Digiday by Jessica Davies October 1, 2019 Germany’s Burda Media has been on an ad-culling mission, cutting a quarter of ad impressions across the eight sites in its digital portfolio. The impact: Digital ad revenues rose slowly back up, with an average 38% year-on-year lift recorded across all its titles in 2018. Its flagship news title Focus Online now has over 23 million monthly unique users, up from 17 million in 2016, according to Germany’s Comscore equivalent AGOF. Meanwhile, digital ad revenues crept up each year, peaking at 44% in 2018 compared to the previous year. The publisher wouldn’t reveal hard revenue figures,

AAIND August 27, 2019 The renewed interest of the subscription revenue model has turned heads in the digital publishing industry. Some publishers have found success in pivoting to this revenue model. However, thousands of other publishers are wondering if subscriptions are realistic options for them. While the ad revenue model has been the historical gold standard, dominance from the major platforms and a lack of transparency across the ecosystem has forced many publishers scrambling. So, is one model really better than the other? Or can these models coexist? Think about any digital subscription service you are currently paying for, right now. What is

What's New In Publishing August 22, 2019 About a year ago, Google announced ‘Subscribe with Google’—a simple way to subscribe to news publications and maintain access everywhere: websites, apps, even search results. ‘Subscribe with Google’, according to the company, is “designed to help publishers drive conversions and engage existing subscribers across Google and the web.” How does it work? “Subscribe with Google lets you buy a subscription, using your Google account, on participating news sites,” the company explained. “Select the publisher offer you’d like to buy, click “Subscribe,” and you’re done. You’ll automatically be signed in to the site, and you can pay–securely and privately—with any credit card

Publishing Insider August 12, 2019 Facebook Inc.’s reported plans to pay news publishers millions of dollars for the rights to publish their articles in a “News” tab on its social network won’t help most publications. If anything, it will give people another reason to keep using Facebook while avoiding publishers’ websites and mobile apps. The social network's planned news section also gives Facebook greater control over how news is presented, diminishing the brands of media outlets. I’m basing this assertion on my experience as a subscriber of online news sites and aggregation services like Apple News+, which Apple Inc. launched in March as a digital

Marketing Dive July 24, 2019 Dive Brief: Staples launched a quarterly magazine for sparking conversation and provide resources for professionals who see their work "as more than just a job," according to a press release. Called Staples Worklife, the publication is a component of the company's new branding as "The Worklife Fulfillment Company." The print and digital magazine, which launches with a circulation of 250,000, is part of a larger campaign that also includes a Staples Worklife podcast, e-newsletter, live events and a digital community. The first issue includes an interview with author Daniel Pink about motivation mistakes and how to correct them, an

AAIND July 9, 2019 The newspaper industry in Canada is a little bit smaller this month. That’s because 79 people at the Globe and Mail are taking buyouts, with more than half in the editorial department, according to a tweet by health writer André Picard. It’s a result of a voluntary severance program announced in May to try to save about $10 million annually. One of those who’s left the Globe and Mail is former foreign correspondent Stephanie Nolen. She impressed her peers with her coverage in Africa, India, and South America. “Parting PSA: pay for journalism,” Nolen tweeted. “The good stuff, the stuff that will help save humankind, doesn’t come free.” The Globe and Mail was founded in 1844

Cosmos Magazine July 3, 2019 In the mid-1400s, German inventor Johannes Gutenberg began producing books on his new printing press, using moveable cast metal type, and the world changed. Previously, monks might take a week to copy just a few pages in a scriptorium. Gutenberg’s print shop could run off hundreds of copies of an entire book in the same time, as Geoffrey Moorhouse noted in The Guardian in 2002, while reviewing John Man's book The Gutenberg Revolution: How Printing Changed the Course of History. Within a decade or so of Gutenberg's death on 3 February 1468, Moorhouse writes, “no fewer than 122 towns across Europe had printing presses. By the

Folio by Greg Dool May 30, 2019 Much like the several years that have preceded it, 2019 will see the deaths of many a once-formidable print magazine. Some will find new life online, some will fade into irrelevance, and many that survive will scramble to implement new business models, hoping to save their print foundations from becoming quaint archives of a bygone era. And yet, even in 2019, a diverse set of both new and traditional publishers continue to invest in the medium despite its inherent financial challenges, begging obvious questions about how, specifically, a new media brand stands to benefit from producing an expensive print magazine at

WARC by Bob Hoffman May 3, 2019 In the advertising world today, the appetite for data has become voracious. According to Rishad Tobaccowala, chief growth officer of Publicis, the global trade value of data flows is now greater than the global trade value of merchandise. Think about that for a minute. Add up the worldwide flow of trade in food, cars, electronics, airplanes, medicine, oil and Cheetos, and everything else that flows between borders… and the value of data already exceeds that. Data is very big business. In fact, it is so big we have forgotten the limits. Gathering data, and the purported advertising benefits

Fipp May 6, 2019 Niche magazines sat in the spotlight in a panel discussion at MagNet, Magazines Canada's annual conference for the magazine media community April 24-25 in Toronto, to discuss the trials and challenges they faced, and how they've overcome. Panelists gave insight into their own publications' issues and the solutions they've used to find success. Burnt Roti Sharan Dhaliwal, editor-in-chief of Burnt Roti, a South Asian lifestyle magazine, started her title in March 2016, followed by an online presence a month later, as a space for South Asians to have conversations where they couldn't elsewhere. Dhaliwal explained that she started the magazine because