Audience Development Archives | Page 5 of 6

This One Simple Action Will Change the Way You Connect With Video Viewers

As new over-the-top (OTT) media platforms continue to launch, consumers have an endless supply of streaming services to choose from. The abundant content libraries, personalized experiences and inexpensive subscriptions offered by these service providers are persuading more and more people to turn to OTT media for entertainment.

“OTT streaming video represents a largely incremental audience and a way for brands to [reach new audiences] and engage directly with their target consumers,” states the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in a playbook on video streaming.

And yet, service providers are neck and neck in competing for consumer attention.

So what if we told you that there’s an extraordinarily simple way to make your platform stand apart from the rest?

All you need to do is enable social interactions on your platform. That way, your audience members will be able to connect with one another as well as with your brand.

Don’t believe us? Here’s why social interactions are adding an immeasurable amount of value to video streams.

Improving the Video-Viewing Experience

Just because people are spending more time than ever before streaming videos doesn’t mean that they’ll be loyal to any ordinary OTT platform. Streaming companies are quickly finding that providing top-quality video content isn’t enough to sustain business growth on its own.

At the end of the day, video viewers will give their business to companies that offer the best consumer experiences. Allowing viewers to socialize digitally around video content just so happens to be the key to unlocking more long-term subscribers.

“During the pandemic, 38% of consumers surveyed have tried a new digital activity or subscription for the first time,” reads a recent digital media trends report by Deloitte. “The most popular [of these activities] are viewing live streamed events and watching video with others.”

In other words, incorporating a social element into video streams is becoming a popular way to win consumer attention.

Companies that use social tools to take video-viewing experiences to the next level will help convince consumers to stick around on their platforms in the long run.

The Value of Social Interaction Around Video

When it comes to infusing value into OTT platforms, live chats have a particularly strong appeal to both consumers and streaming companies alike.

Tools that allow viewers to discuss videos in real time can establish meaningful connections between community members and around your platform’s content. This helps to satisfy the social needs of audiences, increasing their likelihood to remain as dedicated subscribers.

The level of entertainment that social tools can add to the video-viewing experience has also been amplified by the pandemic.

Frank Pallotta, a media reporter at CNN, sums it up well: “With the pandemic increasing the practice of hosting virtual streaming parties, new social tools are providing not just connection in a time of social distancing but a new yet familiar way to keep consumers engaged and subscribing to services.”Just be sure to have an effective moderation strategy in place to protect your brand’s environment from toxic comments.

A Growing Trend for Streaming Platforms

Some streaming companies have already realized that they can enhance the consumer experience by offering social tools right on their digital properties.

Netflix, for instance, launched a watch party feature earlier this year, where viewers can sync their videos while chatting together. Hulu has recently launched a similar feature as well.

Sports media companies are also relying on similar chat-based tools to bring people together around live broadcasts. BT Sport, for instance, is allowing video viewers to watch broadcasts of competitions while simultaneously chatting with community members. A Spanish football league known as La Liga is even testing out a feature that offers fans a simulated experience of being in a crowd during broadcasts.

As a result of these social-based experiences, companies are engaging viewers beyond their content simply by activating their communities.

According to Deloitte, some consumers are even using videoconferencing tools to watch OTT content with friends. This means that viewers are actively seeking out tools that allow them to socialize with others alongside video content.

Leveraging live chats to form watch parties is quickly becoming the norm for OTT companies. The simple act of giving audiences a way to talk while watching content is, after all, highly beneficial to service providers.

Rather than just allowing consumers to passively watch content, OTT platforms can implement social tools to elevate the video-viewing experience and build brand loyalty.

You’ve Got A Paid Subscriber, Now What?

Well done on earning another subscriber for your media company! But contrary to popular belief, it isn’t time to pop open that bottle of Champagne quite yet. In fact, whether you’ve gained one, ten or hundreds of new subscribers for your organization, the journey to long-term success is far from over.

“People are, on average, likely to pay for one news subscription and up to three entertainment subscriptions,” says Lucinda Southern, a reporter at Digiday. This means that “the pool for acquiring new readers quickly dwindles.”

