How are publishers defining “engagement” for their own goals and for their advertising partners? How are they organizing and leveraging their first party data to drive the right outcomes?

1. What is the biggest challenge/obstacle you
face in increasing company revenue?
● An overall lack of resources. We have so much room for
growth but we can’t hire enough talent to maximize the
opportunities – particularly in design and development. We
are constantly making choices and having to re-prioritize
things, or set some things aside until we can get to them.
● Lack of technical resources (funding for development /
people)

2. What is the biggest challenge/obstacle you
face in increasing company revenue?
● Current political cycle is great for traffic and gaining new
users from social referrals. That said, our editorial strategy is
greatly op-ed, and their stance has caused some of our power
users and subscribers to become alienated. We want to take
advantage of this opportunity to appeal to a greater base, but
we're potentially sacrificing our subscription revenue stream.
● Cultural change within the organization and evolving the sales
organization

3. What is the biggest challenge/obstacle you
face in increasing company revenue?
● Migrating revenue to PMPs
● Content loading faster than ads affecting bidding process and
ad viewability scores
● Building scalable operational procedures behind it in a
scaleable way
● Creating the volume of video necessary to keep up with
advertising demand for it

4. What is the biggest challenge/obstacle you
face in increasing company revenue?
● Diversification. direct and programmatic monetization is
being restricted with forthcoming cookie disablement, ad
blocking, tighter advertiser KPIs and transparency,
monopoly/walled gardens stealing budgets, etc. pubs need
to find new revenue streams.
● Commoditization of content, lack of transparency and poor
environments in the marketplace

5. What is the biggest challenge/obstacle you
face in increasing company revenue?
● Distributed platforms, i.e. reaching our consumers on a never
ceasing broad array of platforms, which requires a multitude
of agreements, complexity in building a campaign and
revenue sharing. It’s ultimately a good thing as if
consumption grows in both breadth and depth, then the
overall health increases, but we’ve got to look at ways to
reduce friction to have advertising/sponsorship dollars
follow.
● Lack of knowledge from executive level management, and
internal support from product/dev teams

6. What is the biggest challenge/obstacle you
face in increasing company revenue?
● The loss of direct advertising revenue to Facebook, Google,
and programmatic due to their ability to hyper target
advertising resulting from their huge volume of big data
● Staying ahead of the duopoly and constantly adjusting our
distribution tactics
● Crowded Marketplace. Duopoly sucking up money. Creating a
unique product that scales.

7. ● Unique and creative ad units that contain content
● Our premium subscription product has grown at a rate of
around 30% MoM since we launched it a little over a year
ago. We're trying to continue to innovate in terms of our
marketing strategies and use all the capabilities of our CDP
● Custom content
What is your fastest growing revenue stream
in the last year?

8. ● Video (either branded content or short form pre or mid roll).
● PMPs
● Content marketing (partnership as a publisher for taboola)
● Affiliate / contextual commerce.
● Ecommerce. a lot of sites in our portfolio has been playing
with affiliate partnerships (notably Amazon). we've had a lot
of early success with Amazon ONsite program
What is your fastest growing revenue stream
in the last year?

9. ● Branded Content and large search/social/display buys
● Live streaming and Branded Content
● Editorial video
● Light touch content amplification i.e. amplifying content
written in the clients voice to our audience with little
consultancy
● AMP
● In-app, majority from Facebook
What is your fastest growing revenue stream
in the last year?

10. ● Direct Sales. Agencies and clients don’t have budgets in time,
are under the constant threat of accounts changing hands,
ever changing KPI’s and turnover at agencies makes it very
hard to ever build on success a publisher might have with a
given client and actually grow a relationship
● Partnerships with other publishers to extend our reach. The
rev shares are horrible, and the cannibalization of our
premium content has us rethinking this strategy.
What has proven the most disappointing revenue
stream in the last year?

11. ● Print subscription
● PMPs continue to be an extremely small revenue stream for
us. We have the scale available, but because of all the Trump
content that we publish, it's difficult to find brands who are
willing to advertise with us right now
● Display. Most has gone programmatic or is now considered
value add.
● Branded content
What has proven the most disappointing revenue
stream in the last year?

12. ● Video programmatic
● Data/audience monetization. Relies heavily on
sellers/specialists who know the space and how to sell data
and/or audience extension
● Magazines/Print
● PMP/PG/PD. We’re hoping to convert more open exchange
dollars into private deals, but it’s not happening as fast as
we’d like
What has proven the most disappointing revenue
stream in the last year?

