How Forbes and The Daily Beast are consolidating diverse revenue streams to create the highest value audience

By Kayleigh Barber

Publishers have been trying to break out of the business-side silos for years, but not all have been able to effectively execute a reorganization strategy that’s led to meaningful change.

Now, with the increased importance around developing first-party data, some publishers are figuring out how to apply that data across the company. At the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado this week, Forbes and The Daily Beast shared an inside look into how they reorganized their revenue teams to make money more efficiently.

Forbes began its internal restructuring process at the end of 2022, when several revenue teams were moved under the leadership of chief product officer Nina Gould.

Now overseeing everything from product development and design to e-commerce to programmatic and direct advertising sales operations, Gould said during the Digiday Publishing Summit on Tuesday, March 28 that the term “Product Team” is a bit of a misnomer. That’s because underlying all of those different divisions is data insights, the team for which also reports into Gould and is tasked with using first-party data to give each team a better idea about how they can achieve their individual business goals.

“Part of the impetus behind the re-org [and the] continued evolution of my team really was about breaking down silos. And that isn’t just the physical proximity of people; it really is helping them have a more holistic view of the business. What that presents is opportunities,” said Gould.

Before its reorganization, the brands that Forbes would work with in both advertising and commerce capacities would often have different teams controlling different parts of their marketing budgets, so while the client’s affiliate marketing team might not have the budget to spend on commerce integrations, their counterparts could have a programmatic budget available.

“If [our commerce team] not only know who to talk to on [our] programmatic team, but have actually collaborated with them, brainstormed with them, looked at their client books and compared [notes]… a lot of opportunities [come] out of just talking to each other and hearing what other teams are working on,” Gould said.

It’s still early into the reorg, so Gould said there hasn’t been a ton sold through that scenario, but the teams are talking and that’s the most important thing.

Filling out the subscription funnel

The Daily Beast began a similar reorganization a few years ago aimed at breaking down silos between revenue teams, but rather than making lifetime value the central focus across all teams, Katie Pillich, svp of revenue operations, said during her DPS session on Wednesday, March 29 that understanding what a customer is worth on any given day increases her team’s ability to monetize them more thoroughly across all revenue streams.

The ultimate structure of the reorg became focusing on ways to create “known reader” cohorts, which are “consumers that have unique identifiers to them,” Pillich said, and allows the Beast’s team to find the best method for monetization based on how those users interact with content.

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Source:: Digiday