Category: Community

You’ve Lost a Subscriber, Now What?

Before you continue on the path of subscriber decline, there are some steps you can take to flip the fate of your brand around.

If you’re down one, ten or a couple hundred subscribers, you’re probably facing some pressure to improve conversion rates and reduce churn. Not sure how to help your brand do more than just barely cling onto its survival and climb the ladder of success? Well, you’ve come to the right place. 

We know that losing a subscriber is frustrating — and we also know that your situation isn’t hopeless. It may actually be a blessing in disguise, because you can use your learnings to prevent more churn from taking place. This is your chance to make your platform’s subscription and retention rates better than ever.

A researcher from International News Media Association (INMA), Grzegorz Piechota, explains how “the subscriber journey doesn’t end with the purchase.” 

After subscribing for content, users embark on an entirely new journey.

Unfortunately, Piechota adds that “publishers don’t really seem to be very much focused on monitoring [the] health of the relationship after somebody subscribed.”

If media organizations don’t understand what causes a user to unsubscribe, how can they know how to prevent more churn in the future?

Before you continue on the path of subscriber decline, there are some steps you can take to flip the fate of your brand around. To help, we’ve broken down the process of understanding why your subscriber churned, and how to prevent it from happening again. 

1. Determine How Engaged Subscribers Were Before Unsubscribing

Instead of predicting reader engagement just with the number of clicks on your articles, you need to understand your reader habits on a more granular level. 

As stated by the Local Media Association, “regular reading habit is the single biggest predictor of subscriber retention.”

Dig into your data to determine if, based on their behavior, your lost subscribers were actively engaging with your platform.

Have they recently become passive consumers, logging in only once in a blue moon to read content? Or did they flag any toxic comments before unsubscribing? 

Anything you can learn about the time period before they churned will shed light into why they unsubscribed.

2. Assess Lost Subscribers Through Your Front-End Tools

By now, you may be well informed on the value socially immersive engagement tools can add to a platform. If you do have engagement tools on your website, you have access to critical, first-party data related to your subscribers. Not to mention info on those who have churned. 

Gather as much intel as possible on your churned subscribers by looking to how much they were interacting with your tools. You may be able to learn something important. For instance, are subscribers churning once engagement with your community-building tools drops? If so, your readers may be failing to form meaningful bonds to your platform due to a lack of moderation or real-time commenting.

Look to engagement-specific metrics for deeper insights, like the time spent in comments, engagement velocity and civility trends.

It’s also worth investigating the workflow between your engagement tool and paywall providers. If they’re properly talking to one another, your paywall provider should be alerted when a subscriber’s engagement level tapers off. This would allow you to predict and prevent churn before it ever happens.

3. Send Personalized Offers That Encourage Re-Subscribing

You may have lost a subscriber, but they may not be lost forever. When a user unsubscribes from your services, you have the opportunity to wow them with offers. 

Consider sending them content suggestions that are highly in line with their interests, which can be identified from your first-party data. This may convince them that your content is valuable enough to resubscribe. 

Alternatively, you may want to send them a special discount on the subscription cost. 

If you’re sending these offers via email, it’s worth using an actual person’s email address instead of a generic sales or marketing one. 

One publishing executive tells Digiday that “since more often publishers are landing in the promotions folder, an email coming from a different email address… is really effective in reengaging people.” 

4. Apply Your Insights to Cohorts of Users With Similar Behaviors

While a single unsubscription isn’t the end of the world, disengaged behavior patterns throughout your audience highlight inefficiencies on your platform. 

It’s important for media organizations to use their data to identify these inefficiencies and improve them by building loyal habits for audience members. Every detail you can gather on why a user unsubscribed will help you identify and stop others who may follow suit in the future. 

For instance, some individuals who unsubscribe may log into your platform less and less frequently. Keep an eye on user log-in frequency to make sure that your audience members are visiting and engaging with your content regularly. If they aren’t, it may be time to send them a personalized offer. 

The Globe and Mail, for instance, has developed a highly sophisticated five-step process that aims to keep subscribers engaged with its content based on behavioral data. If a user doesn’t log into the platform for a 30-day period, they’re sent a personalized email with relevant content. 

Take a look at your user data and ask yourself this: are your users unsubscribing because of a high subscription cost, irrelevant content or are they disengaging from the community socially? The answer will help you make improvements to your platform. 

At the end of the day, the value of data from a lost subscriber outweighs the value of the subscriber itself. This is because the insights you gain from unsubscribers can be used to greatly enhance your retention strategy.


RELATED: You Got New Engagement Tools, Now What? 

Week of Nov. 9th-15th: Your Media News Update

This past week, the media industry has seen a lot of new approaches in tackling the challenges of the traditional subscription business model. Companies are getting creative and investing into forming a better content experience and improving targeted distribution.

This past week, the media industry has seen a lot of new approaches in tackling the challenges of the traditional subscription business model. Companies are getting creative and investing into forming a better content experience and improving targeted distribution. Some of the highlights include:

  • A new way of positioning subscription packages with vertical-specific content
  • Numerous examples of media organizations who are developing digital series and long-form content to drive digital traffic
  • Publishers are paying close attention to online search behavior, and are creating content to address those enquiries

Continue reading to learn and stay up-to-date with the latest industry news published over the past week.

