The fediverse buzz continues to grow, with articles highlighting the potential to revolutionize the digital landscape. Proponents say it’s similar to the Internet’s early days, before Big Tech platforms built their algorithmic fiefdoms. Instead, the fediverse is about interoperability and flexibility.
Media companies are always on the lookout for ways to attract new audiences and engage more meaningfully with their readers. And – given Google’s experimentation with AI answers and social sites “distancing themselves from news” – finding new routes to audience development has become an increasing imperative.
The decentralized nature of the fediverse offers a compelling alternative to traditional search and social. Importantly, this approach allows media companies to retain their direct relationship with audiences, which removes the dependency on social and big-tech platforms for reaching new people.
Unlike traditional social media platforms that operate within closed ecosystems, fediverse represents a decentralized network of interconnected servers and platforms. It comprises a federation of independent servers, each hosting its social media platform.
These platforms, which range from microblogging to image sharing to video hosting, communicate using standard protocols. Their interoperability allows people on different servers to interact seamlessly. The fediverse decentralizes media companies by enabling them to distribute their content across interconnected servers and platforms rather than relying on a single, centralized platform.
Emphasis on choice and control
Unlike centralized platforms, where a single server owned by the platform provider stores user data and content, fediverse lets people choose their server. This server is selected based on individual preferences regarding privacy, content moderation, and community guidelines. This decentralized approach empowers audiences by putting them in charge of their online experience. It also mitigates concerns about data ownership and platform censorship. For media companies, this translates into an environment where people are more likely to engage with content they trust and have control over.
Encouraging diversity and inclusivity
The fediverse enables people to connect across different platforms and communities within the federation. For example, a user on a microblogging platform can follow and interact with users on a video hosting platform. This functionality breaks down the barriers that typically separate content and conversations on traditional social media platforms. This cross-platform interaction fosters a rich tapestry of ideas, perspectives, and content, creating a more vibrant and dynamic online ecosystem. Media companies can leverage this aspect of fediverse to reach diverse audiences actively seeking varied content.
Organic and community-driven engagement
In contrast to the centralized model, where platform algorithms often dictate content visibility and user interactions, fediverse promotes a more organic and community-driven approach. Users have greater control over their timelines and content visibility, allowing for a more personalized and authentic online experience.
This user-centric design aligns with evolving expectations of digital privacy and autonomy, resonating with individuals seeking alternatives to mainstream social media platforms. Media companies can benefit from this by creating content that naturally finds its way to interested audiences without algorithmic interference.
Media companies test the fediverse
At least two digital media companies are exploring the fediverse to gain more control over their referral traffic and onsite audience engagement. The Verge and 404 Media are building new functions that allow them to simultaneously distribute posts on their sites and federated platforms like Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Replies to those posts on those platforms become comments on their sites.
This functionality means people from different platforms can interact with the content without creating individual accounts for each platform. For media companies, this interoperability can significantly enhance audience reach and engagement.
Advantages for media companies using the fediverse
Usability and interoperability are ideal for enhancing user experience. This approach enables seamless communication between platforms, ensuring autonomy, and providing robust content control.
Interoperability ensures that different platforms can communicate using common protocols like ActivityPub. This allows people to interact with content across various platforms seamlessly, thus creating a unified and interconnected ecosystem.
User autonomy empowers people to select their servers (instances) based on their preferences for privacy, moderation, and community guidelines, offering greater freedom and reducing the dominance of any single platform.
Content control enables media companies to host their servers or collaborate with trusted ones, giving them direct control over content distribution and audience engagement. Therefore, it mitigates risks associated with algorithm changes or policy shifts on major social media platforms.
Cross-platform interaction allows content like a media company’s article shared on one platform to receive comments, likes, and shares from users on other platforms, broadening reach and engagement without being confined to a single platform.
Community-driven moderation decentralizes content moderation, allowing it to occur at the community or server level. Media companies can set moderation policies to ensure their content meets their standards and audience expectations.
Enhanced privacy through decentralization gives media companies more control over their data and privacy settings, protecting user data from being exploited by large platforms.
Although federated platforms have smaller user bases than the larger walled gardens like Facebook and X, they offer significant audiences for media companies. Federating sites allow media companies to tap into the growing demand for decentralized, user-centric platforms, attracting new audiences and fostering a more loyal and engaged user base.
Federated platforms offers the potential for a fundamental shift in how media companies interact with their audiences. Media companies that experiment with the fediverse can initiate engagement and have an opportunity to build stronger, more direct connections with their audiences.
Digital media has always been marked by the intersection of creativity and technology. Unfortunately, in many cases that intersection has been a bumpy one. Today, however, there are automation solutions that can allow these two sides of the media business to work together and do better work as a result.
The digital publishing business is at a pivotal crossroads. On one hand, an explosion of creative possibilities facilitated by technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling personalized, dynamic content at scale. On the other hand, lies the intricate realm of ad operations, where complexity remains consistent, and efficiency and precision are paramount. The gap between creative potential and operational capability must be closed if digital media firms are to compete and scale effectively in today’s market.
The path to a solution starts with an exploration of the relationship between tech-enabled creatives and ad ops and ends with a question: How can organizations strategically synchronize right-brain creativity with left-brain operational efficiency in publishing? The answer is to level the playing field with the power of automation. Bringing both sides of publishing into perfect, tech-powered harmony does more than just streamline workflows. It empowers media firms to navigate the rapid pace of market changes, paving the way for maximum efficiency and operational excellence.
AI’s impact on the publishing business
Reaching the right customer at the right time with the right message is becoming a critical component of advertising success. So critical, it’s driving publishing companies to embrace advanced technologies, particularly AI technologies, to create content at scale like never before. The surge in tech-enabled content combined with the end of third-party cookies is forcing ad ops teams to re-evaluate their operations to keep up. Here’s a closer look at the impact of AI on content creation.
AI enhanced content production and customization at scale
By harnessing AI’s power to analyze data and recognize patterns, publishers can turbocharge content creation, crafting high-quality texts and visuals that are deeply engaging. This tech-enabled approach enhances content production and enables precise audience segmentation. It delivers hyper-personalized content at an unparalleled scale across various formats. All of which substantially boosts efficiency and the impact of content strategies.
