Hi there, Lucinda Southern, Adweek media editor here. It’s been a busy start to December, as if you were expecting anything else.
A year ago, The Financial Times launched a consultancy business to share its knowledge on how to build subscription models. As case studies go, The FT’s paywall is a pretty solid one. In one year, it exceeded expectations: the separate business division has grown to 13 people and into a multi-million dollar business, quadrupling profit goals.
What I find smart is how it works with each publisher to create a ‘north star strategy’ that the whole business can get behind. And with the surge in reader revenue businesses and Covid-19-spurred cohorts, setting up a consultancy to answer these needs seems a sharp bet.
In the latest platform-partnership dance, Facebook will start paying U.K. publishers like The Guardian, The Economist and Condé Nast, to appear in its dedicated news tab. Why others left out (for now at least), like Rupert Murchoch’s News UK, The Financial Times and The Telegraph, is more interesting.
Like with all platform partnerships, participating publishers have to toss up how much they need to reach new audiences (Facebook said 95% of traffic Facebook News drives to U.S. publishers is new) versus risk relinquishing full access (data) to their audience, diluting their brand identity, influencing their edit strategy etc etc.
How Facebook will remunerate publishers is still unclear, sources have railed against a revenue-share based on clicks that incentivize clickbait-style headlines. A few months ago, U.S. news publisher sources told me Facebook News Tab revenue wasn’t yet anything to write home about. I’m sure that’s not everyone’s experience, get in touch, I’d love to hear from you.
To slightly paraphrase a tweet this week from mParticle CEO Michael Katz, relating to Facebook’s purchase of CRM platform Kustomer, the future is about CX, first-party data, and commerce, not ad targeting. Another shared ID solution has cropped up, this time from open-source coalition Prebid and Publicis Groupe owned Epsilon. SharedID aims to give publishers more much-needed control over data on the open web. My colleague Andrew Blustein goes under the hood about how this solution is different from the myriad others.
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Thanks for reading!
Lucinda