Even so, you don’t need to miss out on that profitable, sustainable business you’ve probably always dreamed of. The solution to that shrinking pool of consumers lies with your existing subscribers. If you’re aiming to be a competitive player in the media industry, the subscription experience your company offers must be second to none.

Make your subscribers want to remain active, paying members of your digital community by engaging them continuously. After all, a sustainable business model doesn’t just acquire subscribers — it retains them as well.

Here’s how to keep your subscribers from, well, unsubscribing.

Build a Community for Subscribers

While your content offering may have convinced a visitor to subscribe to your brand, it likely won’t be enough to keep them interested for long. Especially with countless other media organizations fighting for your subscribers’ attention.

But rather than fretting over your loyal subscribers losing interest, take action.

One of the best ways to keep subscribers loyal to your platform in the long run is to delight them with continuous social interaction. This can be accomplished by maximizing the opportunity for them to build meaningful bonds: to both your brand and to other loyal users within your audience. Think live commenting or chat tools.

“An organization able to build relationships with members — as opposed to plain customers — has… a powerful competitive edge,” says Robbie Baxter, author of The Membership Economy.

Humans are creatures of habit who instinctively crave social interaction. Use this to your advantage and form a sustainable business by offering ongoing social experiences to your audience.

Monitor Subscriber Behavior to Enhance Their Experience

“To truly engage customers and clients, to broaden customer bases or nurture relationships that fuel engagement and growth, data is where it begins,” states a managing director at Deloitte Digital.

In other words, the audience engagement data you have access to on your platform is key to strengthening subscriber loyalty.

This is your chance to dig into the numbers, gather insights into your audience’s behavior, and in turn, use those insights to improve your user’s experience.

Take sports media, for instance. More and more sports organizations are beginning to use their first-party data to offer up a premium experience to their subscribers. And oftentimes, a premium experience means personalization, where brands cater to the unique needs and appetites of the individual.

Consider personalizing your subscriber’s experience by sending them recommended content and experiences based on their data.

Prevent Churn Before It Ever Happens

Sustainable businesses in the media industry have already realized that preventing churn — the loss of subscribers — should be a priority. Even The Economist pours 70% of its marketing resources into retaining its subscribers.

At the end of the day, “acquiring a new customer is up to 25% more expensive than retaining an existing one,” says the International News Media Association (INMA).

So how does one exactly stop churn from taking place and extend the lifetime value of each subscriber?

The answer lies in your engagement tool and paywall strategy. When implemented properly, your engagement tool provider should be able to identify dips in user activity, and notify your paywall provider when churn is on the horizon. Then, your paywall provider can send special subscription discounts and content offers for the subscriber in question before churn ever happens.

Alternatively, you can use your first-party data to send out personalized emails directly to your inactive subscribers with content that would appeal to their interests.

When it comes to paywalls and engagement tools, you can’t just set them and forget them. It is absolutely essential to check on your audience, and enhance their experience time and time again. The fate of your business depends on it.

Churn Reduction 101: What the Media Experts Have to Say

Thanks to the unpredictable algorithms on big tech platforms and decline of third-party cookies, the most effective path to earning revenue is changing. Media companies must now compensate for these failing revenue streams by investing in their own properties.

As a result, subscription or membership-based business models are becoming commonplace among media companies. But with most consumers only willing to pay for up to four media services at a time, the competitive landscape is resulting in high amounts of subscriber churn.

“It is always much easier to retain somebody than to bring in someone new, because they already value and trust you,” states Condé Nast’s VP of audience development and analytics.

So to keep your audience members loyal and lucrative, you must focus on activating and engaging a tight-knit community right on your website or app.

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what your fellow industry experts have to say on how to go about reducing customer churn.

The Athletic: Building an Engaged Community

Every loyal, paying community starts with an engaging conversion strategy. And The Athletic’s CEO, Alex Mather, thinks so too.

“We see an incredible connection between community engagement and subscriber retention,” says Mather. “The question that drives us is how can we connect users in an authentic way, how can we connect users to our staff in an authentic way.”

Successful conversion strategies tend to connect engagement and registration systems together. That way, you can detect drops in engagement, and send special content offers to those likely to churn.

The Wall Street Journal: Early Habit Formation

“The biggest driver of churn reduction amongst new [subscription] members is the creation of early habit formation,” writes Ian Tucker, the associate director of optimization at The Wall Street Journal.