How AI affects brand engagement
The creative advancements powered by AI are also profoundly influencing consumer interactions with brands. Relevant, engaging content that aligns with audience preferences and values can substantially boost brand engagement. Engagement which can potentially turn into revenue for brands. The downside is, it creates even more operational challenges for ad ops teams trying to keep up.
Operational challenges with tech-enabled creatives
To reap the benefits of tech-enabled creatives, publishers must fully grasp the challenges they pose to ad ops teams. This understanding is crucial for implementing effective solutions and maximizing the value of creative content in digital media.
Pressure to scale
Traditional manual processes in ad ops (campaign setup, trafficking, performance tracking), become bottlenecks when faced with the scale and speed of AI-driven content production. The pressure to scale operations to match the pace of content generation increases, requiring an equally robust systems in ad ops.
Complexity management
The complexity of content tailored for different audience segments requires meticulous management throughout its lifecycle. Automated systems capable of managing the detailed workflows and large datasets of ad ops are essential for keeping pace with production, and achieving maximum ROI.
Risk of siloed functions
Another significant challenge is the risk of siloed functions within organizations. When advanced creative tools operate independently from operational capabilities, it can create gaps that lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
Creative outputs must seamlessly integrate with ad ops systems to prevent campaign delays, performance tracking issues, and scaling challenges. Such disconnects hinder adaptability, affecting competitiveness and growth. Robust automation reduces friction between sales and ops teams translating to improved morale, higher productivity, fewer fire drills, and ultimately – happier clients.
Clearly, there is a critical need for automation. Without integrating automated systems, ad ops teams face delays, increased make-goods, and ultimately a failure to capitalize on the content’s potential.
An Integrated approach nets tangible benefits
As the digital media landscape evolves, integrating advanced automation tools with creative production capabilities becomes increasingly critical. It not only enhances operational efficiencies but also serves as a key driver of revenue growth and scalability. Let’s take a look at the tangible benefits automation can deliver.
Quickly adapting to market changes
With AI’s rise, and content production dramatically increasing, ad ops teams struggle to quickly adapt to market changes. However, according to Theorem’s research, 79% of ad ops professionals think their tools need improvement, and 69% feel digital advertising processes need enhancement. Implementing advanced, automated systems can empower ad ops teams to meet the needs of a constantly evolving market more effectively.
Enhancing data flow
Automation also significantly improves the flow of information between creative teams and ad ops. Centralizing information, as noted by 59% of ad professionals, ensures that data from campaign performances is quickly available to refine ongoing and future campaigns.
Automation drives revenue through operational excellence
Automation not only streamlines operations in ad ops, it significantly enhances ROI. 55% of ad pros in our research noted time-consuming processes as a major pain point. Another 36% reported complex processes slowed their pace of work. By automating tasks such as campaign setup, monitoring, and optimization, businesses can minimize costly mistakes and make-goods that are directly impacting bottom line revenue.
There is also the tangible reward of time saved as a direct result of automation. 56% of ad pros believe implementing automation saves valuable time. Time that can be redirected towards creative and strategic initiatives.
Navigating innovation with automation: the strategic advantage
Media organizations need to remain competitive and responsive in an industry driven by rapid technological advancements. Embracing the symbiotic integration of tech-enabled creatives with automated ad ops can lead to marked improvements in campaign outcomes and overall business performance. Implementing automation isn’t merely about keeping pace. It’s about setting the pace in the journey towards more synchronized, efficient, and responsive operations in publishing. Now is the time to act, to innovate. This will empower your team and your organization to lead now – and well into the future.
These days, digital media companies are all trying to figure out how to best incorporate AI into their products, services and capabilities, via partnerships or by building their own. The goal is to gain a competitive edge as they tailor AI capabilities to their audiences, subscribers and clients’ specific needs.
By leveraging proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) digital media companies have a new tool in their toolboxes. These offerings offer differentiation and added value, enhanced audience engagement and user experience. These proprietary LLMs also set them apart from companies that are opting for licensing partnerships with other LLMs, which offer more generalized knowledge bases and draw from a wide range of sources in terms of subject matter and quality.
A growing number of digital media companies are rolling out their own LLM-based generative AI features for search and data-based purposes to enhance user experience and create fine-tuned solutions. In addition to looking at several of the offerings media companies are bringing to market, we spoke to Dow Jones, Financial Times and Outside Inc. about the generative AI tools they’ve built and explore the strategies behind them.
Media companies fuel generative AI for better solutions
Digital media companies are harnessing the power of generative AI to unlock the full potential of their own – sometimes vast amounts – of proprietary information. These new products allow them to offer valuable, personalized, and accessible content to their audiences, subscribers, customers and clients.
Take for example, Bloomberg, which released a research paper in March detailing the development of its new large-scale generative AI model called BloombergGPT. The LLM was trained on a wide range of financial data to assist Bloomberg in improving existing financial natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, news classification, and question answering, among others. In addition, the tool will help Bloomberg customers organize the vast quantities of data available on the Bloomberg Terminal in ways that suit their specific needs.
Launched in beta June 4, Fortune partnered with Accenture to create a generative AI product called Fortune Analytics. The tool delivers ChatGPT-style responses based on 20 years of financial data from the Fortune 500 and Global 500 lists, as well as related articles, and helps customers build graphic visualizations.
Generative AI helps customers speed up processes
A deeper discussion of how digital media companies are using AI provides insights to help others understand the potential to leverage the technology for their own needs. Dow Jones, for example uses Generative AI for a platform that helps customers meet compliance requirements.
Dow Jones Risk Compliance is a global provider of risk and compliance solutions across banks and corporations which helps organizations perform checks on their counterparties. They do that from the perspective of complying with anti-money laundering regulation, anti-corruption regulation, looking to also mitigate supply chain risk and reputational issues. Dow Jones Risk Compliance provides tools that allow customers to search data sets and help manage regulatory and reputational risk.
In April, Dow Jones Risk & Compliance launched an AI-powered research platform for clients that enables organizations to build an investigative due diligence report covering multiple sources in as little as five minutes. Called Dow Jones Integrity Check, the research platform is a fully automated solution that goes beyond screening to identify risks and red flags from thousands of data sources.
