Inevitably, the revenues for many publishers are going to fall far short of previous results and will likely never regain those previous levels. Shareholders need to act decisively to defend their existing brand strength and audience engagement throughout the shake out period in order to ensure their brand is one of the survivors when the winners and losers are decided.
The current vogue for B2C publishers to say 'let's shift to paid subscription walls' is potentially highly damaging. Shifting currently open content behind subscription walls may have some perceived benefits but the damage to a brand may be terminal in the long term. The simple truth is that online audiences don't like paying for information and can, more easily than ever, simply shift their eyeballs to other 'equivalent' content with the click of a mouse or a Google search.
The only possible exceptions that could lend themselves to subscription will be in niche areas where there are highly fragmented information sources, often B2B realm of publishing, rather than overbooked content areas such as general news or media/entertainment.
B2C audiences are more affected as they are vulnerable to online advertising and the rapid decline in offline circulations, but the same shifts are going to affect B2B publishers soon too as aggregators become more vertical and niche in focus.
There are five key action points publishers need to consider:
1. Intelligent aggregation and curation: become the 'iTunes of content' for your audience
Gone are the days when editors can rest on the notion that their content alone is good enough, particularly if they are not breaking news stories daily.
Firstly, through aggregation, offer audiences the ability to find all relevant global news or blog articles through your system. Lead with own content but make it simple to link to the best of the other commentary, wherever that may be. Effectively position your brand as a trusted 'search engine' for global content from trusted sources. It will never replace Google but will cater to a proportion of audience and demonstrate you are adding a suite of useful tools. Right now it is a case of 'eat your own lunch' before Google or aggregators do it entirely.
Secondly, act as 'curator' to deliver to users succinct, contextualised summaries of breaking news, and link to global opinions on these stories. Editorial teams would shift to a mix of 'Investigative Journalists' and 'Curator Writers'. Output would be split into a smaller number of high value, in-depth proprietary commentary followed by a long-tail of curated articles -- all delivered in a highly structured, easily accessed manner.
From a cost perspective there are a number of side benefits:
- Curator writers can be sited anywhere and leverage aggregation technology to automatically identify relevant news breaking globally by topic and flag as ones they may need to write on
- Curator writers do not need heavy journalism experience, which reduces costs for currently highly paid banks of journalists at many publishers.
2. Enhance content indexing and drive cross linking traffic
Add intelligent indexing of content so that online systems really 'understand' the context of any story and extract entities involved.
This so-called 'semantic web' approach makes it easy to jump intelligently to other highly relevant articles (whether own proprietary content or third party blogs or news articles) and drives up usage. Publishers need to make it as easy as possible to add new entities and categorisation structure into their applications, whether those entities are companies, industry categories, executives, celebrities or sports teams, and ensure accuracy of indexing.
3. Engage with users and promote brand: personalised email alerts on global content
During the shake out period, it is increasingly important to defend awareness of traditional brands as the migration online occurs.
Personalised email alerts on content are a powerful tool to maintain daily contact with your audience, delivering both proprietary content links but also those of relevant third party blog or news articles. Alerts would be defined by the user, and using the 'semantic' indexing approach can be as granular and personal as required.
Aside from meeting a key future audience requirement, additional benefits of this are two-fold:
- Daily interaction keeps the brand at the forefront of the user's mind
- Publishers can ascertain exactly what the user is interested in -- one of the supposed benefits of subscription -- and can therefore offer tailored advertising or affiliate promotions.
Alerts in the current market can be delivered via email but increasingly are being delivered through apps as smart devices such as the iPhone become ubiquitous. Once 'embedded' into a device as an intelligence app that does the job for that individual, competitors may find it very hard to displace it, reinforcing the first mover notion.
4. Seek and identify new growth areas: drive new subscription products or affiliate microsites
Identify new content areas that lend themselves to either new subscription revenue products or that can very rapidly drive high traffic levels and associated affiliate or ad income. Example B2C topics may include local news microsites or celebrity microsites (e.g., AllLeonaLewis.com).
Many B2C options may require value add through light 'curation' but others could potentially be fully automated microsites.
Example B2B topics could include areas such as intelligence services on new hot topic areas, such as the environment or WiMax technologies, but more likely would be new products alongside traditional publications in niche industry areas, for example, creating new subscription products on textiles industry alongside an existing magazine audience base targeting same market but with a 'static' editorial delivery.
5. Leverage your content and build efficient technology: experiment quickly to test new areas with little overhead
Publishers need to redefine their technology approach, both in delivering new features for audiences and also in the editorial back-end processes to adapt to the changing market.
Modularising the technology approach so that new services or features can be tested quickly in the current environment is key, particularly to tap into growth areas in 'immediate interest' content topics. In an era of cloud computing, remote services can significantly minimise in-house technology build, especially while testing the viability of new services or features for long term audience protection or revenue opportunities.
The crisis in the publishing industry appears to have reached a crescendo in the last few months and there may be a speed issue here. Once the user finds a content delivery mechanism that meets all their content needs, they may be unlikely to switch, particularly as it becomes configured with their personal interests. The 'Facebook generation' appear to be happy to stick with one platform as long as it does the job efficiently and referral recommendations spreads adoption rapidly. For those publishers not delivering that service quickly may well find themselves left out in the cold.
For today's brands to ensure they are one of the big survivors they need to invest quickly in both amending their editorial approach and in flexible technology to meet the needs of these new audiences.
Nick Gregg is is a former analyst with a Wall Street firm and CEO of StrategyEye.
