How Digital Media Publishers Can Survive The Next 25 Years

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How Digital Media Publishers Can Survive The Next 25 Years

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Being a publisher ain’t easy.   Your direct traffic is starting to decline, and you’re struggling to find new and innovative ways to monetize your audience.   Social media and aggregator apps have become the starting point for most of your traffic.  Fewer big advertisers are coming directly to your door, offset only by the increasing number of smaller business advertisers who are going to programmatic channels to access your inventory through data-driven audiences.  What’s more, you must worry about the quality of the content you present and make sure it remains brand-safe in a world that is increasingly, well, just NSFW.

In the old days, most publishers had the simple point of view that “if you build it, they will come.”  Google’s algorithm would surface you to an audience so long as your SEO was on-point.  Now your content is being hijacked by social media platforms, and you are forced to tease the content in exchange for driving to pages that are almost always gated by a paid login account.  It used to be fewer and far between to find content that was behind a pay wall, but these days it feels as though nine out of 10 links require a paid account to read on. 

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The open web used to be fully supported by display ads, but that doesn’t feel like the case anymore.  Desktop websites are a smaller portion of the total traffic, and mobile websites are inundated with overlay ads and pop-ups that expired on the desktop many years ago.

To succeed in the digital media industry going forward, publishers need to accomplish three things:

Maintain an advantage. Publishers first need to ensure they are competitive with the rest of the industry.  News sites have tried to do this by leaning into opinion and editorial as a way to create content that can’t be found anywhere else.  Entertainment sites rely on scoops and POV-esque content featuring pundits or trusted sources. 

While I understand these strategies, I am hopeful that more sites will simply create higher quality, more accurate, more engaging content.  They should invest in reporting and try to build an audience based on facts rather than opinion.  Being recognized as a source of accurate facts might be even more valuable than we first think.

Invest in  tools for distribution and monetization.  Publishers need to excerpt part of their content and distribute it into social platforms as a teaser that can be viewed by potential subscribers.  Give the audience something before you ask for money. 

A few of the ad sites do this well by giving me access to two or three articles a month, then asking me to pay. 

Immediate pay walls hurt publishers more than it helps because I will never pay for something I can’t sample first.  Your brand doesn’t carry enough weight for me to pay yet, but maybe if I see the true value in what you offer, I will. 

Reduce ads, increase engagement, build a community. If you reduce the number of ads and focus on a cleaner UI, you can potentially charge more. 

Then give me ways to engage with your audience.  Build out the community of readers and find ways for us to engage with one another. 

Community and discord forums are valuable.  People are striving for connection and being a loyal fan, or reader, can be a way of aligning and building a community. 

Focus less on the ads and more on ways to drive engagement within the community, and readers will come back.  Then you can charge more for your ad spaces because you have created a loyal community.

I think the first two strategies, maintaining an advantage and investing in the tools, are table stakes for online publishing.  Building the community is different and one that can’t be usurped by social media, nor will it lose to AI.  Community is the backbone of the internet, and it just might save the publishing world in the long run.

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March 26, 2025 at 01:36PM