Publisher data is more important than ever, so why are digital magazines missing out on it? Plus, Yahoo, Thrillist, and Complex Media updates
Publisher data is a broad term, but executives and sales staff know that they want more of it to develop long-term strategies for their content. But what happens when your user information is dwindling rather than expanding?
Digiday reports on this trend and other industry news. Let’s take a look at a few of the site’s recent articles.
Ad Blocking Leads to Losing Out on Publisher Data
It follows that ad blocking leads to loss of ad revenue, but are media companies being doubly penalized when it comes to publisher data?
“Most ad blockers, including Adblock Plus, work by preventing sites from loading elements from certain domains and subdomains. And while that blocks the ads themselves, it also blocks tracking cookies, which come from ad networks but also and data management platforms such as BlueKai and Krux. That means that readers running ad blockers are invisible when it comes to publishers’ data collection,” Ricardo Bilton writes.
“For publishers with loyal audiences, data can be a major differentiator. Knowing that a particular reader visits a tech site multiple times a day, for example, says a lot about both that reader’s relationship with a site and that reader’s overall interest in a topic. Both are valuable insights for advertisers, which are always on the hunt for more info about the interests and habits of the people they advertise to. Publishers hope that by collecting and packaging that data, they can fetch higher premiums on their CPMs.”
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The PostGame to Seek Distribution Beyond Yahoo
After getting a look at its own publisher data, sports digital magazine The PostGame is branching out from Yahoo, Digiday reports. With traffic numbers under 5 million – far behind competitors like SB Nation and Bleacher Report – David Katz‘s latest enterprise will spread its content out to other media companies, social media platforms, and video networks.
Thrillist Founder Ben Lerer on Content’s Constancy
Thrillist, the Millennial-bent company established in 2004, brought in upward of $100 million last year, Digiday reports. How? With quality content and earning consumers’ trust, Ben Lerer told Lucia Moses in a Executive Summary series interview.
“What The New York Times is getting right is, the pendulum has swung back to quality content being first and foremost,” Lerer said. “Media’s been democratized in that the pipes have been laid. So great content can be discovered. The best content is going to win, and the New York Times has always had the best content.”
Complex Media CEO Rich Antoniello on Going All in on Digital
Bilton’s interview with Complex Media CEO Rich Antoniello is definitely worth a read. In it, the outspoken publishing executive discusses his competitors, convergence consumers, and why the network of young men’s sites – the offspring of print magazine – poured everything into digital.
“Print is on auto-pilot for us right now. If you’re spending time and resources developing that part of your business now, you’re running toward yesterday,” he said. “You have to invest in tomorrow.”
Do you keep up with your publisher data collection? Is ad blocking throwing kinks in your plans? Let us know in the comments!
To read more about publisher data in the news, visit Digiday.
