USA Today has amped up the features on its crossword app and added a monthly $5.99 price tag, all in an effort to drive new, younger subscribers and keep churn down. “We’re evolving as a media company from a primarily ad-driven model, for decades, to being a customer-obsessed subscription model,” Gannett chief marketing and strategy…
Rumors have swirled for months that The New York Times was working on a newsletter project to combat external pressure from platforms like Substack, and this morning the publisher unveiled it. The Times announced on Thursday that it would be launching a suite of 18 new and existing subscriber-only newsletters, including seven entirely original opinion…
In a year largely defined by high expectations and lackluster realities, the video game industry has proven the exception. As the stock of the gaming industry has risen, so too has the value of publishers devoted to covering it, leading to a glut of new entrants joining the field like Bloomberg Media and The Washington…
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Complex Networks, currently being acquired by Buzzfeed, has been building up its audience insights business–Complex Collective, consisting of a panel of 30,000 young people across its properties–since 2019. Since then, it’s published four reports on audience trends to inform campaigns for its ad clients,…
Several dominant digital media publishers–BuzzFeed, Dotdash, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal–all disclosed the state of their financial health this past week, and taken together the findings reveal some of the key trends shaping the industry. While the four companies face similar market challenges, they differ in the strategies they have employed…
Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch, reported record gains in its fourth quarter and full-year earnings revenue call on Thursday. Overall, the trio of publishers saw quarterly revenue increase $68 million, or 18%, compared to the year prior. The full-year revenues for the fiscal year increased $112 million, or…
Bloomberg Media and Ebony are teaming up to make Black stories more visible. The two publishers announced a year-long content-sharing collaboration this morning to cross-pollinate the Bloomberg Equality and Ebony audiences through original content, brand exposure initiatives and custom reports. Ultimately, the tie-up will drive new–potentially paying–audiences, and more ad revenue. “Ebony has been a…
The New York Times is edging closer to its goal of 10 million subscribers by 2025, according to its second-quarter earnings call. But while it drew in its lowest quarterly increase in subscriber numbers, there’s a silver lining since its overall subscriber revenue is growing. While 8 million subscribers is an emotional number, it only…
This morning, Cond? Nast announced it has partnered with Universal Music Group to launch Cond? Nast Certified Video Plus (CNCV+), providing advertisers access to both audiences through one offering. Universal Music Group reaches 150 million monthly active users and ranks No. 1 in the entertainment-music category, according to Comscore data, while Cond? Nast generates 1…
As Bustle Digital Group expands, the publisher once known for its lifestyle brands has developed a particular taste for a different kind of coverage. Beginning in late 2018 when it acquired Mic, BDG has built out what it calls the Culture & Innovation portfolio, a group of publications either acquired or launched that explore the…
As the reign of cookies comes to a close, the digital advertising industry has found itself in a succession crisis. In a roundtable discussion at Adweek’s NexTech event on Monday, executives from BuzzFeed, Vox Media and dentsu shared the challenges facing their respective organizations that stem from the absence of a universally-adopted replacement for third-party…
The Washington Post has hired its first chief subscriptions officer, former vice president of global marketing at Paramount+ Michael Ribero, effective August 16. The privately-owned Washington Post shared with Axios last November that it had nearly 3 million digital subscriptions. Ribero is tasked with growing that globally. Rather than replace the chief marketing officer role…
The New Yorker has added another piece to its department of puzzles and games. The publisher announced this morning the addition of a new product to the growing section, a daily quiz called Name Drop that presents up to six clues about an unnamed figure whose identity the player must guess. The new quiz joins…
Publishers intent on owning the relationship with their audience might be overlooking a key opportunity: commerce. Hypebeast, an independent fashion publisher that covers the streetwear world, launched retail clothing market HBX in 2012, in the hopes of adding a fresh revenue stream by capitalizing on its readers’ affinity for luxury clothing. In 2020, HBX generated…
Newsweek is banking on healthy and rigorous debate to propel it towards its subscription goals. The 85-year old publisher is developing features around its Debate franchise, which it’s published online in written format since 2019. In April these debates migrated to Newsweek’s first podcast series, hosted by opinion editor Josh Hammer and deputy opinion editor…
More than 30 new creators are joining Bulletin, the platform for independent writers that Facebook initially discussed in March and debuted last month. Each creator on Bulletin has a standalone website under their own brand, and they can customize the color palette, logo and name of their publications, as well as customizing their articles with…
As a company founded by four Olympians, it should come as no surprise that the sports media brand Togethxr has oriented much of its most anticipated new content around the upcoming Olympic Games in Tokyo. And given the early appetite from advertisers, expectations are high. The publisher, which launched officially in early March, is using…
This year, partly in response to the gender and racial reckonings of the past several months, a number of the most coveted roles in media have been filled by veteran female journalists, many of them women of color. Women account for more than 40% of newsroom roles but hold only 22% of key leadership roles,…
Playboy is more than crypto-committed. Besides partnering on a number of non-fungible token digital art drops in the last few months, it’s set its sights on the broader goals of audience and revenue growth for the brand showing up in the digital world. The lifestyle brand announced its third NFT digital art collaboration today, teaming…
Maven, the publisher behind brands like Sports Illustrated and TheStreet, announced this morning that it is adopting ConnectID, the first-party data solution created by Verizon Media in December, in order to offer audience targeting options to advertisers when third-party cookies disappear. The publisher, which has 120 million monthly users across its media brands, is the…
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