The planning for Dow Jones Integrity Check goes back a few years, as the company sought to provide its customers with a quicker way to do due diligence on their counterparties, Joel Lange, executive Vice President and General Manager, Risk and Research at Dow Jones explained.
Lange said that Dow Jones effectively built a platform which automatically creates a report for customers on a person or company, using technology from AI firm Xapien. It brings together Dow Jones’ data that is plugged into other data sets, corporate registrar information, and wider web content. It then leverages the platform’s Generative AI capability to produce a piece of analysis or a report.
Dow Jones Risk & Compliance customers use their technology to make critical, often complex, business decisions. Often the data collection process can be incredibly time consuming, taking days if not weeks.
The new tool “provides investigations, teams, banks and corporations with initial due diligence. Essentially it’s a starting point for them to conduct their due diligence, effectively automating a lot of that data collection process,” according to Lange.
Lange points out that the compliance field is always in need of increased efficiency. However, it carries with it great risk to reputation. Dow Jones Integrity Check was designed to reshape compliance workflows, creating an additional layer of investigation that can be deployed at scale. “What we’re doing here is enabling them to more rapidly and efficiently aggregate, consolidate, and bring information to the fore, which they can then analyze and then take that investigation further to finalize an outcome,” Lange said.
Regardless of the quality of the generated results, most experts believe that it is important to have a human in the loop in order to maintain content accuracy, mitigate bias, and enhance the credibility of the content. Lange also said that it’s critical to have “that human in the loop to evaluate the information and then to make a decision in relation to the action that the customer wants to take.”
In recent months, digital media companies have been launching their own generative AI tools that allow users to ask questions in natural language and receive accurate and relevant results.
The Associated Press created Merlin, an AI-generated search tool that makes searching the AP archive more accurate. “Merlin pinpoints key moments in our videos to exact second and can be used for older archive material that lacks modern keywords or metadata,” explained AP Editor in Chief Julie Pace at The International Journalism Festival in Perugia in April.
Outside’s Scout: AI search with useful results
Chatbots have become a popular form of search. Originally pre-programmed and only able to answer select questions included in their programming, chatbots have evolved and increased engagement by providing a conversational interface. Used for everything from organizing schedules and news updates to customer service inquiries, Generative AI-based chatbots assist users in finding information more efficiently across a wide range of industries.
Much like The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other digital media organizations that blocked OpenAI from using their content to power artificial intelligence, Outside CEO Robin Thurston explained that Outside Inc. wasn’t going to let third parties scrape their platforms to train LLM models.
Instead, they looked at leveraging their own content and data. “We had a lot of proprietary content that we felt was not easily accessible. It’s almost what I’d call the front page problem, which is you put something on the front page and then it kind of disappears into the ether,” Thurston said.
“We asked ourselves: How do we create something leveraging all this proprietary data? How do we leverage that in a way that really brings value to our user?” Thurston said. The answer was Scout, Outside Inc.’s AI search assistant. Scout is a custom-developed chatbot.
The company could see that generative AI offered a way to make that content accessible and even more useful to its readers. Outside had a lot of evergreen content that wasn’t adding value once it left the front page. Their brands inspire and inform audiences about outdoor adventures, new destinations and gear – a lot of which is evergreen and proprietary content that still had value if it could easily be surfaced by its audience. The chat interface allows their content to continue to be accessible to readers after it is no longer front and center on the website.
Scout gives users a summary answer to their question, leveraging Outside Inc’s proprietary data, and surfaces articles that it references. “It’s just a much more advanced search mechanism than our old tool was. Not only does it summarize, but it then returns the things that are most relevant,” he explained.
Additionally, Outside Inc’s old search function worked by each individual brand. Scout searches across the 20+ properties owned by the parent company which include Backpacker, Climbing, SKI Magazine, and Yoga Journal, among others. Scout brings all of the results together, from the 20+ different Outside brands, from the best camping destinations, to the best trails, outdoor activities for the family, gear, equipment and food all in one result.
One aspect that sets Outside Inc.’s model apart is their customer base, which differs from general news media customers. Outside’s customers engage in a different type of interaction, not just a quick transactional skim of a news story. “We have a bit of a different relationship in that they’re not only getting inspiration from us, which trip should I take? What gear should I buy? But then because of our portfolio, they’re kind of looking at what’s next,” Thurston said.
It was important to Thurston to use the LLM in a number of different ways, so Outside Inc launched a local newsletter initiative with the help of AI. “On Monday mornings we do a local running, cycling and outdoor newsletter that goes to people that sign up for it, and it uses that same LLM to pick what types of routes and content for that local newsletter that we’re now delivering in 64,000 ZIP codes in the U.S.”
Thurston said they had a team working on Scout and it took about six months. “Luckily, we had already built a lot of infrastructure in preparation for this in terms of how we were going to leverage our data. Even for something like traditional search, we were building a backend so that we could do that across the board. But this is obviously a much more complicated model that allows us to do it in a completely new way,” he said.
Connecting AI search to a real subscriber need
In late March, The Financial Times released its first generative AI feature for subscribers called Ask FT. Like Scout, the chat-based search tool allows users to ask any question and receive a response using FT content published over the last two decades. The feature is currently available to approximately 500 FT Professional subscribers. It is powered by the FT’s own internal search capabilities, combined with a third-party LLM.
The tool is designed to help users understand complicated issues or topics, like Ireland’s offshore energy policy, rather than just searching for specific information. Ask FT searches through Financial Times (FT) content, generates a summary and cites the sources.
“It works particularly well for people who are trying to understand quite complex issues that might have been going on over time or have lots of different elements,” explained Lindsey Jayne, the chief product officer of the Financial Times.
Jayne explained that they spend a lot of time understanding why people choose the FT and how they use it. People read the FT to understand the world around them, to have a deep background knowledge of emerging events and affairs. “With any kind of technology, it’s always important to look at how technology is evolving to see what it can do. But I think it’s really important to connect that back to a real need that your customers have, something they’re trying to get done. Otherwise it’s just tech for the sake of tech and people might play with it, but not stick with it,” she said.
