Voluntary financial contributions to The Guardian’s free journalism have grown 43% during 2020. Record-breaking traffic to their coverage of the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, climate change and the US election has helped drive revenue.
A 2019 initiative to mandate that agencies in New York had to spend at least half their print and digital advertising budgets on community and ethnic media has helped keep outlets thriving during the pandemic.
Low renewal rates, high churn and below-average membership fees have forced English-language ‘unbreaking the news’ publisher The Correspondent to close
To combat ad blocking rates and prepare for GDPR compliance, Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard created an ad and tracking-free subscription. Almost three years later, the decision is paying off, and could be a blueprint for other publishers.
A feature which blocks resource-intensive ads is being rolled out in the latest version of Google’s Chrome browser. But with publishers largely unaware of the changes, there are concerns that the tech giant has too much power in dictating which ads meet its standards.
We’ve known for a while now that third-party data is being phased out of the ad ecosystem because of growing privacy concerns. But how are publishers leveraging first-party data to get ahead of the trend? And what results are they already getting?
As Facebook prepares for a wider rollout of its News tab, it has agreed licensing deals with mainstream news outlets in the UK. This comes as the UK government has threatened a crackdown on the market dominance of the tech giants.
According to Press Gazette analysis of 16 publicly-listed news companies, all have now recovered from the worst effects of the pandemic which impacted them between March and May this year. Nine months later, several are now in fact more valuable than they were before the Covid-19 crisis began.
According to the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and Deloitte’s latest quarterly Digital Publishers Revenue Index (DPRI), subscription revenues grew strongly, up by a strong 44.9%, reaching £34.5 million.
BuzzFeed’s acquisition of HuffPost comes at a time when digital media companies reliant on scale and advertising revenue are struggling. But founder and CEO Jonah Peretti still believes there’s a sustainable future for free media.
