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Product strategies: what publishers should be prioritising in 2025

Wessenden Marketing's Jim Bilton outlines the key publisher product trends he tracked last year, and where he thinks publishers should be looking for investment and prioritisation in 2025.

There has never been a more fragmented or complex landscape for publishers to navigate when it comes to prioritising and investing in product strategies. Methods of consumption, audience behaviour and expectations are changing faster than ever. Yet ironically, legacy outputs like newsletters, apps and print magazines are now high priorities for revenue and audience growth and engagement.

Wessenden Marketing’s Managing Director Jim Bilton has spent decades regularly surveying publishers and media owners, monitoring trends and advising businesses of all shapes and sizes, from digital start-ups to legacy publishers. He produces a bi-monthly report on the business of content distribution alongside the annual Media Futures benchmarking survey and a Media Shapers report on the key movers and shakers in the business.

Bilton joined The Publisher Podcast this week for a ‘scamper’ through some of the key publisher product trends he tracked last year, and where he thinks publishers should be looking for investment and prioritisation in 2025.

Re-prioritising revenue streams

One of Peter’s predictions in our live Pod in a Pub episode was that publishers would be more cautious about diversification in 2025. Bilton pointed to research from FT Strategies, which defined a revenue stream as accounting for at least 15% of total turnover, as recommending three revenue streams as the optimum number for newspaper publishers. Similarly the PPA have recommended five streams for their mainly magazine and lifestyle publisher membership.

“Revenue diversification is a given. We all have to do it. But it isn’t an end in itself,” Bilton said. “It’s what the end users actually want, which I know we as an industry pay a lot of lip service to.”

“We need to go through the business case about why we are actually doing [something] and prioritising it. Most people’s list of things they would like to do is far too long to maintain quality all the way though.”

Bilton has worked on a one-in-one-out system with some of his publisher clients, where if they’re planning to introduce a new revenue stream something else has to stop. “There’s also the reality that what you’re doing at the moment, [for example] where something is in print, is actually paying for these new revenue streams,” he added. “So understanding what works now and why it might not work in one year, two years’ time… is a recurring conversation.”

His advice is to not over-engineer new revenue streams, but to start quickly and small with an idea of what ‘good’ looks like. It’s also vital to record and learn from experiments so that when similar conversations come up in the future, lessons from the past aren’t lost.

Renewed demand for print

Regular readers and listeners will know that we at Media Voices have charted the ‘print revival’ with glee. From Kat Craddock’s sold-out Saveur relaunch to Bloomberg reinventing Businessweek as a 120-page monthly, and even Playboy making a return, print has been one of the hottest publisher products of the last 18 months.

This isn’t a revival of cheap, high-frequency titles. Bilton pointed out that publishers are tending towards longer sale periods, higher pricing and thicker products in terms of pagination and paper quality. “Everybody is flexing with pricing and quality and paginations to see what it is people actually want,” he said. “But there is still this desire for print consumption.”

The lines between magazines and books for B2C publishers continue to blur, with ‘bookazines’ a product that even big tech companies like TikTok and Microsoft are showing interest in. December’s Wessenden Briefing cited that 2024 saw the fourth consecutive year of bookazine growth, with Taylor Swift and Royal-themed titles examples of strong performers.

There’s even hope for newspapers. Bilton noted that they have a very different future to magazines, with daily newspapers and news websites up against so much free content, as well as the threat of conversational search. “But what seems to be coming out of it is that weekly is a good analysis frequency, looking at things like The Economist, The Spectator, The Week,” he explained, echoing predictions we’ve made. “I think there is still a need for - or a demand for - weekly analysis, and standing back, and having some curated, independent [journalism].”

For publishers looking at investing in print as a new product or increasing existing issues, is it still something that can be part of a sustainable strategy? Bilton sees it as a medium-term strategy. “Print has flicked over to be a premium add-on,” he observed. 

“It’s very interesting to see brands which have gone digital-only coming back into print; People, NME, Jackie being revived. Very often it has this premium, added-value, experiential element to it. I think that will continue in the medium-term.”

As noted in the introduction, none of this is new. Bookazines were touted as a big opportunity decades ago as regular magazines began declining. Weekly news products have been around for as long as newspapers themselves. But with an overwhelming amount of information bombarding people every day online, the appeal of finishable, curated collections of content is stronger than ever.

Newsletters are still hot, but cyclical

Bilton’s most recent briefings have identified newsletters as a bright spot for publishers, whether that be start-ups like Mill Media gaining traction or legacy publishers investing in paid newsletters and dedicated teams. There has been so much newsletter hype that some have questioned if we’re seeing another bubble at risk of popping.

“Everybody thinks that newsletters are the answer to everything,” Bilton said wryly, pointing to some publishers who have already gone through streamlining of their newsletter portfolios. “I think we’ll go through that cyclical process of building up newsletter activity, newsletter content, until you get to a point where there’s too much. Then the streamlining, repackaging, rebundling begins.”

He believes newsletters aren’t a bubble, but that the smarter operators will be constantly flexing and adapting their newsletter portfolio to adapt to market needs. 

Finding the optimal glass

These are just a few of many complex product trends that publishers are having to grapple with today. Bilton noted that fragmentation was proving a big ongoing challenge for product strategies. Few outputs have the scale publishers have seen in the past, with everyone seeking to read, listen or watch in their own way.

“We have a number of different entry points into our content,” he explained. “It’s this cyclical [process] of trying to identify ‘what do the readers actually want?’”

“Defining your cohorts [is important]; so we’ve got a range of newsletters that fit particular cohorts, and some of those cohorts may still like print, but want [regular] information coming through, but perhaps also the flexibility to turn it up and turn it down.”

When it comes to optimism about the year, Bilton shared an idiom that it’s not whether the glass is half full or half empty. The core issue is that the glass is clearly the wrong size for the liquid that’s in it, which is a structural issue. 

“Finding the optimal glass is the real task for every business,” he said, explaining that publishers need to look at areas in which they could do better with less. “2025 is a year where…we need to apply our thinking and passion and skills and energy, but think a lot more laterally and strategically than we have done.”

This season of The Publisher Podcast & Newsletter is sponsored by Memberful, a best-in-class membership solution for independent publishers and journalists who want to diversify their revenue streams and connect with their audience.

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