At the end of every year, my team conducts planning sessions with some of the brightest minds in publishing from all over the world. We work in an emerging and increasingly vital sector of the industry – community building- and we’ve honed in on being the best at our craft. What we see time and time again is very simple: publishers that go all-in on community see the return in spades.
At Viafoura, we’re capitalizing on user habits and behaviors formed over the past decade on social media. Think of us as the Apple of community engagement for media organizations. In this context, the iPhone moment for media is now: publishers are uniquely positioned to reclaim audiences from social media and drive direct user relationships on their owned and operated properties.
Zooming out, social media landscapes are changing quickly: X (formerly Twitter) slashed global moderation staff and has paid the price with traffic and advertising revenue and what may be an exodus of publisher engagement (see Guardian). Meanwhile, Reddit is consistently ranking higher on SERPs, above affiliate and publisher rankings meaning the Google Gods are beginning to prioritize UGC.
So what does this all mean? My team’s been busy.
2025 is going to bring a big shift into community-centric operating models for publishers. Here’s what I’m keeping an eye on:
1. Publishers are getting really good at defining the value of user-generated content (UGC) to the business.
When discussing community-centric approaches with execs, I often bring up my favorite FT Strategies piece showcasing Der Standard super-users (top commenters). It covers 2 main points:
- Der Standard did the math: their highest value user segment are community- engaged members
- They centralized their operations to have business units focus on funneling users into community engagement (aka: study them, talk to them, design with them).
I love this piece because the organization doubled down on attributing a $ value to the community, and for a numbers nerd like me, this is the north star of our ‘why’and single most important number in rallying the many teams it takes to make a community strategy successful.
Here’s the baseline of ROI of community engagement:
- Attributed registration & subscription conversion
- Direct ad activation dollars
- Downstream impact of engagement defined by additional Time on Site and PV’s generated by community contributors and those who spend time consuming their content
The new expanded impact areas:
- User Generated Content (UGC) as a story idea generator
- Editorial Engagement sponsorships (Think: commercial teams selling sponsored AMAs)
- The effect of the flywheel of UGC on your unknown audiences and their propensity to register and subscribe
An anecdotal thought: It’s interesting to me how quickly publishers are beginning to see ROI from community on day 01 of launching community and how naturally user behaviors gravitate toward community (the uptick is almost immediate). The appetite for community is there, and users genuinely enjoy engaging with one another, when the community is well managed and stays within brand community guidelines. In the same breath, moderation at scale and duty of care to your editorial team is more important than ever and that needs to be acknowledged and recognized.
2. Journalists are becoming rockstars again.
This is hands down my favorite highlight because we are deliberately repairing a decade-long rip and divide caused by the cesspool of social media. It’s baffling to think how we got here given publishing at its core is a product of the communities we serve, so how can publishers, by virtue, hate interacting with communities?
My gut says they don’t, and my gut says they’re scared from their experiences on social media.
The good news is this is a simple fix but requires a high degree of change management – let the AMAs do the heavy lifting here. This past year, we’ve had a record-breaking % of publishers dip their toe into community engagement, and we’ve had a 100% success rate (defined as repeat initiative).
From an engagement perspective, the results are a pretty clear win: AMAs drive 2x more registrations, 3x more first time commenters, 24x more engagement & 16x more time in comments.
Pretty slam dunk but that’s not the purpose of this highlight- it’s actually the softer side:
- Every time we’ve run a first time AMA, journalists have requested to stay longer because they genuinely had FUN
- Commenters opened their questions with “Thank you so much for doing this” – a little goes a long way
- 100% re-engagement rate by newsroom staff
Next year, this is going to take center stage in many newsrooms for a couple of key reasons:
- This is a low-lift experiential interaction for your community with a high reward.
- It’s safe. Turning on a full pre-moderated approach builds trust with newsrooms and lets journalists step into their fandom 🤘
Customer Spotlight: People.com has started leaning into AMAs and going all in with targeted invites, social recirc, and onsite discoverability during the event.
3. Editorial KPIs: “First Time Commenters” will have a seat at the table.
You’re going to hear me talk a lot about this in the year to come. Knowing the $$$ value of a UGC contributor, your First Time Commenters should be reported in your dashboards, right beside your conversion numbers.
This should be volumes, time to first comment, and % of all new registered users. Here’s what it looks like in practice with a real customer:
- Average of 9,295 first time commenters per month
- 10.6% of all new registrations interact with the community in the same day
- Average of 14.1 minutes for first comment action post registration
Once you’ve got this in, start digging into the mechanics of what prompted your conversions. What drove users to comment? What user ideas drove the most engagement and was there a debate sparked? Was there anything very sentimental that drew people together?
Out loud: This is a slam dunk for GenAI if you’re looking to automate the sentiment of highly-commented conversations and delivering ideas for follow ups to spark ideas in newsrooms.
4. The homepage will be the community page.
Homepages are transforming with more interactivity for users and a big part of that is the concept of active conversations/ top quality comments/ hot takes. You’ve seen these trending on social and you’ll see it transformed on publisher pages as well- again not recreating the wheel, but doing it better.
The concept of bridged discussion, unlike divisive, engagement-driven trends, is poised to be a key player here.
What’s bridging? An academic approach for countering destructive divisiveness across ranking, recommenders, and governance. We’ve partnered with our good friends at Jigsaw, a division of Google, to apply bridging attribution qualifiers to develop a comment quality ranking. We’re able to apply this mechanism at scale and completely reshape the perceived comment quality. The goal here is fairly substantive—arguably beyond just the comment section—as it tackles a broader conversational divide that has emerged, largely due to social media algorithms pinning people against each other.
Here’s what our data shows when we apply bridging qualifiers to shape quality commenting:
- Perceived Comment Quality is up 101%
- Perceived Comment Toxicity is down 36%
- Community-Led Registrations are up 20%
- First Time Commenters are up 6%
- Editors Interaction in the comment section is up 122%
What does all of this tell us? By deliberately promoting higher quality comments (personal storytelling, nuance, compassion, & others) not only do our perceptions of community change for the better, but our interactions become more meaningful.
With confidence in the mechanisms and technology, publishers are using this to highlight quality community as a credit-worthiness of trust on their highest traffic page: home page, baby.
5. Publishers will chip bigger pieces of traffic back from social.
By no means do I hate social media- in fact, some of the largest publishers in the world have built a social-first strategy for growth and holy shit it worked (at least for a while). But building your business model on the current state of social algorithms, which can change at any moment, is very risky, and the only path to stability is owning that audience and the relationship with them.
Publishers are leaning into some really cool recirc initiatives in capturing new audiences on moving over to O&O, and while it’s a little early to share wins, I’m keeping my eyes on targeted audience acquisition for X, formerly Twitter, and Reddit.
One to watch: Rachel Duffy at The Telegraph.
Parallel, I’m also excited to see the big shift toward the creator economy and how that can look for local media. With elections closing out, and a retro on the Kamala campaign, there’s a big highlight on reach with podcasts and the influence creators have over traditional media.I’m wondering if we can see a collab for both next year.
To wrap my musings, I want to settle on the concept of “brands are moats”. If our brand is aging, and by virtue our audiences too, brands get smaller and the word of the brand moves on.
So what makes publishing brands successful and competitive in today’s day-in-age?
First will always be your core offering: trust from your core market.
But second and emerging is the power of your community: a parallel of trust.
Communities are moats.
Feeling hopeful for 2025, watch our space.
