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Social Media Monetization for Publishers

Publications require a community of readers and advertisers to make money. Advertisers need to be able to understand and measure brand interaction to spend money.  Readers on the other hand require good content.  These basic ingredients form the backbone of the majority of publishers:

1) Good content
2) Quality readership base
3) Compelling advertising packages
4) Justifiable ROI

A profitable publication provides their readers with high quality content that they both enjoy and benefit from. The readership that this generates (web traffic) is then converted into direct revenue from advertisers wishing to contact a particular group or demographic that reads the publication in question.

The social community platforms supporting the publishing sector operate under the same principals and apply the same industry standards and practices to ensure that they make money and provide a healthy return for advertisers and publishers alike. In addition to this of course, they must support and enhance the revenue of your offline publications. 

Consider your social community platform as a direct extension of your offline publishing business; it builds the brand equity of your publications, whilst at the same time providing your customers with greater access to your content and your advertisers with additional advertising options and greater measurement of their advertising spend.  As such your social community should be considered as an extension of your brand that provides an integrated media and advertising platform between the online and offline worlds.

As part of an integrated media strategy, the supply chain benefits are clear. By providing online presence in tandem with your offline publications, you can position your titles with a clear differentiator to your competitors. You can also use your combined offline and online presence to negotiate a better rate from your advertisers, giving them a greater reach in terms of readership and clearer measurement of their contact with your readership thanks to your social media platforms.

When you position your Social Media platforms in your normal day to day media sales presentations you have a wider scope for negotiation and a greater potential value proposition for your advertising clients.  Your Social Media platform can help you generate revenue with:

1)    Digital Spend - Direct online advertising on your social media platform only.
2)    Improved customer yield – better deals by offering online & print as a package.
3)    Providing substantiated readership figures for print – Use online reports to substantiate demographics, readership and engagement.
4)    Delivering competitive advantage – Winning an advertisers business by offering an integrated and holistic campaign solution that they can measure.
5)    Offering premium readership products and services.
6)    Using industry techniques such as “arbitrage” and “data correlation” to build revenue

Of course with the additional value of a social community is that your brand is continually active which also servers to promote your offline publication in much the same way as a corporate website with a large volume of traffic promotes the company to which it relates.

Communities based around publications are best suited to niche markets, where content is not readily available through other online sources. Your journalistic expertise in these areas enables you to provide direct value to your customers and engage them in your title on a more regular basis.  If upon evaluation, your current print publications meet the following general criterion then you may benefit from deploying a social community platform.

1)    Your title appeals to an niche market or demographic
2)    You provide quality journalism based around a particular subject matter
3)    Advertisers want to directly contact, sell to or influence your readership base

Consider your social media platform in the same way that you consider your print publication; if you follow the same rules and apply them to your social community platform you will be able to monetize your community easily and build valuable equity into your business by expanding your capabilities and increasing your competitive advantage.

One of the core benefits of social media is that your older content can still generate advertising revenue for you. Unlike a publication where you have a fixed number of pages per issue, when it comes to online, your previous issue content can still generate page views for you all year round, resulting in additional revenue.

Certainly don’t believe the naysayers that are saying that print is dead, it most certainly isn’t and I would hate to think of a day where I couldn’t pick up a newspaper and read it.  Media is certainly changing however, and in order to stay competitive and to help measure and justify an advertisers spend, digital platforms where users are actively engaged with a title, go a long way to substantiating your offerings.

Print publishers are wrestling with how to monetize their digital assets to their full potential. It is clear that when publishers can demonstrate brand engagement with their “Readership Community” rather than simple display advertising, they will most certainly be more appealing to marketing managers that themselves are now required to quantify ROI from their marketing spend.  More on socialmediame.com         

We refer to the process of monetization as making money from your social media investment.  Monetization can be direct revenue from you digital assets or be realized by providing an integrated package that can help ensure that you maximize your revenues by providing a more encompassing solution for advertisers across your supply chain of products and services.

Consider your social community application as you would your current publications; when you have generated significant readership and brand recognition within your sector; it is easy to monetize this network with premium services.  Packages containing paid listings services, rich media advertising options, marketing and sponsorship offerings can be aligned with your print title.

