Month: August 2021

This is far from the only way music festivals are reaching into virtual space. This weekend, Breakaway Music Festival is kicking off with an event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, featuring on-site interactive “esports lounges” administered by esports firm ReKTGlobal. Attendees will be able to take part in hourly tournaments on one of the festival’s stages, with gameplay getting featured between musical acts on the festival’s livestream. “I need to curate events that are going to continue to attract Gen Z,” said Breakaway co-founder Adam Lynn. “And so it’s just kind of a natural fit, and I think music and gaming are starting to blend in a huge way.”

The digitization of the world under COVID-19 may have permanently affected how younger consumers perceive live events. The most attended concert of 2020 was Travis Scott’s Fortnite event, which drew over 27 million viewers across platforms. The event involved all the trappings of an in-person concert, but with more flexibility in its content and range of experience: users who grew bored of the concert could teleport into a different “room” of the concert or simply go back into Battle Royale mode. “Consumption habits of Gen Z are going toward, frankly, gaming and esports,” said ReKTGlobal CFO Brad Sive. “And so we feel that we’re the tip of the spear of that universe.”

The esports lounges at Breakaway don’t yet incorporate fully digital versions of the festival, à la Topia’s Virtual Burn, but this is a concept that both Lynn and ReKTGlobal have considered at length. “There is a way for us to develop an NFT ecosystem around this to help celebrate it,” Sive said. “You’ll be able to interact online, and you might be able to take something unique away from it in the digital space, as you would buying a T-shirt or whatever at your favorite festival.”

Indeed, the convergence of physical and virtual events is a boon for the vendors and brand partners looking to reach this expanded digital audience.

When the League of Legends European Championship was unable to host in-person events in its studio last year, it created a virtual version of the studio that was accessible to users all over the world. This virtual studio acted as the location for the LEC’s Kia-sponsored 8Bit Rift activation, a virtual event whose attendance was far above that of any in-person event held in the Berlin studio.

“This is something that has been on the forefront of our thinking for a long time already, even before the pandemic,” said Maximilian Schmidt, head of esports for League of Legends Europe and MENA at Riot Games. The virtual activation was inspired and informed by the LEC’s past attempts to merge physical and virtual space, including the virtual dragon that flew into the arena at the 2017 World Championship and the performance of the virtual K-pop group K/DA at Worlds 2020.

The landscape of live events has been forever changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. With users primed and ready to experience events in the metaverse, festivals are entering virtual space — and virtual spaces are developing a presence at in-person festivals. In the near future, it might not matter whether attendees experience events physically or virtually; the experience will simply be equivalent and persistent across both.

NFTs on the RFP

The revenue possibilities from publishers’ blockchain experiments are not limited to selling NFTs to the highest bidder.

Right now, publishers that took their first stabs at NFTs earlier this year are looking at how broader blockchain technology (including NFTs, cryptocurrency and utility tokens) can contribute to the other ends of their businesses.

The key hits:

• Publishers are selling sponsorships against their blockchain experiments.
• They are also seeing opportunities to pitch white-label branded content deals.
• Blockchain technology can also open up intellectual property licensing options and beef up subscription programs.

It’s a topic I examined more closely for a cross-brand series that Digiday Media kicked off earlier this week. Specifically, I explored publishers’ relationship with the blockchain and how the explosion of NFTs in early summer opened the door to innovation and experimentation around blockchain usage in the industry. (Read more from our ongoing series here).

In my piece, Time’s president Keith Grossman, who has spent the past six months integrating cryptocurrencies and NFTs into the publication’s balance sheet, contextualized the blooming technology: “NFTs, blockchain technology and ultimately the metaverse will enable brands and the media industry to evolve analogue relationships with consumers and subscribers to more dynamic, loyalty driven communities.”

That shift has given way to the beginnings of discussions around sponsorship deals, as marketers look to publishers that have practiced their hands in this space already. That’s been clear in conversations with other publishers that I talked to for this piece as well.

