools with which to do that’.”

*This article was sponsored by Smartico.

Exclusive offer for Press Gazette Readers: Reach out to Smartico to get a 30-minute video call with CEO Christian to see matching business cases out of 200 media companies that could make you more regional advertising revenues instantly. And receive a free demo/transformation of an advertorial/magazine or print ad into a Smartico campaign at the end.

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Subscriptions have become a “business-critical revenue stream” for publishers looking to make digital pay during the pandemic and many are wishing they’d introduced paywall strategies sooner – according to one of the world’s leading subscription platforms.

 Publishers who were taking their time in moving to a digital-first strategy pre-pandemic are now “reconsidering” according to Nina Juss, co-founder of Evolok. 

Founded in 2010, Juss says the company has seen an uptick in new clients during the pandemic. 

Adding further impetus for publishers to develop a fully-fledged subscription strategy is the incoming cookie-less web. Google has said it will phase out third-party publisher cookies on Chrome by the end of 2023 placing a huge question-mark over the ability of publishers to monetise their sites via advertising.

Promoted whitepaper: The Paywall Revolution Goes Global

What are the latest global website subscription trends publishers need to know?

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Includes latest insights into one-off payments, mobile payment gateways, e-paper benefits and pandemic-fuelled changes.

Subscription journey for publishers

A publisher’s subscription journey typically begins with registering readers, known as a datawall, then moving to paid subscriptions and finding a paywall model that fits, be it metered (x articles free per month), freemium (charging only for premium content) or hard (no free content). 

Only a small percentage of the overall reader base is likely to be converted to subscriptions, but this can nonetheless add up to a significant revenue source for publishers. 

In the UK news industry there are examples of different models at play, with the Financial Times  and The Times websites taking the hard paywall approach, while The Telegraph and The New Statesman run a metered service and The Independent has chosen to go freemium.

Specialist publications that serve an industry or niche interest typically have hard paywalls.

In the Middle East and Asia, which was very much print-led before the Covid-19 pandemic, generous metered paywalls have been the model of choice. 

Machine learning drives dynamic publisher paywall technology

In the UK, Europe and US, the growing trend has been towards a “dynamic paywall” which makes use of new technologies, such as machine learning, to automatically fit the offer to the reader based on data about them. 

“A lot of our clients have already tried and tested paywall models. They’ve been down the road of just doing a pure hard paywall and now they’re moving into a dynamic model,” says Juss. 

Dynamic paywalls use an industry-standard “propensity to convert” score which, once reached, means a reader is likely to subscribe. Only then will they be prompted to pay. “Machine learning now plays a key role in optimising the experience and driving new subscriptions.” says Juss. “Publishers in Western markets are using AI to automate the whole subscription process.”

Data is key to making this work effectively, both in capturing subscribers and retaining them. The more is known about the reader, the more effectively they can be segmented and targeted to pay for content at the right time and at the right price point. 

Juss says data is critical to determining the “success, or not, of a publisher’s digital strategy”. “It drives activity for the publisher, helping them to get to know their readers and how to look after and retain them.”  

“Data helps to build loyalty, to build engagement, to build your subscribers, your growth and, ultimately, your revenue as well.” 

Publisher paywall strategies

Evolok has worked with a number of major media brands, including The New Yorker and Press Gazette sister title The New Statesman, and has seen many clients make a success of paywalls.

One example she highlights is a client in South America who made a decision to trial a paywall expecting to see a small return. They gave themselves a modest target in terms of subscription numbers in the first year.  In the end they “smashed” their target in the first quarter and then proceeded to increase the subscription price as a result.

Publisher paywall strategies: ‘Don’t offer too many subscription products’ 

A classic mistake publishers are prone to making, says Juss, is offering too many subscription products, creating a confusing mix of offers and putting potential customers off as a result. Evolok recommends a maximum of three or four subscription products for readers. 

“Keep your offering as simple as you can,” advises Juss. “You can always have a VIP membership for someone who wants to pay more for the bells and whistles. But, for your general user, give them two or three options – for example: print, online and mobile-app products. Any more than this and it starts to feel overly complex for a potential customer.” 

