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Friday 14th April: Bloomberg trims ad tech in audience-first move
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Ever since Bloomberg announced its pivot towards an "audience-first mentality" late last year, I've been watching with interest to see what they would cut and how they would replace that revenue.
In an ideal world, we would all have clean, light websites without trashy chumboxes, autoplay video ads and many of the other adtech inventions which blight the user experience and play fast and loose with audience's data. But the reality of turning those revenue taps off when you have bills and wages to pay is much trickier.
But so far, Bloomberg are staying true to their word and genuinely looking to put the audience experience first. They stopped open-market programmatic advertising on January 1, and have now axed Taboola from their site. “It’s okay to sacrifice some of that guaranteed revenue if we believe we’re building something bigger and better for our consumers in the long term,” Julia Beizer said.
This is a much more optimistic perspective than my own on the challenges AI imagery are unleashing on us. “The relationship between image and truth has always been unstable,” says one interviewee. “One could say that what we see with generative AI is just a continuation of that. Many people will get used to it. They will develop defence mechanisms both on a personal level but also on institutional level.”
How do you get large, well-established teams to reinvent themselves? Michael Brunt says that it all boils down to planning and communication, and gives some tips from his time working with The Economist where a restructure turned circulation into the biggest contributor of revenue and profits at the group.
Media companies who only stick to one channel end up hitting a limit to their growth at some point. Here, four executives from newsletter-first publishers spoke to Digiday about expanding into events, video and podcasts to diversify their businesses and grow revenue this year. This can really help with agencies, who rarely buy ads just one channel at a time.
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Our special Practical AI podcast documentary explores how local media organisations have got started with AI projects, the benefits they’re seeing, the challenges they’ve faced and what advice they would give to other publishers looking to get into AI. This episode and our corresponding report have been made possible with the support of have been made possible with the support of United Robots.
