Month: May 2022

That confidence has been the foundation of her current role as creator inclusion lead at Pinterest, where she’s made it her mission to give voice and opportunity to marginalized creators in the burgeoning creator ecosystem. 

Diversity, equity and inclusion was important to Shifferaw because of her lived experience as a Black woman, she said. But she also wanted to pay it forward and support others like her in the marketing and advertising industry. Her work is to lower, if not eliminate, the barrier to entry that so many influencers face in connecting with brands and platforms. 

“My job is to make sure that underrepresented communities are being acknowledged and valued for the trends and the creativity that often end up driving culture, which is so important and can’t be overstated,” Shifferaw said. 

Shifferaw stepped into the role last September, taking over from Pinteret’s first-ever creator inclusion lead Alexandra Nikolajev, who carved out the position on the heels of 2020’s social justice movement and the pandemic. Nikolajev has since moved to become Pinterest’s senior lead of creator content and partnerships. 

While she’s been at it less than a year, Shifferaw’s efforts have been palpable at Pinterest. Her peers say she’s already hit the ground running, aiding to ramp up the social media company’s $1.2 million creator fund geared toward historically marginalized communities, as well as launch programming around Native American Heritage Month and Black History Month. She’s also had her hand in building Pinterest TV, the platform’s new live, shoppable video content hub that features creators on the app. 

“We’re really in the early stages of what Zeny’s impact will be,” said Tracey Johnsen, creator partnerships manager at Pinterest, adding that Shifferaw’s ability to combine her passion for equity and advocacy with her creator expertise makes her a “dynamite combination.” 

The two worked closely on the $1.2 million creator fund, which initially launched last April, originally granting $500,000 for participants as part of Pinterest’s recent push to amplify underrepresented creators and businesses. It has quickly become a creator-favorite, according to previous Digiday reporting. 

Over the last few years, Pinterest has doubled down on its efforts to woo creators via the creator fund, Creator Code and creator feedback channels. The platform is aiming to position itself as the underdog in the swelling creator and influencer economy. In the U.S., influencer marketing spend is expected to surpass $4 billion this year, up from the $3.69 billion last year, as reported by Insider Intelligence. 

Creating a seat at the proverbial table

Early in her career, Shifferaw realized the challenges she faced in terms of access and inclusion at an agency level reflected those that creators and influencers were experiencing in the budding influencer ecosystem. Last year, Digiday reported on the social platform’s efforts to cater to Black creators, who said the platforms needed to do more to amplify their voices, which often became cultural moments marketers were looking to tap into. 

But in those challenges, Shifferaw saw an opportunity to overhaul what representation and inclusion looks like for influencers and creators.

“At one point, I was responsible for determining what clients’ dollars were going to go to what influencer. I was in a place with power,” Shifferaw said. “Now, it’s my opportunity to build best practices so we can establish a more equitable way of working and make an impact in the industry.”

Before joining Pinterest, Shifferaw served as vp of culture community and casting at Day One Agency, a media and influencer agency based in New York. There, she partnered with leadership to carve out the agency’s DE&I initiative in 2019. She also led the team that launched a program called The Ones to Know, which was dedicated to discovering and highlighting creators from underrepresented communities and partnering them with brands. 

Since launch, Day One has identified and featured more than 500 underrepresented creators, working with many of them on client campaigns from Maserati to Nike to Ferrara candy to Walmart to American Express, according to CEO and Co-Founder, Josh Rosenberg. 

“She was our expert in how to ensure that our campaigns were inclusive and reflected diversity across all or most dimensions,” said Taslima Parvin-Kabir, Day One’s former director and head of talent development. “Everyone really valued her insight and feedback when it came to consulting with our clients and how they can inform their creative campaigns.”

The idea of having a seat at the proverbial table is one Shifferaw takes very seriously, she said. Although it may feel as though the issue of racial disparity in marketing and advertising is on people of color to solve, it is people of color’s responsibility to be in the room and then hold space for the person who comes after them. But it’s not something that comes without costs. 

Shifferaw said she has had moments that have challenged her enough to make her doubt the work she’s doing. She finds support in her network of friends and allies that build her up when she’s feeling depleted. 

“Any person that is part of a historically marginalized community, who works in I&D space, it can be very depleting because it’s relentless work, and changed behavior takes generations,” Shifferaw said. 