Among those beneficiaries is crypto news publisher Decrypt, which has already sold sponsorships against its blockchain efforts. The utility token it launched in March rewarded its top users of the Decrypt app who in turn were able to exchange the coins for prizes that were provided by the coin’s seasonal sponsor. This was a crypto-adjacent deal, but it did introduce those advertisers to the audience engagement capabilities of utility tokens.

As for getting sponsors interested in other applications of the blockchain in their media buys, Decrypt’s publisher and CRO Alanna Roazzi-Laforet said her team has stepped into the roles of educators versus strictly salespeople.

“People are asking very basic questions right now. ‘How do [I] engage with these different technologies in the right way? What is an NFT? What is the metaverse? How do I play in that space? Is it worth it? How do I get started?’” said Roazzi-Laforet.

(For what it’s worth, here’s Digiday’s explainer on the metaverse).

Bleacher Report has experimented with NFT drops that were done in collaboration with musical artists and is currently pursuing utility integrations into said NFTs that reward audience engagement. But the more the digital sports publisher experiments, the more interest its sales team gets from advertisers who want to know how they can get involved too, said ​​Yang Adija, svp of digital league business operations, growth and innovation at Turner Sports and Bleacher Report.

Early questions for Adija’s team have included the ad options in relation to NFTs as well as their value.

However, B/R has not closed any deals in the space, partially due to the early nature of this business, but also because monetizing NFTs with ads has to make sense for the audience and for the advertiser. 

“We’re constantly testing and pushing to see what’s the best way to deliver for some of our ad partners, but at the same time, we want it to be endemic to the new environment and [want] the fans and users to continue to see value in what NFTs can bring,” Adija said. 

And yet, some media buyers are not putting NFTs in the same category of other shiny new toys that publishers are touting, like augmented reality, virtual reality and TikTok. At issue is the fact that the audience for an NFT sponsorship is largely limited to the person who purchases the collectible.

Things like AR, VR and chatbots, for example, “are still attracting a one-to-many audience where an NFT is [one] person buys it and then owns it,” said Barry Lowenthal, CEO of media buying agency Media Kitchen. As a digital artifact, there is not a lot of visibility of the branded NFT beyond the point of purchase, which would lead to problems of not enough scale to justify the media buy, he added. 

Lowenthal said that NFTs have not been brought up in any sales meetings he’s had to date. In order to consider such a deal, there would need to be a lot of paid media around the NFT’s creation to amplify the partnership, he said.

Roazzi-Laforet believes there is room for everyone on the blockchain, however. “We’re trying to help people come on board because we want to enable the ecosystem and help them shape their own presence within the space. That’s certainly top of mind for us.” — Kayleigh Barber

What we’ve heard

“People are only buying those [NFTs of articles and headlines] out of either vanity or the idea that they’ll flip it for more money later and neither of those are a big audience.”

— The Alpha Group’s David Cohn

Apple News continues to underwhelm

Apple’s Safari browser isn’t the only one of the iPhone maker’s apps still presenting publishers with ad revenue challenges. Six years since the launch of Apple News, publishers continue to be frustrated with the news app’s contribution to their ad businesses.

“I do probably an extra 20% in traffic in Apple News versus web traffic, and it’s more or less unmonetized. Monetization in Apple News is terrible,” said one publishing executive.

“I have a ton of inventory I can sell on Apple News, but nobody wants it,” said a second publishing executive.

Publishers are bumping up against multiple obstacles to making money on Apple News. For starters, the app’s name. Many advertisers are still wary of their ads appearing alongside news content. Additionally, the app’s targeting options are limited — for example, publishers cannot target ads based on their own or advertisers’ first-party data — which further limits its attractiveness to advertisers. “It’s this concept of trying to monetize what’s least attractive to the marketplace,” said the second publishing executive.

Publishers have some options for overcoming these ad sales obstacles. They can rely on outside companies to fill their Apple News inventory. For example, NBCUniversal sells Apple News inventory on Apple’s behalf, and publisher monetization firms like Jeeng can also backfill publishers’ Apple News inventory. Publishers have also offered to discount their Apple News inventory for advertisers and incentivized their ad sellers with bonuses for securing deals that include Apple News. Nonetheless, “all the efforts I’ve tried are basically useless. It’s penny-level CPMs,” said the first publishing executive.