Optimising paywalls by removing barriers 

One of the subscription trends expected in 2022 is publishers refining paywall features to optimise success rates. Ease of payment is vital – “you will lose customers if there is friction in the payment process”, says Juss.

Publishers should be integrating with payment providers  and “making sure the journey to pay is seamless”, she says, adding: “The whole transaction should be as simple and straightforward as possible.”  

The same goes for reader logins. “We’re in a generation where attention spans are short, so logging in needs to be very easy,” says Juss. “Let’s be honest, everybody forgets passwords, so publishers need to be offering a one-time, single login facility that doesn’t require a password – whether that’s through mobile/SMS, social accounts or a QR code.”

As a full-service platform, Evolok not only provides the technology, but the “consultancy, strategic vision and knowledge to enable publishers to use these features in the right way and make a success of subscriptions.”

There is often a debate at publishers, according to Juss, on whether they should build a paywall themselves or work with a partner. “We can understand why some publishers would want to take a more independent approach,” says Juss. “But the benefits of working with an experienced partner far outweigh the challenges of building something from scratch. Will your subscription system be sustainable in five years time? Will it be able to continuously optimise the experience through AI and data analytics? These capabilities are crucial for long-term success.”

These are areas that Evolok has been developing for years, Juss says. “Our roadmap is about the future –  what’s happening in five years from now and how the technology will evolve and improve. We live and breathe subscription innovation and we can share that knowledge with our clients.”

Read more: How Kenya’s The Nation reaches 21,000 daily paywall subscribers

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Partner Content*: ‘Digital first’ has been a buzzword for years in news publishing, but as the pandemic has accelerated print decline, making the shift from print to digital has become a necessity for most publishers.

While print news has a relatively simple business model: sell or distribute as many copies as possible each day/week and get the best price for adverts in the paper, digital brings new challenges.

Set out digital content and revenue strategy first

To help make a success of digital, publishers should set out their content strategy first and then look at how to monetise that strategy, says Gabe Karp – managing director EMEA of digital consultants 10up. His company has helped the likes of Politico, PA Media, TechCrunch, Global News and even the White House’s official website.

He says publishers are often going wrong in the digital space by not taking these first crucial steps, establishing their “true strategy”.

Rather than editorial and commercial teams working in siloes with someone “in the middle trying to figure out how to bring those two together”, Karp proposes that publishers say: ‘Here is our content and it is our core product.’”

What follows next is how to monetise that content “and turn it into a proper digital product”, he says. “That requires you to set clear goals and KPIs from a business standpoint,” including revenue targets, audience targets and cost of ownership targets.

Karp says 10up will approach a project, such as redesigning a news website, with a series of workshops. “That first workshop, before we make any other decisions, has to be making sure that the entire leadership team is on the same page for what their goals and objectives are.

“Once you have that, then you can use it as a framework for decision making, both for a redesign project but also beyond that. And it should grow and evolve as you evolve as a publisher, but it needs to start from that and grow as a set of decision-making tools.”

In the ever-advancing world of tech platforms, Karp says publishers should be wary of having their eye caught by flashy new tech being pushed by salespeople promising easy fixes – “if you install just this one script, you’re going to get ‘x’ more dollars”.

He says publishers should proactively approach technology and vendor solutions once they’re clear on their content, revenue and audience strategies. “It always comes back to eyeballs and money,” he says.

Monetisation – ads and paywalls

When it comes to monetisation,  Karp says publishers should make sure they are getting value from their advertising whether pursuing a subscription model or not. “The idea that you don’t need to focus on that is just a myth,” he says.

“You look at the New York Times or the FT, who are some of the best when it comes to subscriptions, and they’re still doing advertising. They’re still doing sponsored content and all of these things that are part of a healthy revenue mix.”

He adds: “When I say focus on your advertising, it’s not just throw everything in there to make as much money as possible. It’s understand what are the right advertising platforms to be leveraging based on things like performance, based on your audience, based on your content, to make the most money out of the eyeballs that are there and to optimise getting more eyeballs.

“I think from there, outside of getting the basics right, it’s about experimentation and testing what works and what doesn’t.”

