Month: February 2020

“When I reach out to brands directly, they tell me to apply for their programs through their affiliated network, which means I lose whatever personal connections I might’ve had and the ability to negotiate,” Groffman said. A company he had worked with for years recently referred him to its influencer network, he added.

“Influencer marketing has finally matured as an industry,” explained Kristy Sammis, executive director of the Influencer Marketing Association, in an email. “Brands are now willing to allocate significant budget to strategic influencer programs. This means they need scale, benchmarks, and guarantees. That’s simply not possible with one-on-one influencer relationships.”

Currently, influencers lack a standardized set of rates, yet a myriad factors can go into setting a price. That said, a $10 cost per thousand impressions is a baseline for influencers working on Instagram and Instagram Stories, according to Village Marketing founder Vickie Segar. She added that for every 100,000 followers, that rate grants an influencer $1,000 a post. Plus, companies and influencers might additionally negotiate usage rights and exclusivity, which could increase the fee. Terms vary by company, but payment can take from 30 days to 120 days, according to industry sources.

When influencers have the chance to participate in negotiations, they typically share data with the company to prove their worth beyond the baseline rate. For starters, someone with 100,000 followers might not necessarily be able to reach all of them since they might not be as engaged as the audience of someone with a lower follower count. That’s why influencers said they will share their metrics, often culled from their last 30 days of Instagram posts and stories, so as to indicate the level of engagement a company could receive by working with them. Some influencers like Jessica Hirsch, who runs the Instagram account CheatDayEats and has 450,000 followers, will also offer demographic information about followers to provide companies a better sense of who they will reach.

Hirsch said she has received mass emails from networks that are requesting bids, apparently from hundreds of influencers. These solicitations typically don’t give influencers a chance to negotiate their rates. “I prefer to have a relationship with a company rather than put in a bid,” said Hirsch, adding that the networks’ approach “seems a bit impersonal.”

Travel influencer Rob Taylor said he believes that the uptick in networks’ and agencies’  solicitation of bids from influencers has resulted from companies’ setting of short-term influencer impression goals. These companies are pursuing quick ways to achieve those goals instead of fostering long-term relationships with influencers, he said. He has opted instead for direct relationships with companies and encourages other influencers to do the same, Taylor added. “It damages an influencer’s ability to control their own income,” he observed.

Ryan Detert, CEO of influencer technology-platform company Influential, said that while over the last year some influencers may be receiving more mass emails from networks asking for bids and offering flat rates for their content, that the model has been around for some time. “There’s some technical merit because you get a lot of content,” Detert said about companies’ reaching out to influencer agencies. “But more content isn’t inherently better. If the content isn’t great, it’s not a great post. You can’t spam your way to good results.”

“Influencer marketing requires that media is bought individually at scale, a concept that feels challenging,” wrote Segar in an email. “This approach to media is extremely time consuming. When agencies and platforms short-cut that process by sending out mass emails — not individually negotiating influencers based on their real value — the entire program is broken.” 

The publisher’s daily newsletter, which goes out six days per week, is still the lion’s share of the company’s revenue, accounting for approximately 95% of the company’s overall revenue in 2019, CEO Alex Lieberman said. Currently, the daily newsletter has over 1.8 million subscribers and an open rate of 42%, with the goal being to reach 2 million by the end of the first quarter of 2020.

But this year, Lieberman said that the daily product now makes up 89% of overall revenue, with Retail Brew and Emerging Tech Brew accounting for 9% and its new podcast division making up the rest. Emerging Tech Brew, its bi-weekly newsletter covering tech, now has 160,000 subscribers and an open rate of 50% after launching in March. Retail Brew, which is also bi-weekly and covers the retail and e-commerce industries, launched in June and recently reached 100,000 subscribers with an open rate of 55%. The Turnout, its pop-up politics and business newsletter that launched in November and is running through the upcoming presidential election, has 60,000 subscribers and an open rate of 65%. Additionally, the company’s podcast, Business Casual, recently surpassed over 1 million total downloads.

Lieberman said he wants to continue diversifying, and his team is looking to launch two more business-to-business newsletters and another podcast in 2020. While the subjects of the new products haven’t been solidified, he said the “next newsletter vertical will most likely be Marketing Brew.”

