Thursday 1st October: The gold rush to find new publishing verticals

October 01, 2020

Happy Thursday! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Chris.

As the great Covid shake-up rumbles on, it's opening a ton of new niches that publishers are eager to exploit. Yesterday alone saw a number of new brands announced, each of which tells us a little about its parent publisher's priorities.

Future Plc launched My Imperfect Life, a "global digital lifestyle brand" that aims to capitalise upon the growing demand for lifestyle content among "millennial" women. Given Future's expertise in reaching younger audiences and it's strengthened Women's Lifestyle portfolio following the acquisition of TI Media, this seems a smart bet for us.

If you want to know how thoroughly Covid has impacted how we all work, look no further: Reuters has launched an entirely new vertical about the workplace of the future. We know that entire editions national newspapers have been sent to press without having a single person in the physical newsroom, and we have to imagine more journalists will be allowed to work remotely once we're out the other side of this. Regardless, Reuters will be there to cover it.

And finally, Bloomberg has launched a new personal finance vertical, Bloomberg Wealth. It"will include 6 pillars: Investing, Savings & Retirement, Taxes, Living (where to live, renting vs. buying, divorce, etc.), Reinvention (education, careers, networking, starting a business), Opinion and Advice", and marks another step towards lifestyle content for the Bloomberg brand. If we were being cynical, we might think it's just Bloomberg trying to game SEO to prevent people Googling 'Michael Bloomberg wealth', but who are we to speculate...

In an episode a few weeks ago, we asked if TV, streaming, VOD and social video were still distinguishable from one another, or if we need to start using the blanket term 'video' to talk about it all together. This report, covered in The Drum, suggests that consumers got there ahead of us.

News publishers need younger audiences - and as this report demonstrates a significant number of them spend a large portion of their day on TikTok. That means that it's a huge opportunity to brand build on the site - but the continuing confusion around the legality of Trump's TikTok "deal" mean that publishers might be way of getting their feet wet until it's all sorted.

You'll be absolutely shocked to learn that, while an increasing number of Americans look to YouTube as one of their primary sources of news, the ad-based moderation-free platform has led to independent publishers making money from sharing conspiracy theories. This detailed dive into the data breaks down how both established news outlets and those smaller, weaselly channels are succeeding.

This week's podcast:

Director at Cognitive Publishing Roy Rowlands on working in a family publishing business with a trillion-pound audience, going all-digital with their B2B titles, and the benefits of being in Manchester. He also outlines how they've adapted in lockdown, including the reasons behind their decision not to go virtual with events.

The latest in our mini-series is live, featuring Janine Ratcliffe. She says your podcast doesn’t need to be super slick, but it does need to be a pleasant listening experience, care about commercial content every bit as much as you care about your regular episodes and the best publisher podcasts develop a life of their own.