How subscription-based businesses and the shift to first-party data could remake the digital ad industry PLUS The impatience of (data-informed) innovators in media

November 01, 2022

Bloomberg is not just any media business. It makes most of its money from lucrative subscriptions to its pricey financial data terminals. That fat revenue stream has powered its ability to dabble in consumer business information as a loss leader. You can see their top of the funnel strategy by watching Bloomberg TV for a minute when they highlight some data that is available via their platform. But that subscription revenue gives them the strategic flexibility to try things that other subscription-based businesses might want to consider.

Bloomberg has built its own first-party data service, and that is changing its relationship with advertising tech and advertising in general. They have bid farewell to the native advertising platform Taboola, and it is pulling out of other programmatic ad delivery services. The combination of a subscription-based business and its strength in first-party data is remaking how it approaches advertising.

This raises the question of whether this strategy can scale down to other subscription-based businesses that create a competitive advantage. Most smaller businesses don't have the resources to create the first-party data lake that Bloomberg has, but will there be services that they can buy to help them achieve this without having to build something on their own?

Plus - Hearst has launched a social commerce platform - FirstFinds. And José Antonio Sánchez, audience editor for El Tiempo in Bogotá, Colombia, talks about his data-driven innovation and encourages people not to wait until a crisis to transform.

Bloomberg's first-party data play

How Bloomberg Media got out of the programmatic race to the bottom.

One of the two overviews of Bloomberg's shift to first-party data and away from third-party programmatic advertising. As the piece says:

“'This is a real moment for us to say to our clients ‘hey we know these users and they trust us’ and so as a result we want to cultivate those relationships in a really thoughtful way,' said Julia Beizer, chief digital officer at Bloomberg Media. 'We’re not just going to share that information all over the ecosystem because that’s not what the consumer has in mind.'

Anything that dilutes this position is a risk — including ad tech vendors."

Bloomberg Media just turned off third-party ads on its site. But as it shuts the door to open-market programmatic, Bloomberg is opening a first-party data advertising platform. The business media... Continue reading »

Hearst wants to find a way to shorten the time between discovering a product, learning more about it and ultimately buying it.

They will do this by using a team of curators who evaluate items they see on social media against a 16-point list to choose 50 items a day for their social shopping list. The service will generate revenue from affiliate sales. It's a really interesting play with commerce content.

José Antonio Sánchez, audience editor for El Tiempo in Bogotá, Colombia, said the pandemic taught him not to be afraid to speed up your plans.

I love this profile. It basically demonstrates that the curiosity that marks out a good journalist also marks out a savvy media operator who is constantly asking questions and seeking the ways to answer them. Case in point, he did a study to show how driving automation might affect media consumption. (I also think it's worth looking at commuter patterns and that might affect the media mix in a market between text, audio and video.)

Rather than experimenting, these AI tools can make publishing operations more efficient There have been concerns that, under the pressure of the day-to-day challenges of revenue generation and content creation, smaller publishers are avoiding experimenting with AI for fear of wasting precious resources. But a recent article from The Fix has highlighted a range of AI tools …

Small publishers may believe that they don't have the time to experiment with AI, but that might make the case that they should experiment with AI because they need to make the most of the time that they have.

The recent boom of local nonprofit news organizations is proving their model can serve smaller markets, too.

This piece has a collection of graphs that show the shifting nature of these news outlets - including where they are launched and the size of the markets that they serve. You can see how the trends accelerate almost everywhere in the past five years - apart from the Midwest where I'm originally from.

The post-COVID-19 landscape left newspaper U.S. news publishers less exposed to advertising — particularly print advertising — as a share of the revenue mix. But there are three challenges to revenue and profitability.

There are no real surprises here. Print volume is down. Digital churn is up as cash-strapped consumers reevaluate their purchases, and digital advertising is under pressure.

The Media Recession Is Coming, The Media Recession Is Coming -- Or Is It? - 10/31/2022

Another piece highlighting the mixed signals from the economy and how that affects media.

Photo-sharing app BeReal has caught the fancy of Gen-Z and is registering consistent, rapid growth. Its focus on authenticity attracts a younger audience and makes it potentially useful for publishers looking to build engagement and deeper connections. Young people are “critical audiences for publishers and journalists around the world, and for the sustainability of the …

BeReal is the latest social media app. I'm going to admit something. I'm growing sceptical about chasing audiences by age and starting to think it's more about focusing on audience interests regardless of age. Sure, there will be different ways to reach audiences based on age, but I think that outlets need to be a lot more strategic in chasing audiences off platform. They need a clear sense of the goal that goes beyond building a large following elsewhere. How does this fit into your funnel?