Vertical Subscriptions Are the Newest “Side Products” Being Used to Drive Revenue

For many news publishers, the main selling point of a subscription is getting access to a broad range of coverage and content. But some publishers are thinking outside of the content experience box and are starting to promote slimmed-down versions, i.e. vertical subscriptions, as a way to drive more revenue. These types of packages are targeted towards readers who continuously return to specific content categories.

Grant Belaire, VP of digital audience development at McClatchy, proposes that it’s better to retain a subscriber with a vertical than to lose them entirely. Take the publisher’s sports readers, for instance. They make up less than 20% of McClatchy’s total readership, but contribute to over 50% of page views. By promoting a sports-focused subscription called the “Sports Pass,” which gives readers access only to sports content, McClatchy was able to double their subscription conversions in a week. 

Another publisher investing into the vertical-subscription model is The New York Times. The company has a standalone crossword subscription offered for $6.95 a month. With that package alone, The New York Times has earned more than 500K subscribers. And as subscribers consume crossword content, additional content offers can be promoted to eventually expand readership revenue per user.

After seeing more than 60K people visiting articles written by politics writer Charles Pierce every day, Esquire decided to build a $17.99 annual subscription offer specifically for his content. The annual subscription grants access to all of Pierce’s stories, a weekly newsletter written by Pierce and, to top it off, a tote bag. 

Jumping on the sports-related vertical-subscription model is The Athletic, a sports news subscription site that launched in 2016. They now have over 500K subscribers and are targeting over a million by the end of the year.

Media Organizations Get Creative in Developing New Ways to Monetize the Content Experience

In this day and age, the need for more subscribers is becoming increasingly significant in order to provide sustainable revenue. As a result, many media organizations are coming up with creative ways to attract new viewers, with the intent that they will eventually convert into paying subscribers. 

Bleacher Report is a publisher who has taken steps towards appealing to a larger audience. To boost viewership on its YouTube channel, the company has debuted an interactive show called “Your Call,” where viewers play the role of an up-and-coming soccer star. As the series progresses, viewers have the opportunity to make choices that impact the future of their soccer career, such as which team to join. 

The series is part of the sports publisher’s recent shift to produce more mid- and long-form programming for video-viewing platforms like YouTube versus shorter fare made for social platforms like Instagram, which are more difficult to monetize. 

Since October 2018, Bleacher Report’s soccer-related YouTube channel has grown from 235K subscribers and 10.8 million monthly views to over 1 million subscribers and 21.5 million views.

Another publisher that’s adding new formats to the content experience is Dow Jones’ Barron’s Group. Last week, they started a 10-minute weekly digital show called Marketbrief, which covers all the latest financial news for relevant investors. With this, Barron’s Group hopes to widen its audience.

Tastemade — a video network that offers food and travel-related programming for online audiences — is also expanding its long-form content offering on the ad-supported streaming platform, Samsung TV Plus.

Globally, Tastemade reaches 120 million monthly viewers via its 24-hour channel that launched 16 months ago. Samsung TV Plus is the biggest platform for the publisher in terms of viewers, watch time and revenue, largely in part because audiences don’t need to pay for its content and the service comes pre-installed on newer TVs. 

In other news, by repackaging and selling content created for other channels, USA Today aims to grow revenue through its video operations. Similar to Tastemade, the publisher is focused on increasing its content on ad-supported streaming platforms. The most recently launched streaming series is a weekly half-hour show called “USA Today Sports Weekly Pulse,” which highlights the most popular clips from USA Today’s sites over the course of the week on Fubo Sports Network. 

The New York Times also just announced that they’ll be venturing into film with two feature-length documentaries as a way to attract new audiences. These newsroom-specific documentaries will be produced by its very own journalists. In the past, the company has produced shows for connected TV services, including Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video.

To help media organizations monetize their content faster, Brightcove, a provider of cloud services for video, released a new SaaS-based OTT platform that allows content to be released on multiple platforms simultaneously. The new technology helps publishers launch and monetize video content across mobile, web and connected TV, all from one platform. 

Read up on the state of consumers in the streaming wars (and how to win them over) to learn more.

Publishers Try Increasing Site Traffic by Optimizing for Search

While many publishers have a social-first content experience, Delish, a food publication, decided to strengthen its search optimization about two years ago. They deep dived into what people were searching for and created an editorial strategy that incorporated content specifically tailored to answer keyword searches and enquiries. 

While they used to make short-form videos suited for social media platforms like Facebook, Delish quickly learnt that users who stayed the longest were looking for simple cooking guides. So, Delish started creating content that was 3-5 minutes long, aimed at satisfying Google inquiries.

Since the change in strategy, Delish has nearly doubled its site traffic, hitting a record 41 million unique visitors in September. That same month, search contributed 49% of its referral traffic, and in October, it rose to make up 54% of traffic. 

Publishers like Delish are slowly cutting down on the advertising dollars they’re pouring into social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Instead, they’re beginning to focus on perfecting their own organic content and editorial strategies in order to grow audiences directly on their own platforms.