Publishers are not necessarily solely reliant on advertising to make money from Apple News. The app also operates a paid subscription tier, but neither publisher Digiday spoke to participates in that program and was able to speak to its revenue impact.

Given the popularity of Apple News among audiences and its unpopularity among advertisers, the first publishing executive is weighing whether to introduce its own limits on the app. “Recently I’ve been thinking, we get five to six million views a month in Apple News. Maybe we should treat those users differently or gate them. If you read us in Apple News, sorry, we’re not able to monetize in that environment, so we’re only going to give you three free articles a month,” the executive said.

An Apple spokesperson declined to comment on the record. — Tim Peterson

Numbers to know

$130 million: How much money Nexstar Media paid to acquire The Hill.

7: How many “strategies and operations” deputies The New York Times plans to hire to improve diversity, equity and inclusion at the news organization.

54 million: Rough number of Facebook accounts that viewed a link to a news article that incorrectly attributed a doctor’s death to the COVID-19 vaccine.

25: Number of local journalists that Facebook will pay to write for its Substack-rivaling newsletter service Bulletin.

3 questions with The Hill’s James Finkelstein

Nexstar Media, the largest local TV station operator in the U.S., announced it was acquiring political news website The Hill for $130 million on Aug. 20. James Finkelstein has owned a controlling stake in the publication since 2014 — his late father Jerry Finkelstein co-founded The Hill in 1994. In an email sent last Friday to staff, the younger Finkelstein said The Hill, which has over 100 journalists, was “highly profitable,” with profit and revenue increasing 50% a year. The Hill has 48 million average monthly users in 2020, according to Nexstar, citing Comscore.

Finkelstein spoke to Digiday about why he chose to sell The Hill after owning the publication for seven years. He also shared his thoughts on the political media landscape, given reports of Politico and Axios in talks with Axel Springer about a potential sale.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. — Sara Guaglione

What felt like now was the right time to sell The Hill, and why choose Nexstar?

I buy, build and then sell properties. I did that with The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard, and some legal publications when I was younger. But I really loved The Hill. I had it for a long time. I cared about it so much that I kept it longer than I would normally keep a media property. It was also growing very nicely and quite successful in revenues and profits. I just said I have to do it. I finally, completely pulled the trigger. I was attached to it because I really thought we had a mission that was different from most media properties around the country, which have either gone to the right or left. We made mistakes like everybody else, but we really tried to keep it in the middle. For the Opinion section, if there were two very liberal pieces, we tried to do two conservative pieces. We felt it was the kind of journalism that was very important to have. I had a stomach ache for about seven years, but it was worthwhile.

Nexstar has a philosophy of unbiased news as well. And let’s be honest, the price was right. I had met the chairman and the president and others there and I thought they were quite nice and that they would advance The Hill and support it.

Why do you think political publications are reportedly looking for buyers right now? Does it have anything to do with the political climate now? What do you think this means for political media?

I think it’s about timing. Prices are good now, generally in media. People would have a greater interest now than a year ago or even two years ago. I think it’s a hot market in a way — not just in the political field, but all over. The stock market is at an all-time high. On the other hand, over the years, a lot of sites have just gone out of business and what’s left are the stronger sites, not just in politics.

The future is bright for political media. People are so strongly pulled in both directions. I think what happened for a while after the [2020 U.S. presidential] election is people sort of had to calm down, but at least at The Hill we started to see an increase in viewership again, and I have no doubt that will continue.

What’s next for you?

My rule is I will wait two days [after a sale] and then start again. I look forward to starting to look for some great properties in the next part of my life. Politics was the center of the universe for a while, but there are other very interesting areas. It can’t be politics — because of the deal with Nexstar, I can’t be in something in politics for a while — but it can be entertainment, news, medicine, finance — something that interests me.