Trusted sources and GenAI attribution
Solutions like those from Dow Jones, FT and Outside Inc. highlight the power of a brand with a trusted audience relationship to create deep, authentic relationships built on reliability and credibility. Trusted media brands are considered authoritative because their content is based on credible sources and facts, which ensures accuracy.
Currently, generative AI has demonstrated low accuracy and poses challenges to sourcing and attribution. Attribution is a central feature for digital media companies who roll out their own generative AI solutions. For Dow Jones compliance customers, attribution is critical to customers, to know if they’re going to make a decision based on information that is available in the media, according to Lange.
“They need to have that attributed to within the solution so that if it’s flowing into their audit trails or they have to present that in a court of law, or if they would need to present it to our internal audit, the attribution is really key. (Attribution) is going to be critical for a lot of the solutions that will come to market,” he said. “The attribution has to be there in order to rely on it for a compliance use case or really any other use case. You really need to know where that fact or that piece of information or data actually came from and be able to source it back to the underlying article.”
The Financial Times’ generative AI tool also offers attribution to FT articles in all of its answers. Ask FT pulls together lots of different source material, generates an answer, and attributes it to various FT articles. “What we ask the large language model to do is to read those segments of the articles and to turn them into a summary that explains the things you need to know and then to also cite them so that you have the opportunity to check it,” Jayne said.
They also ask the FT model to infer from people’s questions when it should be searching from. “Maybe you’re really interested in what’s happened in the last year or so, and we also get the model to reread the answer, reread all of the segments and check that, as kind of a guard against hallucination. You can never get rid of hallucination totally, but you can do lots to mitigate it.”
The Financial Times is also asking for feedback from the subscribers using the tool. “We’re literally reading all of the feedback to help understand what kinds of questions work, where it falls down, where it doesn’t, and who’s using it, why and when.”
Leaning into media strengths and adding a superpower
Generative AI seems to have created unlimited opportunities and also considerable challenges, questions and concerns. However it is clear that an asset many media companies possess is a deep reservoir of quality content and it is good for business to extract the most value from the investment in its creation. Leveraging their own content to train and program generative AI tools that serve readers seems like a very promising application.
In fact, generative AI can give trustworthy sources a bit of a super power. Jayne from the FT offered the example of scientists using the technology to read through hundreds of thousands of research papers and find patterns in a process that would otherwise take years to read in an effort to make important connections.
While scraped-content LLMs pose risks to authenticity, accuracy and attribution, proprietary learning models offer a promising alternative.
As Jayne put it, “The media has “an opportunity to harness what AI could mean for the user experience, what it could mean for journalism, in a way that’s very thoughtful, very clear and in line with our values and principles.” At the same time, she cautions that we shouldn’t be “getting overly excited because it’s not the answer to everything – even though we can’t escape the buzz at the moment.”
We are seeing many efforts bump up against the limits of what generative AI is able to do right now. However, media companies can avoid some of generative AI’s current pitfalls by employing the technology’s powerful language prediction, data processing and summarization capabilities while leaning into their own strengths of authenticity and accuracy.
Publishers have faced intense headwinds in recent years when it comes to protecting and growing revenue streams. However, there are some equally powerful tailwinds that the industry needs to acknowledge and embrace to put publishers on a viable path forward. Perhaps the most significant one is predictive audiences.
Predictive audiences, supercharged by growing AI capabilities, offer publishers multiple paths to increased revenue. Even more importantly: sustainable revenue. Let’s explore why that is, and the ways in which publishers can incorporate these capabilities into their monetization plans.
A sustainable path within a landscape of crumbling identifiers
When Google announced its latest stay of execution for third-party cookies, some publishers breathed a(nother) sigh of relief. Third-party cookies have long been seen as an understood path to revenue thanks to their role in enabling cross-site ad targeting. However, this capability has been in decline for years. In fact, the reach and accuracy of third-party cookies has become increasingly limited.
Publishers don’t need a replacement for third-party cookies. They need something altogether better. And that’s where predictive audiences come in. By fueling growth based on the strength of a publisher’s first-party data, predictive audiences offer a path to revenue that’s both in a publisher’s control and can be strengthened over time.
The premise behind predictive audiences for publishers is fairly simple: By taking a publisher’s first-party data (i.e., everything the publisher knows about its audience), the publisher can build models capable of predicting likely behavior in current and potential new users. These predictions can be used to create better user experiences while simultaneously opening more and deeper monetization opportunities.
Here are a few areas where predictive audiences’s power to help publishers drive revenue has become most evident.
Growing ad dollars
For many publishers, the fastest path to revenue growth is to look beyond their sites to find additional high-value inventory for their advertisers. By using their audience data as seed data, publishers can leverage predictive audiences to identify users beyond their own walls who are likely to behave like their known audiences. Working with external partners, a publisher can make these models and their resulting segments available for advertisers on demand as an extension of their audience.
Growing Yield
Predictive audiences can also be leveraged to greatly help publishers make more from their inventory within their walls. By combining first-party data with contextual and engagement signals, publishers can fuel robust data models that predict which ads will perform best when served to a given audience. Such an approach tends to deliver far more relevant results than can be achieved with third-party data, enabling publishers to improve the yield on their inventory. Such models can also fuel ad personalization that drives better results for advertisers and higher premiums for publishers.
Growing Audience
Beyond direct revenue, publishers can also tap into predictive audiences to grow their user base. Such growth helps expand their first-party data assets and inventory, driving greater revenue downstream. The mechanisms for fueling audience growth are similar to those for driving more ad dollars: Publishers can model their data to help them predict the behavior of unknown users. By activating that data, they can drive interested audiences in hopes of converting them to loyal visitors.
A bright future paved with predictions
The ability of these predictive audience strategies to drive publisher revenue has a lot to do with the level of first-party data the individual publisher brings. Of course, not all publishers are on equal footing when it comes to first-party data assets. Some have been capturing and building their first-party data practices for years, enabling them to fuel strong predictive models and broader identity graphs that can reach across their properties. Others—publishers that have not invested nearly as heavily in their first-party disciplines—are looking for off-the-shelf solutions that can help them take advantage of predictive audiences’s power all the same.
