Month: August 2021

CTV advertising’s programmatic release valve

Connected TV advertising continues to grow overall, so naturally the programmatic component of this emerging market is also enjoying an upswing. But programmatic CTV stands to play an even bigger part in the broader TV advertising market, as advertisers face inventory constraints on linear TV as well as top-tier ad-supported streaming services.

The key hits:

• In the second quarter of 2021, the amount of CTV ad inventory available programmatically ballooned.
• TV and digital advertisers are recognizing that programmatic is necessary for rounding out their CTV ad buys.
• Increasing demand for TV ad impressions will likely push more advertisers to programmatic overall and specifically to secure CTV inventory through programmatic guaranteed deals.

Reach challenges despite growing viewership

As CTV viewership swells, so is the amount of money advertisers are spending to reach people on the biggest screen in their homes. This year, advertisers are expected to increase their CTV ad spending in the U.S. by 48% year over year to top $13.4 billion and to spend $6.7 billion specifically on CTV ads purchased programmatically, according to eMarketer. 

However, advertisers are finding some difficulty in reaching a wide enough audience on CTV. 

Ad tech firm Innovid and the Association of National Advertisers conducted a study of CTV campaigns from 20 advertisers, including Anheuser-Busch, General Motors and Whirlpool, that ran between January and April 2021. On average, the campaigns only reached 13% of U.S. CTV households. While that may be a function of CTV enabling campaigns to be narrowly targeted to specific audience segments, it indicates that advertisers are running into a reach issue in CTV.

“While the whole industry has been focused on protecting against over-frequency, under-frequency has been largely ignored. It can be a real challenge to build frequency in this space,” said Jesse Math, vp of advanced TV and video solutions at ad agency Tinuiti.

That may sound surprising. For as much as streaming viewership surged in Q2 2020, it shot up yet another 13% year over year in Q2 2021, and CTV accounted for 73% of global streaming watch time in the period, according to video measurement and analytics firm Conviva. But again, wherever audiences go, advertisers will follow, and that rising demand is sucking up the supply of available ad impressions. Per Conviva, the share of streaming ad impressions that were not filled or failed to play dropped from 37% in Q1 2021 to 16% in Q2.

Programmatic picks up the pieces

Enter the programmatic part of the CTV ad market. “The good news for advertisers is, in the programmatic lens, you’ve got a substantial amount of supply,” said Ashwin Navin, co-founder and CEO of TV analytics firm Samba TV. In Q2 2021, the number of programmatic impressions in the U.S. market on Amazon’s and Roku’s CTV platforms increased by 49% and 27%, respectively, compared to Q1 2021; and by 204% and 118%, respectively, compared to Q4 2020, according to a study conducted by Samba TV.

Indeed, CTV’s share of overall programmatic ad impressions has continued to exceed desktop and mobile. In Q2 2021, CTV represented 35% of total impressions, according to ad server Extreme Reach. “Programmatic is really filling the gap where [advertisers] couldn’t secure particular inventory,” said Extreme Reach CTO Daniel Brackett.

Advertisers’ adoption of programmatic buying as a way to round out their CTV ad buys contributed to an “insane” second quarter for Jukin Media’s programmatic CTV business, said Mike Richter, director of programmatic partnerships at Jukin Media. The company operates its own CTV apps as well as 24/7 streaming channels on free, ad-supported streaming TV services like ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV and Samsung’s Samsung TV Plus. 

In April 2021, Jukin Media’s programmatic CTV revenue rose 123% higher than in April 2020, as did the May 2021 figure over its prior-year comparison. Obviously, any comparisons to the economic low points of the pandemic are going to be favorable, but “even before COVID hit, we still are growing bigger than we were then,” Richter said.

Helping to fuel the programmatic CTV businesses of media companies like Jukin Media is the general tightness in the TV and streaming ad market. As Extreme Reach’s Brackett said, advertisers are turning to programmatic buying options to pick up inventory in order to offset the reach challenges on traditional TV and among top-tier streaming services.