What we’ve covered

As The Atlantic draws closer to 1 million subscribers, the publisher must battle traffic declines to keep momentum:

• The Atlantic now has more than 830,000 subscribers, but its site traffic is declining more than other publishers.
• To deal with the publisher’s subscriber acquisition, The Atlantic is reinforcing its core coverage and expanding its climate, technology and books coverage.

Read more about The Atlantic here.

What comes next for publishers on the blockchain:

• To the naked eye, it looks like media companies’ dalliances with NFTs have come to an end.
• Behind the scenes, however, media companies are putting more brain power into what NFTs, and more broadly the blockchain, can do.

Read more about the blockchain here.

Publishers are much less worried about the coming cookie changes than brands and agencies:

• As of the beginning of the third quarter of 2021, less than 50% of the publisher professionals Digiday surveyed said they were worried about their ability to target ads or measure their effectiveness without third-party cookies.
• In the first quarter of 2021, a majority of surveyed publisher professionals said they were worried.

Read more about publishers’ cookie worries here.

Jubilee Media’s Jason Y. Lee and investor Mike Su want to build the ‘Disney for empathy’:

• The digital media company specializes in producing videos that aim to get people to empathize with others.
• Jubilee Media’s bailiwick seems to present a timely opportunity to attract audiences in search of some positivity.

Listen to the latest Digiday podcast episode here.

How newsletters have helped publishers build up their subscription businesses:

• Newsletters exclusive to subscribers are cropping up left and right, and the free ones are becoming just another step in the path to conversion.
• Newsletters also play a role in helping publishers to retain subscribers.

Read more about publishers’ newsletters here.

What we’re reading

News organizations diversify their leadership ranks:
News outlets, including local publications, are appointing women and people of color to leadership positions previously occupied by white men, according to Bloomberg. This industry-spanning trend is notable among local news organizations because of the potential for the improved coverage resulting from the diversity to help the struggling publisher category to improve readership.

Ebony is back:
After being acquired by Bridgeman Sports and Media last December, Ebony’s reboot began in March, and the publication plans to start publishing a print magazine again next year, according to The New York Times. The future of Ebony’s sibling publication, Jet, remains unclear, though.

Vox Media prepares to join parade of pubs going public:
Vox Media is the latest publisher to pick up more properties on its path to going public, according to The Wall Street Journal. The media company has acquired Punch to round out its food-and-drink footprint and is reportedly weighing whether to go public via a SPAC IPO or traditional IPO or simply to raise more money as a private company.

“Everyone has a vested interest in getting the world back to normal as quickly as possible,” said Jon Gieselman, President of Expedia Brands. 

Krispy Kreme, which was one of the first national brands to offer vaccination incentives, is revisiting its original campaign, offering two free doughnuts to Americans who have received at least one vaccination shot. The Axe campaign, which launched in June, touts national ad spots, an in-person experience and product giveaways as incentives.

Meanwhile, Expedia Groups’ efforts span across all its brands, including Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo and others for a global vaccination campaign in partnership with UNICEF. Each purchase made through the brands’ mobile apps will result in a $10 million Expedia Group-backed donation toward UNICEF’s global COVID-19 efforts, including vaccine distribution, diagnostics and treatments.

“That alone isn’t going to solve the world’s challenges, but [it’s] in the hopes that it would inspire other companies to either join our effort or in their own way,” said Gieselman. 

Given the travel industry was one of the hardest hit when pandemic lockdown went into effect, a vaccination campaign made sense for Expedia Group, Gieselman said.  “We saw this as perfectly aligning with [the] company’s goals and the larger mission of helping our fellow man,” he said. 

It’s a win-win for Expedia Group as far as Siegel+Gale branding firm’s group director of strategy Lisa Kane is concerned. As the campaign promotes vaccination, it also promotes mobile app downloads and a hopeful return to normal travel. “They are a global travel brand, and it makes sense for them to help people in communities to return to health,” Kane said in an email. 

But, Kane said, COVID-19 testing and vaccination campaigns may not be right for every brand. As the pandemic polarizes the nation, advertisers will need to tread carefully as “it shouldn’t be about jumping on a hot topic to earn brownie points,” per Kane.