The State of Consumers in the Streaming Wars (and How to Win Them Over)

If you’re an organization that is knee-deep in the streaming wars, the one thing you should be laser-focused on to give yourself an edge over your competition is the very basic thing you seek: consumers.

By now, you’re probably no stranger to the streaming wars raging between old and new video-viewing services. From Netflix, DAZN and Amazon Prime Video to Disney+, Crave and everything in between, the fight for consumers blazes across the media-streaming industry. Which services are best set to win this battle? That answer is still very much unclear. 

If you’re an organization that is knee-deep in the streaming wars, the one thing you should be laser-focused on to give yourself an edge over your competition is the very basic thing you seek: consumers. 

It may seem obvious, and it is — consumers are the foundation of every streaming service. They are the ones who will decide who becomes the top platform, and they are the engine that will allow their preferred services to become even stronger. So if you can get into the consumer’s brain, you will be able to use that to your advantage and stand a fighting chance amidst all the competition in the streaming wars. 

Want to know what consumers are really thinking when it comes to streaming services? Rest assured, because we’ve got the answers.

Streaming Subscription Fatigue is a Very Real Problem For Consumers

In October, a survey by TV Time and United Talent Agency dug into data from over 6,000 respondents in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. The results showed that people are getting overwhelmed by the abundance of subscription services that are either available or launching in the near future. 

While 85% of consumers surveyed in the study are already subscribed to one streaming service, only 42% of them expressed a willingness to pay for an additional one. Also, only 20% were willing to pay for two, and only 4% were willing to pay for three. 

With most consumers unwilling to purchase more than two or three streaming subscriptions at a time, it’s becoming a challenge for people to decide what services are worth paying for. In fact, 70% of those surveyed admitted that they felt there were too many options to choose from. 

By juggling several streaming subscriptions at a time, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that most consumers feel like subscription costs are getting out of hand. 

Due to all the video-viewing platforms overwhelming consumers, your best bet to succeeding in the streaming wars is to put your audience at the forefront of your business plan. Here are a few ways to do this: 

Prioritize Audience Awareness

With so many streaming platforms available, and so many more set to launch (Disney+, HBO Max, NBCU’s Peacock and Quibi to name a few), educating your audience is crucial to your success. 

Consider this: it used to be fairly simple to find past seasons of Blossom or Dawson’s Creek when there were only a few streaming services, but now the consumer needs to be a diligent search expert to find what they’re looking for. According to Forbes, “awareness is a first-step indicator to whether or not a consumer will subscribe.”

So be sure to clearly communicate and promote why your platform’s features and content library is unique from the countless other streaming services out there. It may seem obvious to you, but consumers are still unaware of many streaming services that are launching soon. 

Optimize Your Platform for Engagement

On its own, content is valuable, but isn’t enough to retain your audience.

Go the extra mile for your subscribers by embedding an immersive and valuable community experience directly on your platform. Use moderated tools like live commenting, live chats as well as ratings and reviews to build and connect that community of like-minded individuals together. Allow your audience to be part of the viewing experience, not just people who lean back and watch. 

By providing different ways to engage with your content and fellow audience members, you can encourage consumers to build loyal habits and lasting, meaningful connections to your platform. 

Know Your Viewers

We can’t stress the importance of your first-party data enough. When it comes to content-streaming services, understanding your consumers will help you to better serve them. And the best way to do so is with data.

Netflix, for instance, is constantly assessing viewer preferences to improve what content it presents. They even have a cultural anthropologist on staff to gain a deeper understanding of their audience. The result is a highly personalized experience that offers viewers an easier time finding shows and movies that interest them. 

Inc., a magazine for small businesses and startups, also reports that 61% of customers are willing to give their information in exchange for personalized experiences. And with the loss of third-party cookies, your best bet is to look to the data available on your own platform. 

So dig into the data from your content and engagement tools to gain insights into your audience’s behavior, and refine the content discovery and viewing experiences. This highlights how important it is for streaming services to have a vibrant and engaged community where their audiences discuss and share their likes, dislikes and real feelings about the content. 

“As content discovery becomes more of a challenge in this environment, we need to better understand viewership patterns across platforms and how to best serve people the right content at the right time,” says Alex von Kroh, the VP of a video data solution company.

The more personal and effortless you can make your consumers’ streaming experience, the more likely they are to be loyal to your platform. The ultimate goal is to make your platform part of their daily life, not just another transactional stop along the way.

If you aren’t focused on your consumers, they won’t be focused on you. 

 

RELATED: What We Can Learn From Pirate Sites

Week of Nov. 2-8th: Your Media News Update

As the year 2020 draws closer to us, a wide range of new content forms and topics that consumers will want to engage with are emerging.

With the month of November officially in full swing, we’ve seen a number of reports on current and predicted trends in digital media, especially related to ad spend. As the year 2020 draws closer to us, a wide range of new content forms and topics that consumers will want to engage with are emerging.