With multiple platforms deployed and the right skills on your team, you can start to benefit from your network. This can be monetized through an advertising network, your user database, network arbitrage (the practice of taking advantage of a price differential) and more advanced advertising solutions such as real time advertising correlation (providing users with relevant advertising based on their behavior).  These technologies deliver real advertising benefits far in advance of simple display and bring significant competitive advantage to any publishing business that needs to compete in the new digital economy.

1) Branded Micro sites

Branded micro sites are the equivalent to “paid supplements”. A micro site is a space that can be populated with an advertiser’s product and service information.  Various packages can be provided to your advertisers in a similar way that you provide paid supplements in your offline publications.  

Advertiser’s packages can be configured to provide a number of pages of content, with larger advertisers taking further pages to showcase particular products and services from their range to your readership.  For example, a micro site for a company like Panasonic may include a cameras page, a computers page, a phones page etc.  This allows a company with a larger product range to purchase larger packages.

Charges can also be applied for updates, managed by you or your digital agency.  The number of datasheet downloads available from the page, images available in each advertiser’s gallery and videos on the page can be developed into advertising packages.

Features of the microsites and functionality are the decision of your company and should be carefully created based on the attributes of each of your titles.

Extra charges can be applied per extra data sheet, image, video, or by requesting that advertisers upgrade their package to the next level.  What is included in each of your packages should be defined based on your market requirements and acceptable price points. Extra charges for updates and premium services should also be applied to ensure you cover update costs.

2) Rich Media Advertising Packages

Video advertising is quickly and easily streamed into your social community. Video advertisements and promotional material can be streamed from every page of your community website.  Rich Media advertising can be combined with premium display advertising positions in any configuration required.  Sponsorship can be charged on a tenancy basis by the month, quarter or year.  Attention needs to be paid between balancing the delivery of the rich media advertising against the comfort of your readership. Certainly intrusive or annoying rich media advertising can detract from your reader’s enjoyment of your title and whilst it may generate revenue in the short term it will usually have the opposite effect over the long term.

3) Display & Contextual Advertising Packages

Display advertising “banners” drive digital publications revenue for volume display advertising: be aware however that display advertising on digital platforms will not, in any way shape or form, replace or compensate for any reduction in print advertising revenue.  There are a number of different models for display advertising that should be considered.

Per Click – The amount an advertiser pays you when they click from your title to their website
Tenancy – A fixed amount an advertiser pays you per week, month or year for a position
CPM – A fixed amount per 1000 times your advertisement is viewed (Impressions)

Display advertising images called “banners” come in standard formats based on industry standards, contextual advertising platforms are also available, such as Google Ad Words and other contextual link platforms.  With some contextual link platforms you can define links such as “Hotels” in your entire site content that link off to advertiser’s web sites.  These can generate a high volume of traffic for advertisers but may detract from your search engine positioning if used excessively.  It is certain that display and contextual advertising needs to be seriously appraised before being applied to any online title. For some publications, less is most certainly more but it is always going to be dictated by the tone of the publication.

4) Advertiser TV

A publication digital TV channel can help to differentiate your community as well as deliver significant value for your advertisers.  There may be a cost of content acquisition or development for a publisher although syndication of third party content may fill some of the capital requirement.  Digital TV deployments can be implemented for a few thousand USD per month and will allow you to provide content based advertising on your site that is normally charged out at a premium by Terrestrial Television networks.  Television advertising rates can be charged in a similar way to banner display advertising with a fixed amount per TVC shown on the network or tenancy rates based on your average readership. 

Companies will often pay to provide content on the TV channel although the normal editorial quality supervision should be applied in a similar way to your publication.  

5) Premium Content Areas (Subscriptions)

The fact that users will pay for quality premium content is the basis of many old world publications that are making the transition to providing charged for online content to their readership base.  Although this is a valid strategy for niche market publications where the readership is focused on the educational, industry or informational value of content assets it may be a high risk strategy for a generic news or industry title.   It may also not be the first element of monetization that you introduce to a social community title; often paid content areas can be seen as a barrier to the volume of subscriptions to your site.

Probably of more worth when considering premium content areas or subscriptions is to combine extra content with enhanced functionality, for example premium subscribers may be able to access market intelligence reports that can often be syndicated or purchased from partners.  Specific applications functionality such as creation of polls, gathering feedback, linking to me and other types of features and functions can be introduced as premium services over the time of the publication when the community has already developed a readership base.

