Own Thy Audience

In a recent study of DNR 2021, the median number of subscriptions held by those who pay for news was consistently 1. This means that it has become tricky to monetize the audience through subscriptions. How can publishers stand out with their subscription offerings? What should they do to make the readers pay? Abhishek Dadoo, founder and CEO, Few Cents, talks about all this and a lot more in this episode. 

• What should mid-size and small publishers do to get more subscriptions 
• Building a subscriber funnel
• Who is a never-subscriber and how can they be encouraged to try out subscriptions? 
• How should publishers make sure that subscribers retain and not churn?
• ​​How can marketing play a role to increase subscriptions? 
• How can AI help along this journey? 
• What are important things that publishers need to look at when it comes to choosing a payment gateway?
• 3 things publishers need to keep in mind while starting off with subscriptions?
• Other revenue options for various audience segments that publishers need to look at
• North star metric publishers need to track

According to Google’s Andrey Lipatt Sev, links are one of the three major ranking factors in Google. Newsrooms strive to build links but most are unaware of the different ways to do it. But it goes without saying that link building is crucial especially in the long run. Easier said than done, it has become tricky to rank well on search engines. While some say that off-page SEO is dead, Michel strongly disagrees with it and tells us why. 

 

In this episode, we have Michael Bertini, an SEO expert who specializes in enterprise-level SEO. He talks about how one can build links, measure success, and how to maximize it, and reveals some untold secrets of link building. 

 

• Important to get a link back, and if ‘no follow’ links are better than do-follow links in Google’s eyes
• Measuring the success of link building
• Earn a backlink from authoritative sites 
• Off-page SEO for new publishers 
• Ranking on Google News 
• Influence of social media mentions in a news publisher’s performance in Google News SEO 
• Embedding the anchor text and full URL links in news releases? 
• Unlinked mention and the approach.

Did you know that the Google search team has a 160-page document ( book ) that outlines how the search algorithm works? Even better - Google updates this every 6 months. 

  If you are an SEO, it really qualifies as your first starting point. Question is - how many people do you know to print that document and keep it on their desk? This is why Lily Ray stands out. Also, because she usually DJ's in the New York circuit..   But back to where we are. News, SEO, and EAT. Lily has expertise in EAT. And in this conversation, I got a chance to ask Lily about how news publishers should go thinking about their implementation for EAT. Of the various things that matter, EAT has a massive impact and most publishers haven't quite cracked it yet. We chat about the outlook on AI content, the need of building trust with the audience, and most importantly how newer publications have a shot at establishing their expertise. Lily's updates on Twitter and LinkedIn are fire and her default position on SEO is - optimize for the user and Google will follow. Google has been saying this for.....  Wait. Forever.    Tons of new learnings and a fresh breakdown of what EAT means for news publishers. Go ahead and give this a listen.

Building vs Buy is a decision that almost every software category struggles with. Software is eating the world. Building new tools, products, solutions is easier than ever before. The only question that remains is - Should you build it or let someone else build it for you. This is what Vivek and Aditya Bhelande - founder and CEO @ YuktaMedia sat down to answer. Aditya has been selling software to publishers and media businesses for well over 5 years and he has had his share of adventures. Right from deals going cold because internal teams wanted to build it to teams circling back after 6 months to resume sale negotiations, Aditya has seen it all. 

Aditya talks about the build vs buy dilemma and breaks how teams should approach this problem. Build vs Buy is a frequent conversation even internally at iZooto. We often resort to Wardley maps to figure out what is it that our customers want the most and what is it that will help us unlock maximum value. Wardley Maps is an incredibly powerful framework that helps builders, founders, product managers to identify what is it that they should be investing their time in building and what is it that they should be buying off the shelf. 

Listen to Vivek and Aditya chat about all things media and answering the question of build vs buy.

Building an audience-first culture has become critical, now more than ever. Marketers are gunning for ways to build an audience to take their business to new heights, but most marketers do not know how to begin. It becomes tricky when you have to just rely on experimentation without any playbook in hand. 

Bonnie Roche has been helping publishers build an audience for many years now. Bonnie, in this episode, shares her operating playbook to build an audience-first culture where she talks about how one can start building an audience, how it is essential to inculcate the audience-first culture within the team, and how to build a loyal audience. 