This week’s media news update highlights some of the trends that publishers and brands are finding to be most popular with audiences, including:

  • The renewed focus on building stronger brand loyalty as a way to create new revenue opportunities
  • The increase in ad spend on connected TV media as a way to reach audiences on streaming platforms
  • Creating consumer engagement strategies that attract but fail to profit off of younger audiences through social media platforms, like TikTok

Refocusing on Brand Loyalty Will Increase Consumer Engagement and Sales Partnerships

In order to succeed as a media company today, publishers need to have an extraordinary brand. And the general consensus in the industry is that a trusted brand is built on quality journalism. With this in mind, many big brands have been smart in capitalizing on the trust they’ve developed over time with their audiences. This has been achieved through high-quality, relevant content offerings. 

Rolling Stone, for example, believes so strongly in the need for quality journalists that the company has grown its editorial staff by 40% since being acquired by Penske Media. 

Additionally, the brand is capitalizing on the incredible amount of access it has to artists and celebrities. They’re creating monetization opportunities by offering unique products and services to their niche audiences. Take “Musicians on Musicians,” for instance, which gives readers access to intimate conversations between two artists from different genres.

Products and services need to be deemed valuable and meet the needs of consumers in order to gain their trust. Media executives at the Folio: Show agreed that building brand affinity with an audience relies heavily on engaging content that showcase value, such as solving a need or problem. In the case of Rolling Stone, its audience craves insider content that offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of the musicians and celebrities they admire. 

In addition to consumer engagement, brand power also has a significant impact on sales partnerships when it comes to advertising and renewals. For travel magazine, AFAR, licensing content has become a profitable way to develop strong partnerships and showcase its travel expertise.

For other companies like Meredith Magazines, who owns well-known lifestyle brands such as InStyle, People, and Eating Well, the company’s strategy is to partner with other strong brands, like HGTV’s Joanna and Chip Gaines. Content with those particular celebrities were featured in the Meredith-published magazine, The Magnolia Journal, and sold out in four hours on newsstands when it debuted. As long as quality content is at the heart, brand partnerships have proven to be very successful for many publishers.

Ad Spend for Connected TV Media Increases as Publishers Try to Reach Streaming Audiences

According to a new eMarketer forecast, it’s expected that ad spend on TV streaming platforms will soar this year. Analysts predict that media spend on ads for TV streaming services in the US will be more than doubled by 2023 alone. 

Roku is the most popular streaming device with about 44% of viewers, followed by Amazon Fire TV (33%), Google Chromecast (16%) and Apple TV (13%), taking into consideration that there is some overlap among users of multiple devices.

In response to this, media and tech companies are launching a slew of new services that aim to reach viewers who bypass cable or satellite TV subscriptions and instead, connect their TVs directly to the internet to stream content. Tech company Sabio recently launched a product called App Science TV. It’s a platform that enables brands to serve highly targeted ad units via TV and mobile formats by tracking app behavior. 

A key challenge going forward for these types of services will be developing more reliable audience metrics and ways to keep viewers engaged. 

Publishers Use TikTok for Long-Term Audience Engagement

TikTok, a social media video app for creating and sharing short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos, is quickly attracting a growing group of publishers eager to increase their relationships with young audiences. Media corporations such as Vice and Buzzfeed are among those who have already started experimenting with short-form content on the app.  

Vice, which started using the platform earlier this year, is finding that TikTok followers crave exclusive content. As a result, Vice is planning to launch a “Munchies by Vice” account next month, which will feature exclusive content made specifically for the social media platform. 

BuzzFeed, which also started using TikTok earlier this year, hasn’t gone down the route of creating exclusive content for TikTok just yet. A key motivating factor for the brand to join TikTok was to create a Tasty account, as an attempt to ward off copycats.

Despite the popularity of some brands on the app, publishers have generally been reluctant to spend time and money on platforms when there is not a clear path to revenue generation. Currently, there is no mechanism for creators or publishers to directly monetize on TikTok. Many view TikTok as a long-term way to engage and grow their respective audiences until they can figure out how to extend this understanding onto their own platforms. That way, they can engage and keep audiences while generating profit.

You Got New Engagement Tools, Now What?

With the decline of trust in social media advertising, media organizations are exploring new technologies ⁠— specifically on-site engagement tools that build audiences on their own platforms.

With the decline of trust in social media advertising, media organizations are exploring new technologies ⁠— specifically on-site engagement tools that build audiences on their own platforms.

A recent survey by PEW Research Center has revealed that skepticism towards social media continues to grow. In fact, according to the survey, “six-in-ten (62%) [Americans] say social media companies have too much control over the mix of news that people see.”

Media organizations are growing frustrated as big tech companies change their algorithms, fail to moderate toxicity properly and exercise complete control over how often and where their content is appearing. It’s no surprise that media organizations are ready for a change. 

Businesses have, nevertheless, started shifting away from advertising revenue and towards subscription-driven models, where visitors are nurtured and grown into a thriving digital community. 

And what better way to grow a community than with on-site engagement tools? 

If you’ve invested in tools to help build a thriving community on your own platforms, don’t celebrate just yet — this is only the beginning of your engagement solution. You’re probably wondering what your next steps should be. Well, we’re about to give you the low-down on how to make the most of your engagement tools:

1. Define Your Community Engagement Goals

Every good audience engagement solution starts with a plan. So the first step, even before you purchased your tools, is to clearly define your community engagement goals.

