WAN-IFRA's World Press Trends report dives deeply into the revenue picture for publishers from @damianradcliffe PLUS A healthy dose of critical thinking about measures of time spent with media

October 25, 2022

Damian Radcliffe summarises WAN-IFRA's World Press Trends report chapter on revenue. While the overall economic situation is anxiety inducing right now, there are some bright spots of hope in the report. Echoing sentiments from INMA recently, the transformations that COVID shocks induced for publishers are starting to bear fruit in the form of new revenue streams that aren't as volatile as advertising. It might help mute the cyclical pressures that publishers have seen in the past when they have been more dependent on advertising revenue.

Speaking of INMA, they have an interesting piece prompting some critical thinking about time spent metrics. The piece is viewed from the perspective of advertising, but it's important across the publishing business, and with so many companies being reliant on Google Analytics, it's useful to ask questions about the models underlying their metrics, particularly if some of them pre-date the rise of mobile (although I'd be surprised if the Android maker would not have adopted those models for the mobile age).

This chapter paints the picture of pandemic-era revenues among our survey respondents. It dives into the financial bottom line in 2021 and how this may change in 2022.

A look at WAN-IFRA's World Press trends with a focus on revenue expectations. A very good part of the research is how they break things out between developed and developing countries. The report again points to new revenue streams bearing fruit even as the overall macroeconomic situation deteriorates, and advertising overall is still growing, although that is on a global basis, which leaves a lot of room for regional variation.

All analysts agree on the definition of time spent, but none use a universally accepted measurement because it doesn’t exist.

A piece with a healthy dose of critical thinking about how time spent is calculated. In my last role as a director of digital products and platforms, I started to shift our organisation away from volume metrics because they didn't seem to be connected to our goal of increasing membership. Instead, I started to interject attention and loyalty metrics. This piece takes things a step farther and interrogates how attention is commonly measured.

At this week’s FIPP Insider event in Berlin, BILD Group’s Managing Director, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, will take to the stage to provide key insights into how Europe’s largest daily newspaper, and Germany’s biggest media brand, has managed – and continues to manage - digital change. We caught up with her ahead of the convening to get the inside track…

BILD, Germany's major tabloid, reaches 40 m people each week. The Axel Springer title is doing a lot of the things that other successful publishers are doing such as working to convert unknown users to known users. However, one of the things that they highlighted, which isn't talked about as much, is their pricing model.

Spark Foundry: It's Already Time To Rebrand The Metaverse - 10/24/2022

An agency has done some research and found that the term met averse is falling out of favour and that it has been coopted by the NFT community. The market research also found that the term is more associated with professionals rather than consumers.

Local news initiatives in the US

Introducing the College Media Innovation Coalition, a resource for student-led newsrooms to collaborate and communicate.

From the Reynolds Journalism Institute, Sydney Lewis, one of the innovation staff, is launching a Slack and other ways for college journalists to collaborate. She is also creating a playbook for innovation that college journalists can use.

In the conversation about how to revive the U.S. local journalism industry, we’re talking too much about the kind of journalism we think Americans need and not enough about the kind of journalism Americans want. That's what we have to figure out if we want to regain a mass audience for professional journalism. Without a In the conversation about how to revive the U.S. local journalism industry, we’re talking too much about the kind of journalism we think Americans need and not enough about the kind of journalism Americans want.

I worked in local journalism in the US, and both as a reporter and as an executive editor, both chapters were some of the most professionally satisfying in my life. To paraphrase Arthur Miller, good journalism is a community speaking to itself, and we need more stories about the goings on in our communities, not just official life or investigations but also simple stories about our neighbours' lives.