Own Thy Audience

• Major challenges that publishers are coming face to face while monetizing this Indian traffic.
• Why is the same revenue model (advertising and affiliates) working for the US market and not so much for the Indian market?
• Other revenue trends that are gaining grounds to monetize Indian traffic. 
• How long will it take for the Indian market to follow a similar adoption?

Tune in to know more! 

Alan Jay’s has been working on the “internet” for the last 30 years. Let that sink. From being an active community contributor in is University days, he went on to create the biggest movie fan community, IMDB on UseNet group. It went to the World Wide Web in 1993. In this conversation, Vivek and Alan chat about Alan’s journey of building IMDB, his experience of building community-driven businesses. Alan also talks about how he views Google, paywalls for content, mistakes publishers often make while crafting their reader revenue strategy. 

In 2016 when ad revenues were still growing and publishers were hesitant to use paywalls, Piers Fawkes and his team decided to set up their own paywall. A decision that made them lose around 2 mil site visitors. It wasn't of course the first paywall in the world, but it was the start of Wallkit.

In this conversation, Fawkes narrates his story of establishing one of the most successful subscription businesses, with the perfect checklist for you to transition into one.

Robert Cialdini - author of Influence and Chelsey Heath have a thing in common - they both teach at the Uni of Arizona. While Cialdini focuses on the fundamentals of marketing, Chelsey teaches Search Engine Strategy - whose curriculum changes every semester. In this conversation, Chelsey, helps us understand how news SEO has evolved over the years, early trends in voice search, and video publishing. Full of nuggets and actionable insights, that would make you sit with your notepad and pen as you listen in.

In early 2015 when Quintype began, their founders Chirdeep and Amit realized that most publishers are facing the same problem of creating an interface that lets them run their workflow, each of them building the same workflow, reinventing the flywheel over and over again. 

Initially, digital publishers had 2 sets of solutions to choose from -

1. the open-source model - consisted of platforms like WordPress, Jumla, with customized plug-ins that publishers managed on their own and if they wanted to scale, they'd hire a team of developers that would help them build WordPress for scale. 
2. large media houses- they wanted to go down the path of building their own CMSs because there are a lot of things that are custom to their own workflows.

The problem that the people at Quintype realized was that in the former - a lot of plug-ins were not tested with each other and wouldn't really work together and most of the time would end up crashing the system; whereas in the latter - keeping up with your codebase and catching up with what Google and Facebook are releasing on the publisher landscape is a tough task for most publishers.

During the conversation the question of build v/s buy came up, since the publishing industry is a legacy business and huge media houses prefer to build their own CMSs, and why according to Chirdeep that mentality needs to phase out? His answer was very on the point, that a lot of media houses wanted those readily available plug-ins to be customized with their workflows - which is why they prefer building. And if you look at them now, most of them have landed on creating the same piece of software. A work engine, a rule engine, creating content, distributing content to various channels. 

Quintype was quick to realize the pattern of 90% of these software being very similar to each other. And that is what they created, a platform generic enough to go into the industry and specific enough that publishers can build and custom according to their workflows. 

It's fun to realize that the requirements that were customized a decade ago have now become standardized, and this is exactly why buying software makes much more sense. 

The company describes itself as a digital publisher platform and not as a content management platform. How would Chirdeep differentiate between the two? Is this just industry jargon or there's more to it. 

Here's what he had to say - 

CMS is what everybody is used to. A content management system can be as simple as an individual blogger creating and publishing content. 

Whereas, larger publisher houses have departments and teams, and they have roles and authorization. Someone who is responsible for publishing content for the sports section, should not have authority over the entertainment section. The need to have that separation of concern was present, as well as having an asset management tool too. 

Also, a CMS usually powers just one system whereas here a digital publisher platform can be powering a lot more, the website, the mobile apps, screen less interface, sending information to Alexa, Google News, etc. All these syndications of information are automated. It is one way of powering people to do way more things in a better fashion. 

When asked how have newsrooms evolved with time, since Chirdeep has a ringside view, he said, back in 2015, everything was print first and then editors would choose what would go on the digital front. Now there's a paradigm shift - things are more digital-first, where the focus is on the quality of the content, finding the right SEO keywords, Meta data, and then sending the relevant content out of it to print. A lot of new-age publishers are digital-only. 

There has also been a transition from mobile-first to mobile heavy to mobile-only, and now we are exploring all sorts of content on mobile devices. What then should be the right time for publishers to start thinking about a mobile app? Chirdeep answers, tech has evolved so much that there is hardly any difference between PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) and mobile apps. PWAs are available offline, just like mobile apps, they can have features like push notifications, home screen icons, all of which were earlier just exclusive to mobile apps. Chirdeep recommends having a mobile app when you have a niche audience that is continuously coming back to your site, for example, The Ken, which strongly focuses on startups. Or you have a lot of direct traffic, which happens when you are one of the leading brands in a particular section.

Although engagement on mobile apps is always higher than on PWAs. A user on the web would read 1 or 2 pieces, whereas would end up reading 4 to 5 on an app. And to ease this process, Quintype provides templates that publishers can choose from and develop an app for iOs and Android, within a matter of days and in return have to pay a small licensing fee for it. 

