Digital publishing news for July 24, 2013
Publishers are jumping on board the sponsored Tweet bandwagon, reports Digiday. “In addition to the AP, publishers as diverse as People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Women’s Wear Daily and Slate have given sponsored social content a whirl in the interest of scratching up new revenue. It makes sense. With millions of followers, Twitter is a powerful distribution platform for them. Every little bit helps. The risk, of course, is user backlash.”
Sponsored tweets are being included in ad packages. They’re not going to be the main way publishers make ad dollars but they’re certainly nice additions for advertisers.
The Washington Post, boasting 1.8 million Twitter followers, also plans to start its own sponsored Tweet program, according to Kevin Gentzel, the paper’s CRO. Like Slate and the AP, the paper sees no journalistic conflict in running Tweets on behalf of advertisers, he told Digiday. “Like everything within the native advertising family tree, labeling and transparency is critical.”
New Tool To Boost Ad Dollars
Online Media Daily has the details on a new tool to help publishers increase ad revenue they get from brands. “The opt-in eyeball ad-tracking tool from Sticky, formerly EyeTrackShop, measures the likelihood that consumers will view an advertisement. It also measures the length of time that consumers spent with an ad and the approximate cost of each impression based on that time.”
Knowing where your premium ad placements are and having the data to back it up is a convincing reason to check them out.
All the Content on Many Screens
eMarketer has new research that shows consumers are more willing to pay for a digital subscription if they can have access to it on all of their devices.”From the end user’s perspective, the implied bargain is something along these lines: “If I’m going to pay a monthly fee to read the news or watch my favorite TV show, I expect to be able to access it on my laptop, tablet, smartphone, connected TV or any other device I choose.” The success of subscription models in other industries shows that people are willing to pay for digital subscriptions as long as they can have multi-screen access.
How Weekly Digital Digests are Faring
Finding a publishing sweet spot on tablets is what Esquire and The Atlantic are experimenting with in their new weekly publication apps, Esquire Weekly for iPad and The Atlantic Weekly for iPad and iPhone. Poytner has an in-depth look at the two weekly publications.
“With Esquire Weekly and The Atlantic Weekly, two monthly legacy print publications are trying different formulas for getting compact editions in front of readers with a frequency they can’t achieve in print and a level of curation they can’t achieve online.”
“The overlap between Esquire’s Web readers and its print readers is less than 10 percent, editor-in-chief David Granger has told Mashable. Esquire Weekly bridges that gap by providing content with varying degrees of exclusivity. Brief culture pieces by Stephen Marche and politics pieces by Charles P. Pierce are published online soon after appearing in the weekly, with some tweaks.”
“Smaller app experiences like those offered by Esquire Weekly and The Atlantic Weekly fit nicely into our lives, and they introduce some order to the chaos of the Web. The weeklies respect not only that readers are busy but also that they’re capable of paying attention to something for longer than five minutes.”
It should be interesting to see how well the public responds to these weekly publications over time. Keep experimenting, publishers!