It’s the small wins that count for Shifferaw. When she hears her colleagues using terms like intersectionality after learning what that means, it’s what keeps her going. It may be slow progress, but it’s worth it, she said.

“This is one thing that we all should be holding hands and charging towards,” Shifferaw said. “If other folks within the industry are taking on that ambitious challenge as well, that helps all of us.”

The desire to create and build 

When she’s not working, creating space for underrepresented communities in the creator economy, Shifferaw can be found in her own community. 

She’s a runner, coffee snob and hopeful pet parent. Her family is from Ethiopia — meaning coffee is very important to her, she said. If she can’t make herself a good cappuccino, she’ll trek to a local coffee shop to eavesdrop and people watch. Most days, she works from her Harlem apartment. Other days, she goes into Pinterest’s New York City headquarters. 

Once she’s had her coffee, that’s when her day really gets started. She settles into a slew of meetings with creators or colleagues brainstorming how to make their bond a little stronger each day. 

It makes sense that Shifferaw has built her career on creating space and breaking molds in the marketing and advertising industry. Growing up, her father was an inventor named Tessema Dosho Shifferaw, who created what we know today as the Bowflex exercise machine, but has also patented a number of other things. 

On lunch dates, she’d see him flip over the receipt to scribble and sketch ideas on the back. “His brain was constantly thinking of new ideas,” she said. “I grew up in a very creative household.”

It’s in her blood and is something she’s carried with her to build new inclusive initiatives at each place of work. For now, there’s still an appetite to build and inspire, which she’ll do as long as she has the resources, she noted. “Part of it comes from the innate desire to want to create and want to build,” Shifferaw said. “I can’t do 3-D art, but I can put a strategy together.”

While this gives managers the flexibility to determine what hybrid schedule works best for their teams, the discrepancies among different teams under one company have the potential to leave employees feeling frustrated, with unequal expectations from their bosses.

“Having individual managers determine their department’s workplace location, versus a company-wide approach, could present problems. Namely, creating a workplace environment that leads to inequities — both real and perceived — as well as microcultures — both good and bad,” Kate Bullinger, CEO of management consultancy United Minds, said in an email.

Publishers’ team-specific policies

TheSkimm requires employees to come in three times a month but the specific days are coordinated with managers.

At Dow Jones, “RTO plans are still underway,” a spokesperson told Digiday last month. The company is “taking a team-driven, leader-led approach, assessing what flexibility and office use means for each business unit.”

At Dotdash Meredith, employees are encouraged to come in three days a week but “individuals and groups may have different arrangements,” according to an email CEO Neil Vogel sent to employees in March.

A Dotdash Meredith employee told Digiday that they are in a “privileged position” where their boss “doesn’t care” how often they come into the office. And while this provides “some leeway for me and others on the team,” it’s also “a huge problem,” according to the employee, who was granted anonymity, along with other media employees named elsewhere in this story, to speak freely. “It’s random to enjoy a perk because [employees like me] happen to have a boss that is more flexible than somebody else’s boss. It’s not an ideal situation,” they said.

Digiday spoke to an employee who is a member of the NBC Guild, which is affiliated with the NewsGuild of New York and represents digital news employees at NBC News. Employees in the union are not required to go into the office and can do so voluntarily, the employee said. 

But another NBC News employee who is not part of the union told Digiday they are going in two days a week of their choosing, due to their manager setting that policy.

“If our manager wants us in the office, we go into the office,” they said. “I don’t feel that emboldened or supported in raising the question of why. Managers just want you to follow the rules, and they may read it as a challenge to authority if I say: ‘I’m not comfortable with this,’” they said.

The pros

The advantages of this team-led approach are that employees can coordinate with their managers on a schedule that works best for the team, according to Bhushan Sethi, joint global people & organization leader at consulting firm PwC, which works with companies on return-to-office policies. Managers can also discuss with employees a specific concern or an accommodation that needs to be made based on their circumstances (such as if they are a caregiver, immunocompromised or concerned about their own safety, particularly given the latest string of subway shootings).

“Managers get to do what’s right for their teams,” Sethi said. Leaving hybrid work schedules in the hands of a manager “is good, to the extent that the manager is open, inclusive and empathetic. But when they are not those things, it can be a challenge,” he added.

The cons

The challenge is balancing out a manager’s preferences with their employees’ preferences, Sethi said. 