Further fueling programmatic as a buying option are CTV inventory aggregators. Companies like CTV platform owners Amazon and Roku and ad-tech firms like The Trade Desk and Magnite are doing a better job of packaging up third-party CTV inventory in a way that is palatable to advertisers who have historically been wary of CTV’s long-tail inventory quality. Richter said programmatic marketplace operators are making companies like Jukin Media go through a “stringent” quality assurance process to ensure inventory suppliers are free of ad fraud issues and are properly representing their inventory.

In Q2 2021, aggregators accounted for a larger share of CTV impressions than publishers, which Extreme Reach CMO Melinda McLaughlin saw as “another indication of tight supply.”

Rising pressure on programmatic as a CTV release valve

That tight supply is unlikely to relax anytime soon. 

The overall volume of CTV impressions is likely to continue to grow for the foreseeable future, as major ad-supported streamers like Discovery’s Discovery+, NBCUniversal’s Peacock, ViacomCBS’s Paramount+ and WarnerMedia’s HBO Max gain audiences. And the amount of inventory available programmatically should also swell. NBCUniversal, for example, will start selling Peacock’s inventory programmatically in Q4 2021, and publishers are continuing to pump out CTV apps and 24/7 streaming channels. 

However, the highest echelons of the broader TV supply chain are constricting. TV network owners pushed away linear dollars from ad buyers in this year’s upfront negotiations because of supply limitations, and they are using their streaming inventory to make up for their seemingly inevitable viewership guarantee shortcomings. 

As a result, even established programmatic CTV buyers are expecting to shift strategies. Tinuiti, for example, typically buys CTV inventory through private marketplaces, which are set up with individual media companies and allow for the agency and its clients to be more flexible with their buying than committing to a direct deal. But, with the market poised to tighten even more, the agency is talking with its clients about switching to programmatic guaranteed deals for their Q4 campaigns to lock up inventory and insulate themselves against an influx of demand and dearth of supply that would send ad prices skyrocketing.

“We’re not in a state of panic by any means, but programmatic buyers need to keep a close eye on what will happen this Q4,” Math said.

What we’ve heard

“When we launched [a standalone streaming property], we were very much about, ‘Here is content you cannot find on YouTube because it’s not advertiser-friendly and cannot be on TV because it’s too edgy.’ What we learned is that is not a successful marketing strategy. What people want right now is content they can relax around, so our content is creeping more wholesome and purely enjoyable.”

— Media executive

Stay tuned: Second quarter slowdown

The second quarter of 2021 did not closely resemble Q2 2020. For the most part, that’s a good thing. A really good thing. But the deceleration of TV and streaming viewership in the period raises the question of which will turn out to be temporary: last year’s viewership surge or this year’s slowdown.

Signs of a slowdown

• Netflix lost 433,000 subscribers in the U.S. and Canada in Q2.
• People spent 1 billion fewer hours streaming video on Roku’s platform in Q2 versus Q1.
• Starz lost 300,000 U.S. streaming subscribers in the period.
• The number of U.S. households reached by linear TV in Q2 2021 was 19% lower than Q2 2020 and 9% lower than Q2 2019, according to Samba TV.

These numbers alone lack some important context, though. In Q2 2021, many people started to return to some semblance of normal lives that were put on hold for the past year. As vaccines rolled out and pandemic-related restrictions lifted, people spent more time outside their homes with friends and family. They could even travel. This pent-up demand for pre-pandemic life likely played a big part in pulling people away from their screens.

The question, then, is whether people will continue to reduce their overall TV watching as they strive to return to normality. Maybe. But even then, streaming’s share of TV watching time is likely to grow. There was enough indication of that in Q2 beyond the Samba TV stat.

Signs of the longstanding streaming shift

• Roku’s account base grew by 28% year over year to hit 55.1 million active accounts.
• Vizio’s CTV account base grew by 43% year over year to reach 14 million active accounts, and its streaming hours increased by 22% year over year to total 3.5 billion hours.
• ViacomCBS added 6.5 million streaming subscribers in the quarter.
• Dish Network’s Sling TV streaming pay-TV service added 65,000 subscribers.
• Streaming pay-TV service FuboTV added 91,000 subscribers.

