MediaPost Publishing Insider Summit Slides

6. What is your fastest growing revenue stream in the
last year?
• Events – sponsorship of editorial events (both
signature and bespoke), and custom live
experiences.
• Subscriptions
• Digital Subscriptions
• Organic video
• AMP
• OTT

7. What is your fastest growing revenue stream in the
last year?
• Instream video
• Branded/Custom Content
• Digital revenue up over 20% in 2018. But the mix
changed quite a bit to almost 50/50 native custom
content plays to straight display advertising.
• Programmatic guaranteed deals in terms of growth
rate, then Direct & Open Display in terms of
revenue.

8. What is your fastest growing revenue stream in the
last year?
• Sponsored content and video production.
• Affiliate sales. Primarily with our relationships
with REI and Amazon and other select retailers.
Lower funnel ringing the register immediately has
grown exponentially at the expense I am afraid of
traditional branding plays.

9. What has proven the most disappointing revenue
stream in the last year?
• Print, of course
• Print. We continue to be hopeful and carry
the MPA print flag high.
• Direct
• Mobile
• Programmatic Guaranteed In 2018
• Programmatic Direct/Guaranteed
• Off platform revenue. AppleNews, Facebook etc.

10. What has proven the most disappointing revenue
stream in the last year?
• Digital advertising. But legacy print holding up quite
well.
• We've seen the slowest growth in Private Auctions.
• Podcasting

11. What has proven the most disappointing revenue
stream in the last year?

12. Fastest growing/most promising distribution or
audience development channel?
• YouTube
• Google/Search
• AMP
• Google AMP and organic search results
• Social
• OTT
• FireTV

13. Fastest growing/most promising distribution or
audience development channel?
• Working with a partner who syndicates our site’s
articles in apps. It’s free content syndication that we
get paid for via cut of ad revenue at the same time.
• Fastest growing: Google AMP/search.
• Most promising: YouTube and possibly Twitter for us.
• In the last year or so, we’ve seen Flipboard emerge as a
new top referrer. We also continue to find opportunities
to grow audiences from Facebook, despite algorithm
changes and widely reported issues there.

14. Fastest growing/most promising distribution or
audience development channel?
• Tremendous growth from our social channels
(Instagram in particular)
• Experiential and event activation has gained
momentum and is frequently asked for by our
advertisers.

15. The greatest improvements/benefits from your
programmatic advertising business?
• Programmatic Guaranteed
• Retention of top advertisers running deals with us and
that’s been the result of being able to package our
inventory more efficiently for them via deal setup.
• growing adoption of programmatic guaranteed as it
allows us to serve our advertisers through their
preferred channel while still being able to provide them
our knowledge of our audience and a guarantee of
impressions

16. The greatest improvements/benefits from your
programmatic advertising business?
• Server-to-server integrations
• PMPs - This time last year it was 8% of our total
programmatic revenue. We're closing in on 20% this
month.
• Overall yield/eCPMs from a more competitive
landscape as buyers trend towards safer places to
park their spend
• OTT
• Video (pre-roll and inline players)

17. The greatest improvements/benefits from your
programmatic advertising business?
• Sales team education - we work hard to integrate
direct and programmatic selling.

18. What is the biggest challenge/obstacle you face in
increasing company revenue?
• Less allocation to publisher direct
• Cookieless future, Data privacy act concerns
• Cutting through the ecosystem clutter.
• The amount of energy and time it takes to service the
existing account base (Digital time suck) that leaves
very little time to figure out what is next. These Native
programs including video are epic undertakings and it is
very difficult for marketing and sales to keep their
heads above water.

19. What is the biggest challenge/obstacle you face in
increasing company revenue?
• Scaling our network of sites. A lot of the smaller
blogger sites we’ve seen great success growing, but
adding the mid-tier to top-tier pubs to the network
in a fully exclusive capacity isn’t easy to do.
• Streamlined reporting. Still no one has it really
figured out.
• Content discovery. Audience development.
Retention

20. What is the biggest challenge/obstacle you face in
increasing company revenue?
• The pressure to be innovative, and produce something
never-been-done before on every single deal no matter
its size or scale. It can exhaust resources quickly. The
obstacle is that the outstanding content that editors
create to engage and grow our audience no longer
serves the day-to-day strategic marketing need of the
advertiser; it is only the foundation for everything else
we must build anew on top of it.
• Finding good sales talent – account executives and
account managers

21. What is the biggest challenge/obstacle you face in
increasing company revenue?
• The largest challenge is keeping up and managing
the various opportunities available to us. Podcasts,
video, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram,
technological changes, etc. are all somewhat
difficult for a legacy media company to do all well,
but also take full advantage of from a revenue
perspective.

22. What is the biggest challenge/obstacle you face in
increasing company revenue?
• Keeping reins on ever-broadening revenue
streams—i.e. it’s no longer just sponsorship/ads, so
how to align that in an efficient way
organizationally.

23. The oligopoly (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple)
represents an existential threat to the media business that
requires considerable regulation or breaking up?
• Yes - especially when Google doesn't share publisher
related revenue
• I do believe they need to be regulated, unsure if
they need to be broken up at this point.
• Yes, though regulation needs to be applied in a
thoughtful way.

24. The oligopoly (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple)
represents an existential threat to the media business that
requires considerable regulation or breaking up?
• Meh, not really. Free markets are good by me, sites will figure
it out or die.
• YES to threat, NO to regulation / break-up.
• Yes and No. Good in some areas (technology). Bad in some
areas (competition).
• It certainly represents a threat, but I’m undecided on whether
government regulation is the answer. That is a slippery slope.