Thursday 29th October: Bloomberg Media hoping ABBA means Money, Money, Money

October 29, 2020

Good morning! Our 150th Media Roundup is brought to you by Peter.

Yeah, sorry about that, but how often do you get the chance to riff on an ABBA lyric in a headline? Anyways...

Bloomberg Media has been trying to work out how it can make use of the infrastructure it built for its subscription business to support its advertising business. The answer was for the ad ops team to use ABBA - the A/B testing tool built to support its subscription business - to optimise ad products and campaigns.

A focus on optimisation is said to have played a significant part in the expansion of Bloomberg’s subscription business. The business publisher now has has over 100,000 subscribers paying at least $40 per month.

Bringing subs and ad teams closer together is likely to become more common as publishers work to diversify their revenue mix. Digiday reports Doug Wintz, founder of DMW Media Works, as saying, “In a perfect world, you’d have one group working together". A single data infrastructure that supports both advertising and subscription teams is a step in the right direction.

A US Senate report raises the prospect that local newspaper jobs could “all but vanish in the next few years” if the rate of lay-offs forced by the Covid-19 crisis continues. The report projects the US newspaper industry will face an unrecovered ad revenue loss between 17-28% through 2021.

In an interesting magazine partnership, Guardian Weekend and gal-dem are launching a memoir writing competition for young black women and black non-binary people living in the UK. Winners will be paid, and have a video call with Guardian and gal-dem editors ahead of publication in Guardian Weekend.

Playgirl Magazine is relaunching in print next week, but if you're looking for the “Campus hunks of Fort Lauderdale” featured in its last issue in 2015, you're going to be disappointed. The relaunch sits closer to the title's feminist roots; the cover star is pregnant actress Chloë Sevigny under the headline 'We'll take it from here'.

Throwback Thursday:

Almost exactly a year ago we had Glamour UK’s Editor in Chief Deborah Joseph on the podcast talking to us about the brand's digital-first transformation and about launching a new event in Manchester. Remember when we could launch events?

I've been interviewing the winners of our 2020 Publisher Podcast Awards to learn how they do their stuff. In the eighth episode in the series, Bestseller host Casimir Stone says editing takes time, but crafting a podcast episode around a narrative allows you to deliver a different kind of value than a straight interview.