How a Swedish news publisher increased click-through-rates 130% through iterative experiments

I’m not quite ready to do a year-in-review piece, but when I do, there is a lot to reflect on over the past year. During my career in digital media and working with digital media projects, there have been few years where I’ve seen as much change. Despite the job losses this year and the change, I think it’s a little more hopeful because we do have models and tactics to build successful media businesses. More on that in that in the year-end wrap. Now onto the stories..

Data-driven optimisation is one of the major positive results of product-driven cultures at news organisations, and INMA has a case study from Sweden of how VK used a “data-driven, iterative process” to improve its click-through rate.

As I said, we have some great tactics on how to increase revenue in media, and on the journalism side, WAN-IFRA has a great rundown of the stories that it has done about reader revenue. From paid newsletters to tactics to grow subscriptions, WAN-IFRA has some great case studies.

In my day job at Pugpig, we write a weekly newsletter, and we have a mutual admiration society with Madeleine and Marion from The Audiencers, which has excellent pieces about audience development, digital media transformation and subscription optimisation. A great insight in this piece is to allow for the novelty effect to wear off so that you can see how things have settled down into discernable patterns. As we have said at the Pugpig Media Bulletin, make sure to test only one variable at a time.

I will write more about this in my year-end wrap, but it’s been a tough year both in the US and the UK for folks working in media. And at the end of the year, I had a few friends who were affected by layoffs. Adweek’s Mark Stenberg looks back at the job losses in the US and how many players it affected, particularly in the internet space. And he writes how advertisers are now shifting away from the internet as a channel.

Another theme this year has been regulators battles with tech giants in Australia, Canada, the EU and US states. Canada recently struck a deal with Google for payments to news publishers, and now Australia is looking to share the details of the deals that tech giants have made with news publishers there.

This is data for the UK TV industry, and while I haven’t heard similar figures for newspapers and magazines, I can’t believe that it is any rosier. However, the UK market has its own unique headwinds that aren’t the same for others.

Content discovery is a major issue in TV and podcasts, but improved discovery can also support improved engagement with text content. And AI personalisation of newsletters and homepages is an opportunity for publishers to apply AI.