It could be a brand awareness play for Krispy Kreme, which has already given away more than 2.5 million doughnuts via the initiative. Similarly, Axe has given out all of its promotion products and its website now points to where shoppers can purchase other Axe products online.

“If a company can sincerely and thoughtfully act in support of their customers or employees, positive encouragement of vaccination is generally a good thing right now,” Kane said.

Christine Alemany, CEO of the New York City-based branding and marketing firm TBGA, echoed Kane’s sentiments. “Rather than ‘do good’ purpose, these vaccine campaigns monetarily benefit Expedia—both indirectly and directly. An aligned incentive ensures that follow-through will be there,” she said in an email. 

According to Alemany, the pandemic has invited an onslaught of purpose-driven campaigns, most in response to George Floyd’s murder and the BLM movement.

“Brands need to be very careful in [their] messaging and their non-profit partnerships,” Alemany said in an email. “While vaccine mandates have been polarizing, removing the financial hurdles to access is not.” 

We spoke to Nick Hedderman, director of Microsoft’s modern work and security business group in the U.K., about what the company has learned so far. Here are the takeouts:

Get comfortable with experimentation, fast 

If patience is your enemy, the next few years will be tough. The journey toward nailing a hybrid-working environment that works not just for staff but also for clients, will be long. And when it comes to what good looks like for hybrid, there is no simple answer. Hedderman believes success will lie in an employer’s willingness to experiment. “It’s going to be fundamental to ground the [hybrid-work model] journey in experimentation,” he said. “And companies will have to be very humble because no one will have the right answer.”

Microsoft regularly runs a bunch of both large and small-scale hybrid-working experiments and quickly discards any that don’t stick and scales those that do. While the delta variant has led to widespread delays of office reopenings, the logistical challenges of managing people’s return remain plentiful. One example: After 18 months of not having to commute to work, people don’t want to turn up and find no one else has picked that day to be in the office. 

“This is a challenge that customers come back to us with a lot — what’s the best use of their time and how do they know when they should be in the office?” said Hedderman. To try and solve the issue, Microsoft has begun looking at how to connect the machine learning from its Microsoft Graph, to all the different networks with which people typically digitally interact. “We’re looking at whether we can somehow link that together with — for instance — the badging system from our office buildings.” The theory is that people could then predict when colleagues they need and want to see typically go into the office. “That’s a broader scale experiment, and it may not work, but you’ve got to be open to doing these sorts of things in order to help the hybrid environment flourish and come to life,” added Hedderman. 

Appoint a moderator for hybrid meetings 

Maintaining inclusivity when large proportions of staff are working remotely will be a challenge in hybrid setups. In theory, diversity and inclusivity should improve now that employers can cast their hiring net further, as a result of the work-anywhere trend. But on the flip side, proximity bias is a risk and one of the most obvious places it will manifest is in hybrid meetings. Hedderson’s advice: Assign a moderator for every meeting with more than five people attending. This doesn’t need to be the manager, it can be anyone in the meeting, but their role is to ensure all cameras are on and that everyone gets their say. Plus, any informal chat around the meeting happens with everyone in the office as well as working remotely, tuned in. “You’ve got to have a really good meeting moderator to ensure it’s an inclusive meeting. I’d go as far as to say you need to teach moderation to all employees,” added Hedderson. 

The moderator would also check on the chat window, look out for digital raised hands, read the cues and body language on people’s video feeds. If someone is frowning when someone else is talking, the moderator should be astute enough to pick up on it and invite them to speak their mind, added Hedderson. “There are times when you stray into the old ways of behaving. This is more about adoption of change management than it is the technology.” It’s the layer of behavior and culture that’s critical. “It’s a confidence thing and there is some skill to it. There’s a technique to moderating a meeting well,” he added.  

Be a role model 

Employers going all-in on hybrid must lead by example for it to stick. “If companies embrace hybrid, it’s the biggest change to the way they work since Henry Ford invented the weekend,” said Hedderson. “It won’t happen by mistake but through strategy and it’s got to come from the top — you can’t delegate hybrid to HR or have a half-baked plan that fizzles out after the summer. The leader, chairman or CEO — whoever that person is in the business, needs to lead that conversation and be very humble about the journey. Because they’re not going to be right. No one’s going to be right. They are going to have to swallow that ego a little and role model these new behaviors.” 

