Puzzles and games as the top of a subscriber acquisition funnel PLUS How to make sense of Google's Core Web Vitals

September 29, 2022

At Pugpig, we're working on a State of the Digital Publishing Market report, and we're curious to see how many people are using personalisation as part of their strategies. Today, Digiday is highlighting experiments that British publishers are doing to add some level of personalisation to their newsletters. The results are mixed.

Also today, we have another story about bundles, and of course, it relates to the New York Times. But it also shows how the subscriber acquisition funnel is evolving.

Plus we have a few practical pieces on SEO, including how to use Google's Core Web Vitals scores and a piece by Moz on how to find your 'true competitors' in search. And a Reynolds Journalist Institute evaluates the homepages and articles of a range of major and smaller publications using Google's Core Web Vitals with some surprising results.

Publishers are testing personalizing newsletter content based on readers’ interests - but it doesn't always work.g

Personalisation is one of those features that users always say that they want, but when put into practice, it can have mixed results. And that is what publishers are finding. The Telegraph has found that a personalised headlines newsletter is driving more traffic to its website. However, the Torstar in Canada used AI to personalise newsletters, and they found that their time was better spent creating a really good newsletter for the largest number of people. There is definitely nuance in how the publishers were using personalisation. What's key is having a clear sense of your KPIs and understanding if the personalised product helps you achieve them.

The Times' use of games as a subscriber funnel is part of a renewed focus on gaming sparked by the company's acquisition of Wordle in January.

An absolutely fascinating piece about how the New York Times is using puzzles (rather than gaming, which to most people means gambling) to attract subscribers. They are using a free Wordle puzzle to attract people to a premium puzzle subscriptions and then upselling them to a wider content bundle.

Another US pub media group buys a newspaper

The Denton Record-Chronicle will be acquired by KERA public media in Dallas in a deal that resembles WBEZ's recent purchase of the Chicago Sun-Times.

Dallas public media group KERA has bought a local newspaper. This comes after the public media group in Chicago bought the Sun Times. It's a very interesting model, and as I said with the situation in Chicago, I will be watching how the public media group and the newspaper merger their cultures as much as how they merge their operations. And I'm also curious about the business model that the pub media groups will pursue. Will they pursue the standard subscription model? Or will they adopt the voluntary membership model that US public media uses?

SEP 27 | 2022 “Public media community anchor” in Texas keeps local news in local hands. DENTON, TEXAS⸺The National Trust for Local News announced today a new model of community journalism to support and transform local news in the fifth largest media market in the U.S. This new model, a public media community anchor, represents the second major community journalism innovation catalyzed by the Trust, which launched in 2021 with the creation of a suburban news conservancy in Colorado known as the

Here is the press release from the Trust that helped foster the move.

Top tips to continue to refine your search strategy

Competitor identification and competitor research is absolutely key to a good SEO strategy. Your real SEO competitors are the ones who target the same keywords, speak to the same audience, and solve for the same consumer needs. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Lidia Infante walks you through two…

The thing that stands out for me is the nuance of serving the same audience. There are times both with SEO and ASO (application store optimisation) when a publisher can be competing for keywords against another property or app that doesn't serve the same audience.

Learn how the loading speed, accessibility and other performance metrics of your news site stacks up.

Core web vitals scores are one of the ways that Google ranks your site. An RJI fellow looks at the Core Vitals of a number of publications. There are definitely some surprises in his findings.

At Search On 2022, Google announced that "Discussions and forums" will be getting their own sections in results, while translated...

This may give publishers reason to pay attention to discussions and forums again. In my consulting work, I found that specialist forums can drive significant engagement with publishers' content.

Product: Validating ideas and an early digital innovation from USA Today

Starting a digital business in the modern world is costly, so few entrepreneurs can afford to build a product that won’t fly — and investors are also counting their risks. How do you know your prod...

There are so many things digital publishers can do that they have to decide what they must do. Product management has a number of ways to validate ideas that media companies can use to find market fit and filter all of the ideas and initiatives that they might have.

USA Today Sports Center is a time capsule from a period in which a newspaper could convince people to pay five bucks an hour to log onto their service during the big game.

As someone who now has quite a bit of history in the industry and who had the privilege of meeting and working with so many early pioneers in digital journalism and media, I think that it's really important for us to know and understand early innovation initiatives. In the US, yes newspaper publishers did try text on TVs (the low resolution of US TVs was only one thing that doomed the effort). And there were a number of people involved in early online efforts that predate the internet. I'm keeping this project in my Evernote because it wasn't one that I remembered - an early USA Today online sports service. How many of these efforts were doomed because they didn't generate the fat profits that print did at a time when those profits really were fat?

Podcasting: Buying listeners on mobile games and CNN cuts audio unit

Players in mobile games trigger downloads of shows no one may be hearing for more than seconds

This caught my eye. I will say that it's not difficult to buy audience, but the challenge is to engage and retain that audience. I especially saw this for newsletters in my previous role. However, these methods can be a good way to open the top of your funnel.

Five months after the network axed its much-hyped but short-lived streamer, it gave pink slips to the remaining staffers on the failed endeavor.

Yes, the last remaining employees who worked on CNN+ are gone but so are many folks who worked on their audio. The new CNN isn't just pivoting in terms of its political positioning, it also seems less digitally ambitious.

Social and Web3: TikTok marketing and Razorfish's web3 push

Social Media Today

A good look at the organic and paid approaches for TikTok.

Razorfish Expands Web3 Offerings To Help Brands Navigate The Future - 09/29/2022

It's the role of digital agencies like Razorfish to be on the cutting edge of things. Cutting through the hype of virtual influencers and an executive who is an avatar, there are opportunities here for publishers. Web3 is becoming an amazingly amorphous collection of technologies that are best unbundled. I mean using AI and machine learning is quite a different proposition than metaverse entertainment and virtual commerce.