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Fighting for time and attention: A glimpse into The Independent’s successful audience engagement strategy

The Independent has recently experienced quite a lot of success in growing its registered user base and engaging its audience with appealing digital experiences.

At WAN-IFRA’s Virtual World News Media Congress 2021, The Independent’s head of registered audience, Philippa Jenkins, and Viafoura’s president and COO, Mark Zohar, gave attendees a snapshot of the media company’s audience engagement strategy. Here are some highlights.

Why users spent 15x more time on-site after registering to The Independent

As Jenkins mentioned during the conference, audience engagement sparks greater economic value. The Independent, for example, found that its registered website users spent about 15 times more time on-site than anonymous visitors. This additional time that registered users spend exploring and interacting around the brand offers in-depth information about their preferences, opinions and habits.

As a result, The Independent has been able to identify where users are engaging the most to target them with more relevant experiences, content and offers.

But this build-up of engagement and first-party data didn’t happen on its own. To keep registered users from losing interest and encourage them to subscribe, The Independent implemented several Viafoura solutions, including a personalized news feed, browser notifications and a moderated conversations space.

The personalized feed and notifications showcase where the most active users are on the company’s site and point users to the latest interactions with their comments. Both of these tools established a sense of community for The Independent’s users and produced opportunities for re-engagement. In addition, Viafoura’s digital experience tools offered the media company a way to gather critical first-party data as users interact with one another and consume content.

“Without engagement on your site, you have a passive audience that’s just reading your content — and passive experiences no longer meet the needs of today’s audiences,” says Zohar. “Passive visitors can’t connect with your journalists, they won’t leave their opinions and you can’t get their sentiments or useful engagement data.”

Ultimately, Viafoura’s digital experience solutions allowed The Independent to identify and elevate the most relevant spaces on the site to keep users hooked on its brand.

How 'The Independent' is making the most of its engagement tools

Even with effective personalization and social tools, media organizations must put time and energy into experimenting with ways to draw more attention toward on-site engagement opportunities. After all, there are countless other publishers all battling for your audience’s attention.

In The Independent’s case, Jenkins outlines how the organization has achieved positive results hosting Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions through Viafoura’s moderated Conversations solution.

The AMAs give registered users the chance to voice their questions to an expert or journalist around a particular topic, further connecting them to the brand. In fact, there’s a direct correlation between The Independent’s AMAs and the time users spend on-site. These sessions alone earned the publisher one million views on content related to these events.

Zohar also highlights that registered comment readers and writers generate 46 times more page views and spend 168 times more time on-site per month compared to anonymous visitors.

Jenkins explains that the commenting experience can become much richer during an AMA event because users get direct attention from the community host in return for their engagement.

“For journalists, AMAs are a great way to establish a following that will engage directly with them,” Zohar says.

In today’s highly competitive media industry, audience attention, revenue and loyalty all start with engagement. And it’s up to publishers to develop an effective strategy with the right tools and user experiences to consistently earn their audience’s attention.

How to overcome the most common hurdles of buying a new tech solution

Highlights

40% of companies that have experienced revenue loss lack the digital technologies needed to keep up with their competitors.
Having budget restrictions, too many platforms or decision-makers to manage, vendor lock-in and the build-versus-buy dilemma all act as hurdles on the road to adopting new solutions.
50% of executives across industries will invest in technologies that give their enterprises an edge over their competitors and contribute to their digital transformations.
On average, companies use 110 different software solutions at a time.
Companies must reduce the complexity of their technology assessment and buying processes to overcome their business problems.

Regardless of your industry, odds are there’s software that can help you address any challenge and boost company-wide results. In fact, every business’s survival has become largely dependent on the technologies they rely on to grow, improve processes and earn revenue.

But some business leaders are hesitant to adopt new tech solutions, which can negatively affect their bottom lines. According to McKinsey & Company, 40% of organizations that have seen significant revenue loss in the past few years lagged behind their competitors when it came to their use of digital technologies.

That said, buying a new tech solution can spark a wide range of challenges, resulting in organizations delaying the purchasing process and leaving major problems unresolved.

“If you’re unwilling to use SaaS products to explore ways to improve the value your business delivers, you’re potentially missing out on a lot of learning and growth,” says Dan Seaman, VP of product management at Viafoura.

So we compiled a list of the main challenges organizations encounter when adopting a new tech solution, and how to overcome them.

Budget restrictions

Having a tight budget can create a major mental barrier for professionals and deter them from buying the technologies they need to resolve recurring business challenges.

Yet many organization leaders understand the importance of taking on new tech solutions. McKinsey & Company reports that over 50% of business executives are willing to invest in solutions that offer them competitive advantages or can further their digital transformations.

