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- Tuesday 5th March: By pretending to be Big Tech underdogs, national news orgs do smaller publishers dirty
Tuesday 5th March: By pretending to be Big Tech underdogs, national news orgs do smaller publishers dirty
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Last week, the UK House of Lords held a meeting into ‘the future of news: impartiality, trust and technology’. During the session, representatives from News UK, DMG Media, Reach plc and others gave oral evidence into the impact of technology on media business models. Chris Sutcliffe listened in, and wasn’t impressed.
There were plenty of contradictions, not least that ‘the platforms’ are both so reliant on news content that they should pay compensation for its use, and simultaneously have such a lack of need for news content that they can simply stop including it at no cost to themselves.
As we’ve argued before on Media Voices, media businesses asking the government to legislate for direct payments from Google and Meta is nothing but a naked cash-grab from opportunistic news organisations. But that’s exactly what the idea that huge news organisations are the underdog empowers them to do.
If an ad pays a certain CPM, then displaying more ads on any given page will generate even more cash for the publisher, right? “The way we as publishers think we earn money from programmatic is wrong,” Mark Alker explains in this superb piece for InPublishing. He ran some tests in Q3 last year auditing every ad placement on Singletrackworld, and found that despite significantly decreasing ad positions, revenue actually stayed the same and CTRs increased.
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Apparently it’s ‘increased advertiser demand’ driving most of the growth in podcast revenue. Spotify and Acast are hoping the sunnier market outlook for 2024 will help both podcast businesses to reach profitability this year for the first time.
An interesting read given this week’s podcast interview (below). The willingness of readers to pay for quality content is partly determined by brand perception, which is influenced by marketing. Not to forget, though, that quality journalism has to be the cornerstone.