The Wall Street Journal’s subscriber onboarding process ensures that the first 100 days after becoming a subscriber — the period a user is most likely to form habits — are packed with opportunities for engagement.

The more interactions you can encourage from your subscribers, the more likely they are to return to your property in the future. Translation: encourage your readers to habitually use your platform, and watch as their loyalty grows.

“It’s not just about building our membership models, and looking at churn rates, and acquisitions rates,” states Jonathan Wright, who works as the global managing director for Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. “It’s really about the engagement of those customers once we have them on the platform, once they’re experiencing the content.”

The New York Times: Understanding Subscribers

User data truly stands at the heart of engaging and retaining consumers at The New York Times. According to the company’s editorial director of newsletters, data and user research is essential in helping companies learn what kinds of content subscribers crave, and how they most wish to consume it.

In other words, a business can best understand its audience by seriously digging into its first-party data, and then using that knowledge to refine the subscriber experience.

It’s also important to monitor your audience data and engagement closely to understand why and when subscribers are churning.

“The bottom line is that people who aren’t using the product are likely to churn… Email them, reach out to remind them what you’re doing and what’s of value to them,” explains The Times’ CEO.

There are a multitude of ways you can help to prevent your audience members from unsubscribing. Learn how to prevent churn and re-engage unsubscribers here.

OTT Platforms: Personalization

“We know that today’s connected consumers expect a deeply personalized experience,” states Jason Wong, Hulu’s director of product management.

Through the power of your audience’s data, you can enrich their experience with relevant information and content.

“If you can understand what people care about during the process, and prove to them you can be trusted with the information you’re asking for, that goes a long way. Then they can just focus on the experience they are trying to buy,” says the head of the acquisition and retention team at DAZN.

Consumers are willing to pay for valuable media experiences. So by engaging your subscribers through custom and “premium” experiences, you’ll be setting your company up for long-term success.

Five Simple and Subtle Ways to Recommend Content to Your Audience

When it comes to the media industry, content recommendation goes far beyond newsletters. Companies are beginning to recognize that, when done strategically, recommending content to audiences can amplify consumer interest and enhance their overall experience with brands.

But here’s the big question: what recommendation methods are most effective?

Last year, Gartner, an international research firm, revealed that 78% of consumers crave custom experiences. The report goes on to explain that while consumers want an effortless and relevant experience, they don’t want their personal information to be abused.

This means that it’s important to recommend content from your platform in a subtle and data-secure way. Otherwise, you risk appearing self-serving or annoying to your audience. Just think of how much trust Facebook lost thanks to its history of abusing user data.

Send the right content to consumers without overstepping boundaries by relying on a mix of personalized and automated tools and techniques. We’ve rounded up some simple ways to get started, which will keep consumers on your digital properties for longer — without sacrificing any part of their experience.

Push Notifications

If you’re on the hunt for a way to boost time spent on your digital property, push notifications may be the solution your organization needs. You can allow users to customize their own experience by limiting notifications to their favourite topics and verticals that they’ve opted into.

Research from the Columbia Journalism Review found that consumers are generally comfortable with receiving push notifications. As a result, companies are successfully leveraging this technology to keep audiences interested in content.

New York Magazine, for instance, has seen a 7% click-through rate on mobile push notifications for its shopping vertical, and plans to increase notification frequency around other verticals. Viafoura clients have also seen click-through rates of up to 27.6% on push notifications.

Overall, push notifications are a quick and effective way to connect directly with your audience members for urgent or new content.

Ratings and Reviews

Have you ever wondered how you can best flag top content to consumers without ever lifting a finger? Rating and review tools allow audience members to publish their own authentic feelings about your content.

These community-made recommendations are often perceived by consumers to be significantly trustworthy.

In fact, “92% of consumers trust peer recommendations,” says a marketing expert on G2.

These tools also give consumers an additional avenue to engage with your platform, flagging top content as they generate conversation.

Data-Driven Recommendation Widgets

If you’ve ever subscribed to a video-streaming platform, you’ve probably noticed the recommended content that changes as you watch new videos.

