How journalism organisations can make the most out of first-party data

I’m a proud member of the News Product Alliance, and they have just released an excellent study about how news organisations can use first-party data. I had a chat with Ariel Zirulnick about first-party data for her research. In my last role at Ideastream Public Media, we did an internal data census and found we had 33 different sources of data in the organisation. We started work on making sense of them all, integration was quite a task. Managing all of this data and making sense of it is a tall task but a necessary one. Having reflected on this since my conversation with Ariel, I have these additional thoughts:

🤝 Alignment and priorities - Research for my master's degree in innovation management and leadership showed the importance of high-level leadership alignment on priorities. Without this, organisations, for-profit but especially non-profit, struggle to dedicate themselves to a strategic direction. Even with North Star Goal frameworks in place, I've seen and worked for organisations that struggle to translate a North Star goal into actionable activities. Data, especially first-party data, connects priorities to user needs (beyond the formal user needs process).

🔢 👪 Quantitative and Qualitative data - Before my master's, I undervalued qualitative data because most of the data I had as an executive editor and then a product director was quantitative. In news organisations, commercial teams often have qualitative data that doesn't filter into the newsrooms, so the data already exists in many news organisations (although it's usually high-level market data rather than first-party data). Quantitative data tells you what people are doing. Qualitative data can help you understand why they are doing it. Both are needed for effective execution.

❓ 💵 Knowing users is critical to 21st-century journalism business models - At any scale, modern media businesses are built on first-party audience data. Journalism businesses in the second decade of the 21st century cannot be built on advertising to masses of unknown users. This has been proven time and again, whether by the wreckage of platform-dependent digital start-ups over the past five years or the hollowing out of newspaper chains attempting to scale attention and revenue through consolidation. Bloomberg has built a first-party data business that delivers above-market performance in both advertising and reader revenue. The Independent has built a sustainable digital consumer journalism business on its A2K - anonymous to known - strategy.

FT Strategies recently released representative data on the size of anonymous digital audiences versus the value they deliver to media businesses. The size of the anonymous audience, who are completely unknown due to a lack of cookie consent, dwarfs the subscriber audience.

But revenue from subscribers, from advertising and circulation is several times larger than that from anonymous audiences.

The size of your audience doesn't matter if your business can't capture value from that audience. I will go as far as to say first-party data and the revenue models that flow from it are the only way to pay for distinctive, original journalism.

Changing business models and AI

As I wrote in Pugpig’s latest Media Bulletin, news SEO experts are speaking in nearly apocalyptic terms about Google’s introduction of AI Mode, a custom search result for each query. Moreover, while Google’s AI Summaries do not include news, AI Mode will. “News-focused SEO expert Barry Adams wrote on LinkedIn that the impact of AI mode is clear: “In the next few years, many publishers will be unable to survive.”

However, it has been clear for some time that media businesses still focused on content and business strategies dependent on platform-driven traffic are under existential pressure. Case in point, Business Insider. The digital publisher’s CEO announced that it would be cutting more than one in five of its staff. The parts of the business facing cuts are those sensitive to traffic declines, and the publisher expects “extreme traffic drops outside of our control”. Instead, the company is leaning into content that drives subscriptions and events.

Exhibit B is the Press Gazette. It has now shifted to a subscription model to fund growth.

The Poynter Institute says that news leaders at the recent Hacks/Hackers AI event said that search traffic was cratering, and one expert at the event said it was never coming back. What is the answer? Rethink our relationship to audiences. Amen.