Key points covered - 

• Impact of the audience first culture for the editorial team
• Operating playbook she has been following for years
• Brands in the media ecosystem that share the values of audience first culture
• Change in the content consumption and what it means from an audience development standpoint
• Increasing subscription retention and loyalty

Podcasting is the new low-hanging fruit for pubs looking for new revenue streams. The podcasting ad revenue in the US has crossed $700 mil last year with News podcasting leading the charts. But all said and done, scaling it needs an expert intervention. And that’s exactly why we invited Wil Williams, a co-founder at the Hug House Productions, to address the challenges and their workarounds while monetizing a news podcast. Here’s what the episode will help you learn -

• Though podcasting as a new revenue stream is all lucrative, why are some newsrooms still holding back?
• The go-to playbook for podcast monetization. What to do exactly after you’re done publishing a podcast?
• Sure ways to find out if a news podcast will be a success.
• Metrics that news companies can track once an episode starts gaining traction among their listeners.
• #1 thing digital publishers and media companies should do in order to retain their listeners.
• Advertising or branded content.

In a country like India, there are 121 languages which are spoken by 10,000 or more people in which has a population of 121 crores. Just having content in one language does not cut it. Not anymore. The need to strategize to put together a plan to serve readers with content based on the language and region is now more important than ever. Optimize the website content according to the region the reader is in or the language that they prefer consuming information. But coming up with an SEO strategy is where most publishers get stuck. 

Chanpreet Singh has been doing all things SEO for over 2 decades now. In this episode, he will open up his operating playbook so that you can start off with optimizing your SEO strategy.  

Important points covered 

• How should a digital publisher zero down on the languages?
• What parameter does Google use to identify if a page is targeted for a particular region?
• Different subdomain or different subdirectory? What performs better and why?
• Should publishers go multi-lingual, multi-regional, or does it make sense to optimize it for both? 
• How should one optimize for multilingual search? 
• What are the things that need to be in place before starting off with off-page SEO?
• How should publishers mitigate duplication content?
• How should one measure and track if their regional content is performing well?

42% of businesses fail because there is no market need for their product. Well, building a new product is not easy. Sometimes it so happens that one ends up building something entirely different from what would provide value to their audience. And just like that, all that effort goes down the drain. That’s why achieving product-market fit becomes critical. It could make or break a product’s success in the market. 

 

In this episode, Arie shares the checklist that you need to follow every time you build a new product. He has helped build many products for KapanLagi Universe managing the full product lifecycle, from the requirement to launch, and has also led the product team of CNN and CNBC Indonesia. 

 

Important points covered-

• Process of building new products
• Things to check off before starting off with building a product for the readers
• 3 must-ask questions every product manager should ask readers before working on a product
• How to adapt and evolve in this ever-changing market.
• Once the product is built, what’s next?
• How can one find out if it was poor marketing or lack of product marketing fit if the results are not as expected?
• The most effective way to find out a product-market fit for an existing product
• Key metrics to track for a product that is just built? 
• Monitoring and analytic tools publishers should make use of
• 3 publishers, one should draw inspired from
• Tips and strategies for all things growth?

Podcasting has been in the marketing arena for quite some time now. They have surpassed the video wave, making audio as a medium one of the best ways to engage the audience. 80% of people listen to all or most of each episode, whereas the average reader spends just 37 seconds reading a blog post! Podcast is an intimate channel and has become a companion be it while commuting, talking a walk, or taking a break on a lazy Sunday afternoon. 

 

Unlike the video medium, which requires dedicated attention, the audio medium gives one the freedom to multi-task, helping marketers boost engagement like none other. And it is needless to say, the number of podcasts on various platforms has shot up like crazy! 

 

In this episode, we have Rob Walch, who had started podcasting way before Apple started supporting podcasts and had helped Senator Edwards, the first politician to have a podcast, produce one. Rob shares his 16 years of podcasting experience, points all the do’s and don'ts, shares the secret sauce to kickstart a podcast and outlines what marketers should be tracking.

With the duopolies ruling over, revenue from ads has become unreliable. Publishers are on a hunt for ways they increase their revenue and build their own audience. On the other hand, readers are hungry for authentic news in this era where fake news and privacy breaches are rampant. Finding news that is trustworthy and reliable has become a real challenge.

The reader revenue model has seen quite an adoption, especially in the UK where readers pay for exclusive content. India is not far behind. Readers get what they pay for and publishers increase their revenue. Nandagopal Rajan tells us where the reader revenue model stands in the Indian landscape and shares insights on the what, when, and how of starting off with the reader revenue model.