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New Data: 40% of Your Subscribers Are Sleeping On Your Content

Let’s say you’ve effectively done all of the right things to acquire new subscribers. You’ve created really interesting content and pushed it out for your readers to consume. Before you know it, you’ve monetized your efforts with a new batch of converted paid subscribers.

That’s the good news, and an accomplishment that your publishing team should be proud to hold up as a gold medal. The journey doesn’t end when readers agree to subscribe, though. Once you have new subscribers, you need to monitor how actively engaged those subscribers are with the content on your website.

Who Are The Active Subscribers And Who Are The Sleeping Subscribers?

You want to organize your subscribers into different tiers based on their level of engagement with the website. Bucket users into labels of active subscribers, who are the ones that visit and engage the site on a near daily basis, and sleeping subscribers, which describes people who seldom return to the site after they become subscribers.

Your active subscribers are your highest valued customers with the greatest potential customer lifetime value (CLTV). These subscribers visit your site daily or weekly to consume fresh content, and they’ll often engage in community activities, such as commenting or participating in lively discussions with other readers. When the time comes for the subscription to renew, there’s little chance that a churn will occur instead.

On the other end of the spectrum are your “sleeping subscribers.” These subscribers have paid for a subscription, which is a good thing. According to your audience insights and analytics platforms, they haven’t visited the website since they completed the subscription form.

Studies have shown that sleeping subscribers make up approximately 40% of a publisher’s subscription base. Sleeping subscribers have the highest probability to churn before the subscription renewal, so it’s vitally important to re-engage and retain as many of those subscriptions as feasibly possible.

Remind Sleeping Subscribers Their Journey With Your Publication Has Only Begun

There’s an old saying in the publishing space that 80% of recurring revenue comes from 20% of paid subscribers. Essentially, this means that subscribers who are the most active and the most engaged with your content are responsible for providing the bulk of subscription revenue to your publication.

The driving reason for this challenge is that up to half of your existing subscriber base is not motivated to come back to the site. Once they complete the subscription, they feel their journey with your website has come to an end. As a successful publishing business, your job is to remind them that the journey has only begun.

According to the American Press Institute, only 31% of publishers target low-engagement subscribers with re-engagement campaigns before their subscription renewal dates come up. That means your business can be one of the three out of ten that forms a successful re-engagement strategy to convert the sleepers into active users.

Re-engagement is the most important step in this process. If subscribers are not engaged with your content, they’re likely to balk when the renewal charge comes up on their bank statements. A churn is likely to occur… Unless you can win them back over and remind them why they subscribed to your website in the first place.

First-Party Data Is The Alarm To Wake Sleeping Subscribers

Using an audience insights platform to collect first-party data, you have the necessary touchpoints to form rich audience profiles of your subscribers. Build those profiles so that you can gain a better understanding of how to wake up the sleepers.

You can view the articles they consumed that led them to go beyond the paywall. You can identify topics that resonated to drive the subscription in the first place. You can see what authors they followed, or community discussions they participated in that really shone a light on their passion for a subject.

All of these touchpoints are examples of first-party data that tell you what motivated your sleeping subscribers to pay for your content in the first place. Use that knowledge to build highly personalized emails and activate re-engagement campaigns to awaken those sleepers and guide them back to your publishing experience.

Send Personalized Emails To Shake The Sleepers Awake

Since you’ve collected the audience data and built out the profiles, you already know the best way to re-engage with your sleeping subscribers. Now, you just need to create the messaging to facilitate that re-engagement strategy.

Use your content recommendation module to pull out the articles that align with the topics which led your sleepers to initially subscribe for your content. Once the recommendation engine feeds you the suggestions, drop the links into highly personalized newsletter email templates. Create messaging that triggers the same passion as the articles that led the sleepers on their initial journey with your site to reinvoke those same feelings.

By reminding them of that experience, the sleepers will wake up and they’ll follow those links back to your site. This is when you can create a whole new personalized experience to convert sleeping subscribers into active subscribers with the highest CLTV potential.

Data Is King: Personal Experiences Boost Conversions By 30%

What’s your preferred experience with published content? Would you prefer a site that feeds you generic articles, or a publisher that knows how to personalize the content you see? The obvious answer is the second option. A personalized website is far more enjoyable as it provides the topics, opinions, and commentary that speak directly to your unique set of interests.

Some publications are better at personalization than others. These publications know how to identify if an article, or even a headline, will encourage readers to spend more time on the site. Their content is informative and capable of adding value to the reader’s experience so they feel compelled to consume the story. They also know how to use highly targeted links within the articles to drive up clickthrough rates.