All of that is to say, streaming viewership has by no means plateaued. But streaming companies now find themselves pitted not only against one another but, once again, against the wider world outside people’s homes.

Numbers to know

15.5 million: Average number of people who watched NBC’s nightly primetime Olympics broadcast on TV or streaming, the Games’ lowest viewership since 1988.

$34 million: How much money ESPN reportedly paid per year for the rights to air 29 women’s college sports championships, including the women’s college basketball tournament.

$900 million: How much money ViacomCBS will pay for new episodes of “South Park” as well as movies based on the cartoon series.

23: How many Quibi shows Roku will premiere as Roku Originals on The Roku Channel on Aug. 13.

Trend watch: Production returns to pre-pandemic levels

In-person production seems to have returned to normal, at least according to one measure.

In the second quarter of 2021, the number of shoot days for TV, film and commercial projects in Los Angeles surpassed the mark for Q2 2019, according to the official Los Angeles area film office FilmLA.

Commercials came back quickly
Commercial productions have experienced the biggest bounce-back in the first half of 2021. The second quarter saw a 56% jump in commercial shoot days versus Q1 2021. That makes sense.

Commercials are typically shorter productions with smaller teams and often employ non-union members, which means productions don’t have to be so stringent about health and safety measures (though many commercial producers have said they are following industry-recommended guidelines for non-union shoots).

Reality TV shows really ramped up
On the TV front — which includes streaming shows — the number of shoot days increased 31% compared to Q1 2021, and drama and reality shows accounted for the bulk of that rise.

According to FilmLA, there wasn’t a big jump in shoot days for drama shows between the first and second quarters. But there was for reality TV shows: a 62% quarter-to-quarter surge.

That rise may owe to reality TV shows typically being more time- and cost-effective to produce. As vaccines rolled out and COVID restrictions lifted, TV networks and streaming services have looked to reality TV as a quick, cheap way to refill their short-term programming pipelines and hold audiences’ attentions. The shows can also help to hold audiences’ attentions while they wait for shows that are slower to turn around, like dramas, to debut later this year or next year.

What we’ve covered

YouTube’s creator fund for YouTube Shorts will not exclude videos posted to other platforms:

• While YouTube is requiring that videos be a creator’s own original work, they do not need to be exclusive to YouTube Shorts to be eligible for the YouTube Shorts Fund.
• YouTube is restricting against some types of repurposed videos as well as clips carrying other platforms’ watermarks.

Read more about YouTube Shorts here.

Roku’s revenue and audience grew in the second quarter, but streaming watch time dropped by 1 billion hours:

• Roku’s account base grew to 55.1 million active accounts in Q2 2021.
• However, streaming hours dropped from Q1 as people began to spend more time outside of their homes.

Read more about Roku here.

How Bleacher Report is using sneaker and fashion content to bring new advertisers into the fold:

• B/R recently debuted a sketch comedy oriented around sneaker culture.
• The publisher also airs a segment on corporate sibling TNT’s linear network that combines sports and fashion.

Read more about Bleacher Report here.

Why Triller hasn’t left the experimental phase with advertisers just yet:

• Triller has set its sights on live streaming to mimic traditional TV.
• But the app still needs to convince advertisers it can compete with TikTok.

Read more about Triller here.

What we’re reading

Major League Baseball weighs a bet on Barstool Sports:
Major League Baseball and Barstool Sports are discussing a potential deal to air some MLB games on the sports media outlet’s properties, according to the New York Post. Considering that tech and media giants like Amazon and Disney are most commonly cited as potential rights holders for major U.S. sports leagues, Barstool Sports comes out of left field (yes, pun). But the publisher has been building up a sports betting business, including its sale to Penn National Gaming, which could help MLB to hold on to fans and even expand its audience to those mildly interested in baseball but majorly interested in making money.

