Data-Labor-Technology

This week’s Media Briefing looks at the role of paid trial offers within publishers’ subscription businesses in the pursuit of increasing both retention rates and growing new subscriber totals.

• The case for, and against, paid trial offers
• Fewer podcasts equals more listeners for The Athletic
• Earnings season begins, TikTok has a new e-commerce strategy and more

The case for, and against, paid trial offers

As subscription growth slows, publishers are finding that retaining subscribers is just as important as acquiring new ones. And because of that, finding the right strategy that brings in new paying readers who plan on sticking around for the long haul is top of mind for many audience growth teams.

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A wrist slap that was supposed to end the scandal backfires in federal court.

If the third party puts a conservative atop its ticket, it could lure Republican voters.

Women like crime stories, politics, podcasts aimed at themselves and morbid tales, Edison Research reports.

The top 20 summer shows are down 15% to 3.6 million average viewers from May 25-July 16, using Nielsen’s live airing-plus-7 days of time-shifted viewing metric. The non-scripted summer period was
affected by some networks delaying the start of top summer performers and moving fresh content into the fall prime-time schedule. Nearly all scripted TV broadcast prime-time series currently have
been shut down due to the writers’ and actors’ strike.

Ad spend grew across many major digital platforms that Tinuiti supports. Fashion brand Temu became a major player in the Google Shopping space during the first half of the year, and is now competing
against 82% of U.S. shopping advertisers — a higher share than Walmart, and just about on par with eBay, according to Tinuiti.

Alphabet’s Q2 revenue rose 7% to $74.6 billion vs. the previous year, capitalizing on AI and cloud services. The cloud unit increased revenue by 28% vs. the year-ago quarter. Alphabet also announced
Ruth Porat, its finance chief, will leave her role as CFO to take on the newly created position of president and chief investment officer. She will remain CFO while the company searches for and
selects her successor.

Brands are more likely to have a smaller group of people handling a bigger variety of functions.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk announced a major change for Twitter. We all hoped it was a joke, that he wouldn’t actually change the name of such a well-established brand. But as we’ve all come to see, he was quite serious. With the support of CEO Linda Yaccarino, Musk has changed the name of Twitter…