Content-recommendation widgets run algorithms that analyze user data and automatically choose what media consumers see. In most cases, these tools help companies provide a highly relevant experience to consumers.

“Data-driven personalisation… ensures customers get what they want,” reads an article on SportsPro.

These personalization tools aren’t limited to the OTT space, and can be leveraged by any media company that hosts content on their digital properties.

As a matter of fact, all types of companies that buy into personalization tech are surpassing their competitors by 30% in sales.

Trending Conversations

Comment readers earn up to six times the engagement than ordinary consumers.

For this reason, you may want to consider putting a tool in place to keep these extremely valuable community members interested in your platform.

Certain tools are actually able to highlight trending conversations across your properties, allowing you to keep your most active audience members reading your most engaging content.

Personalized Messages

Gartner explains how “brands find themselves balancing the need for personalized marketing messages while consumers are increasingly concerned about privacy and data usage.”

To keep consumers engaged and satisfied on digital properties, companies are now relying on their first-party data to understand consumer behaviors. With these resulting insights, companies are able to send relevant, personalized messages to subscribers. Custom messages can be used to suggest a curated list of must-read content based on the particular interests of each consumer.

Many companies send out these types of personalized messages to users who are becoming inactive, allowing them to re-engaging audience members and prevent churn.

No matter how abundant or great your content is, the right people aren’t necessarily finding it. Maximize the time users spend on your digital properties by giving them a gentle push in the right direction.

Growing Media Trends That Will Hook Consumers in 2020

2020 has finally arrived, prompting media professionals everywhere to examine and test new industry trends. So how can one possibly predict which ones will help businesses grow and which ones will not? With so many budding media trends to sift through, be sure to keep this in mind: those that reel in, engage and retain consumers are the ones that will ultimately pay off in the long run.

“The race for consumers’ attention is becoming ever more competitive,” writes an industry expert in an International News Media Alliance article. “It’s increasingly important to be relevant to create a meaningful connection with an audience.”

In other words, audience engagement will be business-critical in 2020. In order to attract and engage consumers to your brand, understand and implement the fast-rising media trends below.

Audience-First Journalism

Over the past few years, consumer trust in media has taken a serious nosedive thanks to all the misinformation and fake news spreading around social media. But with revenue models moving towards subscription and membership-driven programs, trust between brands and audiences must be re-established.

As a result, journalists are beginning to put their audiences at the forefront of the content they produce, and even involve them in the content-production process. One media trend in particular known as engaged journalism — the process of building content with audience members — is picking up steam since it gives brands the opportunity to truly listen to and engage their audience members.

Solutions journalism has also been inching its way into 2020, which is where journalists go beyond covering a story by suggesting how to resolve the issues at hand. And with 57% of Americans expressing that reading news affects them in a negative way, solutions journalism could prevent audiences from becoming overwhelmed by your content.

Personalizing the User’s Experience

According to NiemanLab, first-party user data will become increasingly significant to media organizations in 2020. Brands will need to rely on the data they can scrape from their own platforms in order to identify audience appetites and trends.

Linsday Leaf, VP of experiential marketing for POPSUGAR, explains why her brand sees so much audience engagement: “We really listen to our audience — what they react to, what makes them tick and then we serve the trends, topics and experiences we know they crave.”

User data is also becoming more important now than ever before to video-streaming platforms. This data allows OTT platforms to serve up relevant content to their audiences, enhancing the user experience.

First-party data insights open up a world of opportunity to media organizations, including the ability to target meaningful content to known users, push highly engaged users to your paywall or send special offers to inactive subscribers about to churn.

Data Transparency

Thanks to the GDPR and CCPA privacy laws, as well as the countless data breaches that have taken place online, your audience members want to know how their data will be used and handled.

Being open with your audience about how their data is being used will help them feel more comfortable to hand over their personal info. Reassure them even more by telling them exactly what kind of premium experience they’ll get in exchange for their data.

Investing in Audio Content

In 2019 alone, over half of Americans listened to a podcast, showing massive growth from 2018. Spotify also noted that its listeners have consumed almost 40% more podcasting hours compared to its last quarter. Clearly, audio content is catching on for media organizations.

