Data-Labor-Technology

The week before, the Local Media Consortium, a trade group that represents local publishers including The Dallas Morning News and the Philadelphia Inquirer, announced it was launching the Matchup, a program that would give local news publisher subscribers unlimited access to sports content written not only by their local publication, but by other participating publishers.

And in the pages of Columbia Journalism Review and Nieman Journalism Lab, two separate opinion pieces published in the final week of July made a case for bundling, particularly to support embattled local news publishers.

While bundles in media remain few and far between — Michael Silberman, svp of strategy at Piano, a subscription technology provider, said only three of Piano’s 300 clients had sought to build or launch any bundles in the past year — the reaction to those headlines suggest there is a lot of pent-up desire among publishers to do more bundling.

“The amount of outreach of people saying, ‘I’d do that in a heartbeat,’ was kind of insane,” said Tony Haile, the CEO of Scroll whose piece in CJR described how bundles could help local news publishers compete against The New York Times.  

But bundles still present a host of hurdles that can be hard for smaller publishers to clear. Bundles require the attention of a publisher’s development, audience, marketing and revenue teams, and just figuring out which people across organizations need to coordinate with one another can take months the first few times a publisher attempts to build a bundle, said Lindsay Horrigan, global head of subscriptions and consumer marketing of Bloomberg Media.

Figuring out the revenue splits, marketing commitments, and the technological side can make things still more complicated.

That learning curve only needs to be climbed once. Horrigan said Bloomberg, which has launched three different bundles in the past eight months, now has the infrastructure needed to build bundle partnerships more quickly now than when it started, and plans to use them to explore more ways to attract incremental customers and better retain its existing ones.

“There are so many cool things we could do,” Horrigan said. “It’s cool to think about what a membership to Bloomberg Media looks like…but you have to be thoughtful about it.”

But with more publishers than ever operating with limited resources, the likelihood of a quick proliferation of bundles seems low.

“There’s this interesting challenge right now, where there’s this combination of low capacity combined with ‘Please let’s not fuck this up,’” said Haile, referring to the recent bump in subscriptions several publishers have seen in the past few months. “Even if they can see the natural limits of the strategy.”

Publishers have been experimenting with different kinds of bundles for years. In addition to large, Spotify-esque ventures such as Texture (now Apple News+), Readly or Inkl, which roll dozens of publications up into a single paid app, publishers have been seeking out one-on-one deals with complementary products.

About two years ago, Scribd and The New York Times launched a bundle that offered access to both their products for $12.99 per month. Both parties renewed the partnership, though neither shared details about its performance. (Digiday Media got in on the fun, too: Late last year, this publication partnered with Business Insider on a bundle that offered BI Prime and Digiday+ to customers)

Not all of these experiments are long-term, or pan out. A bundle Bloomberg Media and The Information announced in February, for example, has already been unwound.

In some cases, the bundles and partnerships can be deployed purely for their marketing value. A partnership between Bloomberg and American Express would give Amex cardholders rebates if they used their cards to pay for Bloomberg subscriptions at any time between July and the end of 2020.

But few publishers have the luxury of deploying all those resources for marketing purposes.

“When I ask my publisher in Dallas what it would take to
make this worth his while, he said if we sold an additional 50,000 a year in
subs, he’d consider it worthwhile,” said Mike Orren, the chief product officer
of the Dallas Morning News and one of the driving forces behind The Matchup.

If all goes according to plan, The Matchup could cruise past that. The sites participating attract a combined 78 million monthly unique visitors, according to Comscore, which would make it the third-largest sports media property in the United States behind only ESPN and Yahoo Sports.

If The Matchup managed to convert 3% of its audience into paying subscribers, that could mean a total of over 2.3 million subscribers for its participating publishers, or close to four times as many subscribers as The Athletic had last year.

“I think the Matchup is a Trojan horse,” Orren said.

Still, these opportunities are few and far between, and the subscriptions would be spread out unevenly across the sites participating in the Matchup bundle; subscriptions go to the publisher that covers the teams a customer follows. But the incremental revenue, plus the proof that bundling can be good for media companies, could go a long way to opening the door up to further arrangements.