By adopting personalization as part of an overarching content strategy, publishers remain connected to readers who are very protective of what they consume. There’s a rising trend of “selective news avoidance” all over the world. According to CNN, only 23% of people get their news from news websites. Young people, in particular, are more likely to use social media for news updates.

Can Personalized Content Trump News Avoidance?

Reuters Institute commissioned their annual Digital News Report. The study analyzed a YouGov survey of 93,000 participants from 46 different countries. Among the key findings was a growing lack of trust in newsworthy content, a problem with its strongest foothold in the United States. Only 26% of US respondents say they trust the news, a three point decline from 2021, and the lowest positive sentiment among all surveyed nations.

Common reasons cited for selective news avoidance have to do with growing polarization, perceived media bias, and a sense of too much politics in the news. But a senior Reuters executive, who helped commission the Digital News Report, says the issue goes much deeper.

“A large number of those who selectively avoid the news say the news has a negative effect on their mood,” says Rasmus K. Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Click-Bait Headlines Or Insightful Titles: Which Is The Best Approach?

What are the primary causes for news avoidance? According to the International Institute of Information Technology – Hyderabad (IIIT-H), one of the reasons could be that some publishers rely too frequently on “click-bait headlines.”

In a research study entitled “Clickbait’s Impact On Visual Attention-An Eye Tracker Study,” IIIT-H studied gaze-fixation from 60 participants to measure the amount of visual attention paid by readers to different articles. One group of articles had click-bait headlines, while the other group used educational titles. The results found that click-bait headlines received far less visual attention from readers than articles with non-click-bait headlines.

Click-bait headlines promote a misleading title separate from the crux and context of the article content. According to IIIT-H, people feel duped by misleading headlines, feeling a disconnection between the promoted title and the body of the article. They abandon the page rather than continue the experience, reducing total engagement rates.

Instead of creating false headlines to trigger quick clickthrough rates, successful publishers create thought provoking titles, encouraging readers to consume the entire article. The best way to create headlines that generate engagement is to develop a deeper understanding of what resonates with the intended reading audience. To gain those audience insights, you can use the power of first-party data to align engagement strategies with audience preferences.

First-Party Data Is The Intersection For Creators And Readers

Two of the best examples of first-party data are pageviews and time on-site. You can rest assured that people are intrigued by your content if both of these numbers are trending in the upward direction.

Aim to develop a deeper understanding of what best resonates with your readers. You can identify commonalities in things like the tone of the articles, the positioning of the headlines, common topical themes, and certain keywords that appear in articles with the highest amount of reader engagement.

Your creative team can access these findings in your audience insights platform dashboard to view the results for themselves. They can view the data and clearly identify which articles earn the most engagement from readers. This will help them pivot the content strategy to focus on future stories that support greater audience engagement.

Profile, Personalize, Perform: The Power Of First-Party Data

There’s a lot of power to be wielded with first-party data, which gives your publication a leg up on competitors. Your audience insights platform stores demographic details about your readers, including variables like age, location, backgrounds, and past consumption behaviors on your website. Pool these insights together into rich audience profiles that tell your creators how different types of readers are likely to engage with the content.

You can also segment your audience into different buckets: new readers, known readers, and subscribed readers. The difference in each audience category is measured by their degree of engagement with your website. New readers are fresh to the site, which means there’s very little behavioral data to profile. Known readers are people who have provided at least one example of first-party demographic data that you can use to start building your profiles. Subscribed readers are those who have fully converted and actively paid for premium access to your best content.

As you build your audience profiles, focus intently on the subscribed audience. Look back at the patterns that led people on the journey to fill out the subscription form. What were the articles they read? What common topics or themes were prevalent in those stories? Where did they spend the most time on your site?

Using these enriched profiles, coupled with the data you have on your top performing content, you have all of the necessary information to personalize what readers experience the next time they visit your site. You can deploy highly segmented examples of content that appeal to different readers at each stage in the consumption journey with your website.

Focus on creating personalized content that enables those deep journeys, which should help boost subscription conversion rates by 30%. Watch those pageview and time on-site metrics shoot through the roof by deploying this strategic approach!

Ad Revenue Directly Linked To Depth Of First-Party Data

One of the greatest challenges that publishers are facing the world over, is an ever-changing digital landscape.

This new age of publishing comes with a wide range of demands; publishers must treat technological adaptation as imperative, devise more efficient ways of understanding net-new consumer behaviours as new generations age into news consumption, and always be prepared for the moment when, at the whim of a small handful of tech giants, months of work can be upended overnight. Lest we forget the mayhem that ensued when Google announced it would be eliminating third-party cookies.