Karp says getting “core web vitals and SEO in a place where you can drive the type of traffic that you want to drive” is part of the monetisation strategy – “because if you don’t have the right eyeballs there, that becomes a huge challenge. We see a lot of publishers really struggling to focus on that.”

When it comes to paywalls, Karp says there is no one size fits all solution and that testing with an audience is key, but it is important to ensure a smooth conversion roadmap for the user when it comes to paid subscriptions. “If you’ve got the metering right, but then it takes five steps to make a [subscription] payment and you’ve lost somebody on step two, then it hasn’t done much good.”

He says it is important to monetise the people who are coming to your website, “whether they subscribe or not”, by giving them opportunities to share data, such as an email address, enabling publishers to build their data profile and ultimately be more effective in selling to them.

Future of web publishing

Currently the digital space is fragmented, with online platforms such as WordPress and Drupal in one corner and custom-built content management systems in the other.

Karp says that the future of web publishing “doesn’t look that different from where we’re at now”, with smaller publishers sticking with customisable platform solutions such as WordPress.

He says of culture website Den of Geek, with whom 10up has been working, “for them to move to something that is more complex would be out of line from their business objectives because we have been able to build a fit-for-purpose platform with today’s technology and we will keep evolving and growing that.”

At larger publishers, content management systems are often “headless” – a detached back-end – or “decoupled” – where the front end and back-end are distinct.

Here Karp says the focus is often on data points – “what data do I need to collect from the front end? Where am I sending that so that I can make the right decisions as a publisher? What data do I need to send to the front end to influence what people are seeing?”

When it comes to tailoring a website experience to particular readers, Karp says: “It will never make sense to invest in personalisation because they don’t have enough content, because the audience isn’t diverse enough, then you’ve got other publishers where it really becomes a powerful thing”.

Karp says the future of monetisation is where there are “the most unknowns”.

“Everyone is struggling to figure out what the right business model is. I think right now, if you’re not experimenting with three, four or five different revenue streams as a publisher, you’re behind the curve and you really should be looking at what works for what audience and in what type of content.

“So subscriptions, data walls, paywalls, affiliate, ecommerce – all of these things that I think publishers are aware of, and trying in some instances, I think you’ve got to have that diverse mix of revenue to make this work. And I think we’re going to see new revenue models come up over time.”

*This article was produced in association with Press Gazette commercial partner 10up whose slogan is: “We make the web better by finely crafting websites & tools for content creators.”

Image by Shutterstock

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City AM has suspended its print edition from today and will cut staff pay by half in April in drastic measures to cope with the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.

The financial freesheet is reliant on commuters picking up its 85,500 daily copies at train stations and key locations around London – and advertisers paying to reach its readers.

But with so many people now working from home and the UK Government advising against all non-essential contact and travel, stations and streets in the capital have been deserted.

The temporary print suspension will last “until our readers start returning to the capital”, the title said.

Current measures being undertaken to slow the spread of the virus could last another 12 weeks, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said.

According to an email to staff from City AM chief executive Jens Torpe, most advertisers in London are cancelling bookings, meaning the paper has “no income to pay for our costs”.

Torpe said in a statement: “We have served London’s business community with a daily paper for fifteen years, pausing our print-run only on public holidays.

“Now, with so few people commuting into the capital and with advertisers understandably withholding their campaigns, it seems we must hit pause again.

“The coming weeks will not be easy, for anyone, but the board of City AM is clear that the print product will return, and that in the meantime our digital operation will continue uninterrupted, responding to unprecedented online traffic.

“We will continue to produce our newspaper and host it on cityam.com and we will resume the print operation as soon as it becomes viable to do so.”

City AM will continue to produce a “full” e-edition of the daily paper and host it on its website alongside rolling news coverage.

There will be no redundancies as a result of the changes, but Torpe said the group would implement a “range of measures to reduce our costs while we plot a course through the crisis”.

Management will also be affected by the 50 per cent salary cut in April.

Torpe told staff: “We are extremely sorry having to implement these measures but this is unfortunately the only way forward if we want to preserve the company until things are back to normal.”

Editor Christian May tweeted: “It’s a great shame that @CityAM is pausing its print operation, but it’s the right thing to do.