“If a manager feels it’s really important to collaborate and to innovate — and for new hires who haven’t worked in a workplace to get together — they may skew much more to asking employees to be in the office on set days,” he said. That might cause some friction with other employees in the same team, who may have hour-long commutes or childcare responsibilities.

Different policies for different teams can also cause problems. “That kind of inconsistency across different teams in the same company can be damaging — because obviously, people talk,” Sethi said.

How can media companies mitigate these issues? Communication and flexibility, Sethi said. Collecting data is also key, he added. Tracking how many people are coming into the office and how often and identifying trends among cohorts of employees are important for determining if certain groups of people are coming into the office or avoiding it. (It’s one of the reasons some publishers adopted hoteling software to be able to track employees’ office usage.)

While team-led approaches to office return policies can be flexible and give people more agency and choice over their working conditions, it’s also important that it doesn’t “increase inequity,” Sethi said.

“Where are you giving pay rises? Where are you giving promotions or opportunities like going to overseas conferences? What if they are only given to those in the office? Then it’s opportunity bias. You need to be incredibly transparent, analyze data and take corrective action when you need to,” Sethi said.

It’s not hard to see why: Nielsen’s struggles have brought into sharp focus how much legacy ratings’ models are stifling the media industry’s progress toward better forms of measurement. That’s frustrated marketers, many of whom are experimenting with all sorts of new ways to measure audiences better than Nielsen does. Ebiquity hopes to be one of those alternatives.

The pitch is straightforward enough: instead of just looking at cost and quality parameters of media, Ebiquity’s solution looks to track and measure cross-platform reach, attention, brand salience and creative efficacy — including TV. It does this by pulling in data from audience data companies Lumen, System1, Audience Project and TVision in the U.S.

Moreover, it has an Advanced TV solution. Similar to other services, the modular process is set squarely at trying to give advertisers a metric for incrementality. To do this, it measures campaigns that split new customers from those who would have already transacted with the brand even if they hadn’t seen the ad — an issue TV has wrestled for years.

“The changing dynamics of the U.S. TV market are supportive to our business,” said Nick Waters, CEO of Ebiquity. “As Nielsen fumbles and struggles in the U.S., there’s a vacuum opening up for players to enter.”

If successful and able to fill at least some of that space, Waters believes there’s an opportunity to sell other services to marketers, particularly those who are looking to revamp their approach to online measurement. In other words, the current furor over TV measurement becomes a hook to essentially up-sell marketers over time. That’s made it all the easier after the acquisition of MMI — a U.S-based media auditing firm — in March. The deal gave Ebiquity a team of 40 people across the country, serving major advertisers including GM, AT&T, Samsung and GEICO. Call it strategic opportunism.

“Currency and measurement are not mutually exclusive,” said Chris Kelly, CEO of analytics platform Upwave. 

Indeed, there are numerous media metrics that have been tracked for years — views, on-target views, clicks, site visits, store visits and sales to name a few. In channels like search, clicks are the currency, as measured by Google. Across digital media, views are the currency, as measured by ad server impressions. In TV, views have for decades been the currency, as measured by Nielsen GRPs.

“Why are we assuming the metric chosen to be the currency never changes?” questioned Kelly. ”Some advertisers already want to transact against on-target views, or clicks, or sales, etc.  So, in the future, they’ll clearly want to experiment with different currencies up and down the funnel.”

It speaks to the broader opportunity Ebiquity sees globally as a media performance and management company at a point where the world of media is in a seemingly perpetual state of upheaval. There’s a steady decline in the effectiveness of advertising as more dollars are poured into areas of the media mix that are, in many ways, unaccountable and wasted. That’s spurred senior marketers to reorganize their teams and find partners that actually change this dynamic and improve their marketing outcomes.

In 2020, Ebiquity made a series of moves, from acquisitions to a corporate-wide restructure, to capitalize on this opportunity. It’s still a work in progress, but the signs are promising, according to Waters. As a whole, the business is wired less around selling point solutions to marketers, and more about revenue development with them over a five-year horizon — gradually trading them up to various solutions. Of the more than 70 big advertisers it works with, there are 28 who are on that trajectory. The benefit of those deals came through last year when the company’s revenue grew 13% from the previous year. Global expansion was the other growth factor. Asia Pacific was its fastest-growing region at 23%, with the U.S. in second place at 15%.

