Ernie Sander, Executive Editor, PaidContent: print advertising and circulation dropping, digital advertising flattening, audiences fragmenting, increasing time spent on social media vs. other content.
On the other hand: tablet and mobile usage soaring, video and mobile advertising growing rapidly, easier than ever to publish and promote content.
Some publishers to watch: Spotify, Maker Studios, Machinima, Gawker, The Awl, BussFeed, Vox Media, The Financial Times
How to monetize digital content: make your content available as widely as possible, for example Netflix decided in 2006/2007 to make itself available on all kinds of devices and over the next few years their audience tripled. Now available on 800 plus devices. Netflix became platform agnostic. Look for selling opportunities in and around the content. For example Moshi Monsters which is a game and social network combined. Game is free and a small percentage pay extra for premium services. 60 million people in 150 countries and 50% of British children have adopted a monster – building an empire. The lesson is that line extensions of your product. Need to anticipate what audience wants next from you is a question publishers should be asking.
Third lesson is that digital can spur print sales. Publishers think that digital with hurt print and vice versa and somethings this is true, but NY Times has shown that can buck this trend. Ad revenue has been crushed in newspapers and in NY Times, for the first time, their circulation revenue was greater than advertising revenue in 2010. So Times put up a metered paywall and now NYT has 450K digital subscribers, or more than a third of its weekday print circulation. One of their pricing plans was weekend print plus digital for half the price of the monthly digital edition. For the first time in 5 years sunday circulation is growing again and print + digital circulation is also growing. As manage the levers of print and digital the Times has shown that they don’t have to move in opposite directions.