A quick fix:

With so many executives pushing for the adoption of digital tools that can better their companies, you may be able to get some wiggle room in your budget through a convincing business case. The most persuasive ones zero in on the potential value and ROI of the technology in question.

“Some vendors offer revenue-share models that cost zero dollars to use… and split the risk and reward between customer and vendor,” Seaman explains. “This type of model removes the mental barrier of having to get more budget and do ROI calculations.”

Business presentation in front of group of people.

Managing too many platforms

Statista reports that enterprises all over the world rely on an average of 110 different SaaS applications.

Taking on a complex new tool that will change internal workflows in an environment with dozens of other software solutions can be highly off-putting to an organization’s workforce, and may result in pushback from staff.

A quick fix:

Focus on adopting streamlined, intuitive platforms that prevent teams from getting overwhelmed by its features or from needing extensive training. Tech solutions that offer users a frictionless log-in and authentication experience as well as drag-and-drop front-end tools can also help reduce the overall complexity of a platform.

Too many decision-makers

When assessing a tech solution, every interested stakeholder will have different types of questions and concerns. So if a large number of these decision-makers are involved in the buying process, it can complicate and delay the potential adoption of a solution.

A quick fix:

Alex Lea, a senior account representative at Viafoura, outlines that the easiest way to speed up the buying process with multiple decision-makers is to be upfront about who will be making the purchasing decision.

“By being forward about the people who are (involved in the buying discussion), vendor representatives can focus on what’s actually going to solve their problems,” Lea says.

Vendor lock-in

Many organizations can become so dependent on a single software vendor that moving to another seems nearly impossible.

A quick fix:

Avoid vendor lock-in by making sure your company will be able to own and access all relevant data from a potential solution in a portable, usable format.

“If everything the vendor does is opaque and is locked in, that’s a risk,” Seaman says. “If you know you can export all of your data to another vendor, that risk is eliminated.”

The build-versus-buy conflict

It can be challenging to decipher whether it’s worthwhile to go the final mile and purchase a tech solution or build one in-house with or without open-source code. Unfortunately, this conflict may stop business leaders from adopting a robust product that will ultimately save them money and time in the long run.

A quick fix:

Even through an open-source solution, creating a tech product in-house requires hidden time and cost investments around infrastructure and support. Plus, open-source software typically doesn’t give organizations access to their data or rich solutions that offer substantial value.

To find the best path forward for your business, weigh the importance of data ownership and the benefits of building versus buying a solution against the existing resources that you have.

Are you winning the attention war with competitive digital experiences for your audience?

Summary

Media companies must provide extraordinary digital experiences that compete with Big Tech organizations to win audience attention and revenue.
First-party data can tell organizations how, where and when they can engage audiences on a personalized level; however, only 25% of companies are data-driven.
Interactive and social experiences can add value to publisher properties.
Customers who use Viafoura engagement tools experience up to a 364% boost in time visitors spend on their web pages each week and 248% more page views.
80% of all user registrations happen on pages that have digital engagement tools.
Publishers must prioritize engaging users on their own websites and apps over Big Tech platforms to reinforce their direct connections with audiences.
By teaming up with Viafoura, media organizations can deliver memorable digital experiences for audiences in a highly profitable and sustainable manner.

No matter what type of content a publisher produces, every media company is striving for the same goal: to earn human attention.

But your organization is competing with far more than other media organizations to win the attention of advertisers and subscribers. It’s also up against any other company that serves people outstanding digital experiences, like Netflix, Amazon and social media platforms.

And the only way to give your organization an edge over its competitors is to provide users with frequent digital experiences that are highly captivating. Without doing so, your media company will lose the attention of potential audiences and advertisers — as well as their associated revenue — to companies that offer better user experiences.

“Gone are the days where you could simply create a set of content, put up a paywall, wait for people to arrive,” says Edward Roussel, head of digital strategy and development at The Times and The Sunday Times. “You’ve got to work really hard to catch people’s attention.”

Here’s how your media organization can effectively add value to its online community and secure attention, advertisers and subscribers by creating captivating digital experiences.

Follow an engagement blueprint based on first-party data

The most engaging digital experiences for audiences are often built around their unique interests and habits. But guesswork isn’t enough to help you determine what types of experiences will actually resonate with your media company’s users.

That’s where data comes in.

By collecting different types of first-party user data and extracting actionable insights, you can inform and strengthen your business’s community engagement plan. This is essential for bolstering registration, subscription, onboarding, customer retention and ad engagement strategies.

First-party data can give your organization a clear picture of your audience members and their preferences, which can be fed into their experiences around your brand to win their ongoing attention in the future.