It hasn’t all been upside. Operating efficiencies continue to be a struggle for Ebiquity. While certain aspects of those operations are partially automated, there’s still a lot of manual work that goes into standing them up, said Waters. It’s the main strategic reason behind Ebiquity’s acquisition of MediaPath Network earlier this year. It essentially does everything Ebiquity does in agency selection services, value tracking of media and the benchmarking of ad prices, but done via a highly automated technology platform.

“We’ve addressed deficiencies in the market around digital [for our clients] now looking to do the same for broadcast,” said Waters. “A partner like ourselves can help marketers really understand the value they’re getting in the marketplace. To do so, however, we have to do things differently, especially given the traditional approach to measuring TV has its shortcomings when it comes to the streaming world.”

Meanwhile, a number of industry luminaries, including Christian Muche (one of the architects of Dmexco, arguably the international trade show for ad tech), want to etch another date in adland’s collective calendar with a planned marketing conference to be hosted in Miami, Florida, during April next year.

A number of details have yet to be confirmed but several sources told Digiday the event series is ambitious in scale and has a number of influential industry backers, not least leaders within the trade organization founded as the Mobile Marketing Association, a.k.a. MMA Global.

Muche, who now holds the role of CEO and cofounder of Beyond Ordinary Events (the company that will launch and manage the event) and is no longer associated with Dmexco, declined to share the planned branding and venue of the event when quizzed by Digiday.

Such details of the gathering are in the final stages of confirmation with separate sources, who declined to be named given their employers’ PR policies, informing Digiday ambitions are on a scale that could see it rival tentpole events on the marketing calendar by attracting up to thousands of attendees.

Speaking further with Digiday, Muche hinted he will go public with the final details after Cannes Lions and said he intends to prove a point of differentiation to cater specifically to the wider marketing and media industry, especially given the reset after lockdowns across the world.

Beyond Ordinary Events

Beyond Ordinary Events has been garnering opinions on how to conjure a revitalized approach to live events in a manner (it hopes) will up-end the marketing industry’s existing milieu of tentpole conferences as well as hitting the fundraising trail.

According to a March 28 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company has raised $2.6 million in funding from 56 investors, a cohort that sources indicate includes a series of high-profile executives from the ad tech sector of the industry. Digiday was unable to confirm these names by press time although it was able to confirm that Greg Stuart, CEO of MMA Global, has been named as a director of Beyond Advertising.

Muche told Digiday, “It’s no longer a goal just to grow and become big in terms of numbers … that was fine for some time when I came up with the concept of Dmexco in 2008/09 that was a different time and it worked well.”

He further shared his opinion that marketers are likely to favor a different approach to scaled networking events compared to that of more product-driven conferences such as the Consumer Electronics Show or Mobile World Congress — both of which regularly attract a sizeable ad tech contingent.

“I think putting hundreds, if not thousands of exhibitors into a boring convention center, its time is over,” he said. “Saying I have 50,000 or 100,000 delegates doesn’t say anything about the quality… I do not believe in this currency anymore.”

Industry gatherings, post-pandemic?

The planned April 2023 conference was telegraphed on stage by Terence Kawaja, CEO of investment bank LUMA Partners, during its Digital Media Summit last week with sources hinting that event organizers are currently trying to broker potential partnerships, including sponsorship opportunities.

The hiatus in live networking events, especially those on the scale of CES, Dmexco, or MWC prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the need to rethink how such gatherings can help marketers achieve their professional objectives, not to mention justify budget allocation.

“Leadership are not just attracted by numbers anymore,” said Muche adding that if event organizers can facilitate key drivers of growth such as business leads through networking opportunities or educational content, “then it will grow organically … I believe in a boutique-orientated concept at scale.”

Data from Splash indicates a latent demand for in-person networking opportunities with a recent poll forecasting a 30% year-on-year leap in attendance at trade shows between 2021 and 2022 with almost a third of respondents reporting “Zoom fatigue.”

Meanwhile, several sources approached for comment by Digiday noted that while the conference and event schedule is congested, there is scope for an additional scaled conference in the Americas. This is especially the case now that many perceive Dmexco, an event hosted in Cologne, Germany, as returning to its local roots following a two-year absence of scaled international representation, according to some.

Shara Ogg, vp of marketing at Canela Media, a company that aims to help brands engage with Hispanic audiences, told Digiday there is scope for an additional scaled marketing conference in the U.S., as long as it employs a degree of post-pandemic ingenuity to engage advertisers.

