The Digiday Podcast

As many publishers zero in on consumer revenue strategies and hardened paywalls, HuffPost is taking a different tack."Look, I spent 15 years working at The New York Times, which is a fantastic news organization, and I'm thrilled to see them thriving with a subscription model that restricts access to their product," HuffPost editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "But I think what we're ending up with is a highly unequal news ecosystem in which the wealthiest, most educated, most spoiled-for-choice news consumer are the best served. I would be very worried about a world in which advertiser-supported, free-to-consumer news just went away. I think that would be a tragic loss."Polgreen discussed the diminishing returns of news aggregation, alternative sources of revenue for HuffPost and why news publishers need to think beyond the Trump administration.

Hearst Magazines' properties garner 1 billion video views per month. For its head of video, Zuri Rice, that number (and the more granular "watch time") is almost incidental: "Total watch time is something that we think about, but total watch time, of course, is really tied to volume," she said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "So I think for us it's thinking about, as we're growing, how are people connecting with our video?"As the company's senior vice president of video development and content strategy, Rice also wants to make sure they're publishing everywhere. "Platforms are parts of our audience and parts of the pie," she said. "One might be a place where we are getting more revenue, another might be a place where we're really connecting to the audience. Of course, it's always great when we have places that do both."On YouTube, Hearst counts 20 million subscribers on YouTube across their properties -- which include Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, and Men's Health.Rice joined the podcast to discuss how Facebook's potential for video is down but not out, how the company thinks about its content and the merits of short-form versus long-form video.

The prickly relationship between news publishers and tech platforms appears to be improving. Look no further than recent moves by both Apple and Facebook to pay publishers directly."We are seeing better commercial opportunity coming from the [social media] platforms than we ever have," said Josh Stinchcomb, CRO of The Wall Street Journal and Barron's Group. "We've done a couple of big deals this year with platforms and I think the general environment is one where they are valuing -- or they're being forced to value -- quality journalism and recognize they have to pay for it in some way."Stinchcomb joined the Digiday Podcast to discuss the company's digital ads business as a whole ("growing, absolutely growing"), the importance of its events division and how to convince advertisers that news and brand safety go together.

With over $100 million in outside funding, The Athletic is quickly racking up subscribers, recently crossing the 600,000 mark.Hitting 1 million paying subscribers would put The Athletic in rarefied company: "You're talking about companies like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and a couple of others," said Adam Hansmann, the site's co-founder, on this week's Digiday Podcast. "Being in that kind of rarefied air, we'd feel at that point incredibly secure in the foundation we built. We see 90% engagement weekly during busy sports times. We see 80% of our subscribers renew. Getting to that point, we feel good about the platform's permanence. Long term, valuations concerns in the short term aside, we believe there is a $1 billion company to build here, which might sound crazy. But if you look at The New York Times, with their 4 million digital subscribers, they're a $1 billion publicly traded company.""We have a one of a kind business that we've started," he said. "We're going against every instinct that the industry has had."The Athletic, which now has 500 employees, has its share of detractors, who note the company's path to profitability will be perilous with its penchant for paying top salaries for writers."I think there are 50 million sports fans in the US at least," he said. "The segment of sports fans we're targeting are people that really care. That know the difference between just a headline about a story, 'who won the game,' and the true insight about the teams that you really care about."

Sam Dolnick became the New York Times' mobile editor back when the handheld revolution was only just beginning. "And from there, it kind of shifted to trying to think about how our journalism needs to change." Days after president Trump's inauguration, the paper of record launched The Daily, the blockbuster news podcast that inspired challengers at news organizations including the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Economist, Slate, ABC, and even NPR.The Daily's success also led to The Weekly, a video series that launched on FX and Hulu in June, and is averaging 1.3 million viewers per episode, according to FX. Why FX? Dolnick answers that, and talks about the differences between audio and visual journalism.

For all the hand-wringing about the digital media business, there are several bright spots, ranging from successes in consumer revenue products and wringing licensing fees from tech platforms.That being said, publishers must face the reality that the digital media businesses are likely to be smaller than once imagined, according to Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith, speaking at last week's Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida. "The reality is that the industry is not dying, it's not going extinct, but it's actually just going through a process of slimming down."

Podcasts are trendy now for publishers, but Slate has been doing them for 14 years. Slate now has 25 podcasts that drew 180 million downloads in 2018 and expects to top 200 million downloads this year. Podcasting was 28 percent of Slate's overall business last year, and this year will be half of revenue -- eight figures."The hardest thing to do is to make something that is big," said Slate president Charlie Kammerer at the Digiday Publishing Summit. "There are 100-150 podcasts out that there that are big and then there are hundreds of thousands of podcasts that 8,000 people listen to."Slate makes money from its podcast beyond advertising, using members-only episodes to drive consumer revenue in its Slate Plus program, which boasts 60,000 members.One major challenge ahead for the podcasting world? Discoverability. It turns out that making a stellar podcast doesn't automatically get you listeners.

Chances are you've heard of Business Insider. But how about Insider, full stop? In this week's episode, Insider, Inc. CRO Pete Spande talks about growing the Insider brand that complements Business Insider, balancing subscription revenue with that coming from advertising, and Insider's reasoning behind their recent merger with eMarketer.

Building publishing products is fraught with challenges, as product leaders have to balance various constituencies -- editorial, sales, marketing -- that sometimes have competing goals -- all while keeping users top of mind.“It serves its purpose,” Barton said on this week’s Digiday Podcast. “It allows both sides of the business to be represented. It allows the newsroom to be represented, and for the newsroom to be funded. There are times we want to minimize that, but there are times to say it’s delivering our goal of delivering quality journalism to our consumers and be able to pay for it.”

Two decades ago, The Fader launches as a magazine for up-and-coming music, entering a crowded space with the likes of Rolling Stone, Spin, Vibe, The Source and XXL. Times have changed. Taking a multiplatform approach, joked Fader president and publisher Andy Cohn on this week’s Digiday Podcast, is “that’s the only way for us to stay alive.”