Do you want to drive ad loads by maximizing pageviews? Increase depth of visit or visit frequency (a.k.a. loyalty)? Or perhaps you’re aiming to drive registration or subscription conversions and even prevent churn.

No matter what you’re trying to accomplish, you need to return to the basics and set some relevant goals. After all, the way you implement and measure audience engagement will be greatly influenced by what you’re aiming to achieve. 

Our industry experts strongly advise against using on-site engagement tools without a clear strategy and goal. Otherwise, the major benefits of these tools may slip away, right between your fingers.

2. Ensure Your Community Guidelines Are in Tip-Top Shape

By opening up your platforms to engagement, you’ll learn more about your users and improve how invested they are in your brand. However, the onus to protect these engaging spaces from trolls and toxic behavior falls on you. 

In order to properly protect your brand and encourage participation, your community needs to know what rules they should be following. And you need to know how strict any moderation should be. For instance, sports news organizations may want weaker moderation to allow for friendly debates, but still prevent offensive discourse and harassment. The choice is ultimately yours and will differ between companies. 

By investing some effort into carefully crafting community guidelines and enforcing comment moderation, you can expect to see more revenue funneling into your company’s pockets as users become hooked. 

Not sure where to begin? You can find community guideline-setting best practices here. 

3. Perfect Your Conversion Strategy

After you’ve set goals for your on-site engagement tools and have your community guidelines in place, it’s time to establish the ultimate conversion strategy for your platform. 

Work with your paywall and engagement tool providers to come up with and implement a conversion strategy that best suits your business model. 

Whether you’re looking to convert visitors to registrants, members or subscribers, you need to decide what type of conversion message should pop up and how strict your paywall (if any) should be. You may also want to consider having your engagement tools feed highly engaged visitors as well as churn-ready subscribers to your paywall. 

Creating a conversion strategy can be complex and may require some trial and error on your part; however, if done correctly, it will absolutely pay off in the long run.

Bloomberg Media, for instance, has seen tremendous success with its conversion strategy in the past two years, which has tightened a paywall using 22 criteria. The media organization now credits two-thirds of their subscribers to website visits alone.

4. Watch the Metrics to Keep Visitors Engaged

You’re no stranger to your platform’s analytics, we get it. That said, there are some key metrics you can get from your engagement tools worth keeping an eye on. Media organizations that don’t pay attention to factors like active user engagement and civility trends are missing out on a big opportunity to keep their communities engaged in a valuable way. 

Rather than turning to social media for audience data, dig deeper into the information from your own platforms so that you can give people exactly what they want, when they’re ready for it. 

Your engagement data will help you to identify how well or poorly your content is being perceived by your audience. You can also re-engage inactive subscribers with personalized, special offers based on insights from your first-party data.

Keep in mind that it can cost up to five times the amount of resources to attract new consumers than keep old ones.

As stated by the VP of audience development and analytics at Condé Nast, “it is always much easier to retain somebody than to bring in someone new, because they already value and trust you, and they want to engage with your content and your product, versus trying to convince somebody why they should subscribe or join.” 

5. Highlight Examples of Top Engagement/Community Members

Strengthen relationships directly within your online community by highlighting good behavior on your platform. 

You can try rewarding users with special badges that identify them as trusted community members. Or, showcase top comments on threads to help your users feel valued. This will help you to build trust and interest within your community. 

Once you have your engagement tools, your platform will transform into a place for people to interact with trustworthy content, establish relationships with others and become important community members. 

Yet, the most effective on-site engagement tools can’t be left to run on their own. They need to be backed by strategy, community guidelines and actionable insights. Planning, testing and refining your business’ audience engagement process must be a constant effort. That way, your business can evolve as the industry evolves.

 

RELATED: Your Guide to Building and Engaging an Online Community

Week of Oct. 26th-Nov. 1st: Your Media News Update

During the last week of October, we saw the release of many new technologies that will forever impact the state of content delivery and how we consume content. We now have an abundance of information at the touch of yet another app.

This week’s media news update focuses on the impact that everyone from tech companies to social advocacy organizations has in influencing how we access and engage with digital media, including:

  • Amazon’s and Apple’s foray into TV app streaming services for video news
  • Media executives’ thoughts on the value of reader habit on their owned and operated properties
  • America’s oldest and largest journalism advocacy organization slapping President Trump with cease and desist letters every time he uses the term “fake news”

For more details on the latest and greatest industry news from the past week, read on.

Amazon and Apple Have Been Busy Shaping the Future of TV

Streaming services have revolutionized how we watch TV and consume content. Watching news broadcasts used to be something that was part of your early morning routine as you prepared for work, or in the evening, before or after dinner. 

However, the internet has significantly changed our behaviors by giving us access to news content at any hour of the day. Streaming apps are now gaining speed in overtaking pay-TV services. And with an abundance of pirate sites available to consumers, competition for media streaming services is stronger than ever.