The AI-driven future will favor publishers that prioritize robust first-party data practices, but the race is far from over. Regardless of where an individual publisher stands with its first-party data assets, there’s still time to build out the needed strategies that can fuel growth through predictive audiences. By doing so to capture the right data and signals to fuel the strongest models, publishers can chart a more sustainable (and monetizable) path forward.
When aspiring journalists ask me whether the media is dead, I always say no.
I remind them that while the menu might change, the hunger for news and information never vanishes. To stick with the food analogy, news these days is like UberEats: far more options are available at your fingertips.
Here’s the thing: evolution in the media is constant and ongoing.
Historically, the delivery method has evolved in this industry, from horseback to telegraph and radio to television. Cable news, the internet and social media caused disruptive waves over time. These days, news is on a 24-hour cycle that is no longer limited to cable news. And, now, Artificial Intelligence has entered the chat. (And they are here whether we like it or not.)
Newsrooms ignore the emergence of AI at their peril, as history shows that transformative technologies don’t disappear simply because they’re ignored. Remember in 1995 when Newsweek predicted the Internet would fail? It was already decades into its inevitable march to dominate media consumption.
Technology usually gets better in time, and it has only improved in my 22 years in this industry. We have a greater reach than we could have imagined. I can instantly read what’s happening in any part of this country—or the world. All from a device that fits in my pocket.
Technology and journalism will always travel hand-in-hand. However right now, a lot about the relationship is toxic. It’s not serving us and we need to do some soul searching to fix what’s not working.
Change can be a painful experience
News and information is everywhere, and everyone can share their perception of news. It’s transforming in real time and the growing pains are unrelenting.
The year started with over 500 journalists losing their jobs, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. About 2,681 journalism jobs were eliminated in 2023 alone. That’s a 48% increase from 2022 and a staggering 77% increase from 2021.
Circulation, viewership and listeners have steadily declined for newspapers, broadcast TV news, and public radio. Major online news outlets are trying to stave off website traffic and engagement decreases. The shift to social media platforms for news consumption is particularly noticeable among younger generations. All this before we get to the fallout from tarnished community trust and news avoidance.
Everyone is looking for sustainability.
Same old traffic metrics
Meanwhile, social media referral traffic has plummeted globally over the past two years.
The big picture: News organizations invested heavily in social media for two decades, relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter/X, but the algorithms were not in our favor. They never loved us half as much as we loved them. We infiltrated these platforms, but social media prioritized advertising over truth and accountability.
Now, logic tells us that AI search could be a death knell for search traffic. Search has served as a major entry point for metrics that have helped newsrooms drive advertising revenue. Audiences have grown accustomed to using Google searches to find links to information. AI, however, can directly answer most questions, and it’s getting smarter by the hour.
The WSJ has reported that publishers might lose 20-40% of their website traffic when Google’s AI products are fully implemented. The loss of traffic from social media and search will likely have devastating effects on this industry.
Some local shops still rely on the same old metrics – the volume of web traffic and the value of a click or pageview – because that’s what we’ve always done. But given how much the landscape has changed, that well is drying up and we need to find a new source.
Rather than wait and see and react to the technological changes coming at us, the industry must redefine its relationship with technology and take some control. Some news organizations have come to terms with this, and others see the value in creating new revenue streams. Diversifying revenue sources is key.
But beyond that, the industry has to be more entrepreneurial and less traditional. Doubling down on the old models is simply not enough.
When we think about rebuilding the infrastructure for news, we should ask ourselves: Could we build our own pipeline to traffic? Is there a way we can empower audiences to share content by building a trusted social media platform for distribution? That’s the thing: We – the news and media industry – have to take responsibility and build the infrastructure we need to create new habits for readers.
Provide audiences with utility
The reality is that news organizations have done a decent job building brand presence across platforms, but there’s no measurement for the value of that. Unfortunately, our success is housed under decaying pillars of success. The entire model must be flipped on its ear. We must reimagine everything. That mindset is why some startups have done more than survive and become a new breed of media success story. There’s a there there.
We spend a lot of time curating audiences we already have and need to spend more of our days figuring out how to capture the ones we don’t. Live events, office hours and panel discussions center the news and make it accessible to more people. It’s a way to expand your brand in a three-dimensional way. Lean into your personalities and their subject matter expertise to establish a more potent value proposition. And recognize that not all change is bad. The trick is harnessing it in ways that attract and satisfy audiences.
We must pay closer attention to evolving media consumption habits. Some people do have shorter attention spans and want brevity. However, that’s not absolute; there’s room for it all.
We use our phones to do everything and email is a new form of currency. Delivering news to a consumer’s inbox via newsletters just makes sense. We have to develop content creation and delivery strategies that fit today’s lifestyles. And then be ready to do it again as things inevitably change.
Newspapers are going the way of the tablet—not the ones Apple makes, but the ones Moses carried when he descended from Mount Sinai. Hieroglyphics, papyrus and wood had a place in history, as did quill pens. We can appreciate Johannes Gutenberg’s contribution and still embrace all the waves of technology that followed.
Diverse perspectives
The pandemic showed us that people need the expertise journalists wield. However, at the same time we see that people increasingly value the perspectives of social media influencers over journalists. We may not like it, but this needs to teach us something. Rather than ask our journalists to be invisible or unobtrusive, perhaps we need to re-examine ways to humanize them for audiences.
The plethora of free options suggests that every media outlet needs to focus on offering more distinctive coverage. No, it shouldn’t be harmful or polarizing. But it has to be inclusive, reflecting more communities that demand to be heard. That’s why so many niche and local publishers have cropped up; to fill a void that was created by arrogance, neglect and an unwillingness to change – a poisonous recipe.
Media has to marry new technology, develop a trustworthy infrastructure for news distribution and create a steady diet of distinctive coverage mixed with utility and expertise and get back into communities.
The media landscape will look different by the end of this year (and the next, and the one after that), but you can’t point to a time in history when information didn’t matter. And you cannot point to a time in civilization when news – no matter its platform – didn’t make a difference.
If we haven’t learned anything else, history tells us we should pay attention.