The next segment in the conversation was the big question of publishers moving beyond advertising as the only business model for them.  They are now looking at models of paywall, membership, community, eCommerce. And as a publishing platform what role did Qunitype see itself playing here? Chirdeep predicts trends moving more towards a reader-centric business model but only for content pieces that are more niche or have in-depth research behind them. 

For this, Quintype has a product Accesstype, which lets publishers set up the entire site for monetization through reader revenue. He also mentioned the different levels of plans that can be used in this model, providing different levels of access to information. 

As an organization that is centric to India and South East Asia, what trends were seen in terms of adoption, both by publishers and also by end-users. Is the end-user now willing to pay for content? While almost 30% of the total audience pays for content in the Scandinavian nations, and around 10-15% of the audience in the US, the percentage is fairly low in India and SEA, almost around 1%. Mainly because these countries are habitual to accessing free journalism, but the trends are changing gradually because a large chunk base is willing to pay for news that is well researched or niche. 

To conclude, it continues to be a significant piece of the monetization pie but a lot of publishers are now looking at alternatives in terms of eCommerce widgets, affiliates, a lot of publishers also use social media branding. It does not seem like publishers will stick to just one business model. 

The last question of this extremely insightful conversation was how did Chirdeep see the pandemic change the way publishers are operating on day to day basis? 

To which he answered, things are turning more digital, India and SEA still rely a lot on print, with 70-80% of the revenue coming from print for them. The pandemic although made them accelerate more towards digital, where in the first two months of the pandemic, traffic went off the roof. They thought that with time it would go down but turns out the publishers are doing really well. They have accelerated their digital-first strategy, trying to figure out what does the post-print world look like, and what can they do to populate their funnel more and more.

Someone who transitioned from print media to digital media knows audience behavior is different in both. As an analyst, Karla's first principle for analyzing data is looking past those vanity metrics, somewhere publishers often get lost. And one such vanity metric for her is pageviews. According to Karla, the focus should be on the engagement meter of the user and not the page views. A strong believer in quality over quantity.

In this episode of Own Thy Audience, she was strongly led by her principle of being "Data driven, not data led". Especially with 2020 being such an eventful year, publishers need to focus wisely. She also openly accepts her obsession with mailing lists and advocates their massive importance.

When asked about working with renowned editors, and finding the right way to coax them to give in to numbers, she adopts a methodological approach, and always believes in providing a lot of context to her research. 

Tune in to this wholesome conversation over audience, data, metrics, tools, and some controversial choices made between Microsoft Excel and Google Data Studio.

It is no secret that monetizing traffic for publishers is still a challenge. How do a carrier billing and telco partnership company find a place here?

What does an ideal checkout flow for subscribers look like? With disposable incomes varying across the globe, how important are pricing experiments? And what kind of pricing experiments should publishers try?

These were some of the many questions that we had for Andrea Boetti, the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Fortumo.

With the experience of working with more than 100k, Andrea was just the right person for this. Head over to know more.

Vivek Khandelwal was recently invited over as a guest to the SaaS Growth Show with Raj Swaminathan. He talked about the iZooto journey of 60 Billion Notifications Per Month, 1100 Customers & the $1 Million ARR From India & South East Asia, and our global expansions. 

The conversation covered some important points like:

1. Owned Media Channels - Often Overlooked & Underestimated For Customer Engagement & Retention 

2. News & Media - The Publishers Is An Underserved Vertical Mostly Given Up To The Biggies For Monetisation 

3. Obsessive Focus On Delivering One Promise Removing One Pain Area For The Stakeholder - Speed Of Delivery @ Scale 

4. Using the "Freemium" Model as a "Foot In The Door" Strategy To Induce Trials / POCs Can Convert Latter To Paid Customers

5. Land & Expand - Upsell & Cross-Sell Growth Strategy To Increase Value Of Business From Existing Customers

6. In High Language Barrier SEA Markets - Going After & Acquiring Top Customers Creates FOMO & Cascades Into Automatic Interest & Pull From Other Prospects In the Niche.

7. Innovative Co-Marketing & Strategic Alliance With AdPushUp To Fuel Growth In New Markets

While giants like the Washington Post were busy focusing on the international market, InsideNova stuck to the local communities. They knew there’s more to news than just politics, but also roads, schools, employment, etc.

And today in these tough times, it is paying them off just right.

Situated around Northern Virginia, this media house has a huge presence with around 100k followers, an email list of 80k+ subscribers and 0.5 to 1 million unique visitors on the website every month.

Their CEO Bruce Potter joined us for a conversation and answered tons of our questions around how have they transitioned from being a conventional newspaper to going absolutely digital, their advertising revenue getting affected this pandemic, the various silver linings that they have found for themselves, and what are some trends that he thinks are never going to come back once this pandemic gets over.

Imagine wanting to write a book that helps people grow professionally, starting a blog for it, and then slowly realizing you can make a whole business out of it. Oh now that I come to think of it, isn’t this what Ben Aston at Black + White Zebra did beautifully?

What started in 2011 as The Digital Project Manager, is today a fully bootstrapped company providing communities thought leadership in emerging digital disciplines. They turn typically boring and uninteresting things into fun activities to learn and grow. Ben believes that today people do not just want to save time but also focus on personal development and professional growth. 

A man who loves being his own boss, and believes in compact teams, tells his side of the story in a very candid conversation with Vivek Khandelwal. Tune in.