Today at 1pmET, I’m hosting a TRB Expert Session with Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk to discuss what AI is actually revealing about audience behavior, where it creates blind spots, and how media companies can use it to build deeper relationships without losing the editorial instincts that make them worth reading in the first place.
(If you can’t make today’s session live, you’ll get sent a replay link and summary of the takeaways)
Also: We are conducting research on publisher adoption of AI in their operations, and how they’re balancing the need to protect credibility with the imperative to stay ahead of a massive technological change. Please take a moment to fill out this short survey
Audience strategy now reaches far beyond traffic and reach. Media teams are being asked to support retention, revenue, product decisions, and long-term audience value. We surveyed your media and publishing peers to understand what is driving progress, where teams are getting stuck, and what leaders should pay attention to next.
Inside the report, you’ll find data on:
Audience growth and retention trends
Ownership and operating model challenges
Monetization pressure across revenue lines
AI and audience discovery shifts
Phase 1: Gather audience data
On Thursday, The Rebooting hosted a private table discussion about what’s working in audience strategies, in collaboration with Omeda. Recent research by Omeda found a striking disconnect: 70% of publishers reported audience data is critical yet only 9% said their organizations effectively use audience data to take actions.
It is yet another example of digital media’s underpants gnome in action. In South Park, the plan is to collect underpants before profiting. Only the intermediary step is a giant question mark. People Inc chief innovation officer Jon Roberts evangelized this meme as applicable to several areas of the media business, including audience data as it turns out. Step 2 in this instance is activation.
Why the disconnect? The boring reality is that too many publishers struggle to centralize their data in businesses that are frequently far more complex than their size justifies. Data is often strewn across several platforms, trapped in email service providers or subscription platforms or data-management platforms. Like most companies, publishers can be too siloed without one area informing another. Sometimes they even work against each other.
Nobody in this business is betting their future on publishing words on webpages, attracting eyeballs – remember them? – via search, then monetizing that traffic with programmatic. Legacy publishers are operating these businesses to fund building new audience-focused businesses, with a particular emphasis on events and activating high-value audience segments.
One business publisher described the shift as looking deeper into data to focus on activation. For instance, take a story that generates 200,000 pageviews, two newsletter signups and one who remains signed up a month later. In the old measurement rubric, the big pageview number would be what matters. But now, this isn’t judged as successful as a piece that generated only 1,500 pageviews but seven email newsletter signups with four still on the list a month later.
The missing activation piece is particularly pronounced with events. No matter the topic of TRB gatherings, conversation frequently turns to events. The challenge: Publishers see events mainly as a high-margin alternative to advertising revenue. Events data rarely flows back into central audience data or can be normalized with digital audience metrics. Publishers are unable to tie the impact their content has on this critical part of their business.
On Thursday, May 21, at 1pmET, I’m hosting another TRB Expert Session with Omeda vp of client experience Tony Napoleone to discuss the findings of Omeda’s State of Audience report, particularly why Sign up to join this interactive discussion.
The revenge of brand
Markets in the midst of technological change tend to have two camps. One is the legacy incumbents that have strengths in their brands and the other in upstarts that are nimbler. In digital media, it turned out brand won.
At Possible, The Rebooting held TRB Conversations powered by EX.CO, a series of podcast discussions with media leaders on what they’re betting on. The connective tissue that emerged is that publishers are leaning more heavily on the value of their brands as they reorient their businesses to focus less on scale and more on depth.
"We consider ourselves to be the last truly global business daily." – Brendan Spain, vp of advertising for the Americas, FT
The Financial Times differentiates from US-centric giants like The Wall Street Journal by its decidedly global point of view. That means not just tracking the stock market for how it affects 401(k) balances but connecting the dots between Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz to fertilizer prices in Michigan. Bonus: As a British publication, it is mostly outside the American political psychodrama.
"Chasing scale is important, but not totally the answer." – Racahel Savage, svp of ad revenue operations, Hearst
Digitally native publishers like Vice, BuzzFeed and Vox didn’t end up replacing legacy operations like Hearst. It turns out that brand was more important than digital DNA. The challenge: Hearst spent years trying to centralize operations to run a single playbook across brands. That era is over. Now, Runner’s World needs a different approach than Cosmo or Motortrends. Scale is still critical to what Hearst offers but that comes in the form of a collection of deep niches, each with its own approach to connecting with enthusiast audiences.
"We're going all in on cultural moments." – Avi Ziemak, Chief Growth Officer, BDG
Bustle Digital Group was founded to disrupt legacy magazine companies. But it’s SEO-focused traffic model became a liability, so it pivoted to an activations model that uses legacy magazine brands to embed brand partners in cultural moments like Coachella, Art Basel and F1. Rather than ad impressions, BDG is selling earned media amplification through an influencer network that amplifies content across their social handles.
"CTV is still the opposite of being democratized — you have to have the right connections, the right budgets." – Shachar Oren, CMO and CRO, EX.CO
The Mary Meeker slide that showed the gap between time spent on the internet and budgets spent on internet advertising defined digital publishing for a generation. It’s now back for what is becoming the new open web: connected TV. 20% of time spent is on CTV but less than half of ad budgets go into CTV advertising. Much of that is due to a far smaller pool of advertisers compared to the millions who run ads through automated digital ad systems. EX.CO is using its experience in monetizing web-based publishing across the emerging decentralized TV advertising ecosystem, from CTV to digital out of home.
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