Let’s travel back in time to the digital publishing world of 2014 when programmatic was just beginning its march to ascendancy. At that time, it accounted for just 52% of display-related advertising revenues. Flash video ads still had two years of life left! And digital media consumers were enamored with interactive rich media ads.
High-impact, creative ad formats from a decade ago peacefully coexisted alongside premium publishers’ content (remember the corner peel?). But as the open programmatic marketplace took off, many of those compelling ad units died out as publishers sought to fill pages with easily transacted, low-yield static banners.
It’s time for a rich media revival in advertising
Publishers and advertisers are beginning to question the value they get from OMP. As more advertisers limit their programmatic spend and more publishers shift strategies toward direct sold ads, flexibility and customization of ad formats becomes paramount.
Here’s why high-impact rich media creatives are poised for a comeback:
Rich media ads engage users who are primed to tap, swipe, and scroll
TikTok, Tinder and countless other apps have shaped how users behave online. While static ads can lead to banner blindness, compelling interactive rich media executions that give users something to do can increase dwell time and brand engagement. Top ad features that drive engagement include:
Augmented reality ads where the user can try out or try on a product (likethis jewelry ad)
It’s easier than ever to run rich media ads without being disruptive
High-impact units once thought to be disruptive – such as wallpapers, immersive page takeovers, floaters – seem less so now. Today’s web viewers battle pop-up video players, cookie banners, adhesion units, and multiple ads in viewport at once. A new generation of high-impact rich media units can reset the balance between user experience and ad revenue.
When done well, these ad executions command top CPMs and allow publishers to reduce ad clutter… and they’re actually creative! We’ve worked with partners to develop formats for numerous ad campaigns that showcase premium creative that’s truly one-of-a-kind. For example, last July we helped Vulture create a high-impact homepage takeover for Starz announcing the new show “Minx.”
A super billboard ad with video appeared atop the page and triggered an overlay of a champagne bottle bursting through the main story image. The “tear apart” of the homepage revealed an animated poster for the show, before reverting to the homepage again. The ad performed 6x better on a key metric versus a standard ad. Though bold, a single high-impact execution like this one, instead of a page cluttered with ads, can be more memorable and generate far more revenue.
First party data and dynamic rich media creative are a powerful match
Savvy publishers are incorporating first party data not just into audience targeting but also into the actual creative being served. Rich media ads can turn data into powerful, personalized ad executions. Data-driven creative and optimization capabilities enable publishers to combine first party data with advertiser data feeds for real-time ad customizations.
Imagine selling an airline a campaign that can dynamically show available frequent flier miles and flights this weekend from a viewer’s closest airport, and videos of that destination. Combining relevant data plus arresting creative assets like video or animations, and executing it via a single ad tag, lets publishers sell high impact ads at higher CPMs, without creating complexity for ad engineering or operations teams internally.
Programmatic ad containers with low quality fill hurt your site’s brand (and revenue)
If you’re a premium publisher, the ad experience on your sites should also be premium. But overreliance on programmatic fill can litter your site with Temu carousels. Publishers that are investing in direct sold ad programs can’t treat creative as an afterthought. Make impressions more valuable by offering interactive, rich media ad products that engage users and give your advertisers options for delivering their message in a compelling way.
Versus open programmatic fill, direct-sold rich media ads give publishers more control over their inventory, command higher CPMs from advertisers, and offer more compelling features and creative that resonates with users.
The rich media revival will lead to improved ad quality and revenue
Advertising is still the major revenue lever for media executives. Shifting focus to direct sold ads requires a thoughtful rebalancing of the ad products portfolio to ensure publishers are offering effective, compelling ad experiences that connect with users and meet the goals of advertisers. High-impact, rich media formats offer the flexibility, customization, and performance that will command higher CPMs. And, unlike a decade ago, they’re easier than ever to efficiently execute.
About the author
Shawn Pokorny is an ad operations veteran with 15+ years of experience designing and managing display ad campaigns for major publishers including Paramount, Yahoo!, PGA Tour, Dotdash Meredith, The Guardian, and more. He leads Clipcentric’s campaign services team.
In the age of artificial intelligence, it could be argued that the calculus of content is changing.
Since the advent of publishing metrics, the goal has always been more: more page views, clicks, keywords and SEO. And while AI can automate various aspects of content creation and production to save digital media companies time and resources, the convenience of the technology has also allowed for a firehose of low quality content to proliferate.
But, amid the sharp increase of these junk content farms, is there a new opportunity for quality journalism to quietly reclaim its place at the fore? It’s certainly on the minds of the leadership at The Atlantic.
In April, The Atlantic announced it had reached 1 million subscribers and become profitable, by investing in areas where the company had “fairly high confidence of good returns,” according to CEO Nicholas Thompson. The 167-year-old publication currently boasts financial stability and is well-positioned to think about where it is headed as it approaches its 200th birthday.
The Atlantic’s one-million milestone is just the foundation for further growth. In a recent memo to staff, Thompson and Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
“The key to continued success is to be constructively dissatisfied with the present, and so both of us believe very strongly that our 1 million subscriptions represent merely the foundation of future excellence and growth.”
Goldberg says that he would like The Atlantic to double, then quadruple its current size, saying the company needs to figure out how to reach larger audiences around the world. “I want to set a course as The Atlantic heads towards its bicentennial in 33 years. Now is the time for us to decide this is where we want The Atlantic to go and this is how we’re going to get there,” he said.
In terms of excellence, The Atlantic’s awards speak volumes to the quality of the journalism it produces. For the third year in a row, The Atlantic was awarded General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards. No one else has done that in this century, Goldberg remarks.
“So, we have the recognition of our industry that we’re doing something right, and I feel like this is the year when we need to really focus on: what are the next large steps we take?” Goldberg said. “Because we’re in a very good spot. But I don’t want to spend the next five years defending the hill that we’re on. I want to move to some other mountain entirely.”
And, that means not just defending their reputation for journalistic excellence, or growing iteratively. It means figuring out how to reach enormous audiences around the world – and getting a whole lot of them to subscribe.