A growing number of platforms that aggregate video news from a variety of services have launched apps this year. Amazon now joins the ranks with the release of an ad-supported video news app designed for Fire TV devices. This app enables viewers to catch up on all the latest current events with both live and on-demand content from the likes of CBS, Reuters and Bloomberg. 

Simply called the News app on Fire TV, this new offering joins the previously launched news aggregator from Plex and other similar offerings from competing companies. The News app is free for Amazon’s Fire TV users. With this release, the company will be in a better position to compete with the offerings of rival services such as Apple News and Google News while at the same time strengthen relationships with publishers such as Sports Illustrated, Al Jazeera and Yahoo.

News-related content within the app will be rolled out to an expanding pool of compatible devices over the next few weeks, including tablets such as the updated Fire HD10. Amazon is focusing its efforts on creating the optimal customer experience so consumers won’t need to create separate accounts to benefit from the content. 

New ad revenue streams to diversify its revenue base are currently in progress, setting the company up to become the third-largest digital advertiser in the US after Google and Facebook.

Meanwhile, Apple is trying to get its TV app on as many devices as possible as it launches its $5-per-month video streaming service. Most recently, the company added its TV app to Amazon’s Fire TV platform. Available as of October 24 for both the Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick 4K, the Apple TV app will also be making its way to other Fire TV devices in the coming weeks. 

Media Executives Dig Into Building Profitable Consumer Habits

With print ad revenue in decline and digital ad spending heading towards its first decline in a decade, publishers are now looking to a future where readers are loyal to their own platforms.

At Digiday’s Publishing Summit Europe in Budapest, Hungary, executives shared their plans to diversify their sources of income, and the associated pain points.

One topic that was explored was how to develop loyal reader habits, keeping them on publisher sites for longer. Media executives who attended the event emphasized how the more opportunities to engage readers they offer, such as engagement tools or apps, the more likely visitors are to stick around.

One way that publishers are engaging their readers is through real-time, moderated commenting tools.

In another media news update, Publishing Executive also proposed that an upcoming trend for 2020 will involve publishers focusing on key reader metrics, on a more granular level than ever before. And it won’t just be up to data teams to analyze these metrics. 

The media company goes on to suggest that editors themselves need to understand the metrics that matter. That way, editors can create content that better engages community members, and appeals to advertisers. 

Fun Fact Friday

The Florida Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has had enough of President Trump using the term ‘fake news’ whenever he doesn’t like something the press says about him. 

SPJ is America’s oldest and largest journalism advocacy organization. To help uphold the integrity of the industry, they decided to trademark the term ‘fake news’ in hopes of stopping the president and others from using the term haphazardly. Every time he uses it incorrectly, the organization will send him a cease and desist letter.

In addition to obtaining the trademark, a launch video has been marketed that features a journalist explaining why the term was trademarked. The video drives people to FakeNewsTM.com, which has tips on how to spot actual fake news and what journalists are doing to ensure they report the truth. 

It currently has 332,000 social media shares and has been covered by Newsweek, The Hill, New York Post, CBC, CTV and Daily News, among other publishers. The project was created in partnership with Calgary-based creative agency Wax.

If you haven’t already taken a look at it, you may find some valuable takeaways to share with your own company’s editorial team. 

Week of Oct. 19th-25th: Your Media News Update

The last week has seen a flurry of activity around topics related to automated content moderation and product design as well as ways to develop communities and keep them engaged. The many news stories and reports that have been discussed are a treasure trove of best practices we can learn from, including:

  • Twitch’s decision to amp up its live-streaming moderation and establish a “three strikes” rule before suspending a streamer’s channel
  • Microsoft’s testing of new content filters for its Xbox Live messaging system as a way to reduce the amount of toxicity on its platform
  • The Telegraph’s ability to achieve a 49% growth in subscriptions by optimizing its homepage

To continue learning and staying up-to-date with the latest and greatest industry news from the past week, read on.

Content Filtering and Moderation Reaches a New Level (for Some)

Content filtering and moderating live-streamed content have significantly evolved over the years. Twitch, one of the most popular video live-streaming services in the world, is leading the charge by providing a space for online communities to develop in a positive way. CEO Emmett Shear has been a big proponent of stream moderation as a way to empower streamers in creating the type of community they want. 

Twitch isn’t an “anything goes” type of platform. It’s very explicitly not a free speech platform, which differs from Twitch’s competitors. Shear says, “We’re a community. And communities have standards for how you have to behave inside that community. And so we think that it’s not anything goes.” 

When it comes to the digital world, community guidelines need to be set and enforced to keep platforms safe and productive.

More and more companies are also taking steps to adopt automated content moderation systems as a way to create safer online communities for the masses. For example, Microsoft is now testing content filters for its Xbox Live messaging system to reduce toxicity on its platform.

Microsoft has managed moderation on Xbox Live for almost 20 years, including the ability to report messages, usernames, and photos. Their new content filters empower players to have control over what kinds of messages are instantly hidden. The company also aims to protect live audio calls with real-time bleeps, similar to broadcast TV. Microsoft is now trying to be more open and transparent about how it moderates Xbox Live and the choices it makes to enforce these filters across the community.  

