On April 15, Crowdynews was present at Digital Media Europe. The conference organized by WAN-IFRA with the sub title – Get ready for the next digital impact, addressed the issues of the publishing industry and the opportunities and possibilities for innovation. Returning topics where paid content and new revenue streams.
Several large online publishers presented their strategies, their learnings and conclusions regarding social media, paid content and business models.
Here are the top learnings for online publishers from the conference:
Mobile First
Focus on mobile is key in online publishing. Perhaps it should even be leading. Some of the publishers are experiencing two third of their visitors coming from mobile devices. Most digital publishers are choosing responsive web design for their website and are launching apps for tablets and smartphones. The apps are in most cases completely different from the regular website. Offering a new user experience and offering special content. The paid apps are doing well however most prefer a freemium model where some content is freely accessible and some content can only be read by (paying) subscribers.
Pay walls
We have seen several strategies around paywalls. For the large digital publishers pay walls are starting to work. Where a few years ago people thought is was crazy to launch pay walls on news websites, they are now (slowly) getting used to the idea that news is not always free. The biggest learning in this field is that it only works on content that is not available elsewhere. If you are publishing general news, your readers probably aren’t willing to pay for your content, because it can be found elsewhere for free. It is important for publishers to find their uniqueness and their place in the news consumption of their readers before deciding to put up a pay wall with the risk of losing readers.
Thinking Customer first
“We were thinking very digital-first before, now we are thinking consumer-first,” said Frédérique Lancien, Digital and New Business Director at Groupe L’Equipe . “You need to think what consumers want before you build your offer,” she recommended.
Paul Smurl, vice-president of NYTimes.com, and Brooke Christofferson, VP if business development at Republic Media shared this thought: “to make a paid digital offer work, it’s essential to invest in quality, unique content, and identify what readers are most concerned about. Regional publishers seemed to have success with freemium models as well, offering unique local content only available to subscribers.
The panel discussion was concluded with the wise words to try, try, and try. There is no such thing as one working strategy. All publishers at the conference tried a lot of different models before they found the ones working for them their readers.
Social
Social media strategies become more and more necessary for digital publishers. Adding options to increase interactivity and allowing readers to discover content through social media is engaging readers. Readers are no longer just reading articles, they are distributing it for you. When digital publishers aren’t thinking about ways to improve engagement and audience participation they could be leaving highly valued opportunities untouched.The discovery of social content related to your editorial content is one way to improve reader engagement and that is where Crowdynews fits in perfectly. If you are interested to find out how we can help you to enrich your editorial content with real time social content, in a fully automated way, contact us now.