The pivot to events
Fragment yourself into niches and do things platforms can’t.
Check out the latest episode of People vs Algorithms, where we dig into the inability of publishers to escape distribution chokepoints, the Twitter rebrand, Hollywood’s dead-cat bounce with Barbieheimer, whether the digital ad market is in secular or cyclical decline and more on the topic of this week’s newsletter: publishers making events a bigger part of their businesses.
First, a message from The Rebooting supporter Omeda.
The recirculation imperative
As recent troubles at BuzzFeed and Vice have shown, buzz doesn’t pay the bills. To compete in this media landscape, you need to optimize for recirculation rather than constantly chasing the next big trend.
In this guide, learn how to improve your own recirculation rates and discover how to harness your audience data to boost sharing, encourage repeat visits and keep your audience invested for the long term.
The pivot to events
Back in 2017, I was speaking to then-Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith at a Digiday Publishing Summit. We were about to do a keynote conversation after Justin presented a “survival guide” for publishers at the height of platform chaos. I noted that being a sliver of a giant data and information services business, anchored in The Terminal, perhaps gave Bloomberg a different than most publishers. Justin replied, “Your events are your terminal.” Not quite the same scale, I replied.
For Digiday, where I was president and editor-in-chief at the time, events were the overwhelming majority of our revenue. I left Adweek in large part because I didn’t believe in the business model. It relied on congratulatory ads in a print product. There are only so many fawning ego-driven lists you can produce to shake down vendors to congratulate their clients. At Digiday, I saw PubMatic and Rubicon battling over who would host a dinner. That seemed a better business.
Events are now moving to become central to many publishing business models, as they’ve long been in B2B media. In Justin’s survival guide, his advice to publishers contained two points that speak to why events: fragment yourself into niches and do things platforms can’t.