Not only is audio equipment an extremely inexpensive investment, but FIASCO podcast host Leon Neyfakh also notes “that podcasting is a distinctly intimate medium, [where] people form a special connection to podcast hosts because they have us in their ears while they’re walking around and living their lives.”

That special connection between podcast host and listener is a solid way to build loyalty towards your brand.

Interactive Video

2020 will be the year that video takes on a whole new meaning of the word ‘engaging.’ More specifically, media organizations have started incorporating interactive elements into their videos to fascinate viewers.

Take Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch film, for instance. The video-streaming platform tested this interactive movie in 2018, where viewers could influence the plot by making decisions for the film’s protagonist. After the film produced a successful response from its audience, Netflix announced that it’ll be “doubling down” on interactive video in the future.

Other media organizations are also testing out video content and ads that consumers are able to shop through. In these cases, eCommerce crosses over with media content to deepen audience engagement through a shoppable, content-viewing experience.

Staff as Influencers

From Buzzfeed, and Bon Apétite to a variety of podcast hosts, media staff from all walks of life will be upping their efforts to engage audience members directly in 2020. This includes staff members starring in regular videos, attending meet-and-greet events, running live chats and responding to user comments.

By creating a direct connection between audience and staff, brands are able to transform users into dedicated fans. Your audience is the lifeblood of your organization — this means that the most useful media trends in 2020 will consistently engage and monetize consumers.

Trust in Facebook is at an all-time low: Here’s how media companies can use that to their advantage

Facebook is addictive — for both consumers and advertisers. With over 1.5 billion users accessing Facebook on a daily basis, the social media giant has become a major source of advertising for brands worldwide. However, little by little, the community standards of Facebook have been dropping — and people are noticing.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal, where Facebook leaked data from millions of people to a company that used it to promote political ads, was only the beginning of the platform’s trust fall. Netflix’s documentary, The Great Hack, offers an in-depth view into the scandal.

The social media giant’s sudden and strict algorithm changes have also affected businesses in a negative way. These changes drastically reduced the reach of Facebook posts from publishers, which dropped to as little as two percent of followers.

Even as Facebook races to protect its users, their moderation solution still leaves a lot to be desired. And let’s not forget that one of Facebook’s co-founders penned an article about everything wrong with the company

Tips to capitalize on Facebook’s trust deficit

To help your brand use this mistrust between Facebook and its users as an opportunity to gain loyal community members, we put together a few of our top tips.

Invest in your own platform

With trust in Facebook at such a visible low, there’s never been a better time to start building your brand’s reputation as a trusted media source… on your own domains.

Sure, Facebook can be used to promote content and events — but only to an extent. You don’t want to be stuck relying entirely on a platform that decides how to promote your content without your input. Thankfully, you have other options. Better options.

Instead of struggling to build your brand on Facebook, invest in tools and strategies that bring engagement back to your domains. You don’t need to stop using Facebook completely. But you also don’t need to give a portion of your revenue away to a platform that doesn’t give you enough exposure for your content. After all, Facebook prioritizes posts from family and friends over posts from advertisers.

You will find more infographics at Statista

If you can invest in building a safe and engaging environment on your own domains, individuals will no longer associate your content or brand with the abundance of misinformation on Facebook.

Give the people what they want

Have you ever wondered what it is about Facebook that seems so attractive to users?

People are social creatures. Consumers continue to use Facebook despite our trust issues with the platform simply because we crave socialization and engagement. In fact, an analysis of the media industry has found that engagement is key when it comes to building loyal brand followers.

A report by Salesforce also found that “84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.”

Facebook, along with other social media platforms, offers many opportunities for users to engage with one another as well as with publishers and their content. However, attaching this immersive social experience to a brand is no longer exclusive to social media platforms.

Consider integrating tools directly on your platform that allow your users to discuss your content, chat with one another, follow their favourite authors and receive content-related notifications based on their preferences.

By generating engagement on your domains, your visitors will want to stick around and subscribe.

Nurture safe conversations, not toxic comments

Many media professionals find commenting counterproductive to a brand’s development — especially with the rise of trolls, harassment, bullying, misinformation and spam in the digital world. At the end of the day, it’s probably more effective to avoid commenting altogether, right?

Wrong.