Publishers and the global markets at large have, more or less, adjusted to the new normal – even though Google yet again delayed the cookie demolition to 2024 instead of 2023. Having adapted to first-party data, for the most part, publishers have been able to uncover reasonable solutions to all of the above demands. First-party data analytics can inform new insights and illuminate a multitude of fresh paths to heightened revenue and a diversification of income streams. One such stream is ad revenue.

Thus, to the laundry list of things publishers must have these days, one must add: a fully fleshed out revenue-focused ad space strategy. In the wake of Google’s big cookie announcement, advertisers quickly invested billions of dollars in order to capture as much value from third-party data as they could. Those investments were fast and furious, but quickly diminished after their peak in 2021. According to research conducted by Insider Intelligence, the rate that advertisers have spent on digital display advertising has since steadily declined as projections show diminishing investments in the years to come.

US Programmatic Digital Display Ad Spending

What does this mean as publishers, brands, and corporations look ahead?

No more cookies: what this means for publishers

It’s important to note that, in the chart above, not all of those display-ad investments were directly or even loosely tied to publishers. Businesses of all backgrounds advertise on the web, but the media and publishing industry is uniquely affected by the pending end of third-party cookies. Not to mention the rise of crucial privacy protection mandates emerging globally, all with the intent of safeguarding consumer data. At face value, this may seem like a daunting challenge for publishers who rely so heavily on data to guide their content and editorial teams – but is it?

The digitally savvy consumer is no longer anomalous, they are the norm. Modern consumers are far more protective of their privacy, well aware of the value their information holds, and they’re much less quick to trust any old businesses to respect their data. According to Deloitte, 40% of consumers don’t trust online services to respect their privacy. Which, when it comes to ad space and ad revenue for publishers, means they’re less likely to interact with unwarranted and unwanted ads.

A growing trend emerging in consumer behaviour is that the timing and relevance of an advertisement on their journey is of the utmost importance; they want the right ad for them, at just the right time – anything else will diminish their interest, trust, and brand loyalty.

Listen & Learn: earn an audience’s trust with their own data

With consumers more fickle (justifiably so) than ever, how can organizations navigate their user needs and meet their own business goals?

By forming real, meaningful relationships with them.

If a publisher is able to leverage their data to provide the content and experiences their audiences want to have with their site, consumers will feel connected to their brand. Over time, affiliation with the brand will nurture readers to develop an affinity for the publication, making them more likely to come back for new content. This means that publishers are in direct possession of their very own high-value niche-interest users that, if analyzed and segmented properly – can raise their ad space cost per mille(CPM) astronomically and give prospective ad partners access to ideal target audiences.

First-party data is the resource that allows publishers to create those kinds of brand experiences. Unlike third-party data, first-party data is directly collected from consenting users. Each time a user interacts with a site by visiting a webpage, commenting on a post, searching for specific articles, etc., each of those touchpoints provides first-party data points.

It’s through collecting all those insights that organizations can build rich audience profiles and create content that appeals to their users’ interests. This personalization of direct relationships between brands and their audiences is paramount to continued growth and success.

The rewards from personalization are highly engaged users who interact with more content on publishers’ sites, including personalized display ads promoted by their affiliates. Personalization is one of the keys to bolstering growth in audience, reduction in attrition, and improving ad and subscription revenue. According to McKinsey & Company, 71% of users want publishers to personalize their experiences.

The audience’s intent is laid bare; all that’s left is to do the work in order to analyze, interpret, and take strategic action with their first-party data.

First-party data is the key to an ad revenue boom

By creating a first-party data strategy, publishers can win over their audiences and create longstanding relationships with loyal consumers of their content. Imbued with brand-trust and their intrinsic value as consumers, these audiences become key partners in building profitable relationships with existing and prospective ad partners who want to buy engaged time with high-value interest-relevant users.

Google and Facebook dominate the digital advertising landscape, controlling a whopping 57% of all digital ad revenue. Although, even with the lion’s share in their possession, the returns on those investments leave much to be desired. According to HubSpot, 68% of marketers say paid display advertising is “very important” or “extremely important” to their overall marketing strategy. However, a “good” return on advertising spend (ROAS) is a 4:1 ratio, meaning $4 of revenue for every $1 spent.

Given the complexity of Google and Facebook’s algorithms, which have traditionally relied on third-party cookies to reach viewers, many advertisers fall well short of that average benchmark when calculating ROI on their ad campaigns. In fact, 80% of marketers say their campaigns were less effective without accurate audience identifiers. Those advertisers need to grow their businesses, and they need a better way to do so.

