- Digital Media Products, Strategy and Innovation by Kevin Anderson
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- The Indy in the UK: High engagement niche content drives conversion
The Indy in the UK: High engagement niche content drives conversion
Green shoots as local media returns to local ownership in the US
Kevin Anderson
March 20, 2023
The Independent pivoted to all digital in 2016, and it offers a lot of excellent lessons, particularly around its use of data to refine its strategy. I had the pleasure of hearing Jo Holdway, their chief data and marketing officer speak at the Press Gazette's media and technology conference last autumn, and she has a clear vision and excellent execution. This is another overview of the paper's A2K - anonymous to known strategy, but it also is a concise overview of their transformation journey. The numbers she has at hand explain how moving those fly-by visitors down an engagement funnel as they become known to the paper is something you will want to read. And this was the zinger for me:
What I am interested in is the high engagement but low traffic quadrant, the niche quadrant. Because what we find in our analysis is that this is the quadrant where there are people that are most likely to convert to a subscription.
I had a back-channel chat with Esther about this piece. She criticises the user experience of Reach's sites. I feel torn because there are a lot of really good people and excellent journalists at Reach because I have a lot of friends there after doing two years of consulting with them on user engagement and analytics. I think it's time for the company to review its strategy. How long can they pursue their current strategy when it seems not to be delivering the results that are necessary for the company to thrive? I say that as a friend of the group and a friend of many with the group.
I love this piece because it challenges a lot of the conventional thinking in the scale business that has ground down local journalism in the US. I find it really interesting how one local publisher has gone against the grain of centralising back-office functions. I have to say that this gives me hope that communities are having the chance to see their papers returned to local ownership and run well.
Another attempt to capture some of the value from platforms that they have earned through featuring publishers' content and returning it to those publishers.
A good overview by one of the great media thinkers, Victor Pickard, about local and public media.
I see what’s happening today as a kind of culmination of some long-existing tensions and market failures that have always been present just beneath the surface, and often justified or overlooked. Today we’re seeing growing news deserts, and I would argue this is an example of where the commercial imperatives that dictate journalism must always be profitable have essentially driven the industry into the ground.
Digital Media Industry News
The layoffs in digital media continue, and now it is game streaming service Twitch. This shows just how challenging digital media of all stripes has become. Of course, this might speak to bigger woes at parent company Amazon.
I have been watching a lot of YouTube recently because I have growing obsession with vintage computers and the amazing sub-culture of people on YouTube who are restoring, upgrading and renewing these old bits of tech. And I come across these YouTube hustlers all of the time. Vox produces a great piece with a health warning about these folks. I have to say that any person who questions my work ethic because I don't have a Lambo (and don't want one) has never worked with me.
The state pushback against TikTok continues.