According to Lieberman, the company had 180 advertisers across the daily newsletter, Retail Brew and Emerging Tech Brew in 2019, nearly doubling the number of partners that ran ads in the newsletter in 2018 (97). He said one of the reasons for the increase this past year was hiring a new head of brand partnerships and integrated marketing, Jason Schulweis.

Since joining the company in July, Schulweis grew the revenue team from three to 10 staffers, and overhauled the sales department.

The smaller team, Lieberman said, would be tasked with everything from figuring out where ads would be placed or what they would look like to creating the contracts for sales. This system had a tendency to overwhelm the sales staff by pulling them in many different directions, Lieberman said, and it impeded the team’s ability to sell ads across products. Sales were made “on a placement by placement basis,” which was inefficient.

Now the sales team works with clients in a consultative manner and sells more branded content campaigns. Morning Brew’s ad spots are sold by flat rates, according to Lieberman, though the prices have increased based on audience growth. He wouldn’t disclose Morning Brew’s rates.

Kerel Cooper, svp of global marketing at marketing technology company LiveIntent,  said that most of the publishers he’s worked with sell their newsletter inventory on a CPM basis and rarely do a sponsorship model, which would be similar to the flat fee model Morning Brew has. He said, however, that because marketers are only able to reach Morning Brew’s audience through the newsletter platform (coupled with the fact that the publisher has much higher open rates for its newsletters than the average of 10-15% across all newsletters) Morning Brew is able to charge higher and in different formats than other publishers. 

Lieberman said that in order to continue the company’s growth, the long-term plans are to look for ways to “monetize the audience more directly.” Though he said he’s not 100% sure what these opportunities look like at the moment, he said that creating in-person engagements is something readers have been asking for in various feedback conversations.

“Email has replaced newspapers and from a digital perspective, it is the new homepage. It’s a smart publishing strategy” to continue building out new products, said Cooper. “Newsletter are key to continuing relationships with readers.” 

The average age of online readers of VG’s homepage is 46, said Gard Steiro, VG’s CEO. According to the publisher, the tabloid reaches half of the Norwegian population of 5.4 million people. The publisher’s goal: having more than 17.4% of the unique visitors to its homepage be age 15 to 25. That’s the percentage of Norway’s population that are of this age.

According to the publisher, the Z team will explain to VG’s newsroom the concerns and needs that young Norwegians have. Plus, Verdens Gang will focus more on user research and reader feedback in order to expand its number of younger readers and subscribers.

Z staffers take part in daily meetings with the rest of the newsroom employees, including members of VG’s TV department. The Z team works closely with Schibsted’s developers and user experience designers on product-related projects so they can gain a better appreciation of younger people’s perspectives. Previously the publisher created separate VG teams for mobile and video projects in order to beef up specialty areas before integrating them into the wider group.

Like a lot of other news publishers, Schibsted is prioritizing its efforts to reach younger audiences. Steiro has called the failure to recruit younger readers “a deadly strategy.”

He said, “Our goal is not only to make more content for the younger audience, but we also aim to do it more systematically than before.”

VG is primarily funded by advertising, so most of its content is free, but it also has a subscription program whereby paying readers can access an additional 15% of content.

With about 150,000 digital subscribers, VG captures a relatively high percentage of the online population, according to Reuters Digital New Report in 2019. Norwegians have relatively robust rates of subscribing to digital news publications, with 34% of the population paying for online news in 2019; that’s an increase of 4 percentage points from the previous year. By comparison, only 16% of people in the U.S. paid for online news in 2019; that percentage that has remained unchanged since 2017, per Reuters Digital New Report. 

Globally, all news publishers are at pains to grow their younger readership, striving to recruit new digital audiences to supplement an aging print readership. Often this means that they launch a presence on newer platforms like TikTok and Snapchat (as The Telegraph did), or unveil new verticals featuring content for younger people, as French newspaper Libération did. The Financial Times opens up its paywall for students who enroll in its special program.

But there have also been casualties. Subscription publishers who have pitched lower-cost products to younger people have found that the new offerings have cannibalized the audience for their core products, which their companies need keep at sufficiently high price points. Two years after the 2016 launch of NYT Now, The New York Times closed the app that targeted young readers, with the publisher citing low user numbers. At NYT Now’s peak, in May 2015, it had 334,000 unique users, according to the New York Times.