Publishers with detailed audience profiles are saviors for these advertisers. Audience profiles tell affiliate advertisers what consumers are looking for in terms of visuals, messages, offers, and promotions that motivate them to click on an ad insert. These profiles, built using first-party data, are far more valuable to advertisers than playing a guessing game with Google or Facebook.

The odds of achieving or exceeding that 4:1 ROAS benchmark are much higher with first-party data backed audience profiles.

The takeaway: don’t just collect first-party data – use it!

First-party data is the essential ingredient to creating a profound win for all parties. It’s a win for publications because they collect valuable audience insights that help inform what the best content to produce may be. It’s a win for audiences at large and individual users alike because they in turn receive more relevant content that appeals to their interests. It’s a win for advertising partners and affiliates because they know exactly what type of ad-content to promote on the goldilocks ad space that they now have access to. That audience-specific digital real estate will make it possible for them to cash in on greater ROIs that justify committing to high-end CPM digital ad spaces.

A detailed first-party data strategy has the potential to make any website very profitable. So long as publishers continue to build and maintain relationships with advertising partners that are eager to pay for access to their hard won audiences, first-party data informed ad-revenue strategies will always result in new and abundant revenue.

Top Revenue Diversification Streams For Publishers

At the root of every digital publication is an inherent goal to educate, interest, and engage with the intended audience. By providing relevant and informative content to the end users, publishers create thoughtful and fulfilling relationships with their readers. A consistent stream of high quality content motivates readers to return to the site and continue to consume the content.

The cycle repeats itself until the reader develops an affinity for the publishing brand. Visiting the website for the latest updates on the news of the day becomes part of a daily habit. As that habit becomes a growing need, those same readers become brand loyal users. These are the people with the highest potential to become paying subscribers for your top quality content.

All of that is well and good for building a loyal audience of passionate and engaged readers. But how do you monetize those efforts, and how can you introduce new revenue streams to scale growth higher and faster while maintaining publication standards and providing quality journalism? That’s what we’re going to discuss here.

Challenges for revenue-driven publication leaders

Increasing revenue requires a proactive push for subscriptions and a delivery of highly targeted ad inserts as part of an affiliate marketing program. The good news is that, according to Pew Research Center, 86% of American citizens get their news through a smartphone, tablet, or computer.

More importantly, over half of respondents said they prefer consuming content through these devices as opposed to TV, radio, or podcasts. This means there does remain a sizable audience to monetize from through revenue diversification strategies.

The bad news is that, as polarization deepens throughout the population, the amount of trust in journalism has waned. This is a particularly growing problem for US publishers.

According to a study published by Statista, United States citizens rank lowest on a list of 40 countries whose residents say they trust the media. Only 26% of surveyed Americans say they trust the news media. By contrast, 37% of neighboring Mexicans say they trust the media, while 42% of neighboring Canadians admit they trust their news sources.

All of these insights emphasize why there’s such a strong need for a high quality content strategy. Aligning content production to the tastes and interests of the intended audience is essential to boost onsite engagement. That’s what allows you to run affiliate marketing campaigns with select partners.

Examples of revenue diversification channels

As a business model, it’s always critical to live by the adage “never put all of your eggs in one basket.” The more you can diversify means of generating revenue, the less likely you are to falter if one of those channels stops performing at the level that your business needs. When it comes to revenue diversification strategies, knowing how to utilize each of the channels available to grow your brand is vital to scaling new growth.

So what are some of the channels available for your revenue diversification strategy? Here’s a quick breakdown of each and how best to use them to your advantage.

Subscription models: win them over with quality

This is probably the most straightforward revenue generating model for publications. By convincing more of your reading audience to pay for access to your top shelf content, you’re earning direct value out of each posted story across your publication.

Many readers actively want to add their own opinions to a published piece of content. If you gate access to the comments section and the community behind it, you incentivize those readers to become paying customers.

In exchange, they gain the means to participate in lively discussions with other engaged readers. It’s a two way relationship that benefits the reader and your publication. You just need to guide people to that decision by doubling down on high quality content that increases their propensity to respond.

E-commerce strategies: target the right offers to the right people

It goes without saying that data is essential for any digital experience to become a successful venture. However, the type of data makes all the difference between publications that have something to sell to their e-commerce affiliates and those that don’t.

First-party data has become the backbone of any e-commerce engagement strategy. It’s by using first-party data that targeted shopping experiences are provided to the audience. This type of data allows you to build highly informative audience profiles in which you can segment your readers by their interests and what types of content best capture their attention.

By curating these profiles, you can coordinate with your e-commerce affiliates to create relevant shopping experiences for the intended audiences. Align the offers to the reader’s passions, which you can determine based on the content they consume. This is how you improve the user experience and make some extra money through your affiliates.