“Once we understand who (the customer) persona is, then we can walk through the customer journey to make sure we’ve got the right content, at the right time, on the right channel, to build that relationship between your brand and your target audience,” says Michael Beckerman, Torstar’s chief client officer.

Unfortunately, the International News Media Association highlights that only 25% of organizations are led by their data.

Media leaders must start embracing their first-party data now — especially as third-party cookies die out — if they hope to power highly personalized, engaging experiences that can transform passive visitors into active, loyal brand advocates.

Elevate user experiences with interactive opportunities

To earn consumer attention consistently, media companies may want to consider investing in user experiences that involve an interactive component. These interactive or social opportunities — think push notifications, comments, likes, replies and author follows — encourage people to stay interested in content for longer and return to a website or app after leaving.

In fact, a Viafoura study reveals that digital engagement tools can boost audience interest significantly, resulting in:

A 364% increase in time spent on customer web pages each week
A 248% boost in weekly page views
Notable user registration growth, with 80% of all registrations taking place on pages that have on-site engagement tools

Since publishers can build visitor habits through subtle, interactive digital tools, the value of their properties can grow over time as these experiences become a part of their audience members’ daily routines.

“The most successful (subscription programs) are supported by consumer experience strategies that create the stickiness necessary to keep customers hooked, happy and renewing,” shares West Monroe, a consulting firm, in a report on the state of subscription services.

Host engaging digital experiences directly on your website or app

Although it’s crucial to develop interactive experiences to succeed in the media industry, not all engaging spaces across the internet are worth investing in.

For instance, engaging followers on social media or another third-party platform does not offer your company complete control over its audience, data, content or related revenue.

Rather than relying on these third-party platforms, media companies need to start hosting engaging experiences directly on their owned and operated websites and apps for greater access to their communities and profits. Otherwise, organizations won’t have the resources they need to understand and consistently attract their audience members.

According to a media reporter at Digiday, “(publishers) are finding the direct access to readers — away from competing social media algorithms — can serve as an honest way to see what readers want most and are adopting their subscription businesses to meet those needs.”

John Witherow, The Times of London’s editor-in-chief, also reports that more than half of consumers don’t remember what news brands publish the stories they read on Big Tech platforms, which threatens the identity of media companies.

Organizations hoping to connect to their audiences with competitive and memorable experiences must, therefore, prioritize digital engagement on their own properties.

Your media company doesn’t have to build out highly competitive digital experiences on its own, though. By embracing Viafoura’s suite of digital experience tools, your organization can continuously amplify the value of its website or app and strengthen its profitable, long-term relationship with audiences.

Don’t Leave Your eCommerce Strategy Hanging: Why First-Party Data is Critical

Spotlight:

66% of publishers worldwide are active in the eCommerce space right now.
First-party data is key to creating relevant shoppable experiences.
Publishers can serve up targeted on-site and off-site product recommendations and offers.
Engagement and interest data lead to closer relationships with retail partners and shoppers.
According to Viafoura data, engaged users spend an average of two to ten times the amount of minutes on publisher pages compared to unengaged visitors.
Viafoura provides rich, first-party data that media organizations can feed into their eCommerce strategies to engage their users, boost sales and strengthen relationships with retail partners.

With more consumers turning to online shopping during the pandemic, eCommerce has been booming. Media companies are now rushing to enter this profitable space and diversify revenue streams by delivering trusted shopping experiences across their properties.

In fact, a survey conducted by Digiday found that 66% of publishers are already generating some level of revenue from affiliate commerce.

It’s clear that publishers are diving into eCommerce — so how can media companies maximize their profits and reputation in this space?

Media organizations must serve up products that align with their audience’s interests if they hope to provide trusted shopping experiences and increase related revenue.

And that is where first-party data comes in.

Discover how first-party data can improve the way media companies approach eCommerce below.

Producing Targeted Shopping Experiences

Just as your business’ editorial strategy can be supported with user data, you can also lean on critical data insights to personalize their shopping experiences with your organization.

However, it’s essential that you’re leveraging first-party data, not third-party data, in your eCommerce strategy. After all, as third-party cookies are set to be erased from the internet forever, first-party data has become the obvious replacement.

Media organizations are now gradually recognizing how first-party data can replace third-party data and help create relevant shopping experiences for different groups of digital visitors.

Take Vice, for instance.

“Vice will… focus on curating recommendations for specific micro-communities within its audience as those groups tend to spend money based on their passions,” says Vice Media’s chief digital officer, Cory Haik.

By personalizing product recommendations through first-party data, media organizations can make smarter, data-informed decisions to grow eCommerce revenue.

Data-Driven Recommendation Tactics

Odds are, you probably already use your audience data to improve visitor interactions with your company’s website or app in some way or form. And you can do the exact same thing with your eCommerce strategy to set your company apart from competitors and build trust from audience members.

