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- Wednesday 10th May: The Platform Era is Dead. Long Live The Homepage!
Wednesday 10th May: The Platform Era is Dead. Long Live The Homepage!
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Jacob Donnelly is offering his take on the platform implosion in his newsletter, A Media Operator. He says anyone that has worked in audience development over the past 10 or 15 years would have pointed at Facebook, Twitter and Google in response to questions about audience growth. Now? No so much - the era of getting free traffic from major platforms is at an end.
Jacob says, like it or not, the platform era is dead. We've been sharing stories about Facebook de-prioritising publisher content for what feels like forever, but he highlights recent data reported by Press Gazette that shows the reality of the collapse of Facebook referral traffic. He goes on to list other examples of how platforms, from Twitter to LinkedIn have throttled referral traffic to the detriment of publishers.
Jacob also slams The Messenger's 'preposterous' launch numbers as being impossible in the post-platform era. But his big takeaway is that brand matters again: "Long live the homepage is another way to say that brand matters... If we have successfully built a strong brand with great content—the kind people would miss if it disappeared—people will visit our homepages."
Adam Tinworth says hundreds of thousands of words have been written to describe a new era of search that nobody understands yet. He's added to the wordcount with a welcome explanation of why you don't need to worry just yet, pointing out that that we’re barely 18 months beyond the Metaverse hype. "Hyped things don't always happen," he writes reassuringly. "And they usually take longer than we expect." Keep calm and read Adam.
Publishers should not be launching podcasts “for the sake of it” and need to be putting more effort behind their ideas, according to Immediate Media’s head of podcast Ben Youatt. “If you're not going to do something that is best in class, then you're not going to be able to cut through the noise,” he told Podpod. And that's not a one and done thing - he says it's a publisher’s responsibility to continue trying different things to see what engages the audience.
I wrote a wee thing for the International Magazine Centre in response to a patron's question about what data to collect. For me, especially when it comes to small and medium sized publishers, zero-party data - the stuff given through direct interactions - is most important. That’s the data that lets you build relationships, that lets you know who your readers are, what they’re into, and how you can serve them better. You're trying to grow a relationship, not your database.
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