For hybrid to truly be a success, it requires a collective effort — from senior leadership, through to team managers and individuals themselves. “For managers, it’s about team coordination skills. It’s about individual employees taking control and being intentional about what it is they need to do, and how when and where they do it best,” said Cali Yost, CEO and founder of consultancy Flex+ Strategy Group. “It’s about the business owning a new way of operating, that is enabled in one part by HR making sure there’s a clear performance management system in place, and that people have the skills and tools they need to execute the work.” But making these hybrid set-ups work in the day-to-day business, it’s going to take senior leaders aligning around a shared vision of what the plan is, and ensuring they lead by example, she added. 

Asynchronous-working fosters culture of openness

Asynchronous working, which lets people respond to work messages and add to projects at times that fit their individual work schedules, will likely grow in popularity. To get it right, it’s important not to be over zealous on the number of channels used, within whatever company tools are used to communicate — whether it’s Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Google Docs. Hedderman advises not to go over seven channels. These channels are where the asynchronous work happens. “Every leader needs to think about asynchronous working,” he said. “I’ve got a general channel, a channel around ‘rhythms of business’, I’ve got one around products, people and channels within teams.”

So, if Microsoft is getting ready for a product launch, Hedderman will write the plan for it in a Word document and post it into his product channel. Most major tasks require an element of teamwork so he can add people he wants to contribute and they will receive an alert to show they need to add to the document. “The process then gets richer as more and more people contribute,” he added. Although certain people are alerted, anyone in that channel can view its progress. “There are about 20 of us in this particular group and it fosters this culture of openness. No longer is knowledge power, knowledge is about sharing and helping. And it’s enriched by having different people’s perspectives included in it,” said Hedderman. 

Like most things in this hybrid world, establishing the right blend of asynchronous and synchronous working is the sweet spot. In-person meetings will always be valuable although more and more people are recording them and catching up asynchronously. Getting the right balance will be down to the individual. 

In addition to art and music, Twitch users spent a good chunk of 2021 watching women in hot tubs. The past year saw the rise of “hot tub streamers,” who go live in bathing suits and offer fans donation incentives such as writing fans’ gamertags on their bodies. In May 2021, Twitch formally responded to the moral panic around hot tub streaming, creating a dedicated category for hot tub streamers and promising not to ban them from the platform. Less than a month later, it re-sparked the controversy by temporarily suspending hot tub streamers Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa and Jenelle “Indiefoxx” Dagres.

This situation is emblematic of the growing pains Twitch has experienced as its user base widens. As the Twitch audience grows, so too has the platform’s need to more closely moderate the content it offers. Not long ago, Twitch was a livestreaming Wild West, featuring questionable content ranging from thinly veiled piracy to videos of mass violence. Now under more scrutiny than ever before — and in its seventh year under Amazon ownership — Twitch is cracking down on potentially controversial content as it prepares for continued expansion. The company has made a significant investment in its moderation system, not just to smooth over a long-standing source of frustration among Twitch creators but to create the most ad-friendly environment it possibly can. 

Specifically, Twitch is hiring more professional moderators to oversee its content. The company’s Safety Ops team has doubled in size over the past year, allowing Twitch to reduce its median user report response time by 96%, according to its internal transparency report. Since the first half of 2020, the number of “enforcement interactions” on the platform — bans, suspensions and other rule violation punishments — has increased by 41%, reflecting both Twitch’s growing user base and its efforts to further educate users about its moderation and reporting processes.

“It’s about brand safety,” said Tom Morris, a gaming insights analyst at consumer research firm GWI. “There’s a lot more brands interested in being a part of gaming, and the last thing anyone wants to do when they get involved is align with someone who doesn’t necessarily reciprocate their values.”