“When investing, we expect at least some platform for discussion beyond the presentation,” she said, adding that anything that can help delegates “reap the greatest benefit from interactivity” and meet their business objectives “while people are in the room” is crucial.

Meanwhile, Johanna Bauman, CMO at PubMatic, a publicly-listed ad tech company, said such conferences have to demonstrate how they can help teams such as hers to reach audiences they wouldn’t normally be able to.

“We work in an industry rife with disruption and innovation, and we should hold ourselves to the same standards,” she added. “It all comes back to value; there needs to be a clear reason for the event to exist and for companies to participate, sponsor, and otherwise prioritize investment.”

Additionally, Justine Frostad, vp of marketing at Cognitiv, an ad tech company that helps advertisers develop custom algorithms to improve their online ad placements, noted that executives in charge of marketing budgets are willing to invest in new marketing opportunities, such as a debut conference series, even if the wider economic outlook currently looks uncertain.

“No matter what the state of the economy, we’re always willing to work with partners on the event side,” she said. “Provided they’re collaborative, creative and flexible, especially as we all deal with these unprecedented times.” 

“So, if attendance ends up being low because of Covid or some unavoidable health issue, or whatever, you need to know they’ll still work with you so you’ll see impact from a branding or lead-gen side either through a makegood or something.”

The state of the media market

The key hits:

• Digital subscriptions are no longer in a slump for some news publishers. 
• However, digital ad revenues are starting to sag, especially on the programmatic end.
• Commerce businesses are also taking a hit as audiences change shopping habits from online to in-person.

After the first quarter of 2022, publishers have a lot to consider when it comes to maintaining the health of their businesses. 

From the earnings reports of BuzzFeed, Future, Gannett, IAC’s Dotdash Meredith, NewsCorp’s Dow Jones and The New York Times, it’s clear that the advertising economy is already starting to slow, be it from an impending recession or major world events like the Russian-Ukrainian war. And with audiences changing everything from reading behaviors to shopping behaviors, commerce isn’t as lucrative a business as it once might have been.

Overall, revenue was up in the latest earning reports:

• BuzzFeed’s total revenue increased by 26% to $91.6 million in Q1 2022 compared to the first quarter of 2021.
• Future’s total revenue increased by 48% to £404.3 million ($508.4 million) in H1 2022 from £272.6m ($342.8 million) in H1 2021. 
• Gannett’s total revenue decreased 3.7% to $748.1 million in Q1 2022 compared to the first quarter of 2021.
• Dotdash Meredith’s total revenue reached $500.5 million in the first quarter of 2022, compared to $65.4 million in Q1 2021, a 765% increase due primarily to the acquisition of Meredith. 
• Dow Jones’ total revenue grew by 16% in the third quarter of its 2022 fiscal year from the same quarter in 2021, increasing from $421 million to $487 million. 
• The New York Times’ total revenue increased by 14% year over year to $537.4 million in Q1 2022.

But by the looks of it, publishing executives are bracing themselves to just get through 2022, with hopes that these slight dips and slow downs in revenue are only temporary adjustments to a pseudo post-COVID world. 

“We remain more focused on 2023 and beyond and will continue to make the changes and take the charges necessary to set up a cleaner and clearer future for the business,” wrote Joey Levin, CEO of Dotdash Meredith parent IAC in the holding company’s Q1 2022 shareholder letter from May 9. – Kayleigh Barber

Digital advertising revenue hits a rough patch

The New York Times’ first quarter earnings revealed the possibility of a less than desirable digital advertising landscape emerging. The company’s digital advertising business fell “below our expectations,” according to CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, despite digital advertising revenue increasing 13% year over year to $67 million, according to its Q1 2022 earnings release published on May 4. 

The Times, however, was not the only publisher to be slightly displeased with the digital advertising results of the first quarter.

“In 2021, there was the seasonal uplift that everybody saw in terms of advertising CPMs across the market. And so we are seeing a softening of those CPMs across the programmatic space,” BuzzFeed CFO Felicia DellaFortuna said during the company’s first quarter earnings call.

Still, BuzzFeed, too, saw an increase in advertising revenue from the first quarter 2021 to the first quarter of 2022. Its earnings report stated the advertising business grew 26% year over year to $48.7 million, though much of BuzzFeed Inc.’s growth was attributed to the acquisition of Complex Networks, which closed in December 2021. Meanwhile, ad revenue earned on third-party platforms was lower year over year, due to audiences preferring other platforms in recent months that do not share ad revenue with publishers, such as TikTok over Facebook, DellaFortuna said during the call.