Affiliate links: personalize ad inserts for maximum effectiveness

This is a very similar approach to your e-commerce strategy. Using first-party data and the profiles you create from it, your affiliates can customize the ad inserts they promote to specific types of readers on your site.

Customization and personalization are the best ways to generate views, clicks, and engagement from targeted advertising. Show your affiliates details about the end audience so that they can create highly curated messaging, images, videos, and other forms of content to connect with the audience. If done successfully, they should see a healthy return for their efforts.

Flexible commercial models: putting it together

Imagine if you could give your affiliate partners the ability to form a trusted partnership built around reliable, audience-driven, first-party data. How much more valuable would a relationship with your publication be to those affiliates as opposed to a standard commercial revenue vendor type relationship that other publishers will offer? There’s no question: you gain a significant competitive advantage by offering a commercial revenue partnership.

The first-party data you possess and the audience profiles you build allow affiliates to send out promotions that will earn engagement. People end up coming to your site and the site of your affiliates. It’s more scalable, more flexible, and more beneficial for everyone involved.

Conclusion

With an analytical approach to the data available to you, a definitive goal, and an audience-first content strategy, the right revenue growth tactics will become increasingly evident. Keep in mind that each of the above approaches, while uniquely effective, may not align with your brand and its interests – which is OK! Carefully curate strategies that are in alignment with your brand’s overarching POV and they will in turn effectively serve the long term goals of your organization and contribute to the growth of your audience and, subsequently, your revenue.

First-Party Data Or Social Media Advertising: Which To Use?

Companies all over the world spend millions of dollars on social media advertising. For many years, it’s been one of the best avenues for brands seeking to expand their reach and visibility. By building a social following, brands gain direct access to customers already interested in their services and from there, speak to them directly and set about converting them into paying customers.

However, social media metrics leave much to the imagination, which is not an ideal way to set about developing audience strategies. Likes and comments on social posts are hard to quantify without more specific data, though some of the declarative data uncovered therein can help further an understanding of audience behaviors. Without access to concrete, sophisticated data, how can you build relevant audience profiles to augment your publishing strategy? And without those profiles, how do you know what to advertise to new audiences? How can you convince third-party affiliates to advertise on your site?

Publishers have recognized first-party data as not only a viable alternative to social media metrics, but a far more valuable resource with rich insights instrumental to audience growth and activation, subscription revenue, ad revenue, retention, and so much more. By investing in a first-party data strategy and taking advantage of resources that help you acquire, analyze, and interpret insights, publishers can track audience engagement across their digital property portfolios. By doing so, they’re able to make informed strategic decisions that drive conversion and support the efficacy of their audience funnels, thus ushering unregistered visitors into paid subscriptions.

Publishers report less value in social media advertising

A telling sign of how publishers are rethinking their approach to audience insights and how to spend their advertising dollars is revealed through the Publishers and Social Media: 2021 Trends report conducted by Echobox.

Based on a survey of 159 publishers from over 40 different countries, the findings revealed that 63% of respondents believed discovering and tapping into new audiences is now more important than ever. For publishers hoping to lead the curve, this report indicates an evident need for audience expansion strategies that connect to fresh eyed audiences as opposed to relying on brand-aware users who sought them out through social media channels.

In the same study, only 29% of publishers chose to prioritize investments in new social media channels. While many respondents said social media continues to be an excellent resource for “more referral traffic,” little is mentioned about the conversion rate to transform referral traffic into paid content subscriptions.

Additionally, social media algorithms continue to remain beyond the control of publishers who must do their best to anticipate upcoming changes and implement contingency plans for detrimental algorithmic changes. Four out of ten respondents say constant changes to Facebook’s algorithm cause an extreme and unexpected impact on traffic. This inconsistency makes it hard for publishers to predict accurate growth in both website visits and new subscription rates.

First-party data is a response to the changing times

Sometimes, the best growth strategy is less about bringing in more traffic from social media to a publishing site and more closely tied to establishing an approach that optimizes existing traffic with behavioral data. These insights are used by publishers to enhance content strategies by aligning writers and editors around data-driven audience insights. Data-informed teams are far better prepared to produce more content that strikes a chord with audiences and leaves them eager for more and prone to return visits with longer page visit durations.

Part of the reason for this approach is in reaction to updated consumer privacy protection laws. Mandates like GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy protection legislation have begun a depreciation, or retirement, of third-party cookies, which Google will indefinitely eliminate by 2023. These cookies have traditionally been used by brands and publishers to acquire audience insights and support advertising campaigns.