“Even though personalized recirculation has become common across media, the number of publishers personalizing the shopping content recommendations their readers see is small,” explains Abby Campbell, the VP of a marketing agency.

Get ahead of the game by using first-party data to power your product-recommendation widgets or shopping pages directly on your site based on the unique interests of your audience.

The New York Post, for example, is feeding data from its customer data platform into shopping recommendations that are displayed across its digital properties.

Alternatively, you can dig into your first-party data to discover the topics that your most active users tend to engage with. You can then send them customized emails featuring shopping offers and discounts to heighten interest in your products.

Audience members will be more likely to purchase products that are relevant to them, after all.

Enhancing Publisher Properties for Retail Partners

Major eCommerce platforms like Amazon and Instagram currently provide consumers with outstanding shopping experiences. As a result, internet users expect every digital shopping experience to be just as engaging and personalized.

Retailers are now looking to deliver unique experiences to potential customers with trusted partners.

For media companies, this means that they have the chance to generate eCommerce revenue if they can impress retailers enough with a unique, data-powered strategy.

Autovia Chairman Peter Plumb highlights how there is a whole range of “opportunities for those with the broadest and most engaged reach, the richest audience data and the most trusted brands & content.”

First-party engagement and interest-based data can be used to activate digital visitors through personalized experiences, encouraging them to spend more time on your pages looking at — and buying — products. These experiences can also be targeted to highly engaged audience members to heighten product sales.

Keep in mind that, according to Viafoura data, engaged users will spend an average of two to ten times the amount of minutes on publisher pages than an unengaged visitor.

Ultimately, first-party data is key for media companies to improve their digital eCommerce services and solidify profitable relationships with retail partners and audience members.

As a first-party data provider, Viafoura gives media companies a 360-degree view of their community’s behaviors and interests. Organizations can access this information and draw critical insights to bolster their eCommerce strategies and attract retail partners.

5 Benefits Publishers Stand To Gain With A First-Party Data Strategy

This cannot be overstated: the shift from a third-party to a first-party ecosystem will be challenging but it also presents the first opportunity in 20 years for publishers to reclaim their power among ad tech and social media giants. Media companies that move into 2022 focused almost entirely on producing superior content will attract genuinely engaged users, and win.

Download the Publisher's Guide to First-Party Data

And, how refreshing! Death of the third-party cookie is giving publishers the freedom to shift their attention towards a first-party ecosystem rooted in audience engagement for the first time since digital marketing and programmatic media forced their hand.

The “clickbait” era pushed publishers and media companies to diverge from content-first strategies with misaligned incentives that benefitted nobody in the ecosystem. Publishers have focused on quantity over quality at the expense of user experience and the perceived value of their content. The quality of audiences reached by advertisers plummeted, and users lost trust in media titles they used to have delivered to their doorstep. Publishers have been stuck in a negative feedback loop since 1996 and have a chance to rethink everything in 2022.

The shift to an advertising paradigm based on real identity, not cobbled-together proxies from a bunch of third-party cookies, is the future of advertising and a real opportunity for publishers. Audience engagement is a critical driver of conversion and first-party user data, and the lowest-hanging fruit for media organizations to implement in preparation for 2022. Automated technology makes audience engagement significantly more cost-effective and viable for publishers to collect first-party data than it ever was in an analog world.

Here are five profits that publishers stand to gain with a first-party strategy:

The Power To Collect Fully Consented Data

First-party data is fully consented data. It’s authenticated by users who create “logged in” profiles so they can comment on articles or register their user preferences to receive more personalized notifications from a publisher. In a first-party system, publishers are transparent with how and why they are collecting first-party data, and users opt-in with full consent. Fully consented data is high-quality data, a huge improvement for publishers seeking incremental revenue from ad placement.

The Opportunity To Build A "Known" Audience

Converting users from “unknown” to “known” will be a crucial focus for publishers seeking to bridge their first-party data with the advertising ecosystem. When users feel motivated to opt-in by an attractive value exchange and become “known” to a publisher, they willfully supply first-party data that publishers can use to identify their audience segments and serve personalized ads, and experiences.

The Ability To Drive Community Engagement

Two benefits of building an active community are subscribers and ad revenue. Publishers that implement community engagement tools will dig deep into their core audience’s behaviour and interest through user engagement, behaviour, and preference data. Publishers can then plug that raw data into their paywall, business intelligence, CRM and data management platforms.

The Benefits Of Better Content Performance

First-party offers publishers a considerable opportunity to grow their content performance with personalized recommendations (push notifications) informed by data collected from logged-in users. Personalization gives users what they want (and ask for) and leads to higher engagement while respecting opt-outs. Investing in personalization tools will pay off with serious rewards.