Hello Sunshine shows studios’ high valuations:
Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine has agreed to a sale valuing the studio behind “The Morning Show” and “Little Fires Everywhere” at more than seven times its revenue, according to The Information. Paired with Amazon’s planned acquisition of MGM — which values the latter studio at fives times its revenue — the deals indicate how expensive Hollywood’s content arms race has become.

Sony stands alone:
While studios like Hello Sunshine and MGM are being snatched up, Sony Pictures Entertainment has set itself apart as an independent studio without its own streaming service, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company is situating itself to profit from the competition among streaming owners by selling shows and movies to all of them, rather than tie itself to any single outfit or try to go it alone in the streaming wars. The risk, though, is the major streaming owners setting up their own content operations, which make less them interested in or dependent upon outside studios like Sony for programming.

Agency bosses everywhere are welcoming back their people with great fanfare after the seemingly endless hiatus necessitated by the Coronavirus — an excruciating year-and-a-half when Zoom took the place of the conference room and creative collaborations were relegated to emails and Slack. Despite the rising threat of the delta variant, doing business face-to-face is (cautiously) coming back, though not with a roar as we had all hoped. 

But there’s still plenty of excitement to be found, as the ad industry finally begins to return to normal.

“Coming back in after 16-and-a-half months of working virtually, this is a celebration,” said an animated Sojka, practically leaping through the screen during a Microsoft Teams call during which he bounded about Madwell’s 24,000-square-foot space (a onetime croissant factory), giving a tour of the newly completed digs and greeting coworkers along the way. “It’s important to celebrate the energy and creative collisions we’ve been missing,” he said. “I’m so psyched to be back in the office.”

About 30% of Madwell’s staff of more than 100 went in the first day. Sojka said the agency will be fully hybrid going forward, even as he personally plans to be in the office on a regular basis. “I find the energy of the people I work with to be inspirational,” said the CCO, who related that his employees, individually confided to him how happy they were to be back, too. “I want to be here — it’s the way my brain works,” he added. “I always felt a duty to come to the office — now it’s a luxury.”

Back in January, Sojka shared how he longed for the daily commute. “That moment in the morning where I could listen to music and let my mind wander as I prepared for a day of meetings and creative reviews turned out to be crucial to my output,” he said at the time. “It was also the mirror image of my trip home, where I was able to shift gears from a work mentality to that of being a partner and dog dad.” Now he can get back to that routine that so inspires him, and the same goes for his people.

Omaha, Nebraska-based agency Bailey Lauerman went so far as to cook up a full-blown creative campaign to welcome back its employees. 

The theme: space. 

The tagline: “From outer space to office space.” 

The brief: “For over a year we have been floating around in a distant universe. It’s time for our controlled meteoric return. Prepare for reentry.” 

An email message the agency sent to employees, read: “Omaha, we have some problems. Which printer is EAST when they stand north and south? Where do we keep the notepads? What day is food thrown out of the refrigerator? Where can we get a new dongle for our monitors? How do we book a conference room? And worst of all, the only flavor of LaCroix left is coconut. Sure reentering the office atmosphere is going to be a bumpy ride. Think you can handle it? We’ll see.”

A newly designed seating chart for the office was circulated. The campaign also featured social posts, posters and plenty of swag, including specially designed lunch bags, notepads, name badges and baseball caps, all sporting the space theme. 

“Since we spend our days communicating ideas through campaigns, it felt necessary to create one for an internal move this big,” said Aaron Jarosh, creative director at Bailey Lauerman, whose clients include Bosch and Phillips 66. “To us, 17 months apart is no small deal. We’re a tight-knit group. We wanted to let the staff know, using a lighthearted campaign idea, that it was OK if the experience felt awkward or bumpy at first.”

The staff was invited to return July 6. The agency is testing a 4-1 flex workweek over the summer for vaccinated staff, with Friday as a WFH day. Staff are required to have their temperature taken when they arrive each morning and must wear masks in common areas. Forty people work in the Omaha office, with remote staff dispersed across five states. 

