Month: June 2018

Get ready for a quick trip back to the 1980s, thanks to a partnership between Netflix’s Glow and Lyft. Lyft users in Los Angeles and Las Vegas will have a chance to ride around town in Melanie “Melrose” Rosen’s stretch limo seen in Season 1 of the show about female wrestlers. Lyft released a short…

CANNES, France–It’s one of the most visually complex ads ever created, a perfectly choreographed adventure that’s half Alice in Wonderland, half Wrinkle in Time. But Apple’s “Welcome Home” spot for the HomePod began, as all great ads do, with a simple, concise thought. “We started talking about how great music makes a space feel bigger,”…

It’s no secret how popular streaming video services have become. According to Deloitte’s 2018 Digital Media Trends Survey, over 55 percent of U.S. households were subscribed to a paid video streaming service in 2017. In early 2018, 10 percent of all TV usage was through video streaming, according to Nielsen. Over the years, competition has…

CANNES, France–Typically, tourism policy changes in small island nations don’t spark international attention. But at this year’s Cannes Lions, that’s exactly what took center stage. Palau Pledge, a conservation initiative created by Australian agency Host/Havas, was the festival’s most highly honored campaign this year, taking home an unmatched three Grand Prix. The project won top…

The effort stems from its research that 77% of women and 70% of girls believe all images they see have been digitally altered or airbrushed.

A new wave of ad formats that reward consumers explicitly has emerged. Often called “opt-in advertising,” “value exchange-based advertising” or “rewarded “advertising,” the rewards typically are to
unlock entertainment content, “points,” upgrades, premiums and freemiums in exchange for completing an ad exposure. On July 12, the Interactive Advertising Bureau will hold a “kick-off” meeting for an
Opt-In Rewarded Advertising Buyer’s Guide Working Group to begin setting industry parameters for new formats. Meanwhile, digital video advertising platform Jun Group has released findings of a study
of a year’s worth of “value exchange based” video ad views, engagements and completions that begins to provide some audience compositions and behaviors. engagements and completions that begins to
provide some audience compositions and behaviors.

Big sporting events contributed to the rise in ad views, such as the Winter Olympics, NCAA’s March Madness and the Super Bowl.

Big sporting events contributed to the rise in ad views, such as the Winter Olympics, NCAA’s March Madness and the Super Bowl.

The Daily Beast is creating a membership program, becoming the latest example of a publication to try to drum up new revenue from readers. The program is called Beast Inside, and for $100 a year, members will get exclusive and early access to content.

At launch, members will get new newsletter called the Rabbit Hole that’ll go deep into the story of the day; a customized version of its existing popular Cheat Sheet newsletter, based on whether they want a Trump-free or politics-heavy version; a new podcast called Omnishambles; full access to a new reported crime series called The Beast Files; and access on Friday to the biggest story of the weekend. They’ll also be able to have their comments appear on the site, even on the home page; there’s no commenting option for regular readers.

“We wanted to find a way to build deeper, more intimate relationships with our most loyal readers,” said Heather Dietrick, CEO of the IAC-owned Daily Beast.

Getting readers to pay for information that isn’t essential to their jobs and is similar to other content already out there is a hard sell. But Dietrick believes the Beast is in a good position to ask readers to pay because while other publishers relied on Facebook to send traffic their way, the Beast dug in and focused on cultivating a loyal audience that would come to the site on its own for culture and political reporting and analysis. As of 2016, the site had 40 percent of its traffic coming directly to the homepage, up from 28 percent two years earlier.

As a result, a million of the Beast’s 20 million monthly readers visit the site 50 times a month on average, according to the publication, citing Google Analytics. (ComScore put the Beast’s audience at 13.3 million in May.) The membership is aimed at those readers, who tend to be urban, affluent and news junkies, Dietrick said.

Other highbrow publishers have created similar membership programs offering exclusive content and access to staff, including The Atlantic’s Masthead, which costs $120 a year and has thousands of members; and Slate’s older Slate Plus, which costs $49 and has signed up upward of 40,000. Many others have put up online paywalls. As people get more used to hitting paywalls or membership offers, they may be more inclined to pay, expanding the market for paid content; there also could come a point where publications start cannibalizing each other, though.

Dietrick said the Beast opted for a membership model with the idea that keeping its core news product widely available will enable more people, not fewer, to discover its content and consider becoming members. Industry research suggests around 2 percent of a publisher’s online audience will pay for access to the content; Dietrick said based on the Beast’s highly loyal readership, she said she’s confident it could get higher than 2 percent. (As a hedge, though, the Beast is discounting the membership to $50 for the time being.)

An argument for the membership model is that unlike paywalls, it avoids the frustration readers feel when they hit a paywall and removes the incentive publishers have to push people to click through content to get them to subscribe, said Krish Subramanian, CEO of Chargebee, which helps companies measure their subscriptions and related services. “You don’t optimize for more clicks and hope someone will convert.” Doing membership programs right requires constant price testing, trying different ways of delivering content to them and gauging member satisfaction, though, he said.

As a run-up to the membership program, the Beast created an stand-alone newsletter called PayDirt in April for its most die-hard readers; Dietrick said that newsletter has had a 40-plus percent open rate, which helped validate the idea of doing more exclusive content. Other parts of the membership program came out of data and reader surveys. When the Beast does a mystery-type crime story, it’s often one of the top 10 stories on the site, so the Beast is turning that concept into a multipart series for members, The Beast Files, with only the first chapter available to all readers. The Rabbit Hole newsletter was in response to readers saying in surveys that they count on the publication’s take on big stories.

While other publishers dangle memberships and paywalls to offset declining ad revenue, Dietrick said the Beast was doing so from a position of strength. Direct ad sales, a significant part of the business, are on track to more than double this year, she said. The Beast also makes money from commerce and licensing. “This is more about finding more diverse revenue sources,” she said of Beast Inside.

As the Beast learns what members respond to, it may add other member-only benefits like events and private Facebook groups. Existing staffers, under business development head Samantha Winkelman and with help from subscription services vendor Piano, are handling the membership program. Over time, the Beast expects to make some hires to staff the program.

The post The Daily Beast pivots to paid with $100 membership program appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook’s internal probe into potential misuse of user data is hitting fundamental roadblocks: The company can’t track where much of the data went after it left the platform or figure out where it is now.