Subscription strategy with an editorial focus
Prior to the pandemic, Atlantic Chair David Bradley and Laurene Powell Jobs decided they should move into the digital subscription space. They’d had a lot of success through scale – growing web traffic and advertising, Goldberg said. The company hired Alexandra Hardiman, (currently New York Times’ Chief Product Officer), as Chief Business & Product Officer in 2018-2019, to build The Atlantic’s digital subscription model.
“We launched basically six months before the pandemic started when advertising collapsed. And we did very well in those early months. There was a lot of demand,” Goldberg recalled.
The 2019 metered model offered three annual subscription plans for readers: digital, print and digital and a premium tier, which offered exclusive access to podcasts, product discounts and priority access to events among other perks. The Atlantic earned 300,000 new subscriptions in the 12 months that followed.
The following year, the pandemic impacted the publication’s in-person events and advertising, forcing layoffs of 17% of its staff, and losses in the millions.
Now, overall revenue is up more than 10% year over year. The company says advertising booked year-to-date is also up 33% year over year. And, subscriptions to The Atlantic have increased by double-digit percentages in each of the past four years. In fact, they’ve surged 14% in the past year alone.
By 2023, The Atlantic was back on the path to profitability. According to Axios, The Atlantic adjusted its paywall to be more flexible for subscribers and was working to add new revenue streams. Then, roughly 60% of its revenue came from subscriptions, which included print magazines and digital subscriptions through Apple News.
Flexible paywalls meet journalistic excellence
The strategy was to have the best, smartest, most dynamic, flexible subscription, acquisition and retention strategies, Goldberg said. “We’ve always believed that you can have the best systems in the world for acquiring people easily, but if you don’t have a quality product to sell them, they’re not going to come, they’re not going to stay.”
“We pivoted, I would say, to a total quality model on the web. We were doing good stuff on the web for years. We had a large team of young reporters doing news analysis and quick summaries and that sort of thing. But I’ve always believed that the aspect of The Atlantic that differentiated us from everyone else was a commitment to having the highest standards and producing the most complicated, interesting, aesthetically-pleasing, well-written journalism. I think that strategy has borne fruit,” Goldberg said.
The Atlantic focused on editorial excellence, publishing stories that exemplified depth and range and drove news cycles. It recruited high-profile writers including New York Times’ Jennifer Senior and Caitlin Dickerson, who won Pulitzers in 2022 for Feature Writing and Explanatory Journalism, respectively.
“My goal here is to build the greatest writers collective in the English language. We’re halfway there,” Goldberg said. “I don’t need the biggest one. I just need the best one. There are tremendous numbers of readers of English, who want access to our writers, and so as long as there’s an audience for quality journalism, quality non-fiction, we will be okay.”
Reaching new subscribers with newsletters
In addition to a flexible digital subscription strategy and editorial excellence, The Atlantic invested in new newsletters for subscribers in 2021, bringing nine newsletter writers into the fold. Newsletters help reach different audiences, build loyalty and repetition. And as Goldberg pointed out, The Atlantic is launching new ones all of the time. Thus far, the strategy appears to be a moderate success.
“One of the best things to happen out of that is we found more great staff writers, Yair Rosenberg, Xochitl Gonzalez and Charlie Warzel, just to name three and so, it ultimately brought their following,” Goldberg said. “They’re integrated into our writers collective in a way that’s great for our readers and great for our journalism.”
High-quality content reckons with AI
As digital media companies reckon with the changes artificial intelligence brings, deciding on how to adapt or adopt, it’s becoming clear that high-quality journalism retains immense value in the AI era. It offers authenticity, context, and deep analysis that AI-generated content lacks. It provides meaningful insights, informs people and counters misinformation.
Despite the one million subscriber milestone, Goldberg isn’t ready to relax. “It’s not like a breath out. We’re not breathing easy because you’ve got to run scared in this business,” he said. “But those three things, the subscription health, financial health, journalism health and recognition, give us a great place to have meetings where we can actually think through, alright, what are we going to do with The Atlantic on its approach to its 200th birthday.”
“Because it is a very unstable industry, obviously, and I worry about small mistakes or small missed opportunities snowballing over the years. I worry about missing the opportunity to do something newer and bigger.”
Few of The Atlantic’s contemporaries are left. As Goldberg points out, many venerable magazines that came after The Atlantic – like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post – have disappeared.
“So it’s kind of a miracle that The Atlantic has made it through the beginning of the internet age successfully. It survived the Great Depression and the Civil War and World War II. And, so we really have to focus on what is it that made it survive? And what do we do to increase its chances of surviving and flourishing into the next phase?”
Twitch – the go-to platform for gamers and live streamers – may have something to teach the media about as a news production and engagement. New research shows a generational shift in live news production, emphasizing community-driven storytelling and interactivity and real-time engagement. Amazon-owned Twitch’s popularity among young audiences challenges traditional journalism to confront the realities of how news consumption is changing.
In their paper, Recasting Twitch: Livestreaming, Platforms, and New Frontiers in Digital Journalism, researchers Maxwell Foxman, Brandon Harris, and William Clyde Partin explore Twitch as a new platform for journalists and examine how the platform influences journalistic practices. They analyze three popular Twitch channels: The Washington Post (WaPo), Hasan Piker, and Patriots’ Soapbox (PSB). The authors chose to focus on these three channels due to their popularity and distinct modes of news production thereby offering a comprehensive view of the platform’s impact on journalism.
The research highlights several themes regarding news production on Twitch: the concept of liveness, various styles and formats used, engagement with the audience, professional identity and boundaries, and the platform’s relationship with digital intermediaries.
A Twitch approach to live news and entertainment
Central to Twitch’s influence on journalism is its unique approach to “liveness.” Liveness refers to audiences routinely tuning in and interacting with creators. The platform encourages viewers to actively contribute during streams through Chat, which also becomes content that hosts react to aloud. The real-time back-and-forth entertains users.
While WaPo relied on exclusive coverage and traditional broadcast formats, Piker and PSB (which appear to no longer be on Twitch at all) integrate pre-existing content and engage directly with their audiences, fostering a sense of community and immediacy. This dynamic interaction blurs the lines between creators and consumers, redefining the traditional roles of journalists and audiences.
Media style and format
Each channel exhibits its style and format, reflecting the diversity of content on Twitch. The Washington Post’s channel (which hasn’t broadcast since May 6, 2024) took an approach that resembles traditional broadcast journalism. Piker’s is a social media-inspired mix of news and entertainment. PSB offers hyper-partisan commentary. Twitch provides a wide range of approaches to news production, which allows news brands to cater to diverse audience preferences.
Professional identity and boundaries
Each channel navigates journalistic boundaries differently. WaPo adheres closely to traditional journalism practices. However, Piker and PSB embrace their roles as ideological commentators, blurring the lines between journalism, entertainment, and political activism. This fluidity in professional identity can challenge traditional journalistic integrity and objectivity norms.
Audience engagement lessons for media
Audience interaction is central to all channels, with each streamer fostering a collaborative relationship with their viewers. Piker and PSB rely on audience contributions for content and validation, while WaPo maintains a more traditional broadcast format with limited on-air engagement. This direct interaction enhances viewer engagement and fosters a sense of community, continuing to blur the distinction between creators and consumers.
Twitch and media audience engagement
This study recognizes Twitch as a way to offer new and innovative forms of journalism that challenge traditional norms and practices. Its unique approach to “liveness,” diverse styles and formats, and dynamic interaction with audiences could impact how journalists produce news as it reflects how audiences engage with information they enjoy.
ESPN’s Esports channel (active almost daily as of May 2024) has 88.8k followers https://www.twitch.tv/espnesports
However, while Twitch has lessons to teach legacy news organizations, it seems few have found a sustainable model on the platform. In addition to the sites included in the research, it appears that channels for Wired, Complex, Rolling Stone, and Vice have all gone dormant. In any case, this research highlights the evolving relationship between live streaming, entertainment, and news.
The popularity of Twitch (as well as other social platforms) among young audiences needs to offer more than competition for media brands. It is important that we experiment by going where the audiences are. However, it is also important that we begin to understand the reasons audiences gravitate towards these platforms to find ways to better attract and engage them.
As the digital landscape faces the potential U.S. ban of TikTok, media companies are presented with a unique opportunity. TikTok has rapidly emerged as a dominant player in the advertising market, even rivaling giants like Meta, Amazon, and Google. Needless to say, open web publishers have felt the competition as well. However, TikTok’s uncertain future offers an opening for media companies to attract brands that are currently spending on TikTok and are seeking more stable alternatives.
With that in mind, my company, MediaRadar, conducted a comprehensive analysis of ad trends on TikTok to better understand patterns that could help media companies strategically position themselves during this transitional period. We found some useful openings in the ad market as well as some tactical tips for publishers positioning themselves to offer digital advertising alternatives.
Overview of the digital ad spend
Before we get into TikTok, let’s table set the digital advertising marketplace: since January 2023, total media spending overall in the U.S. has reached $184 billion, with $150 billion spent in 2023 and an additional $33.5 billion in the first quarter of 2024. The primary sectors driving this investment are Retail, Technology, Media & Entertainment, Medical & Pharma, and Finance. They accounted for 49% of the total, contributing over $55.8 billion. This represents 56% of the $100 billion invested during this period.
Advertising expenditure on TikTok
On TikTok, advertising expenditure reached $3.8 billion in 2023, with nearly $909 million added in the first quarter of 2024. This brings TikTok’s total ad spend since January 2023 to $4.7 billion, which makes up just under 3% of all U.S. media ad revenue during this period.
Yes, TikTok’s market share is modest. However, its impact is significant, especially in engaging dynamic and visually-oriented industries such as Media & Entertainment, Retail, Technology, Beauty, and Professional Services. Brands in these sectors alone have spent over $2.4 billion on the platform, representing 51% of TikTok’s total ad buys.
Growth and digital ad trends
TikTok experienced significant growth in the first quarter of 2024, with spending increasing 13% from $805 million in the same quarter of 2023. Monthly increases were 18% in January, 4% in February, and 19% in March.
The top 1,000 advertisers in 2023 significantly increased their investment, spending $340 million on TikTok—up 47% year-over-year. These advertisers accounted for 37% of the $909 million spent on TikTok in the quarter. For comparison, the top 1,000 brands in digital media overall spent nearly $6.4 billion in Q1 2024, marking a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Advertising opportunity for digital media companies
In April 2024, President Joe Biden signed a law that put restrictions on TikTok in the U.S. Even though it may take a while to play out, the uncertainty alone is likely to create opportunity for digital publishers to woo advertisers seeking alternatives to the platform. The challenge is not just to capture ad dollars but also to prevent them from flowing into platforms like Meta (Instagram and Facebook) and Snapchat, which are poised to benefit from any shifts in the digital landscape.
Here are three key takeaways for publishers to help win those migrating dollars.
1. Embrace and promote snackable, short-form video content
TikTok’s success is largely built on its short, engaging video formats that appeal to younger audiences. Publishers should develop and showcase their own versions of these video formats that are optimized for quick consumption and designed to keep the audience coming back for more. By demonstrating the ability to produce compelling short-form content, publishers can attract brands interested in engaging the digitally native audience that thrives on quick, impactful visuals and storytelling.
2. Emphasize the advantage of brand safety
In a digital advertising landscape where brand safety continues to be a major concern, publishers have a distinct advantage over platforms like TikTok, known for their UGC which can often veer into controversial territory. Publishers should highlight their controlled environments and rigorous content standards, presenting themselves as a safer alternative for brands that want to ensure their ads are displayed in a reputable context. This is particularly persuasive for TikTok’s largest advertisers, who are likely larger brands who deeply care about their brand and its equity.
3. Highlight the direct link between content and consumer action
TikTok has proven effective at driving sales and conversions through innovative ad formats and integrated shopping features, like TikTok Shop. Media companies should also capitalize on this trend by promoting how their content can drive consumer action. This involves showcasing success stories and case studies where advertising with them has led to measurable increases in sales or conversions. By articulating how their platforms facilitate a seamless journey from content engagement to purchase, publishers can appeal to advertisers looking for clear ROI on their ad spend.
By focusing on these strategies—leveraging formats that appeal to the TikTok audience, ensuring brand safety, and demonstrating a direct path to consumer action—publishers can effectively redirect advertising dollars to their platforms as they become available.