First-Party Data Ownership

First-party data ownership will save many publishers’ faltering ad businesses by giving them exclusive possession of their audience information. Ownership will become increasingly important when publishers pitch advertisers their first-party data sets and soon become the pillar of programmatic advertising sales. The sooner that publishers begin developing their first-party data sets, the better (and more significant) their programmatic ad sales outcomes will be.

The Bottom Line:

When one door closes, another one opens. Death of the third party cookie is giving publishers the freedom to shift their attention away from the third-party programmatic ad model towards a first-party ecosystem rooted in audience engagement for the first time in over 20 years. The media business is returning to a golden era of great content and growing audiences.

The Future of Advertising: What’s Your Interest?

On March 3rd, Google shocked the advertising industry by announcing in a blog post that it will not support individual identifiers, such as hashed or encrypted email addresses, as an alternative to third-party cookies on Google Chrome — the web’s dominant browser. Instead, Google announced that beginning in 2022 the future of online advertising will be based on interest-based cohorts.

Ad tech stocks, including The Trade Desk and Criteo, who have placed their bets on the Unified ID 2.0 solution that uses individual identifiers, plummeted following the announcement. The media response to Google’s announcement was swift and widespread, though there are many questions that remain unanswered. Let’s focus on what we know and how advertisers and publishers can adapt to and profit from Google’s announcement.

Two key takeaways from the March 3, 2021 Google announcement

Google’s announcement made it clear that they believe it’s critical to build a privacy-first web that does not rely on Personally Identifiable Information (PII) graphs based on peoples’ email addresses. Google stated that, “advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing and other privacy-preserving technologies offer a clear path to replacing individual identifiers.” Google’s replacement to individual identifiers is an advertising model based on users’ interests — not their email address.

What are individual identifiers?

An example of an individual identifier is an email address. People use their email addresses to log into Chrome, which can be tagged as “identifiers” and operate similarly to third-party cookies tracking users around the internet as they click on stories, and products, revealing their interests. Google is rejecting the use of individual identifiers, like email addresses, because it says this practice has led to a general distrust of the internet and puts the future of the web at risk. Instead, Google will support interest-based cohort advertising.

What is an interest-based cohort?

An interest-based cohort is a group of individuals who interact with similar content or share common interests. An interest-based cohort could be “Tennis,” grouping together people who follow ATP news and others who read stories about Serena Williams. All individuals within this cohort could then be made available to advertisers for tennis-related advertising and offers without ever revealing any personal information.

The critical difference between individual identifiers and interest-based cohorts

Individual identifiers provide personal data to advertisers without peoples’ knowledge that their PII is being tracked. Interest-based cohorts are large clusters of people who share similar online reading habits and general interests. Significantly, cohort clusters don’t reveal or share personal information when they are created or used for advertising purposes. Going forward, advertisers will receive an identifier for a cohort rather than for the individuals within it.

What’s the bigger story here?

The biggest story here, and the most important message for publishers to hear, is that Google has confirmed that first-party data relationships will be key to delivering value in a cookieless world. In fact, Google reaffirmed its support of first-party relationships on its ad platforms for partners. Media companies that build robust interest graphs of their audience, based on their users’ declared and identified interests, will align seamlessly with Google’s privacy-first advertising modus operandi in 2022 and beyond.

The biggest threat to advertisers

The reason why Google’s announcement shocked the ad tech industry and sent stocks plummeting is because, beginning in 2022, advertisers will no longer be able to rely on user identity for ad tracking on the web’s dominant browser. Without identifiers in the bidstreams, advertisers will need to work more closely with publishers to access high resolution audience data — including and especially, interest-based cohorts derived from first-party data. The necessity for advertisers to work more closely with publishers to access high resolution data hasn’t existed for decades. It’s a big deal and a huge switch from the status quo.

The biggest opportunity for publishers

Ironically, the biggest threat to advertisers is the biggest opportunity for publishers. In our ebook, we talk about how the death of the third party cookie is giving publishers the freedom to shift their attention away from the third-party programmatic ad model towards a first-party ecosystem rooted in audience engagement for the first time in over 20 years. The media business is returning to a golden era of great content and growing audiences.

How Viafoura helps publishers build interest-based cohorts

At Viafoura, we work closely with publishers to generate interest-based audience data by leveraging our engagement tools and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to uncover audience interests, intent and affinities. We help media companies collect first-party data from their audience via commenting tools, live chats, and personalized content recommendations. We also help media companies generate robust interest-based data about their audience by understanding and inferring user intent and interests.