Those subsequent partnerships might not be confined to content, either. Publishers such as TechCrunch have identified perks and discounts as a key opportunity for subscriber retention as well as acquisition.

“You’ll start to see some of those tactics employed in the content and media space,” Horrigan said. “The people who have an audience that care about them, grow them, nurture them, are going to be successful.”

There’s a cliche that tech industry founders are bent on reckless growth all because their aggressive entrepreneurial tendencies weren’t tempered by any college coursework in the humanities.

But Craig Newmark, who founded the eponymous Craigslist in 1995, learned some useful lessons in sociology even before he got to college.

“In the 1970s, my high school U.S. history and civics teacher taught us about the importance of a free press,” Newmark said on the Digiday Podcast. “A trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy.”

Newmark has gone on to donate millions to journalistic programs and schools via Craig Newmark Philanthropies. His beneficiaries include the Poynter Institute, NPR, Consumer Reports and two journalism schools in New York City — those at Columbia and the City University of New York (the latter of which changed its name to The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York its name in his honor).

Dollars go a long way, but Newmark says he also helps generate conversations within his network, especially among “frenemies” working against the same big issues like cybersecurity or the online harassment of women (especially journalists).

Or, for that matter, disinformation (it’s no coincidence that he created his philanthropic foundation in 2016 when Russia tampered with the U.S. Presidential election). Beyond supporting high quality news, Newmark has taken an active role against bogus political information, “particularly disinformation regarding voting by mail,” Newmark said. “And so I’m working with people in journalism, people who are the experts in voting, I’m helping them fight back and to take the battle to the enemy.”

Social media giants are partly to blame, according to Newmark, even as they’ve tightened their speech regulations and political policies in recent months. “The social media platform[s] know who the bad actors are. They know who the foreign adversaries are, they know who their domestic allies are,” Newmark said. “They should take action against all of them.”

But what about Newmark’s own career, as the IBM programmer who went on to create a free digital version of the classifieds that ate into a traditional (and lucrative) preserve of local newspapers?

“Newspaper revenue [declined] starting in the early ’50s. It went down precipitously in 2008 and 2009 when the big guys started getting things done. And that’s about it. I asked [economists] to show me what blip I could see due to Craigslist, and they couldn’t show me one. I mean, my instincts tell me Craigslist must have had some effect, but the economists have not been able to show me one,” Newmark said.

Here are highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

Creating peace among frenemies

“I don’t know journalism the way a professional journalist does. What I do know is that we need people talking about the good work that they’re doing. Because sometimes people doing good work in the same field view each other as frenemies. I put a lot of energy into getting people to talk with each other in two related areas: One has to do with counter-harassment work. Harassment online is a really big problem. Harassment of women journalists is an enormous problem and it’s gotten very vicious in the last three months towards the U.S. election. I’ve reminded the team I’m working with that we need to work faster, getting more people together, and to get loud about it and work on some means by which people can let harasser-types know that that’s no longer OK. [The other is] cybersecurity, which for me is part of overall information warfare. I’m telling a group of people working on the safety of Internet of things that they [should] talk to each other and work faster.”

Social media platforms have more to do

“I think the big guys [Google and Facebook] should be doing more to help journalism. But first things first, given the crisis this year, I think they need to … discourage disinformation operating from their sites. Combating disinformation is really hard, except when there are frequent abusers of information, then they make themselves very obvious. Maybe you could do something about that in a manner which is fair to everyone. I’d encourage the social media giants to do the easy stuff, to do what their own people are telling them they want, and then to be prepared to take a certain amount of heat. I can tell you it’s no fun to take that heat, especially if you’re subject to disinformation or even dirty tricks. But right now the country’s survival relies on the social media giants to stand up and do the right thing.”