According to Google, 90% of North and South American publishers say stricter consumer privacy laws have forced them to adapt their strategies. Now, the vast majority of these publishers are leaning into first-party data in order to acquire more accurate and detailed information about their customers. First-party data allows publishers to build enriched audience profiles that third-party cookies and social media engagement could never provide.

Publisher ownership of first-party data leverages revenue-driven affiliate partnerships

First-party data gives publishers the insights and sophisticated specificity to enhance and take ownership of the direct relationship with their audiences. Since audience insights are acquired through reader interaction with published content, publishers retain the rights to that first-party data. This provides powerful leverage for publishers to increase advertising revenue through highly curated partnerships with specific affiliate advertisers.

It’s a great way to appeal to affiliates eager to advertise at a time when advertising budgets are being cut. Recent economic downturns have forced companies to scale back on their ad budgets, though they do still need to generate awareness and engagement.

As the proprietors of detailed first-party audience data, publishers can incentivize affiliate advertisers to spend their limited budgets wisely on ad inserts with the greatest potential for engagement and conversion. It’s a strategy that companies like Trusted Media Brands have successfully delivered upon, which has generated 40% year over year programmatic revenue growth.

Social media casts a wide net; first-party data chooses the right bait

When calculating the ROI on advertising campaigns, a helpful way to look at the dichotomy between social media advertising and using first-party data to connect with affiliates is to think of it like an analogy for fishing.

Social media advertising is essentially casting a wide net out into the digital ocean. The hope is that you use the social media algorithms effectively to maximize reach and engagement. Through that engagement, you need high clickthrough rates (CTRs) so that you have the best potential to grow paid subscribers of your content. Those subscriptions are the final achievement to prove the merit behind your social media advertising strategy.

There are a lot of holes in that approach, which is why using a first-party data strategy to convince affiliates that they should advertise on your site is far more effective. With first-party data and the audience profiles and segmentation it can provide, you don’t need to cast a wide net and hope for the best. Instead, you’re in a position to convince the right affiliates that their products and messaging have the greatest potential to connect with the consumers that make up your engaged audiences. When we choose the right bait, we stand a greater chance of catching exactly what we’re after.

First-party data is a win for publications and audiences alike. Audiences benefit from the improvements it informs and appreciate the thoughtful content produced for their interests. Publishers on the other hand stand to benefit greatly from the ability to appeal to their affiliates and encourage them to invest more of their advertising budgets into developing extensive relationships with their publication. Everybody wins and everybody gets more of what they want!

Improving the value exchange: How to encourage users to give up their data

The majority of media companies know that having an abundance of user data at their fingertips will allow their businesses to flourish. In fact, publishers need rich user data to understand their audience members, keep people’s attention focused on their brands and grow their subscription and advertising revenue streams.

But recent research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism highlights that news companies are struggling to collect people’s information online. More specifically, the study outlines how 32% of people worldwide don’t trust news media companies to handle their data.

And since user data is critical to the success of your organization, you’ll need to convince them to provide their personal information by becoming registered users.

Luckily, persuading your media company’s audience to hand over their user data doesn’t have to be a complicated process. All you need to do is adjust your data strategy while reinforcing the value of becoming a registered user.

Personalize experiences for registered users with first-party data

With so many competing media brands and online services, publishers need to go beyond their content to convince users that it’s worth taking the time to register on their websites or apps.

One simple way to build up your company’s registration value proposition is to offer personalized user experiences.

Research from McKinsey & Company even reveals that 71% of people actually want companies to personalize their relationships with users.

In the past, media organizations have turned to third-party data to power custom experiences. But since Chrome is now phasing out third-party cookies, media companies need to find other ways to collect data for their personalization tools.

Instead, organizations can persuade users to register and subscribe to their websites in return for personalized experiences using their first-party data.

“[Subscription] services need to employ strategies that build loyalty, provide added value, and offer personalization to compete in the global marketplace,” says Rande Price, VP of research at Digital Content Next.

And offering users personalization — whether that be through notifications, email campaigns or content recommendations — can give them the push they need to hand over their data.

The importance of owning your user data

It feels like tech giants have a new data breach or scandal around irresponsible data handling every year.

For this reason, it’s critical for media companies to operate independently of tech giants. The reality is that Big Tech companies lose the trust of their users with every data scandal — so how can you expect your audience to trust you if you’re relying on a tech giant to gather and access their data?

One of the easiest ways to earn the trust of online audiences is to ensure your organization has complete ownership over its user data. This means moving the focus away from third-party data and toward the first-party data collected directly on your own digital properties.

“Registration from a user means ‘I trust you’ and ‘I also trust you with my data,’” states Jo Holdaway, ESI Media’s chief data and marketing officer. “You have to be very respectful to your audience to get them to come back.”