“Life in London has changed so much, so quickly, that we must adapt if we are to survive. And we will survive.”

A City AM insider told Press Gazette: “This obviously sucks, but our business model basically evaporated overnight. What are you going to do?

“We are a small ship, so we were first to be swamped. But it is hard not to see this repeated across the industry. It is going to be really, really shit.”

City AM’s print distribution was down seven per cent on Wednesday morning, compared to two weeks prior.

The decline was seen in Canary Wharf and central London, but pick-up outside the capital was said to be at “normal levels”.

Read all Press Gazette’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic and the news industry here

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Amal Clooney has warned world leaders that “signing pledges and making speeches is not enough” when it comes to supporting media freedom at the first ever international conference on the issue.

Clooney, a human rights lawyer who spent hundreds of hours working to defend jailed Reuters pair Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe oo who were both freed from a Myanmar prison earlier this year, spoke at the Defend Media Freedom conference co-hosted by the UK and Canadian governments in London today.

She said: “It is clear that the challenges to media freedom are urgent and they are global, but an international campaign like the one being launched today can only bring about positive change if governments are willing to pay more than lip service to the ideal of media freedom.

“All governments say they support press freedom, the right is even enshrined in North Korea’s constitution. What matters is enforcement of that right and enforcement depends on states.”

She said ministers must “must make sure that their laws respect media freedom and that their police prosecutors, judges and citizens do the same”.

Clooney also chided world leaders for responding with “little more than a collective shrug” following the death of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in at a Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year.

The wife of Hollywood actor George has been appointed the Foreign Office’s special envoy on media freedom.

She will co-chair a panel of legal experts which will “advise countries on how to strengthen the legal protection of journalists” which is set to begin its work after the two-day conference ends tomorrow.

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced five “practical steps” the UK Government would be taking alongside its international partners, of which the legal panel is one.

Among them was a pledge to pay £3m over the next five years into a new Global Media Defence Fund that will provide legal advice for journalists and safety training for those reporting from conflict zones, according to Hunt. UNESCO will administer the funds.

Hunt also said an international task force would be set up “to help governments to deliver their commitments on media freedom, including by developing national action plans”.

He said the task force would meet to review progress every year at the UN General Assembly “commending those countries where media freedom is getting better and agreeing what should be done where it is not”.

Hunt, who is vying to become the next UK Prime Minister, also pledged that the British Government would consider the “potential impact on press freedom” whenever a new law is proposed or an existing one amended.

A £15m fund or new programmes to promote media freedom worldwide has also been set up, it was announced at the conference earlier today.

Finally, Hunt said he and Canadian Foreign Affairs minister Chrystia Freeland and a “group of like-minded countries” would “lobby in unison when media freedom comes under attack”.

He added: “Our aim is for this to be a rapid response mechanism, helping foreign ministers and ambassadors to react as one when abuses take place.”

Hunt said: “In a world where a Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, was murdered inside a Saudi diplomatic property – and a talented young journalist, Lyra McKee, was shot dead by dissident republicans in Northern Ireland – it would be easy to succumb to fatalism.

“But we must resist that. Because if we act together we can shine a spotlight on abuses and impose a diplomatic price on those who would harm journalists or lock them up for doing their jobs.”

He went on: “The struggle for media freedom is being waged day after day, not in conference centres like this but by independent journalists in authoritarian states – by vigilant bloggers who expose corruption and by courageous activists who publish the evidence of human rights abuses.

“There is no place for neutrality in this struggle. We are on the side of those who seek to report the truth and bring the facts to light. We stand against those who suppress or censor or exact revenge.”

Picture: Press Gazette

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“Yellow vest” activist James Goddard has been charged with assault after allegedly threatening a Manchester Evening News photographer.

Goddard, of Kelvindale Drive, Altrincham, is also charged with a public order offence following a protest in Manchester City Centre on 9 February.

The 29-year-old has been bailed to appear at Manchester and Salford Magistrates’ Court on 20 March.

The alleged threats are understood to have been directed at journalist Joel Goodman, who recorded the encounter on a body camera.

Picture: Reuters/Simon Dawson

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