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
Monetization
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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