When your media company owns all of its user data, your organization can reassure audience members that it isn’t associated with data leaks and scandals from other companies. You’ll also be able to communicate that your organization handles data responsibly since it would only collect and store information that users consent to hand over once they register.

Swap engagement opportunities on-site for registration data

Although personalization and data integrity are effective tools in winning over user data, there’s still another way to persuade anonymous audiences to submit their personal information.

Media organizations can enhance their ability to earn registration data by offering interactive digital experiences just for registered users.

According to Viafoura data, implementing audience engagement tools in even the most basic way can make up 30-50% of user registrations on publisher websites.

The bottom line is that people want to engage with each other, content and authors on your company’s website. Giving users opportunities to interact on-site in return for their data will, therefore, encourage them to become registered, known users.

Ultimately, each of these registration-boosting strategies has the power to encourage users to give up their data. Even so, it’s important to use a combination of all three methods to maximize the value of your registration proposition and earn the best business results.

What is a value exchange moment?

Publishing in the digital age, not unlike advertising, has become a conversation between audiences and content providers. A conversation that’s full of opportunities to form substantial and lasting relationships, that is – as long as both sides stand to benefit from a value exchange. Through entertainment, information and fostering a sense of community, it’s up to publishers to give audiences something worthwhile for what they have to offer as digital individuals: unique, rich, first party data.

If publishers are able to create interest, garner engagement, and earn subscriptions and all the first party data that comes with them, they gain a huge advantage. Continued access to first party data will inform improvements to their audience development strategy and usher in new growth; growth in their following and subscriber base and inevitably a marked boost to ad and subscription revenues.

However, digital savvy consumers are hyper focused on protecting their privacy by knowing exactly who’s collecting their data and what it’s being used for. Just recently, fast food chain Tim Hortons came under fire for collecting data without proper consent. Users will typically agree to provide personal data only if they believe it’s worth what they get in exchange. This decision is what we refer to as a value exchange moment, a point in time where the end user decides if what they receive is worth their trust and, of course, their personal information.

While the value a publisher may traditionally provide is content, more and more we are seeing that community has become a huge draw for prospective subscribers. For example, a user who regularly engages with a publisher’s content has a higher propensity to become an active member of the publisher’s community by registering or subscribing. The social perks may vary, but a more nuanced value point is the sense of reassurance a trusted community gives to newcomers. When faced with a group of folks who share interests and values, all of whom consent to share their data with the publisher, anonymous but engaged users are likely to feel at ease when it comes to sharing their information. As publishers, it’s essential to provide high quality content to draw in leads, but the value of a thriving community to prospective subscribers is just as valuable when seamlessly guiding users toward registered and subscribed states.

Once anonymous users have been drawn in by interest-rich content and/or community, they agree to a value exchange and join the ranks of subscribers. With access to their audience’s first party data (e.g. how much time they spend on site, which pages they view, how they engage with sponsored content, etc.), publishers gain a far better understanding of their audience as individuals and cohorts alike. With this data, publishers need only keep their audience growth strategies and first party data strategies up to date in order to keep optimizing their content and retain registered users while continuing to recruit new subscribers.

Once immersed in the community, formerly anonymous but active engaged users become user generated content (UGC) contributors – another value point for prospects on the outside looking in. These contributors comment often and create posts of their own within the community, typically generating over 41 times more pageviews and 100 times the amount of ad impressions compared to anonymous users. As the numbers demonstrate in the funnel above, engagement improves exponentially as users move further along the registration process. By retaining user interest and engagement, publishers not only get closer to the value exchange moment that earns them subscriptions, but they also reap the rewards of substantial growth in impressions as their audience members move further along the funnel’s stages.

Publishers who understand that the potential to maximize their registration, retention, and revenue lies directly in this value exchange moment are on track to setting themselves up for success. So long as users – anonymous, engaged, or fully subscribed – are benefiting from a continued value exchange for their information, publishers can continuously use that self-replenishing well of information to improve their offerings and win big in both audience loyalty and business growth.

Skip The Toll: How To Deal With Tech Savvy Trolls

It’s the year 2022 and people now turn to devices for human connection. The internet has never been more social and with that constantly growing traffic comes a bounty of wonderful moments of connection… And an all time high population of trolls.Internet trolling is defined as ‘malicious online behavior’ characterized by aggressive or deliberate provocation of others. While this behavior may (debatably) be cathartic for the person trolling communities in anonymity, their presence significantly deteriorates the health and safety of a digital space, and thus its usability.