We support declarative interest data

Our ‘topic follow’ feature is the most accurate method for understanding user interests. If a user chooses to follow the topic “sneakers” on a sports media website, they indicate that they are interested in sneaker culture and a prime candidate for marketing and advertising from Nike and Adidas, for example. It’s a direct and declarative method for organizing individual interests into interest-based cohorts that a media company can leverage for non-personalized ad targeting — easy as that.

We use natural language processing to generate interest-based data

Viafoura can also generate interest-based data from user-generated content on our media partners’ digital properties. We use NLP to extract topic and entity-based data, as well as sentiment, from user comments and chats. For example, based on the user comment, “I love my Tesla. It’s by far the best EV on the market!”, Viafoura is able to automatically identify the topic “electric vehicle”, the entity “Tesla” and a positive sentiment score. We then associate topics, entities and sentiment with the user profile for cohort assignment.

We generate interest-based data from reader behaviour

This one is simple and effective. If a user frequently reads articles about “baking recipes,” we include them in a ‘baking and food’ cohort. Easy as pie.

We generate interest-based data from topic-based chats and AMAs

We know that a user who participates in a topic-based chat about the Toronto Raptors is interested in sports and basketball. Similarly, a user that participates in an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) session on vaccine safety has an interest in healthcare and vaccinations. All of this interest-level data is collected by Viafoura and added to user profiles for assignment to a relevant cohort. Significantly, Viafoura enables media companies to run branded topic-based chats and AMAs on their owned and operated sites — not off-site on social networking sites.

The bottom line

Viafoura helps media companies and publishers develop comprehensive and dynamic interest graphs based on their audiences’ behaviours and activity that is foundational to enabling interest-based cohort targeting and compliance with Google’s interest-based advertising model.

If you want to read the media responses to Google’s announcement on March 3, 2021, you can click here to read coverage from The Verve, here to read an explainer from Reuters, and here to read a column in AdExchanger. Finally, you can click here to download our free ebook titled The Publisher’s Guide to First-Party Data for the full context of the situation.

How Media Companies Around the World Are Succeeding

Over the past few months, media organizations have had to endure one challenge after another. Some companies are now struggling to compensate for declining print and ad revenues sparked by these challenges. Meanwhile, others have exceeded their revenue targets and continue to position themselves for growth by adapting to the evolving markets.

After surveying 25 industry executives, an advisory firm exposed how media professionals are persevering by embracing change and innovation.

“All [survey respondents] are innovating with new business lines and new served markets,” says Tony Silber, president of a content and marketing company. “From digital products to virtual events, from research and data to lead generation and subscription boxes, there’s a lot going on.”

Many players across the media landscape are succeeding. So why not learn from what others have already done right and apply those best practices to your business?

We’ve laid out some profitable strategies below that have helped organizations all over the world grow and succeed.

Spain — El Pais and Building Audience Relationships

For many industry professionals, the paywall is an art form that must be tested, tweaked and mastered over time. However, El Pais, a Spanish news media company, quickly earned over 90,000 digital subscribers not even a year after launching its paywall.

The organization was able to spark rapid subscriber growth by strengthening its relationship with each website visitor before sending out paywall messages.

By leveraging a metered paywall, El Pais gave users access to 10 articles each month so they could sample content and understand why it would be worth paying for.

Forming a relationship with digital visitors before asking them to pay helped El Pais prove the value of its subscription program to visitors.

The U.K. — Future PLC and First-Party Data

In 2020 alone, Future boosted its revenue by 65% compared to the previous year. One of the reasons the company has flourished to such an extent is because it has tailored its business strategies based on its audience’s behaviors and interests using first-party data.

According to the chief executive of Future, Zillah Byng-Thorne, “Future has continued to thrive by knowing what our audiences value most, enabling us to take advantage of the changing market landscape to continue to deliver incredible content to our communities in whatever way meets their needs.”

By personalizing user experiences around its brand and its advertisers, Future is at an advantage against competitors and is well-prepared for the loss of third-party cookies.

Bangladesh — The Daily Star and Audience Engagement

When COVID-19 initially forced people into isolation back in 2020, The Daily Star, a Bangladesh media company, launched a campaign that earned itself a medal for engaging its audience. The digital campaign aimed to thoroughly engage people and connect isolated individuals through a microsite, where they could share stories and interact together.

While this campaign was temporary, media companies that have integrated audience engagement into their sites have seen tremendous growth across user registrations and retention.

Viafoura data scientists have even found that engagement tools drive 30% to 50% of user registrations. They’ve also discovered how engaged users spend three times longer on-site than unengaged users.

In a world where in-person human interaction is limited, digital social tools help companies build meaningful connections to visitors and positive experiences worth sticking around for.