On a platform whose audience is at least 21 percent minors, the aforementioned piracy and violence are obvious no-nos. A more significant challenge for Twitch as it tightens its moderation policies is content like the hot tub streams, which dance on the edge of acceptability. “I think that Twitch is maturing. As it grows and becomes more popular, it becomes a more integral part of both creators’ and viewers’ lives,” said Doron Nir, CEO of StreamElements. “They are challenged with the edge cases of free speech — and where does a company like them, and Amazon at large, stretch the line and say this is going to be bannable or not?”

One reason why Twitch bans can be controversial is that the platform has historically provided users with very little clarity about why or how they were banned. This makes it difficult for the streamers expanding into newer types of lifestyle content to know what is permissible on the platform. In June 2020, Twitch permabanned the wildly popular streamer Herschel “Dr DisRespect” Beahm for reasons that still remain unknown to the public. Petra “Tofusenshi” Zemánková, a popular art streamer, speculates that she was once suspended for drawing an image of a woman wearing a bikini. “The Twitch art rules are not so developed so you don’t know where the line is,” Zemánková said. “I was just drawing a character in a bikini, and I got banned for pornography.”

In August, Twitch responded to protests about the opacity of its ban system by promising to start informing suspended users about the specific date and time of their rule violation — another sign that its moderation processes are becoming better attuned to its role as a wide-ranging content and lifestyle platform. 

For Twitch, the controversy stirred up as it adjusts its moderation policies is a necessary sacrifice to make the platform more appealing to potential brand partners and advertisers. “We’ve made a huge investment in our infrastructure and continue to update our policy,” said Twitch CMO Doug Scott. “Ultimately, Twitch is writing a lot of the book on how to do livestreaming at scale, so we’re encountering and addressing those challenges as we go.”

This is more of a preemptive strike than a response to any specific brand’s discomfort with Twitch’s content. By all accounts, Twitch has been successful at bringing on potential advertisers: in the first half of 2021, ad spending on the platform increased by 21% year-over-year, according to Standard Media Index. Many brands now consider gaming and streaming to be a core element of their marketing strategies. “It’s a key part of our spending,” said Pringles Europe digital marketing specialist Stephen McSweeney. “Twitch doesn’t get all that money, but it is one of our main partners.”

Still, said Malph Minns, managing director of agency Strive Sponsorship, “something bad’s going to happen at some point for a brand — they’re going to have a bad experience. I don’t know who that will be or where that will be, but that will be the catalyst for other brands.” For this reason, Twitch’s move to crack down on controversial streamers is necessary despite the dearth of serious brand pushback thus far.

Under COVID-19 lockdown, Twitch transformed from a game-streaming service into a lifestyle platform, with creators expanding from gaming-specific content into politics, art and even psychotherapy. As the pandemic recedes, these new types of Twitch streamers aren’t going anywhere. If Twitch wants to hold onto the gains it’s made since March 2020, it’s going to have to invest a lot more money — and thought — into how it polices its platform and its creators.

“Twitch has grown exponentially over the last decade,” Scott said. “More people were exposed to the experience of livestreaming, and that experience met a critical need for human connection. That’s going to drive our growth for a long time yet.”

This year, the stakes are even higher. Gift guides are important this year, especially after a pandemic-influenced boom in holiday e-commerce and online product discovery last year. Visits at product and gift review sites Strategist, Wirecutter, CNET and Consumer Reports, for example, were up an average of 690% in November through December 2020, year-over-year, according data from traffic analytics firm Similarweb. Affiliate-linked clicks from these guides can help brands find new audiences for their products and drive conversions, explained Ceres Cueva, the head of global publisher partnerships at Rakuten Advertising. (Exact conversions or sales from gift guide media couldn’t be calculated.) As Covid cases rise again this year, the online gifting space remains more impactful than in the past. While brands are focusing their holiday budgets online for this reason, they ultimately have less control than on brick-and-mortar store floors.

Siblings sells its products online via its own direct to consumer site as well as in-store at retailer partners including Nordstrom. Last year the brand knew in-store foot traffic would be smaller than usual, but wanted to offer the option for last minute shoppers. This year the strategy will focus on tightly monitoring ever-changing patterns of in-store foot-traffic, and allocating product online and offline accordingly.

