Key Takeaways From Digiday’s Publishing Summit Europe

Posted on by Jorrith Schaap

The Digiday Publishing Summit is “where the publishing industry meets”. Europe’s top publishers and technology providers gathered in Bologna earlier this month for three days of discussion & networking around the platforms that are changing the business of publishing. We had a couple of our employees in attendance at the event, and here’s our take on how to address this changing business, based on what we’ve seen and heard last week. What are the greatest challenges that publishers are facing?

Context is King

The value of good content is what sets your publication apart from others and what delivers the right message into the hearts & minds of your readers. Content ís important but context is getting more and more important to your audience: Today, your audience desires a more appealing and engaging user experience. It’s no longer just about delivering good, high-quality content, it’s what’s next to it, what surrounds it – the overall experience – that keeps readers on your sites longer.

We’ve listed our top 3 highlights, based on the impressive keynotes we attended at the event:

  1. Platform versus Publisher
  2. Ad-blocking
  3. Native Advertising

Platform vs. Publisher

We are all familiar with the numbers of referrals coming from social: all together, the top social media sites drove over 31 % of overall traffic to news sites. Those referrals are tricky customers, they tend to not stay on a publisher’s site for long. For example, the average visitor coming from Facebook visits your website for 1.41 seconds, compared to a direct visitor who’s on your site for at least 4 minutes on average. They also visit far fewer pages than the direct visitor (4.2 vs. 24.8). A publisher of course wants their reader to subscribe or visit more pages; they do not want their readers to leave their domain and return to the distribution channels they came from. There’s a continuous battle going on, where publishers and platforms need to work together now to get the best results that benefit both parties.

Getting your audience’s attention is another key aspect that was focused on. Publishers are looking for guaranteed visibility: they want their reader’s attention for more than ~4 seconds. With the new & improved Crowdynews overlay you are able to deliver just that: the overlay appears when readers click an item in the Crowdynews social media stream, providing your audience with a more user-friendly display & easier navigation, more content to engage with, and more advertising opportunities.

Ad-Blocking

Ad-blocking continues to be a struggle for publishers today. Publishers are still deciding on how to tackle the ad-blocking issue. See how top European publishers dealing with ad blockers. Do they need to follow the steps of Axel Springer’s Bild and let their readers find out the hard way, or stand together as one and make block ad blockers collectively? One thing that was made perfectly clear at the Digiday Publishing Summit: either readers pay or they allow ads to be shown.

Native Advertising

Readers desire a more refined user experience without annoying bad-looking ads. They want the information that is presented to them to blend into the user experience elegantly, so they wouldn’t even notice it or wouldn’t even perceive it as being advertising. Native is the future!

Last but not least, we would like to give today’s publisher the following advice:

  • Take pride; be proud of what you’re doing
  • Take control; be in control of what you’re publishing
  • Take risks; dare to be different

More Digiday Events

Will you be at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail today? We’d love to meet and talk about social media curation & digital publishing!

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