“Battle against oligopoly of portals” can be won if magazines can learn to leverage their strong engagement and consumer insights
John Byrne of Businessweek.com moderated a panel at the MPA’s Magazines 24/7 conference in Manhattan titled “Digital Drivers on the Road Ahead” and opened by stating that 85% of all wholesale ad revenue spent last year online went to the “big 4” – Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. Sarah Chubb, President of CondeNet, lightened up that statistic by reminding publishers that the big 4 sell something very different than what magazines sell. “We focus on what we’re good at,” said Chubb, “which is selling packages to advertisers that focus on the special relationships magazines have with their readers.”
Lauren Wiener, Senior VP, Meredith Interactive agreed. “Engagement at scale with a target audience is key,” said Wiener. “Cross platform is a very strong thing, we offer users a full service touch point,” said Wiener. “Yahoo! doesn’t have that level of engagement. We have decades of insights into our consumers. We know our consumers better than anyone else.” Wiener said that their mission, then, is turning that insight into a strong selling proposition for advertisers.
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“We call them participants – not users, not readers”
Reader engagement is a very important metric for Meredith. Weiner noted how at first, they were calling their web audience readers – then they called them users – and now, they are called participants. The ability for participants to rate every article, to blog, giving them choice and voice about how to view content, using contextual video – have all led to great success for sites like BHG.com, which has seen a 42% increase in pages per visit in January 2008 over January 2007.
“The industry needs to do a better job”
Vivek Shah, President of Fortune|Money Group, in the same panel, said that the industry needs to do a better job of selling the “deportalizing” of the Web. He noted that visitors are spending much more time on sites other than Google and Yahoo! and that magazine publishers need to focus on time spent and engagement when talking to advertisers. “The advertising side hasn’t fully shifted there yet,” he said.
He also noted that while article-level entry from Google is valuable, at Fortune|Money Group, they are now much more focused on becoming bookmarks for their users. “The big 4 are all about homepage entry,” said Shah.
“Investment finally coming back”
In the same panel Chubb noted that CondeNet invested heavily in producing hundreds of videos over the last few years and that the investment is finally coming back. “The purpose of distribution is to find users we haven’t found yet. A very high percentage of traffic that comes through distribution end up subscribing to our magazines,” said Chubb, who is responsible for the great success of sites like Epicurious.com, which has also seen a healthy 48% increase in pages per visit from January 2008 over January 2007.