To foster a good relationship with your digital community away from social media, you need to craft a solid set of community guidelines and enforce them. According to a new study by the Center for Media Engagement, individuals are more likely to have a negative impression of a domain when 75% of its comments are uncivil.

While it is important to engage your visitors in a social experience, they will only enjoy the experience in a toxic-free environment. This means that on top of providing a social layer for your community, it is also essential that comments are thoroughly moderated and that user data is completely secure.

Enforcing a safe environment will help your community members feel comfortable engaging in, and returning to, your domains.

Produce targeted, reliable content

In the digital age, knowledge is always power. Capturing data on your own domain is, therefore, crucial to your success. More specifically, you can leverage data insights from your community to inform your content strategy. By understanding your community members’ interests as you learn about and track their behavior, you can predict what types of content will perform best.

If you are able to create valuable content that maintains a consistent tone and is highly relevant to your readers, they will start looking to your brand as a reputable source for trusted media.

While Facebook can target content based on people’s interests, your posts are hidden behind the noise of fake news and algorithms in a potentially unpleasant environment. Even as Facebook moves to license news content from publishers, we must be cognizant of the fact that Facebook will still own part of your community.

Other publishers are also beginning to realize that success in the media is no longer just about directing visitors to your domains — it’s also about keeping them. For too long, publishers and consumers have flocked to Facebook in search of content and community. Unfortunately, both have become problematic on the platform. So, the time is right to create a protected social space around quality content and reclaim your community.

The Connection Between Human Habit and Brand Loyalty

Naturally, humans are creatures of habit. We visit the same restaurants, stick to the same daily commute and speak to the same people on a regular basis. According to a recent report developed by Hootsuite, people spend an average of two and a half hours on social media each day, browsing the same feeds and reacting to the same media brands.

So what exactly does this have to do with your company’s website? To put the answer simply: shaping those repetitive user behaviors on your site can help your brand build a loyal online community.

NiemLab published an article detailing how to turn subscribers into loyal followers based on their habits. In the article, NiemLab outlines how The Wall Street Journal tracked the actions of new members during the first 100 days after subscribing, and then used the data to create an engagement strategy that would improve retention rates.

“We know that publishers are focused on habit formation,” explains Dan Seaman, Viafoura’s product director for engagement tools. “All the definitions of loyalty are starting to converge around habit signals. A company’s website engagement strategy should be adjusted based on those behaviors.”

Loyalty is fueled by habit. This means that in order to convert website visitors and subscribers to loyal brand followers, each company must create a unique strategy to improve user engagement habits.

The Wall Street Journal also found that the top trends in retention were driven by habits: repeated visits to a website section, reading regularly-published content and interacting with more passive media like video.

To help kick off your own company’s retention strategy, our engagement specialists suggest following a few best practices:

Gather as much raw data as possible

Before you can begin suggesting new ways to engage and re-engage website visitors, you need to have a thorough understanding of their regular behaviors.

To do so, be sure you have a way to gather raw data — in a secure, lawful way — resulting from every onsite action, including subscriptions, app or information downloads and other forms of website engagement. You can then analyze your data to gain valuable information on the habits of your company’s online community.

Maximize the opportunity for interaction

“It’s not just newsletters and content itself that drives loyalty,” states Seaman. “It turns out that there’s a broad range of actions people take and habits they form that contribute to retention.”

In other words, it’s important to serve up plenty of tools and features right on your website to engage your online community over and over again.

As Viafoura’s product manager, Mehrad Karamlou, explains, one of the key takeaways from The Wall Street Journal’s study is that “the first 100 days after a person’s first interaction with your company is your opportunity to re-engage them.”

Give your website visitors the opportunity to interact with your company in multiple ways during that impressionable period. After all, boosting engagement is a great way to boost retention.

Include a social layer on your site

Adding a safe and well-managed social layer to your website, where users can share information with one another, is a great way to encourage ongoing interactions from visitors.

Tools that enable meaningful conversations include real-time chat, live blogging & commenting, site-wide moderation, community management and push notifications. They help to ensure that people interacting on your owned and operated digital properties are forming meaningful connections with your brand.

At the end of the day, every brand is completely different and will need to create a unique strategy to build loyal visitors.