“While our return to the office was voluntary, we knew it would take some getting used to,” said Jarosh. “We sensed that there might have been some hesitation or trepidation. We were hoping to replace any of those feelings with anticipation and excitement — and remind employees that we’d navigate our return together.”

Since its foundation in 2019, Vindex has worked primarily in the shadows, handling relatively mundane aspects of the esports event business such as ticketing and broadcast production. But last Friday, it stepped into the limelight with the opening of its first North American esports arena in Pearland, Texas, just outside Houston.

Indeed, Vindex might be the first company to go all in on the wide-ranging business of esports infrastructure. By founding or acquiring subsidiary firms, including logistics company Esports Engine, data consultancy Let’s Play and esports arena firm Belong Gaming, Vindex has gradually formed a consortium that works in tandem to grease the wheels of a complex esports event machine. So far, Vindex has provided logistical support to major esports leagues like the Overwatch League, the Call of Duty League and the League of Legends Championship Series, in addition to prominent one-off events such as the Fortnite World Cup and non-endemic activations such as gaming competitions at the X Games. 

Last week’s opening of the Houston-area Belong Arena showcased the benefits of Vindex’s multidisciplinary strategy. “We’ve gone into a completely different level because we have the support of Esports Engine,” said Belong CEO Martyn Gibbs. “When we launch here on Friday, there will be one or two of the Esports Engine team helping us manage and curate all of the tournament activities.” In other words, outside companies interested in running events at the arena don’t need to show up with any in-house expertise or prior esports experience: an expert team of event managers is baked in.

This holistic approach allows different branches of the company to support each other organically. Let’s Play, its in-house data consultancy, uses first-party data collected through event registrations and purchases to help streamline the company’s other services. “We want to turn Belong into the most badass offering by making decisions using sound quantitative results,” said Let’s Play head Matt Samuelowitz. “Same thing with Esports Engine — we are talking about ways to ensure that we have the optimal broadcast, whether that be the right talent, how often we’re showing scores and various data elements about the broadcast itself onscreen. We’re tracking all that stuff so we can create the best content.”

Still, bringing such a variety of events and services under a single umbrella has its challenges. As a vendor serving numerous esports leagues and events that are direct competitors, there is potential for Vindex to feel the friction as its obligations to these competitors deepen. 

According to DiGiovanni, Vindex’s low-key branding helps it downplay these tensions. “We’re white-label on these leagues,” DiGiovanni said. “It’s not the MLG days, it’s not branded Vindex — it’s not something that we’re monetizing on our own elsewhere. These leagues exist for as long as we can help make them successful.”

Though Vindex proudly serves the aforementioned major esports leagues, its offerings might be most beneficial to the smaller, less corporate companies active in the space. Esports leagues that lack the funds to rent multiple venues or hire their own event staff could delegate those responsibilities to Vindex in order to provide participants with a consistency of experience. “It definitely would have helped,” said Max Krchmar, the U.S. lead of Canadian esports organization Even Matchup Gaming and former head of Super Smash Bros. operations at Collegiate Starleague. “For that uniformity, if you’re running a league, you would definitely want some kind of similar or equal experience across the board.” 

The expansion of Belong Arenas also provides opportunities for esports organizations to partner with smaller, more local brands. “The pro esports teams that we’re linked with have been unbelievably supportive,” Gibbs said, “because they’ve gotten lots of local partnerships.”

And as the growth of esports and gaming shows no sign of slowing down and events become larger and increasingly unwieldy, more logistics companies are likely to crop up to jockey with Vindex for a share of this new market. But for now, Vindex stands alone in the esports infrastructure arena. “We want to create that grassroots community feel for gamers all over the country,” Sepso said. “And frankly, all over the world, eventually.”

“It might make sense to stick to topics instead of cohorts,” said Josh Karlin, Google’s tech lead manager of the Privacy Sandbox team in its Chrome browser division at a July 26 Internet Engineering Task Force meeting. A video of the meeting was published on YouTube and is embedded below.