13. ● Homepage promotion next to our blockbuster journalism
● Subscriptions to get off the ground. The strategy is
cannibalizing what we receive in programmatic
● PMP, mostly due to our internal focus shifting to open
market, but PMP will be a renewed focus
● Direct advertising
● Distributed pre-roll/mid-roll
What has proven the most disappointing revenue
stream in the last year?

14. Fastest growing/most promising distribution or
audience development channel?
● Live Video – It’s a chance to interact daily with our most loyal
audience, and from a production standpoint it gives us a
really efficient way to produce a lot of content quickly, which
frees up other production resources for content more
deserving of a higher production value
● SmartNews has really taken off for us. Also Syndicated video.
● We are big fans of Snapchat. Great partners, great audience,
fair business terms

15. Fastest growing/most promising distribution or
audience development channel?
● Search closely followed by social
● Brand partnerships
● Launched our OTT app, so expect this to help garner a new
audience for our brand
● Unfortunately Facebook. We also do a lot of internal cross-
site promotion of branded content and premium editorial
content.

16. Fastest growing/most promising distribution or
audience development channel?
● Out of market sales
● OTT
● YouTube
● Audio and newsletters
● Sports
● Pinterest

17. How has your video strategy changed most in the
last year?
● Getting smarter about how we shoot and edit in order to
create content that is optimized across all distribution
platforms. Looking at views and engagement across multiple
platforms and assigning different values to those views by
channel so we can prioritize certain subjects on certain
platforms.
● Not focusing on length of video, but of completion rate.

18. How has your video strategy changed most in the
last year?
● Pivoting from exclusively branded content videos to accepting
some sort of "roll"
● Considering an outsourced video player
● Major investments in higher quality production

19. How has your video strategy changed most in the
last year?
● We're planning on tripling video content in the next 12
months - we have really high completion rates on site, ~90%
even with preroll, but on subsequent video views the
completion rate drops off by about half. By increasing the
content that is created we'll be able to frequency cap each
video so maximize overall completes.

20. How has your video strategy changed most in the
last year?
● A focus on high end content creation for integrated media
plans
● Making longer form content (10+ mins)
● Moving towards limited series and long-form video content

21. How has your video strategy changed most in the
last year?
● Implemented a lot of tech upgrades with our video player to
be more engaging while keeping up with advertiser/agency
KPIs.
● Expanding distribution of content to emerging platforms—
Xumo, Pluto, etc…to focus on getting both AVOD and Live
Streaming available through as many services as possible

22. ● Overrated – Still can’t believe ComScore is a thing
● Underrated – Newsletter open rates and CTR
● Grammerly is underrated as a newsroom tool
● Overrated has been Video Header bidding (too many
technical challenges).
● Underrated affiliate contextual commerce.
● Overrated: podcasts; underrated: podcasts
What Bright Shiny Object is the digital media field is
most overrated? Underrated?

23. ● Blockchain and specifically smart contracts are pretty
underrated right now.
● Some publisher friends I have tried to invest in video (2-4
years ago) and never really saw a full return on the
investment.
● Over: Facebook ----- Under: OTT
What Bright Shiny Object is the digital media field is
most overrated? Underrated?

24. ● Overrated: DMPs - because they are mostly tied to 3rd party
cookies
● Underrated: Cookieless DMPs
● Most overrated is AR, most underrated is OTT
● Overrated: OOH. I think we are still some years away
● Overrated: Podcasts. Takes too much volume/scale for it to
pay off. Publishers hear video-like cpms in the audio space
so they are trying to pivot to podcasts.
What Bright Shiny Object is the digital media field is
most overrated? Underrated?

25. ● Overrated - Facebook. Underrated - Programmatic TV
● OTT Apps are overrated. TV is underrated
● Overrated = subscriptions. Underrated = video content
● Overrated - Belief in third party audience measurement tools
● Underrated - the monopoly google & facebook have on our
industry
● Underrated: Big Data and Premium Subscriptions: I hope I am
underrating them but I may be overrating them
What Bright Shiny Object is the digital media field is
most overrated? Underrated?

26. ● Overrated: Obsession with data. Gives the illusion we are
delivering "smart" marketing programs, yet the work is
subpar and we celebrate incremental gains in performance.
● Underrated: Great creative. It breaks through and performs
across platform
What Bright Shiny Object is the digital media field is
most overrated? Underrated?