According to Digiday+ research, emerging revenue streams for publishers include programmatic advertising, events, affiliate commerce and selling products. The challenge is publishers are managing these diverse business initiatives in siloed departments, with limited optimization across organizations.

“We’ve seen how many publishers are navigating through so many new challenges, leading to numerous different revenue initiatives to tackle — and the side effect is creating more silos,” said Amit Elisha, general manager of Keystone and vice president of products at Outbrain. “Right now, many publishers do not have a unified view of how to optimize all of their various business initiatives and deliver the best offers to the most appropriate readers.”

Understanding the business costs of publisher silos

Many publishers rely on manual systems to manage business objectives, including subscriptions, e-commerce and ad sales. Siloed departments also lead to internal competition for resources, perhaps most notably site real estate.

“They try to convince other teams why they’re more important than others,” Elisha said, noting that silos often create room for this kind of debate. “Eventually, someone needs to be the arbitrator who makes the decision about who gets the real estate.”

How publishers prioritize KPIs that both compete and interact with each other is more of an art than a science, although data and analytics can offer some clarity. For subscriptions, this could be conversion rates and the lifetime value of retention. For e-commerce, this could be affiliate fees, conversion rates and average order size. On the other end of the spectrum, events bring in revenue through ticket sales and shape reader loyalty.

“I think that the challenge is really finding a common denominator between all of these initiatives because all of them have different business models and publishers need to be able to take them into account,” Elisha said.

Further complicating the picture for publishers, different departments take ownership of different initiatives and business objectives across the organization — leaving no one-size-fits-all solution for improving management systems.

Competing KPIs coupled with existing manual systems also have discernible impacts on readers. For instance, many systems lack needed tools for personalization and are hard-coded to push every offer to every user, even if those offers risk being irrelevant. This creates an overwhelming and even off-putting experience for readers — a hit to the bottom line and a wasted opportunity for publishers.

In an example that ties all this to the physical world, Elisha compares the mismanagement of a home page to a disorganized department store. A shopper may need to buy a shirt, but when they enter the store, they first see a cosmetics department and no signage indicating where the shirts are located. Similarly, publishers are best served by predicting what interests each reader and serving relevant offers as they “come through the door.” In the case of the department store, this may mean positioning pants …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron