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Alex White
1. Alex White, Head of Digital
Publishing
Testing New Revenue
Streams
2. 1 Introduction to BBC Good Food
2 A new home..
3 Size isn’t everything
4 Creating more value from our audience
5 Culture of experimentation
3. DIGITAL LIVE
EVENTS
INTERNATIONALPRINT
BBCGoodFood.com
BBC Good Food App
BBC Good Food Voice Skill
Significant social footprint
Wine Club
BBC Good Food Summer
BBC Good Food Scotland
BBC Good Food Winter
15+ Exclusive restaurant events
4x print licensees
1x multiplatform licensee
Significant digital footprint in Ireland,
ANZ, USA, Canada and SA
BBC Good Food magazine
(and digital edition)
Easy Cook magazine
(and digital edition)
Home Cooking Series
BBC Good Food books
4.
5. Digital has driven growth in the Good Food brand
• Successful transition to digital first
• Brand profits growing despite print
decline
• The UK’s biggest food website, 3rd
globally
• Highest reach of any UK magazine
brand
• Trust, reputation, quality, destination
• Scale audience – solid ad base
• Path to growth: diversify revenues
22m
uniques
6.
7. Size isn’t everything…
From anonymous users to known customers? £
My Good Food Tailored content
verticals
Native app
8. Anonymous
Know where the value is coming from
Revenue
per user £
Volume #
Paid
Registered
Data management
platform
Yield optimisations
Viewability
Affiliates
My Good Food
Personalisation
Native app
• Increase the size of the known audience
• Increase the value of the unknown audience
9. As well as your own stuff, what else will they pay for?
Whisk integration
- add-to-basket
ingredients
- targeted ads against
ingredients
Wine Club
- Selected by Good
Food experts
Travel
- Foodie holidays
- Exclusive
experiences
Product reviews
- Monetizer
comparisons
- Skimlinks
- Deeper partnerships
10. Voice – the next frontier for content surfacing
Developed BBC Good Food voice
Skills to achieve market leadership in
voice applications and search, in order
to facilitate ’hands-free’ cooking
assistance
11.
12. Revenue now; revenue later?
“Our collective
homework is test and
learn.
If you double the
number of
experiments you do
per year, you double
your inventiveness.”
Helen McRae,
Mindshare UK CEO
Thank you
alex.white@immediate.co.uk
Editor's Notes
Good morning everyone and introduce self
Thank you for making time in what is for most of us the busiest period of the year, to meet together & learn more from each other on how we can move our digital publishing businesses forwards.
Great privilege to be invited to share my experience from leading the digital strategy for the BBC Good Food brand
Chosen to talk about the changes we’re going through and how we’re achieving our ambition to diversify revenues
Hopefully there will be some insights you can take away and apply to your own businesses
So to prepare you for what’s coming…
I’ll give you a brief overview of the BBC Good Food brand for those not familiar
We’ve recently acquired a new owner, since the summer, so I’ll talk a bit about Immediate Media and the journey they and we are on
I’ll then talk about our shift from focus on audience scale, to creating audience value
And finally talk about how we approach innovation and experimentation
So.. All about us
BBC Good Food is the biggest food media brand in the UK
We have the market leading Food magazine, over 100m copies sold across 25 years, and circulation of around 190k, half of which are subscribers
Our website, bbcgoodfood.com, is the biggest recipe website in the UK and number 3 globally, with 22m unique users per month
Good Food show live events are the largest and most popular food and drink shows in the UK, with over 250,000 visitors a year. We currently have 3 main events, in Birmingham, Glasgow and London
And we have a strong international licensing business, with 4 international printed editions and a strong digital footprint ex UK
But here’s a short video which will give you a better idea of what we do – and how much fun we have.
So what all this should tell you is that we’ve been pretty successful at building a scale audience, and owning our market.
Our whole ethos is about trust and quality, inspiration and usefulness, we’re not aiming to win the battle for transient attention on social; we see ourselves as a destination site.
That’s enabled us to build a strong advertising proposition
We have pretty much transitioned to being digital first, with our overall brand profits in growth, so digital is making up for print decline.
In fact we have the highest reach of any UK magazine brand, thanks to our success on mobile.
So we should be pretty smug, right?
Well actually, no….
We operate in a very crowded market with a myriad of competitors especially in the social space, vying for the attention of our customers
And along with the rest of the publishing industry, we’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with our reliance on one source of revenue in advertising, given the many headwinds facing us thanks to the dominance of the big platforms and tech partners, and some serious wobbles from marketeers in the past 18 months thanks to Brexit.
Happily, our success and our potential have been significant enough to attract a lot of interest and this summer, Immediate Media acquired us from BBC Studios and brought us into their fold alongside a number of other BBC titles like Gardeners World, BBC History, as well as many other specialist print and digital businesses as diverse as Radio Times through to Made for Mums, Bike Radar and Hitched, and not forgetting Olive magazine who now joins us as a sister title in the new Food Group.
All in all, Immediate has 75 market leading specialist brands…all of them igniting peoples’ passions all over the world.
There are lots of good things for us about joining Immediate; having been through their own sale process from their previous private equity owner Exponent to their new owner, the family-owned media and publishing empire Burda Media, there is huge ambition to grow revenues from digital, and particularly to invest in the platforms needed to grow more direct to consumer revenues, either through membership or ecommerce. Many of their titles have a strong product review focus and transactional elements to their business, so they are as an attractive parent for us as we, with our heritage and significant audience scale, were a prospect for them.
Our digital strategy has for many years been about developing a deeper engagement with our products and services. We worked out some years ago that our loyal users were the ones really generating commercial value for us, as in, they come more often, they view more pages, and they are much more highly engaged. So our product development has been about creating products and services that super-serve these users.
Examples might be our My Good Food area for registered users, where they can save and organise recipes into their own collections, upload their own recipes (we’re now up to 9k of them!), add comments and ratings etc. Or our content strategy which has centred on expanding beyond pure recipe content into more feature and topic led verticals such as Family, Health, Travel and Reviews. Or our native app, which acts as a companion for My Good Food super-users to easily access all their stuff offline, as well as a very fast and streamlined way of accessing our database of 12k professional recipes.
All this serves to help us turn anonymous users into known customers.
To illustrate it in a different way.. With volume of users across the bottom scale, and revenue per user up the left hand axis.
There is huge value in the long tail of anonymous users, where the main business model is advertising. Then there’s the middle chunk of registered users who are engaged enough to give us their data in exchange for functionality and convenience. And then there’s the proportionately small slice of users who are prepared to pay for our content, where the revenue per user is significantly higher. At the moment, that’s mainly our magazine readers and subscribers, but we are putting in place the proposition that will make up a digital subscription offering.
The two key things we need to do are therefore to a) increase the size of the known audience, so push people up the scale from anonymous into registered, and from there into paid, and b) to increase the value of the unknown audience. I’ve mentioned some of the ways we’ve done the former (and we have more than doubled our registered user base in the past 18 months from 0.5m to 1.2m), and on increasing the value of unknown users, the key strategies have been around programmatic yield optimisations and also focusing on data. We switched our DMP to Permutive this year, and from this and the use of tactical surveys, the insights we’re able to gather about our users and their preferences are forming the basis of our proposals to advertisers.
For us, we believe that the strongest opportunity for building direct to consumer revenues lies with our own products and content, where the margin will be highest and we have the best brand recognition and control.
However it makes sense to look more broadly at where our users are likely to pay for stuff that’s not ours but is strongly related to what we’re making.
Here’s a couple of examples of commercial partnerships we’ve developed to build a decent affiliate model:
We work with Whisk to match our huge database of recipe ingredients with the vast inventory of supermarket products, so users can select their preferred supermarket and then add straight to their weekly shop from our recipe pages. As you might be able to see from the image here it also enables us to serve highly targeted ads for partners (here’s Jus Rol advertising against a pastry recipe) and suggest items for their baskets.
Linking back to my point earlier about data: we can tell that our digital audience are very into their wine! So we launched a wine club with Laithwaites, where our in house experts are involved in selecting wines for our special Good Food cases
Thirdly, we are expanding our range of product reviews, gift guides and shoppable content, which we make money from through affiliate partnerships, and this has recently expanded into accreditation where we award our stamp of approval for the best in class of certain products, which those brands can then pay to use our kitemark.
And fourthly, we identified an audience segment which is very interested in travel and foodie experiences, so we have developed a new content strand to showcase the best in local and international cuisine, restaurants and local recipes, and partner with Travel Zoo to provide tailored offers on relevant flight and holiday deals.
So again, with these last three, thinking about where to focus our efforts on where price points and margins are high.
So these are all areas where we have been exploring which new revenue streams will work for us.
With all these, the approach has been to start small, test and learn; if it does well, do more, if not, move on.
With limited resource it’s always a challenge to know where to focus. My tips would be, to look at where your audience goes after they’ve visited your site; see what your data tells you about their related interests (or ask them outright), and find partners who can help you trial things quickly at low risk.
The last area I wanted to share with you is one that we’re incredibly excited about, new for us in 2018 and wasn’t even on our roadmap last year.
And that’s the new frontier of Voice. Since the vast majority of our users arrive via a Google search, we had to pay attention to the rapid adoption of voice enabled devices for the home. Certainly the kitchen has become the new frontier for tech companies rushing to get their latest devices to market, and they are all hungry for content. For us, we want to make sure that if our audience asks Alexa for a recipe using ingredients in their fridge, the result they’re most likely to be given continues to be from BBC Good Food. The revenue models are nascent, but there’s strong potential for working with brands also exploring this space.
We launched our custom skill a couple of months ago and it’s doing pretty well, but keep your eye out for Good Food as featured in some very cool new stuff appearing in the run up to Christmas.
It’s easiest to show you in this short and rather homemade video, if we have time to show it, featuring our very own MD, Chris Kerwin…
That’s all there is really time for this morning so I’ll just leave you with a quote from Helen McRae which she shared at another great conference earlier in the autumn:
“Our collective homework is test and learn. If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you double your inventiveness.”
Words to live by. Thanks very much.