New gifting-focused media

Traditionally, brands had the upper hand in the in-store discovery of the past — showcasing the products they wanted consumers to pay attention to in their own storefronts or investing in paid partnerships to secure premium floor space in big box stores. However, many of the top-searched and most-visited gift guide results today are held by third-party media outlets like New York Time’s Wirecutter or New York Magazine’s Strategist that don’t accept paid placements.

In the past, brands could pay to play in holiday product roundups in glossy print magazines. Today’s product roundup landscape is more egalitarian, focused on top reviews from thousands of consumers, elaborate product testing processes or third party perspectives. Moreover, this media shift is occurring alongside a major acceleration in e-commerce over the past year and a half.

At Wirecutter, explained deputy editor Jason Chen, product selection is an elaborate process. While brands can and do pitch products for consideration, the editorial team also scours the internet for every popular iteration of any given product. The team then puts these products into a comparison table of how each meets different, preselected criteria. From there, the editorial team calls in products to be tested by a team of people of different ages, sizes, backgrounds and interests for both short term and long term testing. Write-ups are often thousands of words, and end up closer to a scientific experiment than a brand-led, pr-pitched guide.

“Compared to other gift sites that might just bop around on Amazon and round them up into a guide, that’s not our bag, we don’t operate that way,” said Jason Chen, Wirecutter’s deputy editor.

Gifts guides have a little more leeway than Wirecutter’s regular roundups, sometimes featuring one staff member’s favorite item for example, but often also include the best products from earlier product testing articles. “It’s kind of taking the best of what has risen to the top of the Wirecutter process, and then adding in a couple of things that are delightful and surprising and beautiful,” said Chen.

Chen said that, in the past, consumers may have used the site as a complement to in-store shopping, reading up on a product online before going to a store to experience it in person, but now many are buying directly after reading.

“You’re almost relying completely on the word of a site on the internet, a reputable site on the internet, but we take that responsibility very seriously,” said Chen.

Strategist, like Wirecutter, also doesn’t accept paid placements. “I think the value that we bring to the table in that sense, is, we do have this bird’s eye view,” said editor Maxine Builder. 

However, other media outlets do offer paid spots. As print dollars dry up, fashion and beauty publications like Elle, Vogue, and Glamour have increasingly embraced explicitly branded content online where fashion and beauty brands can pay to play. Brands can invest in these paid placements or in their own product-focused editorial content on brand sites. However the scale of these efforts under-pace third-party sites like Strategist and Wirecutter in site visits.

The Strategist has 10.7 million monthly views. Goop, one of the few brands or retailers to even build out a full editorial site beyond a branded blog, for example, still only has 2.6 million monthly views, according to Similarweb.

Brands invest holiday dollars elsewhere

Thus, while interest in online gift guides may be skyrocketing, brands’ ability to control the space is diminishing just as quickly. While startups like Siblings are trying to double down on strong PR narratives to speak to this independent media, others are focused on traditional paid advertising rather than gift guides. 

Two year old CBD skincare brand No, Thank You, for example, investment is instead centered on direct advertising and only “supplemented” by third-party paid gift guide placements and organic PR pitches. Holiday advertising, while easier to control through spend than gift guides, still has its challenges however.

“We support our gifting initiatives with online ads,” said No, Thank You co-founder Graham Smith. “That can be tricky in our business… [as] all our products contain full-spectrum CBD… [and] the holidays result in competitive ad bidding so there’s a huge focus on making sure we only run ads that perform well.”

When all else fails, however, brands are betting that 2021 may have more of an in-store focus. Smith said his brand plans to distribute offline for the first time later this year. Siblings is continuing to invest in retailer partnerships with companies like Nordstrom.

“We still believe in the in-store discovery, as it’s hard to replicate that feeling of finding something unique and fun while shopping in-person over the holiday season,” said Bronkie. “Everyone has preferences, and as a brand, we try to be where the customer is and provide the best experience for them.”