Facebook, on the other hand, still lacks in its commitment to content moderation based on its current automated filtering tools. The company has now publicly announced its shortcomings in an attempt to challenge a European Court of Justice ruling. 

When the top EU court decided earlier in the month that Facebook must use automated content moderation to detect “defamatory content,” the company responded by saying its tech was simply not good enough. Facebook described their own moderation tools as a “blunt instrument,” unable to properly understand the context, and therefore, make correct decisions.

Publishers Tap Into Creating Better Product Designs to Increase Subscriptions

Many publishers are trying to move away from relying on advertising income as the main source of revenue. To be financially sustainable in the long-run, more companies like The Telegraph are continuing to think about a subscriber-based revenue model. Consequently, there is a new thought emerging about how products reflect and align with this type of model. 

All of The Telegraph’s products, for example, now revolve around subscribers. Mathias Douchet, Director of Product at The Telegraph, says that “we had to move away from an ad strategy to a more user-engagement, user-centric strategy with our own products.”  

To do this, The Telegraph rebuilt its website’s homepage. Its old homepage offered hundreds of stories but very little in the way of editorial curation. It was also difficult to group content around a theme and make content stand out.

Since the Telegraph’s homepage is a key product that many subscribers turn to on a daily basis, it was revamped to offer top-notch user experience and ongoing engagement. 

The homepage redesign has resulted in very positive outcomes for the publisher. All consumption and engagement KPIs are up, subscriptions have increased by 49% and advertising revenue has increased but with fewer ads.

The Guardian has also released a daily app for paying subscribers as part of its quest to reach two million financial supporters by 2022. The appeal of the new app is that it won’t carry ads and will offer news in a streamlined way.

The new app lets users scroll horizontally through different news sections in depth. It also lets users read the previous week’s worth of papers. 

Publisher app users are typically highly valuable because they consume more content more regularly and for longer periods of time. For these reasons, publishers are beefing up their apps for subscribers. This includes The Economist, which last year launched an app to help drive retention. The app design takes its cue from the digital user experience of music streaming apps like Spotify. Similar to publishers, music streaming apps also face the challenge of displaying massive amounts of content grouped by genre in an intuitive way.

Successful businesses are no longer making products and decisions that revolve completely around advertising; they revolve around subscribers. 

Why People Hate Live Commenting, but Will Learn to Love It

A common misconception about online, live commenting tools has taken root within the internet. Want to take a guess as to what that might be? Let us give you a bit of hint:


Thanks to spammers, bots, trolls and toxic behavior, people now believe that commenting tools are destructive to a brand’s reputation. And with 63% of Americans convinced that incivility online results from social media, it’s no surprise that people think of all online social experiences in a negative way.

Here’s just a small taste of why people hate live commenting tools online:

In a Facebook post, one commenter responds to a video titled ‘What if Online Trolls Acted Like Trolls in Real Life:’ “This is why I think most websites should turn off their commenting sections. People say so much online that they never would face to face. And most of the political arguments would evaporate too, which would be great.”

People assume that comments — especially those posted in real time — threaten the health of a community as harassment, profanities and spam can be brought alive instantly, with the push of a button.

But while these concerns are all valid, they encourage the loss of profitable, on-site audience engagement. In reality, there’s actually a way to host real-time commenting tools on your owned and operated properties without damaging your brand.

The Uses and Gratification Theory introduces us to the idea that people actively seek out media to fulfill their needs for information, human connection and socialization. Commenting tools can help to satisfy this innate human need to socialize and connect with others, sparking healthy, social interaction online.

Breaking the Chain of Misinformation Around Commenting

Media organizations that have killed or rejected commenting sections have experienced and will continue to experience a massive loss of opportunity.

Yes, there are trolls running wild online, just itching to frustrate other people. So rather than letting them — along with countless other digital trouble-makers — ruin your engagement tools, all you need to do is put one simple measure in place to tame them: comment moderation.

Comment moderation can completely flip your commenting platform from destructive to profitable in a matter of moments. In fact, communities that had sophisticated moderation in place see significant on-site engagement growth: including 62% more user likes, 35% more comments per user and 34% more replies per user.

By creating a protected and social environment that users can engage with, you can begin building a loyal community that drives revenue.

Civil, live commenting platforms help to form an environment where visitors feel safe enough to participate in conversation. As they create meaningful discussions with others around content, their propensity to subscribe increases.

Comments also provide organizations with valuable audience engagement metrics.


Just as the previous post stated, these metrics can help organizations identify community behavior and content preferences, which can be used to improve editorial and subscription strategies. Take it a step further by making sure you’re getting first-party audience data from your commenting tools so you can gather actionable insights to help grow your community.

Setting Rules in Your Community

If you’re going to bring a commenting tool into your platform, you need to decide how strict your comment moderation should be.

A recent post on The Verge outlines the value of moderation in online communities. In the article, Twitch’s CEO, Emmett Shear, addresses the difference between allowing free speech and building a civil community online:

“I hope people can express themselves. I hope they can share their ideas, share their thoughts. But we’re not a platform for free speech. We are not upholding the First Amendment. That’s the government’s job. We’re a community. And communities have standards for how you have to behave inside that community. And so we think that it’s not anything goes.”