Publishers big and small suffer equally at the hands of trolls. They’re tech savvy, almost always anonymous, and with an abundance of time on their hands to spread toxicity, they’re a force to be reckoned with. What’s worse? They’re here to stay.

In lieu of surrendering, here are a few troll tactics to look out for and what you can do to skip the toll and protect your peace.

Multiple Accounts

Trolls are obsessive, petulant and persistent. If you’re suddenly up against a horde of trolls, keep in mind it may just be one person, on a mission, using many accounts. Trolls have the time and the tech to overwhelm spaces, dodge bans, and sully the hard earned good vibes of your community. How do I solve it? – Once you’re familiar with a troll’s behaviour, you can spot them in the wild (disguised as a new user) as they start fights or encourage incendiary opinions. These repeat offenders leave hints that point to their identity. Armed with your community tools and data, look out for similar names, emails, avatars, or IP addresses linked to existing bans. Check, confirm and then ban them as many times as it takes.

Hate Speech and Vulgarity

Trolls need attention and offensive language is an easy way to get it. In 2019, approximately a third of the posts that Viafoura moderators came across contained hate speech and/or vulgarity. That’s almost 83 million attempts at being nasty for no reason, so we can at least give trolls credit for being dedicated to their craft… But not good credit, to be sure. How do I solve it? – A ‘banned-word list’ can help limit this particular tactic but some trolls may use a tactic called ‘masking’. Trolls will mask banned words with symbols, vertical spelling, periods, etc. to throw off a simple banned-word list. If you’re not sure what to look for, trust – 0nce u se.e 1t, y0u c4n’t uns33 1t. A more sophisticated, natural language processing AI, like Viafoura’s, can spot masked words and block them with over 90% accuracy.

Bonus tip: Many service providers claim to have AI or automatic moderation, but don’t actually leverage natural language processing or machine learning to understand variations of words and sentence structures. Check in with your moderation provider to make sure your tool can learn as moderators approve or block comments, further training the algorithm, which should be customized to your guidelines.

Serial Flagging

User to user moderation can be a valuable safety tool but it also has the potential for abuse. Some trolls will use the ‘flagging’ feature to silence or frustrate innocent users. In some cases, the serial flagging may even result in an unfair ban for people that have not violated any guidelines. If a user flags often and most of the content they flag does not violate community guidelines, you may have a troll on your hands.How do I solve it? – Use your data and work with your community. Consider this incentive to be involved with your community and get to know who your positive contributors are. Asking trusted users for their insights and experiences with the suspected troll will help you recognize false-flag reporters on the spot.

Dealing with trolls isn’t always easy and it’s never a fun experience. Unfortunately, they are here to stay and if left unchecked they can turn your digital space into a tumultuous community rife with conflict – definitely not something you want associated with your brand. By equipping ourselves with the proper knowledge, tools and awareness, we can keep trolls at bay and use those same moderating methods to prevent toxic user behaviour from developing even without trolls fuelling the flames.

To learn more about Viafoura’s suite of moderation tools visit https://viafoura.com/content-moderation/.

Are You Getting The Best Value Out Of Your Engagement Tools?

If you’ve invested in an audience engagement solution, you’re probably well aware of how important the data you collect from the platform will be for the future performance of your business. Insights into how your existing users engage with content and the community built around it allows you to optimise your strategy. An optimised content strategy means you’ll produce more content that should drive additional users to convert into loyal subscribers.

Making those strategic decisions requires the right platform so that you can collect those insights. You need a solution that helps you collect first-party data and analyse on-site user behaviour. With that data in hand, you can effectively maximise the 3Rs:

Registrations
Retention
Revenue

So how do you ensure you’re getting the best value out of your engagement tools? Our latest infographic offers a helpful visual guide on what you need from your platform and how it can help achieve your overarching business goals.

The right audience engagement platform should provide strategic recommendations that you can use to help grow the nature of your business. The technology should help you answer the questions of how to grow registrations, retain existing users, and increase revenue as the end benefit for all of your hard work.

Your team should find daily value from their audience engagement platform. They should not only know how to use the platform, but they should also understand why there’s so much value to be gained from these solutions. You’ll know the platform is a success if your team:

Feels motivated to use the platform every day
Increases productivity across the entire spectrum of your business
Understands how each of the core features helps solve the underlying business needs
Has the desire to collaborate with other departments and gain the deepest understanding of user intent and behavioural insights

If answers to any of these questions are anything short of yes, it might be time to ask yourself a much harder question: do you have the right audience engagement solution? Remember that audience engagement is the first step towards monetisation and greater revenue for your business. Without a platform that can help you gain the necessary insights to make effective revenue-driven decisions, you will likely struggle to achieve those aspirational growth targets.