During a 20-minute session, Karlin explained how an updated version of FLoC could enable interest-based ad targeting without cookies. To do so, the algorithmic system might generate topic-centric IDs associated with subject matter on websites people visit — think “performing arts” or “fitness” — as opposed to assigning an opaque numerical cohort ID, which Karlin said “was still hard to express and still hard to understand.” Despite the apparent incomprehensibility, FLoC’s original cohort-based approach raised some clear red flags among privacy advocates for how they could be used to identify people, and those fears turned out to be fairly well-founded.

“Nothing has been decided yet,” a Google spokesperson told Digiday regarding future versions of FLoC. The company concluded testing of the original iteration on July 13 and plans to incorporate feedback from the web community into future versions before launching updates for testing.

Adopting a topic-based approach could give advertisers, ad-tech firms, website publishers and people a clearer understanding of how ads are targeted through the technique. “Topics have a number of advantages over cohorts. Users can see what’s being said about them and understand it,” said Karlin. 

Though Karlin did not go into extensive detail on how the browser-based FloC process would change, he provided some clues:

• Google might assign a site topic based on a variety of interests reflected by the sites people visit in a given week.
• As opposed to choosing from thousands of cohort IDs, topics would be derived from a much-shorter list of publicly-available, standardized topics akin to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s content taxonomy. “Say, 256 topics as opposed to the roughly 30,000 cohorts,” Karlin said — which would make them less useful when connecting with other types of data in order to identify people.
• People may be able to opt themselves into or out of topics assigned to them.

In general, many observers and industry stakeholders are in the dark about the concept Karlin introduced at the meeting, and Google does not appear to have formally introduced the new topic-based concept to participants in the Worldwide Web Consortium forum where Google formally operates its Privacy Sandbox initiative. 

“It’s possible that the next version of FLoC will work much the same as the recent origin trial, except that they’ll use topics or keywords from the page instead of, or in addition to, domain names,” said Don Marti, vp of ecosystem innovation at CafeMedia, who keeps close tabs on Google’s Privacy Sandbox efforts. However, he said, “I don’t know anything about how the next release of FLoC will be different from the last one.”

FLoC facilitates fingerprinting 

The topic-centric approach Google is mulling, at least in part, is aimed at quelling privacy concerns. Karlin himself acknowledged that, by generating new data points, FLoC IDs could be used to enable fingerprinting techniques that piece together someone’s identity.

“FLoC adds new fingerprinting surface, and that’s true,” said Karlin. He said the topic-oriented update “can dramatically drop the usefulness of FLoC for cross-site fingerprinting.” He said the new approach could impede fingerprinting methods because it would reduce the number of “bits” of information or signals that might have been used to detect identity with the older version. Adding random topics to a site is another way an updated version of FLoC might mitigate fingerprinting capabilities, he said. 

“Google might be switching to a more topic-based ID, because I think the demand is there from advertisers to understand interest behavior, and it might deter companies from trying to enrich the cohort IDs themselves,” said John Goulding, U.S. head of strategy at MiQ, which builds tech and offers services to help agency and brand clients conduct programmatic ad campaigns. “This is a good thing because if publishers or ad tech companies had tried to ascribe interest behaviors to the old cohort IDs, that could have risked undermining the privacy protections of the whole framework,” he said.

The original FLoC approach came under fire from privacy advocates who argued that, instead of targeting ads in a way that safeguarded people’s privacy, it created new ways for companies to track and possibly even identify people. Throughout development of the technology’s original iteration, Google publicly pushed back on privacy-related criticisms, and said the firm would mitigate privacy infringements, for instance by removing correlations with sensitive website content categories.

But once the system’s cohort IDs began trickling into the digital ad ecosystem, ad agencies and tech firms began tinkering with them to see what they could learn, peeling away some of the system’s arguably privacy-preserving veneer. Digiday reported that identity tech providers expected to use cohort IDs to improve the accuracy of systems that detect people’s identities and that ad agencies and other tech providers were intercepting the IDs and analyzing how they could be used in conjunction with existing user profiles.

