Welcome to the age of ‘premium’ publishing
After years of a race for reach many of our biggest mastheads are now touting their ‘premium’ positioning. Mumbrella’s Alex Hayes looks at what they actually mean by premium.
If you follow the trade press (or like me are still on a lot of PR lists and get press releases), then there is an interesting phenomenon which seems to be occurring amongst publishers – the adaptation of the concept of ‘premium’.
In the last few weeks we’ve had News Corp, Fairfax, Pacific Magazines and just yesterday the NRL of all people position themselves as premium publishers. In fact what they seem to mean is they’ve upgraded the user experience on their websites.
Given the rise of fake news, premium is a timely positioning to adopt, giving sales teams a good positioning in market.
And the fact that marketers are starting to wake up to the idea that chucking large chunks of your budget into a programmatic ‘black box’ may not be the wisest move given much publicised issues around audiences, brand safety and unserved or unseen ads also helps.
The Brisbane Times site is a good user experience in large part because there are — literally — no ads. While great for the user, not sure how Fairfax are planning to monetise their shiny new site/s. Given digital revenues are now dropping faster than print revenues for Fairfax and News (latest SMI data) they need to do something to turn this around. Fast. Less, but better, ads sounds great in principle (and is certainly better for users). Not sure how it’s going to work out for them in practice — all depends how much more advertisers are prepared to pay for this so-called premium environment.
Agreed.
Whether they pay more will likely come down to if it delivers better outcomes for the advertisers. However, we need reliable data to prove this, otherwise it will be another empty sales pitch which does nothing to differentiate between publishers making the same claim.
That said, publishers are also rapidly shifting to models that put the audience first, and not advertisers. Just take a look at the ARPUs between a direct consumer and an advertiser, it’s a no-brainer. Now they just need to create something worth paying for!
Brilliant article ALEX
I think Alex needs a bigger photo byline
Ben – I agree entirely it should be at least twice the size.
I didn’t actually upload this one myself – when I do I tend to leave my photo out…
Cheers,
Alex – Mumbrella
Hahah most excellent banter. And good article, thanks Alex
Good point and brisbane times is an ad funded model with no paid subscriptions.