‘Take the battle to the enemy’

“There are two main areas of concern right now. One is that we have to ensure that voting mechanisms are in place. And that means absentee voting or vote-by-mail. That needs to be a thing, particularly in the time of a pandemic, but [also] in general, for a lot of people getting to a polling place where the lines may be very long. We need good vote by mail and we need good vote in person, which means enlisting a lot of younger poll workers. That’s one focus. The other is … foreign adversaries and the people in America helping [them] are conducting active disinformation warfare — particularly disinformation regarding voting by mail. So I’m working with people in journalism and experts in voting and helping them fight back and to take the battle to the enemy.”

“Crucially, the fact Channel 4s inventory will be available through more demand-side platforms like the Trade Desk and Adobe is a big step forward and means that the broadcaster can now start to compete with established premium online video players,” said Lawrence Dodds, client director at agency Universal McCann.

In order to maximize the money made from those auctions, the broadcaster has set its sights on guaranteed deals. This means advertisers agree to buy a fixed number of impressions from Channel 4, which then agrees to deliver them for a guaranteed price. The broadcaster has the security that comes with knowing its inventory is sold at an agreed-upon price, while the advertiser knows the exact amount of impressions they will get instead of bidding on impressions in the hope that they win them all.  

“For the first time, programmatic buyers will be able to buy our premium video-on-demand audience alongside their normal video buys,” said David Amodio, deputy head of digital and innovation at Channel 4. “The ambition, which is backed by what we’re already hearing from the market, is that we’ll get briefs that we couldn’t access before like digital and pure programmatic budgets globally. Frankly, we’ve not serviced that part of the agency business before.” 

Channel 4’s pivot to programmatic could help shore up its business against the growth of streaming services like Netlfix and Disney+. By the end of June and with lockdown easing, the amount of time viewers spent watching traditional broadcasts fell 44 minutes to three hours and two minutes per day, according to media regulator Ofcom. Subscription services, however, retained almost three-quarters of the extra viewing they had accrued over lockdown. With the battle for that attention intensifying, Channel 4 believes its own gains over the last two months could make it more appealing to programmatic advertisers. 

“Our latest stats show that our viewing is up 54% on All 4 on the first 12 weeks of lockdown,” said Amodio. “That growth is coming from connected TVs and other big screens where around 70% of our impressions are delivered.”

The response to that growth has been encouraging so far. 

Procter & Gamble is the first advertiser to buy Channel 4’s programmatic ads, while there are a “couple of campaigns” to follow, said Amodio, who declined to share any further detail on them.

Some of those advertisers see Channel 4’s inventory as a way to reach more people who are watching the same TV at the same time, while others see it as a way to extend the reach of larger campaigns. Eventually, the broadcaster expects to see more of that interest come from the small businesses and DTC advertisers that prop up the ad businesses of Facebook and Google. As Amodio explained: “That [small and mid-size enterprises] feels like the obvious place to grow our business. We see some money from SMEs, but not as much as we’d like to so it’s our long-term ambition to grow in that area.” 

Those opportunities could crystalize over the coming months, particularly as programmatic spending starts to recover from its coronavirus-induced slide.Indeed, The Trade Desk expects connected TV spending will more than double the third quarter’s growth rate to around 80% on the previous quarter. As advertisers redirect spending from national, one-size-fits-all campaigns toward more targeted impression-based alternatives, ad-funded streaming services are looking more attractive.

“The use of planning tools in DSPs such as those on the Trade Desk platform are becoming an important part of the media planning process,” said Dodds.

Despite the apparent demand for its programmatic ads, Channel 4 won’t rush to capitalize on it as evidenced by the way it’s working with ad tech vendors. 

Where other media owners sell ads through multiple ad tech vendors, Channel 4 is sticking with Freewheel for now. While more ad tech vendors selling auctions to more advertisers drives up the competition, there are trade-offs like those that push for higher margins. Furthermore, more ad tech vendors mean more relationships to manage, which can be costly and time-consuming. 

“It’s something we’ve thought about, but we’re not ready to have more supply-side platforms like Freewheel,” said Amodio. “At the moment we just want to get the programmatic business up and running. We take an agnostic approach to ad tech and wherever there’s commercial growth — then that’s when we’ll look to expand.”