The Age of the Cookie is Crumbling Giving Publishers a Huge Opportunity

Last Updated: February 13, 2020

There once was a time when the cookie was all-powerful, drastically changing the advertising and media industries. But the cookie’s time is passing, and publishers are in search of other tools to monetize their readers.

Even Chrome is now officially joining in on the cookie crackdown.

Starting February 17th of 2020, Chrome will require web developers to set tighter restrictions on cookies. More specifically, cookies must be defaulted to first-party access — the kind that collects a small amount of user information and stores it directly on the website that the user visits. Companies that use third-party cookies — the ones that follow you around, reporting to an often-anonymous home base that re-targets you with ads — will need to tweak their website code to restrict them to secure websites.

“Only cookies set as SameSite=None; Secure will be available in third-party contexts, provided they are being accessed from secure connections,” states Google on the Chromium Blog.

If developers fail to add the necessary code, or don’t have a secure website, their cookies will be deleted without hesitation by Google. In some cases, websites may even break if the proper cookie code isn’t added in.

Although this update won’t completely eliminate third-party cookies from Chrome yet, the company is limiting their use to secure websites and eventually plans to phase them out altogether by 2022.

While this change could bring about yet another period of dread and uncertainty for media companies, we think it actually marks an opportunity for publishers to reclaim authority as the shepherds of engaged audiences. All it takes is quality journalistic content and a connection with readers. Just like the good ol’ days.

How it Crumbled

Consider the events that led to the crumbling of the almighty cookie: Its fall from popularity started when Safari — often the most-used browser on North American mobile devices — began limiting third-party cookies. Firefox and Google followed suit, blocking more and more tracking with every product update.

End users benefit from this shift because being tracked across the internet feels creepy, so any step away from that is a good one. But while many online publishers currently rely on ads served using tracking data, the Great Cookie Shift will be a boon for them too.

Cookies have devalued the context of where a given ad appeared. Because cookies have been able to find someone anywhere it doesn’t always make sense for an advertiser to pay a premium to serve it on a site producing quality journalism. That has, in turn, disincentivized publishers from producing high-quality content in exchange for sheer volume.

But if third-party cookies are de-powered as a result of browser changes and ads can no longer easily heat-seek their way to a reader in any ol’ corner of the internet, advertisers will have to shift their approach to find the quality audience they seek.

Why Quality Matters More Than Ever

The selling of quality context is going to matter more and more and advertisers, agencies, trading desks and everyone in between will be thinking more about that. Instead of chasing the New York Times’ audience to cheaper third-party sites with retargeting, it will mean advertisers must simply advertise on the actual New York Times.

However, capitalizing on this opportunity will rely on engagement with audiences.

As Martin Pietrzak, Viafoura’s VP of Marketing put it, “If you can no longer target anonymous, single-visit users, quality connections with audience members will need to be the focus. Converting anonymous users to registered users will be key, and the faster a publisher can do that, the better off they’ll be.”

”The big win is that publishers can profile their registered users on the server side, gathering rich behavioural data in a way that’s immune to cookie restrictions.
Dan SeamanDirector of Product

The big win, in this case, is that publishers can profile their registered users on the server side, gathering rich behavioural data (pages visited, dwell time, ads clicked etc.) in a way that’s immune to cookie restrictions. That behavioural information — matched with declarative demographic info — is valuable first-party data that publishers can offer to brands who advertise directly on site, or to exchanges who want inventory.

First-party data has always been incredibly valuable, and publishers could become the gold standard for that once again, Pietrzak added.

Before the digital revolution, news organizations marshalled large audiences for advertisers, offering little data beyond the size of readership and overall demographics to help with content adjacency. At a time when cookies are giving way to privacy concerns, those same organizations are positioned to lead the pack again, this time rich with user behaviour information given willingly by an engaged audience.

Read more about how media companies can drive retention, loyalty and trust in our guide.

Please note that this article was last updated on February 10, 2020.

How The Irish Times Uses Audience Data to Build Engaged Communities with Quality Content

Sometimes the solution to a complicated problem means thinking outside the box.

Or outside the country.

Just ask Patrick Logue, the digital editor of the Irish Times. Logue joined the 160-year-old paper in 1996 when its website was just two years old, a shadow of the print edition.