“We are always exploring options for how to make the Privacy Sandbox proposals more private while still supporting the free and open web,” said the Google spokesperson.

During his talk, Karlin added, “Ideas are still being evaluated; none of this is locked in. We plan to discuss these ideas in the open, refine them and test them to better understand their privacy [implications].”

“Members were telling us: ‘there’s a lot here to read [on the website and app], we can’t take advantage of all of it, we don’t know where to look,’” Bell said, referring to insights from member surveys Quartz conducted. About two-thirds of Quartz’s members are subscribers to its flagship newsletter, Daily Brief.

Quartz has 27,000 members and its membership base increased by 71% year-over-year, according to Bell. Memberships run $14.99 per month or $99.99 per year, according to its website. The company is on its way to generating over $3 million in subscription revenue by the end of 2021, Quartz previously told Digiday, though advertising is still its biggest source of revenue.

Overall, Quartz has 1.3 million total newsletter subscribers and has an average weekly email open rate of around 35% for both paying and non-paying readers, Bell said. Ads run in all of Quartz’s emails. Quartz declined to give revenue figures on newsletter advertising.

Quartz is one of many publishers investing in newsletters to acquire and retain paying readers. The Information launched a newsletter business in March 2021 and now has around seven. Free to read for now, Jessica Lessin, founder and editor-in-chief of The Information, said a subscription will be added to the newsletters “over time.” The New York Times sees its popular newsletter The Morning as a path to convert readers to subscribers.

Email newsletters are “typically the first step in getting someone to convert to a paying member or subscriber,” said Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of audience development and marketing firm Twenty-First Digital.

The new newsletters

Quartz now has a total of 11 newsletters, five of which are exclusive to members. The four new member-only newsletters are:

• “The Forecast,” which comes out on Mondays, looks at what’s to come for an emerging industry, technology or trend. 
• “The Company,” which comes out on Thursdays, focuses on the companies changing the way other businesses work, such as Coinbase and Discord. 
• On Fridays, “How To” suggests ways people can work more effectively as well as solve problems on issues, such as spending too much time on their phone or managing a company’s return to the office. 
• “The Weekend Brief” goes out on Saturday and analyzes the biggest news story of the week.

“How To” is brand new, but the other newsletters evolved from preexisting email products. The Forecast is a version of a newsletter that published a “concise set of insights” from Quartz’s Field Guides, or deep dives into topics, trends and industries. The Weekend Brief used to be free to access for all readers but is now member-only. 

The whole newsroom will be contributing to the newsletters, but member-only emails will mostly be written by one reporter. Quartz also just hired an associate membership editor, who will start later this month.

A ‘modern take on a weekly magazine’

When asked if she was worried about overwhelming members’ inboxes with Quartz emails, Bell said there “is always that danger.” However, this “forces you… to be really selective to what you bring attention to” in the newsletters. She likened Quartz’s emails to a “very modern take on a weekly magazine,” in terms of the curation and analysis that goes into them. And like a magazine, the newsletters don’t have “endless space,” so the newsletter team aims to keep the emails concise, insightful and useful for readers, Bell said.

Quartz is “simply responding to their users’ behavior,” Chowning said. “A publisher should never force a reader to get content on the publisher’s terms, but instead where the reader prefers to engage.” And because email is “much less likely” to be affected by algorithm changes by platforms, “establishing email as a primary benefit to a membership makes a lot of sense,” she said.

Later this fall, Quartz will offer another membership, around its Quartz Africa vertical. Quartz has a team in Kenya and Nigeria that already produces a Quartz Africa newsletter, which has about 100,000 subscribers, but soon members will also be able to sign up for a second Quartz Africa email focused on the startup scene and emerging businesses in the continent. Non-members can also sign up and pay specifically for that newsletter without getting a full membership to Quartz.