The problems and opportunities facing premium publishing brands
What is premium publishing? Premium publishing is what happens when media companies prioritize high-quality content – and then produce the infrastructure to support it. Premium publishing means monetization. Paywalls, subscriptions, audience loyalty, among other components, comprise a big part of premium publishing.
Premium publishing is the path to victory for digital magazines. Your content matters, and you must put it to work via multiplatform strategy. But that’s not to say it’s not without its challenges. TheMediaBriefing.com covers some of them in recent posts. Let’s take a look!
How Growing Premium Publishing Brands Can Protect Audience
Magazine expansion is a course of action for digital publishers looking to increase revenue at scale, whether into additional markets, niches, or geographies. But do you risk diluting or even losing your premium publishing audience if you’re too greedy? TheMediaBriefing.com has an interesting recent article on the issue.
“The reason we’ve maintained a premium audience is that we don’t think like a publisher. We think like a brand. The fundamental question is ‘who is going to buy my product,’ and you design everything to make sure that the products you’re building are right for that target consumer.That brand-centric approach means that you don’t end up doing things that aren’t relevant for that audience because it’s got to be relevant to the brand,” Great British Chefs CEO Ollie Lloyd tells Chris Sutcliffe.
“But, having established a premium audience brands will pay to reach, how can a niche interest publication expand? Like most publications GBC is ramping up its video operation, which remains the great hope for revenue generation, but it is also expanding geographically and diversifying its business model, using its trusted status and premium audience as a launchpad,” Sutcliffe writes.
Key Questions Ahead of Monetizing Media Conference
TheMediaBriefing.com‘s Monetizing Media Conference is coming up, and the publishing analyst is focusing on four questions going in. We won’t reveal them all – check out the story for that – but one topic, of course, is video.
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“An ever increasing amount of video is consumed on mobile devices, so much so that Cisco predicts fully 75 percent of the world’s mobile traffic will be video by 2020, and there are even predictions that make that figure look conservative. Even when confusion around exactly what constitutes a view is taken out of the equation, all the figures for video consumption indicate that audiences are consuming more than they ever have in the past,” Sutcliffe writes.
“But video is still relatively costly to produce to a level of quality befitting newsbrands, and advertisers’ requests for video far outstrip newsrooms’ ability to produce it. So is video the next great hope for publishers or, as some have predicted, is the video advertising bubble about to burst? At MoMe, representatives from Telegraph Media Group, AOL, VGTV and Great British Chefs will discuss how video can serve publishers’ needs – and how to prevent that bubble from bursting.”
Facebook Live: Measuring the Impact for Digital Publishers
Third-party platforms like Facebook have turned up the heat on digital magazines in an effort to make them bend to their content distribution will. With the emergence of Facebook Live, those efforts have only intensified.
TheMediaBriefing.com offers some thoughts on whether it’s all worth it.
“With pre-roll adverts before videos having a reputation for being unfit for purpose, Facebook may be biding its time while searching for a better solution. For instance, it told the WSJ that people were willing to watch live video for three times as long as pre-recorded content, opening the possibility of advertising within livestreams, as predicted by Recode,” Sumant Bhatia writes.
“However, arguably a bigger problem for publishers is monetising their non-live video content on Facebook’s video platform as well. In some ways the two issues are blurring, with the company reporting that two-thirds of the audience watch the recording of a live broadcast. On top of this the recent changes to the Facebook algorithm means fewer videos (both editorial and native advertising) will be landing in users feeds and plays may well be going down.”
Do you produce premium publishing content? What are the positives and negatives you’ve seen? Let us know in the comments!
To read more about premium publishing content and other industry news, visit TheMediaBriefing.com.