Free speech is important to society as a whole, but online, speech that disrupts a community’s overall health is toxic to a brand’s success. Which is why it’s so important to set community guidelines and enforce them throughout your engagement tools.

“[A community] with good, strong moderation, in many ways, is actually the place with freer speech,” says Shear. “Because it was actually the place where people could express themselves and not just get destroyed by trolls and abuse and harassment.”

Preventing toxicity on your platform actually forms an ideal environment for users to interact with one another in.

So here’s the bottom line: moderated commenting tools are absolute necessities to engage visitors, build communities and grow revenue.

Can’t afford to spare any resources to do the moderation in-house? You may want to look into a tool that offers automatic moderation services. You can review the different types of moderation here.

Week of Oct. 12th-18th: Your Media News Update

The past seven days have seen a lot of chatter within the media and publishing industry. The many news stories and reports that have been revealed will have a significant impact on the industry moving forward, including:

  • The many creative ways publishers are using first-party data to better understand subscription behaviors, and implement initiatives to reduce churn
  • How publishers continue to compete with social media players
  • The major successes email publishers are experiencing by allocating more resources towards building and growing subscription referral programs

To learn more and stay up to date with the latest and greatest industry news from the past week, read the details below.

Media Companies Experiment to Decrease Subscription Churn

Schibsted Media Group has decreased the amount of customers who cancel subscriptions by pioneering a seemingly counterintuitive sales model. This model makes it easy for consumers to cancel subscriptions, but at the same time, convinces them why it’s worth keeping. Emphasizing the utility of the product and giving users the power to make their own choices has dramatically increased Schibsted Media Group’s subscriber engagement. In addition, the company has turned the cancellation process into an educational experience by providing users with more information on how they benefit from their subscription.

Apple is another company that recently recognized a missed opportunity to improve subscriber retention. After looking at their data to understand where subscribers were most likely to drop off, they implemented a new billing feature for subscription apps. Referred to as a billing grace period, users are given more time to address auto-payment issues before they are cut off from paid content.

Many publishers are also increasing their ad spend as a way to reach more potential subscribers. The goal is to lead users to content that requires registering through a paywall. Publishers are trying to make the best use of their subscription data by creating digital marketing campaigns that focus on targeting audiences with similar characteristics as their current subscriber base. That way, they can attract and keep new audiences.

The Battle Between Publishers and Social Media Continues

With Facebook preparing to launch a human-curated “news tab” this month, publishers are becoming increasingly threatened by social media.

The industry has long argued against not getting a cut of the revenue that social platforms make from sharing their content. Additionally, a report from the Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook will only be paying a small handful of the publishers for content that’s shared in its human-curated news tab.

This week, Publicis’ Zenith Media published Advertising Expenditure Forecasts, revealing that social media has overtaken print in ad spend for the first time ever. That growth will expand social media’s share of global ad spend to 13%, making social media the third-biggest ad channel behind TV (29%) and paid search (17%) in 2019.

Although publishers face major challenges with the increasing popularity of social media amongst their target audiences, consumers are becoming increasingly skeptical and distrusting of the quality of news they receive through these platforms. This declining trust in social media poses a huge opportunity for publishers to focus on building civil social experiences on their own platforms. There’s still a demand for meaningful news, information and entertainment that publishers can provide as a counterbalance to the “fake news” on social media.

A new survey asked 1,200 adults about their thoughts on media, privacy and trust. The results found that 86% of people believe there’s a “fake news” problem that continues to grow in the market. Additionally, 66% of people said data-privacy concerns affected their trust in social media.

Leveraging the Power of Email Referral Programs

Since people love free stuff, some email publishers have started giving their readers free perks as a way to grow their subscription lists. Morning Brew, The Hustle and TheSkimm are prime examples of email-based publishers who have established referral programs that encourage subscribers to get their friends to sign-up to newsletters.

The programs now account for a significant chunk of year-over-year email list growth. The Morning Brew, which launched its referral program in 2017, now has 1.6 million subscribers to its daily newsletter. The publisher attributes 35% of its newsletter audience growth to the referral program.

The Hustle, which used referral programs to promote both its free daily newsletter and paid products, created its first version of the program in 2015 to sell event tickets. Because the referral program grew their email list so significantly, they launched a newsletter business the following year to capitalize on the growing audience. The referral program now accounts for about 10% of growth towards the The Hustle’s newsletter list and has over 10,000 subscribers, who have each referred at least four other sign-ups.

TheSkimm, which introduced email referrals through word-of-mouth call-to-actions in 2012, now credits 20% of its newsletter growth to the publisher’s referral program. The program is so strong that the newsletter publisher has more than 30,000 Skimm’bassadors, which are community members that have referred 10 or more people to sign up for the daily newsletter.

Results have shown that subscribers are willing to refer a publisher when offered anything from branded T-shirts and stickers, to exclusive content or contests. Although these programs can require quite a bit of budget allocation for gifts or prizes, the cost of retaining a customer or increasing loyalty significantly outweighs the short-term expenditure.

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