Dear Publishers, if you want my subscription dollars (or euros), here is what I expect…
▻https://mondaynote.com/dear-publishers-if-you-want-my-subscription-dollars-or-euros-here-is-wha
Over the last two years, three forces have combined to favor the subscription model: The “Trump Bump,” the growing concern about misinformation and the depletion of the digital advertising business. After years of denial, the ad is finally acknowledged as a blatant failure for the news sector, with all indicators blinking red: prices remain flat, engagement is dwindling, viewability of formats is at its lowest, fraud is rampant, users vote with their ad-blockers, Google and Facebook have sterilized the battlefield (they snatched 84% of the global ad spending last year), and as if that were not enough, the new data privacy regulation concocted by the EU’s bureaucrats will drastically reduce the performance of advertising. While a small fraction of publishers try to reinvent the ad model, the vast majority is still milking the cow, not realizing that its udders now looks like dried apricots.
The biggest concern in news economics is that, over the recent years, the quality of the service — I’m talking about execution — hasn’t improved significantly. I don’t want to go into finger pointing (it will spare me replies to unpleasant emails). But here are examples of weaknesses that should be easy to address: