Month: May 2024

This is the second installment of Digiday’s two-part series on how publishers are optimizing revenue streams. The first installment focused on publishers’ subscriptions and events businesses.

After a volatile 2023 in which publishers’ revenues were less lucrative than expected and the media industry witnessed an ongoing cycle of layoffs, publishers are placing their bets on both traditional and alternative revenue streams in 2024. Digiday recently spoke with executives at Condé Nast, Forbes, The Atlantic, The Guardian and The Independent about their current revenue strategies. What follows are their thoughts on key revenue trends in the industry, including affiliate commerce, diversification of revenue streams and global business expansion.

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Horizon Media’s social content agency Blue Hour Studios and talent management platform Key are partnering to develop a talent platform called Swell Audience Network, Digiday has learned.

The Swell Audience Network aims to integrate data insights and help brands work with all different types talent, from celebrities to influencers, and manage their audiences programmatically. Increasingly, agencies and influencer agencies alike are building tools and partnerships in order to match brands and influencers — often using artificial intelligence and data-focused applications as a means to sort accurately through an expanding sea of options.

From the agency perspective, adding measurement injects a vital element to justifying their clients’ investments, including showing metrics like awareness or conversions, said Sarah Bachman, head of Blue Hour Studios, a Horizon affiliate formed in 2019.

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Chatbot assistants emerged last year as one of the first real applications of generative AI for marketers. Companies such as Ikea, Klarna, B&Q owner Kingfisher, Mastercard, Uber Eats and L’Oréal have each launched AI chatbots of one type or another.

What’s less clear, though, is what impact — if any — those assistants have actually had on sales.

Ikea made its “AI Assistant” available to the public three months ago via the OpenAI GPT store. According to Francesco Marzoni, the retailer’s chief data and analytics officer, it’s clocked 1,500 users a month. Twenty percent of those interactions have resulted in visits to the Ikea website, mostly to look at its outdoor furniture and sofa ranges. Five percent of those visits resulted in a transaction, he said.

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When a food influencer creates something new, it’s likely that the influencer will use more than one brand. Case in point: A recent recipe post (dill pickle chicken salad) from wellness food influencer @lainiecooks_ featured both Graza olive oil and Grillo pickles, with both brands tagged on Instagram in a paid partnership.

Food influencers aren’t the only ones who combine brand partnerships in their content. The same can be said for beauty influencers, for example when they post a Target haul or beauty routine, or fashion influencers, when they post summer outfit inspiration, or myriad other influencers in various niches. Marketers are increasingly recognizing the benefit of collaborating with other brands on influencer marketing efforts and are anecdotally more keen to do so this year, according to five influencer marketing executives.

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In ad tech, nothing is ever straightforward – not even the perennial snafus. What seemed like a clear case of an ad tech vendor being shady is actually a lot more layered. The ad tech vendor in question is the Colossus supply-side platform owned by Digital Holdings Group. 

According to ad transparency startup Adalytics, there were repeated instances of user IDs being misrepresented in its programmatic marketplace. Moreover, the altered ID information consistently mimicked cookie IDs that had attracted high bids from The Trade Desk, the DSP utilized by Adalytics in their analysis.

The implication being that this pattern of behavior looks a lot like fraud. 

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As a platform, X (formerly Twitter) has seen better days. After Elon Musk took over back in 2022, the platform has fallen from grace with advertisers and creators alike, due to the reinstatement of previously banned accounts, an increase in bots and simultaneous decrease in brand safety. However, X hasn’t managed to scare away everyone.

In fact, Jessica Davis, a part-time creator who focuses on career content, has managed to build out a following of more than 40,000 people since starting her account in 2021. Since then, she’s been able to convince subscribers and brands to shell out for her tweets, pulling in revenue from monthly subscriptions and funds from the platform’s ad revenue sharing program, which launched last summer.

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The New Yorker has refocused its newsletter strategy in an effort to retain its cohort of 1.2 million paid subscribers and grow its audience beyond that — by sending fewer emails.

Last August, The New Yorker began sending newsletters less frequently and giving paid subscribers early access to content in their inboxes. As a result, onsite page views and time spent from newsletter users has gone up, as has the percentage of newsletter subscribers who are also paying New Yorker subscribers, according to Jessanne Collins, The New Yorker’s director of newsletters. 

The New Yorker expanded the early access part of this strategy to its non-paid reader cohort by relaunching its Books & Fiction newsletter on May 12. People who get the free-to-read newsletter are the first to receive a new story on Sunday mornings from the latest magazine issue, which doesn’t go on sale until the following Monday — and paid subscribers will also get interviews with the author of the week.

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Amazon Advertising’s revenue neared $47 billion last year, up from 24% compared to 12 months earlier, with analysts suggesting its media earnings growth now outpaces Facebook and Google. 

An eMarketer forecast maintains the e-commerce giant’s advertising revenue will top $67 billion by 2025, and earlier this week at Amazon Publisher Services’ summit, it revealed new features (it hopes) will help its edge closer to that number. 

Here, APS announced several new features spanning its full product suite with updated features for the cleanroom offering it first unveiled in beta last year, topping the bill at its New York City earlier this month. 

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In a scorching statement, Scarlett Johansson claims that after she turned down an invitation to voice ChatGPT, OpenAI brazenly mimicked her distinctive tones anyway.

Come on. Rudy Giuliani had to know he’d get roasted for promoting his own coffee brand. Clearly, the hair dye jokes just write — and roast — themselves.