In the more than two decades since his arrival, the editor has seen the paper move away from the traditional newsstand sales-dependent model and transform into a profitable multi-platform media organization that in recent years has actually seen its audience grow.

“It’s been a mammoth task,” says Logue of the transitions he’s witnessed. “The traditional model is broken, so we’re creating a new one focused on finding new audiences and revenue.”

As other Irish papers have watched their circulation numbers shrink, Logue and his team are drawing in new readers in droves – and not from where or how you might think.

Paywall Innovator

Back 2015, print sales at the Times were plummeting and online advertising was hardly making up for it. The Times’ circulation had dropped 45 percent in the previous five years, and things were looking dire. It felt like a race to the bottom, as other publications pumped out click-bait stories in pursuit of page views.

The Times made a bold decision. Instead of focusing on page views in the hopes of generating advertising revenue, they would create premium content that users would be willing to pay for. Up until then, all the major Irish dailies had been providing their online content for free.

That year, the Times became the first Irish daily to introduce a digital “leaky” paywall meaning readers could view 10 articles for free each week, but to read more, they had to subscribe for either 12 or 16 euros ($13.40 or $17.86) a month. “We decided that we were not going to chase traffic in an aggressive manner,” says Logue.

The other benefit of this approach? Developing content paying readers want.

Logue says the paper then began using the new data generated by online readership to discover what was important to readers — be it abortion laws, Irish History, or these days, Brexit.

“We become the experts on these big issues,” he says. “We break things down in simple ways using explainers, infographics, and evergreen digital content that informs the reader.”

This dedicated focus on quality has led to several Times stories dominating global news cycles. A story reporting the Times’ exit poll of the 2018 abortion referendum was viewed more than a million times, with the BBC breaking into regular programming to report the poll’s results. An editorial about Donald Trump’s ties to fascism by revered columnist Fintan O’Toole broke the paper’s record with 1.3 million page views.

”“The traditional model is broken, so we’re creating a new one focused on finding new audiences and revenue.”
Patrick LogueDigital Editor, The Irish Times

Data-driven Community Building

Audience data has continued to reveal unexpected opportunities to develop active, loyal communities with existing readers. For example, one of Logue’s responsibilities is to search for new, untapped readers, and he was surprised to find them beyond Ireland’s borders.

“We recognized that there is a large Irish diaspora around the world,” he says of the one in six people born in Ireland who now lives overseas. “They’re hungry for a sense of community and for information from home.”

To satiate this audience, Logue created the paper’s Abroad Network. Readers anywhere in the world can sign up and will receive a weekly email containing a collection of Times stories as well as e-ballots to participate in polls about important political events.

”“We recognized there is a large Irish diaspora...they're hungry for a sense of community and for information from home.”

Patrick LogueDigital Editor, The Irish Times

Abroad Network readers are also encouraged to contribute as photographers, writers or interviewees to the online project Generation Emigration, a digital section featuring the images and personal narratives of Irish readers living abroad, including a personal report from New Zealand after the Christchurch mass shooting in New Zealand, reports from the front lines of climate change in Australia, and numerous essays on Brexit from Irish citizens living in the United Kingdom.

“We found these readers were looking for a sense of community and were also willing to contributing content,” he says. “Generation Emigration brought in a new audience, and in a very real sense created that community.”

Logue explains that the overall goal is to drive traffic, engagement and ultimately subscriptions while at the same time bringing in ad revenue. It has proved effective — some 35 percent of the Times’ page views now come from outside Ireland, and the Abroad Network has 35,000 members.

This two-fold approach of quality content and community building within its readership has been an important part of the strategy that has kept the Times in the black in recent years.

An audit of the paper in February of 2019 showed digital edition daily circulation of 21,275 — a 26 percent increase over the previous year. The paper also grew its total daily circulation by two percent to 79,406, with sales of digital subscriptions rising more quickly than the decline of print. As such, digital revenue has grown by 8.7 percent in 2018 even as print sales dropped by 8 percent. The paper posted a €2 million euro (US$2,200,000) profit last year — which is no small feat in today’s newspaper market.

Read more about how media companies can drive retention, loyalty and trust in our guide.