6) Brand Engagement Packages

Brand engagement packages extend your advertising products further by delivering direct brand engagement with your readership.  In exactly the same way that publishers can run print competitions, polls and surveys through offline publications, digital platforms allow a publisher to offer digital surveys, polls, competitions and advergaming (games where users interact with advertisers) online.  The benefit to the advertiser is that they can monitor and measure the direct engagement they have had with each of your readers and that the responses are immediately available to them. 

7) User Generated Content Creation & Syndication

Although not directly generating cash revenue for a digital publication, we feel it’s important to understand how UGC can be used to increase your equity valuation and the number of potential advertising messages you can deliver.

Soliciting user generated content as part of your publication can significantly add to your equity value whilst at the same time increasing your advertising revenue.  Every time a user creates a blog post, a video post, audio content or any other content asset on your platform, they are depositing direct content value into your business.  The larger your content base the greater your search engine footprint – as a result the more advertising impressions, rich media spaces,

TV slots, contextual adverts and brand engagement packages are delivered to your advertisers. 

User generated content has many forms and not all of them may be suitable for your publication. Depending on the terms and conditions applied to your platform however, the valuable content items can be syndicated to other publishers and media providers.  These syndicated content items can contain your advertiser messages depending on the structure of the technology systems that you are using.  Certainly many platforms syndicate content and share advertising revenue, if you are a provider of multiple titles it may be that user generated content can also be shared between titles.  Defining content syndication processes and policies and revenue sharing can be a potential quagmire for the less advanced digital publishers and also requires a significant technology investment.

8) Jobs Advertising

Many jobs sites will provide selected feeds of relevant jobs by industry vertical and will pay a direct fee or performance based fee relevant to the number of CV’s they collect.  Rates and positions can be negotiated with each vendor.

9) Paid Listings & Classifieds

Business listings and classifieds can be charged to your readership base although a publisher needs to balance this against the value deposited by users in the publication by creating this content without charge.  Generally a mixture of free basic listings and classifieds can be supplemented with featured listings & classified packages.

10) Events Marketing & Ticket Sales

 

Many publications run events as a supplement to their direct revenue, or as part of their integrated media offerings.  Providing registration management systems for internal or advertiser events generate direct revenue both as commission on the sale of the ticket and the capital amount held in any relevant clearing account.  Providing a registration system that integrates user event registrations with your community base also allows you to target further events based on past booking history ensuring that your revenues are maximized for ticket sales.

11) Network Arbitrage

Arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price differential between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices.  Arbitrage is used to build a publications user base rapidly whilst at the same time trade links, i.e. purchase inbound readers from advertising networks (links in) and then sell them out for more money than you buy them for click through.  Certainly arbitrage when applied successfully can generate significant cash flow but not without significant risk and capital requirement.  If you engage in network arbitrage then you will undoubtedly requires a significantly experienced company advising you on your conditions or an experienced trader on your team, who should not be too hard to tempt when you can bring relevance to his math :-)

12) Supply Chain Benefit

The supply chain benefit that can be derived from your social community publications are directly related to the data asset that your social community contains.  A company that owns a publishing arm but derives most of the group revenue from events sales is an example.  Similarly if you run Cars.com one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand how the data held within the community database can be leveraged into car sales if you own a garage.  Supply chain benefits only really relate to companies that already have a diversified business or a business that derives a secondary benefit such as e-commerce.

13) E-Commerce

E-Commerce is of course always the most obvious monetization strategy for any company wishing to monetize the value of their content.  Operating a store on your online web “property” and allowing your advertisers to sell products and services online for a commission with the capital held in trust, accruing interest for your company prior to fulfillment by your advertisers can drive significant revenue.  Other models for e-commerce for publishers incorporate selling print subscriptions, online advertising products as per this document, reports, sponsored content and of course merchandising.

14) Affiliate Links

Affiliate marketing is a practice that rewards affiliates for directing traffic or customers to a company’s website or business; it is in effect a monetization of crowd-sourcing. Publishers can use techniques such as search-engine optimization, paid search engine listing, email marketing, and display advertising to drive traffic to a particular product or store.

 

This process means that your company can derive direct revenue through commission for the sale of third party products or services. When your publication has significant traffic or is based in a high yield market, this practice can be particularly profitable.

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