IAC’s Dotdash Meredith actually did see a decline year–over-year in digital advertising revenue when looking at the pro forma revenue figures that adjusts Dotdash’s revenue from the first quarter of 2021 to reflect if the Meredith acquisition had been in effect during that time.

Digital advertising pro forma revenue — i.e. when including Meredith’s pre-acquisition revenue for an apples-to-apples comparison with the post-acquisition amount — saw a 3% decrease from $222.2 million in first quarter 2021 to $216.2 million in first quarter 2022. This was attributed to “lower traffic to our sites compared to prior year COVID traffic highs, impacting both display advertising and performance marketing revenue” as well as “multiple macro headwinds (e.g., Omicron, supply chain, Ukraine) impacting the display advertising environment and rolling out the Dotdash playbook on the Meredith properties including content remediation and reduced monetization,” according to the company’s earnings report.

Commerce isn’t what it used to be

Aside from advertising, commerce is a culprit for why publishers experienced a soft first quarter of 2022.

BuzzFeed is one of the few public publishers that reports out commerce as a singular revenue stream in its earnings reports. From the first quarter of 2021 to 2022, commerce revenues declined 27% year over year to $10.6 million, which the company’s CFO Felicia DellaFortuna said was an “expected” drop compared to how robust e-commerce was during the height of the pandemic.

IAC’s CEO Joey Levin also put some blame for the first quarter’s less-than-desirable digital revenue performance on reader’s migration away from online shopping. “The digital revenue decline in Q1 2022 was driven by a combination of the prior year’s unusual COVID-related behavior (many people spent Q1 2021 at home with their devices shopping online) and the changes we’ve made to the business that reduce short-term revenue,” he said.

But BuzzFeed is also claiming that where audiences do spend their time online has changed, impacting the largest pipeline that puts commerce content in front of readers — Facebook.

“The majority of audience traffic to our commerce content is generated through Facebook [and] as a result, our commerce revenues were also impacted by the shift in audience consumption patterns,” DellaFortuna said, adding that time spent on BuzzFeed Inc.’s content has declined 4% year over year during the first quarter due to declines on third-party platforms because audiences “continue to favor short-form vertical video formats such as TikTok and Reels.” 

Meanwhile, Future, which owns several brands focused on deals, product comparisons and reviews like Tom’s Guide and Thrifter, reported a 10% decrease in organic year over year affiliate revenue from H1 2021 to H1 2022, according to the company’s H1 2022 earnings report. As a company that was also very active in the M&A space, the organic growth measurement excludes acquisitions and disposals made during the reported period to show a clearer year-to-year comparison of performance. 

With the addition of the new acquisitions, this business increased by 63% from £85.2 million ($107.1 million) to £138.8 million ($174.5 million) year over year, making it the largest portion of revenue at Future, according to the report. 

Like BuzzFeed and Dotdash Meredith, Future’s report attributed the decrease in organic affiliate revenue to a natural slowdown from the bump in online shopping that occurred earlier in the pandemic. What’s particularly interesting about the organic decrease is that H1 of Future’s fiscal year included Q4 2021, typically the strongest period for commerce.

Creators are a golden ticket for dealing with platforms 

Noting audiences are continually favoring short-form and vertical video platforms, like TikTok and Reels, BuzzFeed Inc. has restructured its creators program to encompass both BuzzFeed and Complex Networks. 

Called Catalyst, the new creator program is one of three strategic focuses that CEO and founder Jonah Peretti said during the company’s earnings call was responsible for increasing the company’s revenue year over year by 26% in the first quarter to $91.6 million.

Catalyst also ties into the company’s other initiative, UpShots, which produces vertical video for advertisers to use on third-party platforms that can feature one of the program’s more than 100 creators.

Subscriptions are a news publisher’s best friend

Advertising and commerce are struggling, but news publishers like the Times, Gannett and News Corp.’s Dow Jones saw digital subscriber bases increase by double digit percentages year over year.