The U.S. — The New York Times and Diversifying Revenue Streams

The New York Times made headlines earlier this year after it announced that its digital revenue has finally surpassed its print revenue. The media company has thrived amid the pandemic by investing in several different revenue streams, producing over 7.5 million paying subscribers.

“Consumer revenue streams, including digital subscriptions and ticketed live events, are increasingly important to news organizations as reliance on traditional advertising revenues continues to decrease,” states Angelica Irizarry, who directs live events at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

For The New York Times, it was necessary to go beyond advertising to become self-sustaining. That meant pivoting to prioritize subscription-based revenue, powered by a variety of revenue-generating products, including its digital news content, online events as well as cooking and game apps.

New Zealand — Stuff and Audience Ownership

Stuff, a New Zealand-based news company, completely abandoned Facebook in 2020. You may be questioning why Stuff would leave Facebook when it could interact with followers and reach new audiences on the platform. But there was a method to Stuff’s madness.

From the ban on news in Australia and data leaks to hoards of trolls, misinformation and bots, social media doesn’t have the greatest track record with publishers or the public. Stuff’s mission became to build direct relationships with its audience, away from the negative and unpredictable influences on Facebook.

Not only did the New Zealand company maintain its traffic after abandoning Facebook, but it’s also established a reputation for itself as a resource for trusted content.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism highlights how Stuff has “benefited from huge public support, growth in trust, and happier newsroom staff who are no longer being trolled.”

Organizations around the world all have to deal with different policies, economies and events. However, surviving as a self-sustaining business and continuing to grow are universal goals that media companies have in common.

Understanding what other organizations have done successfully to achieve these goals can help to refine and perfect your own business’ growth strategies.

How To Leverage First-Party Data To Activate Your Audience

The days of social media companies profiting from publishers’ communities are over — and that’s a beautiful thing. Leaving behind the necessity to chase volume for ad impressions is pushing the publishing industry in a positive direction and presenting media companies with the chance to reclaim their positions of power for the first time in 20 years. Publishers now have the freedom to focus on producing great content and engaging audiences without being at the mercy of an algorithm or cookie.

The move towards a first-party data and revenue model relies on highly valuable content and incredible user experiences. Building a proprietary and high-resolution first-party audience that will attract advertisers and marketers, based on contextual and behavioural signals, is how publishers will reclaim their audience and generate new revenue opportunities in a post-cookie world. One of the best things that publishers can do today in preparation is to focus on increasing the volume, accuracy and recency of their first-party data gathering activities.

Let’s break down the values of data volume, accuracy and recency:

The value and volume of first-party data is clear; the more data that a publisher has to make available to buyers, the better. The value of data accuracy is also immense; it’s collected when users declare their interests, either directly or by their actions, and stored on the server-side regardless of how browsers or regulators evolve their privacy restrictions in the future. Finally, user data has a very short half-life, so media companies with audiences that return frequently will have an advantage with data recency — bringing users back to your website frequently will help to ensure that your audience data is fresh.

Now, let’s review some of the ways that publishers are collecting first-party data today:

Newsletters

Newsletters have emerged as one of the most popular tactics for collecting first-party data. It’s a great strategy because newsletters capture registrations in a user-friendly way and provide a clear value exchange for readers. They also cement a direct relationship between the publisher and the user.

Registration Walls

Registration walls are becoming increasingly popular both as standalone tools and as a step along the paywall meter. Registration walls can be very effective in collecting first-party data but they can also undercut the relationship-building process with your audience and put a damper on data collection so they should be implemented carefully. As the value of first-party data increases, publishers may want to consider rebalancing their registration walls to ensure they’re maximizing the perceived value exchange for users.

Community Engagement and User-Generated Content

Community engagement and user-generated content (UGC) represent the most comprehensive and sustainable ways for publishers to build their first-party data stores. While some publishers previously shied away from community engagement and UGC in fear of the costs traditionally associated with managing online communities, modern automated moderation technology is making this process highly cost-effective — creating new and scalable opportunities for publishers to promote community engagement and generate valuable first-party data.

We mentioned earlier that authenticated users allow publishers to store and track their activity on the server-side regardless of how browsers or regulators evolve their privacy restrictions in the future. Viafoura data shows that even the simplest implementations of audience engagement tools drive between 30 to 50 percent of all user registrations on our customer sites.

Here’s some compelling data from Viafoura on how user engagement tools drive user engagement and retention:

Engaged users spend three times as much time onsite than non-engaged users.
Engaged users have a fifty percent retention rate in month two, versus three percent for non-engaged users, and even after six months, engaged user retention rates only dip to forty percent.
Registered users generate twenty times more page views and monthly time spent on site than non-registered users. User retention and frequency is crucial, and engaged and authenticated users are much more likely to return.

Here’s the clincher:

To leverage first-party data to activate their audience, publishers must offer value in exchange for the effort it takes for a user to register, and for their consent to collect. At Viafoura, we call these “value exchange moments” and we design our products to easily integrate these moments into your site. The landscape has changed. Building a value-driven relationship with your audience by creating a series of engagement opportunities is how you will reclaim your audience and revenue opportunities in a post-cookies world.

To learn more about how to build your first-party data strategy download The Publisher’s Guide to First-Party Data today.

Do You Have What It Takes To Build a Thriving Digital Community?

Every digital audience is flowing with revenue-generating power. Whether that power remains untapped or is harnessed to grow your company depends on how well you can transform your audience into a thriving digital community.

Future plc, for example, grew its online audience by 56% in one year by nurturing its digital communities with worthwhile content and experiences.

But building and sustaining a profitable community online isn’t a simple walk in the park — it requires attention, effort and a carefully-crafted engagement strategy.

If you’re interested in securing loyal brand supporters and additional revenue-generation opportunities, we’ve created a checklist below that outlines everything you need to build a thriving digital community.

1. Social Tools for Your Owned and Operated Properties

2. Re-Engagement and Retention Techniques

3. A Process for Understanding Your Audience

4. Personalized User Experiences Based on First-Party Data

5. Comment Moderation

1. Social Tools for Your Owned and Operated Properties

You can’t form an active digital community if people don’t feel connected to your brand. For this reason, media companies must encourage their audience members to forge strong relationships with one another right on their websites or apps.

Adopting conversation-based engagement tools — like commenting widgets, live chat tools, and live blogs — will allow your company to establish meaningful social connections between your audience members and brand.

A recent analysis of Viafoura data even revealed that people who interact with social tools online have a 20-40% higher retention rate after six months of visiting a site compared to those who do not.

2. Re-Engagement and Retention Techniques

With an abundance of media companies and services competing for your subscriber’s dollar, preventing churn is a constant struggle.

Take video streamers, for example.

According to a survey conducted by Deloitte, consumers paid for around five streaming services in 2020. And yet, nearly half of the consumers surveyed canceled at least one of them that same year.

It’s important to have a strategy in place to re-engage your community members when their engagement levels begin to drop. That way, you can keep people away from your competitors by gently nudging their focus back toward your brand.

Consider working with your engagement tool provider to find out when a user becomes unengaged. Once you identify your inactive subscribers or registrants, you can send out targeted offers and content to re-engage them.

3. A Process for Understanding Your Audience

As is true with any connection in the physical world, the relationship between your company and its community members shouldn’t be one-sided. After all, you can’t expect your audience to give you their loyalty, data or money without getting something valuable in return.

And how could you possibly know what your audience wants if you don’t collect their first-party data, monitor their comments and speak with them to discover their interests?

To fully understand your community members and meet their needs, you’ll also need to turn anonymous visitors into known, registered visitors.

In fact, Piano, a subscription service provider, reports that, on average, registered users are 10x more likely to convert than an anonymous visitor.

Organizations that use a proper identity management system will have a clear, 360-degree view of audience members and their interests.

4. Personalized User Experiences Based on First-Party Data

Once you have a steady stream of first-party audience data coming in, you can draw actionable insights to personalize the on-site experience for your community members.

“This way, audience fragments become super-served niches and loyal viewers become VIP members — who will stick around and pay off in the long term,” explains Rande Price, research director at the Digital Context Next trade organization.

It’s also worth noting that people are hungry for personalized experiences.

According to a research expert on Statista, 90% of U.S. consumers perceive content personalization in marketing to be appealing.

Producing customized experiences around your audience’s behavior will, therefore, keep them coming back to your digital properties for relevant content time and time again.

5. Comment Moderation

Your social tools are critical for forming strong connections between your community members; however, not every internet user will leave positive and productive comments. And unfortunately, toxic comments can damage your digital community.

The Pew Research Center states that one in every ten people will abandon an online service if they see nearby offensive behavior.

Safeguard your brand’s integrity and keep your social spaces inviting by enforcing your community guidelines through an effective moderation system.

We would recommend selecting a moderation system that can immediately detect all 6.5 million variations of each word. It should also be able to evolve alongside your community and understand sentence context for maximum protection.

Whether your end goal is to achieve sustainable revenue growth or simply to serve your audience members better, your success depends on the state of your digital community. The more engaged and connected your community members are, the more valuable they’ll find your membership program or subscription package to be.

The truth is that anyone can create a thriving digital community. All it takes is connecting our business to the right engagement, data-collection and personalization strategies.