Dow Jones’ circulation and subscription revenues increased by 15%, or $48 million, from the publisher’s third quarter of fiscal year 2021 to the same period 2022, which runs Jan. 1 through March 31. The Wall Street Journal’s total subscriptions grew by 10% compared to the prior year, to more than 3.7 million average subscriptions in the quarter, and digital-only subscriptions to the news site grew 16% to more than 3 million average subscriptions in the quarter, representing 82% of total Wall Street Journal subscriptions, according to NewsCorp.’s earnings report. 

Gannett’s digital-only circulation revenues increased by almost 30% compared to the same quarter a year prior ending March with 1.75 million digital-only subscribers, a 44% increase in total subscriptions from the first quarter of 2021. This growth comes less than a year after the publisher launched the paywall for its largest brand, USA Today.

And finally, the Times’ acquisition of The Athletic historically helped the publisher complete its 2025 goal three years early of having 10 million subscriptions, but the first quarter of 2022 is already seeing additional growth in this business, including doubling its subscriber conversion rates year over year. Digital-only subscription revenue was up 26% year over year to $226.8 million, with total digital-only paid subscribers to the Times reaching 8.3 million, up from 6.8 million in Q4 2021, according to its earnings report.

What we’ve heard

“You need more personalities to pull people in these days. You look at the site today and you’ll see there are headshots of the columnists — that’s new.”

— Bloomberg News senior executive editor David Merritt

Numbers to know

15%: Percentage share of Outside Inc.’s employees that the publisher plans to lay off as it eliminates some titles and reduces the printing of others.

~$150 million: How much money SiriusXM will pay to acquire Conan O’Brien’s podcast company Team Coco.

33.5%: Percentage share of Google’s U.S. employees who are women.

10%: Percentage share of The Atlantic’s total revenue this year that will come from its special projects unit Atlantic Ventures, which has a remit that spans editorial projects to physical events to book publishing.

7 million: Number of registered users that Telegraph Media has, nearing its goal of 10 million by the end of 2023.

What we’ve covered

Inside Bloomberg Media’s regional expansion plan into an economically uncertain U.K.:

• Bloomberg is broadening its efforts to reach British audiences interested in business and finance.
• The publisher has hired several high-profile senior journalists to bolster its output for U.K. readers.

Read more about Bloomberg Media’s U.K. expansion here.

Future plc’s Jason Webby says U.K. publisher wants to be a dominant player in the U.S.:

• Future has acquired eight companies since Webby joined as CRO for North America two years ago.
• The acquisitions have helped to diversify the publisher’s advertiser base, opened cross-selling opportunities and expanded its first-party database.

Listen to the latest Digiday Podcast episode here.

Podcasters are pitching longer, more lucrative ads, but ad buyers prefer shorter, cheaper spots:

• Pod Digital Media, Slate and Vox Media are selling branded segments that exceed 60 seconds in length.
• Ad buyers see the longer ads as less cost-effective than traditional podcast ad slots.

Read more about podcast ad pitches here.

How Vox Media’s branded content studio is working to integrate its podcast ad capabilities post-merger:

• Vox Media’s and Group Nine’s respective branded content studios had little overlap among key advertisers.
• The Group Nine Brand Shop was heavily focused on social, whereas Vox Creative specialized in premium storytelling and utility-driven content.

Read more about Vox Creative here.

What we’re reading

BuzzFeed’s news dump:
Now-public BuzzFeed’s pressure on BuzzFeed News to turn a profit has resulted in the disbanding of the news org’s investigative unit, which ended with a run of solid stories this year, according to Vanity Fair.

Media’s diverse leaders:
The media industry is still addressing its historical lack of diversity, but major publishers and TV news organizations have diversified their highest ranks in recent years, which is having a trickle-down effect, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Campbell Brown’s new role:
Meta’s vp of news partnerships Campbell Brown has been tapped to expand her purview by adding oversight of the company’s work with TV networks, streaming services, digital publishers, film studios and sports leagues in addition to news outlets, according to Axios.

Congress’s duopoly divvy-up:
A mix of Democrat and Republican senators have introduced a bill that would require Google and Meta to spin off parts of their respective advertising businesses, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Publishers’ 4-week subscriptions:
Of the 50 biggest U.S. publishers, only 20% bill subscriptions on a four-week basis versus a calendar-month basis, according to Toolkits. The four-week billing cycle would be more lucrative for publishers because it adds up to one extra payment per year versus the monthly cycle, but the extra payment risks subscribers reconsidering whether a publication is worth the added price.