Today’s guest has a strong background in magazines —offering a fresh perspective on media audience engagement.
Meet Alastair Lewis, CEO of FIPP, the global trade association for media owners. Alastair connects publishers worldwide, helping them expand their reach and innovate in audience engagement. Alastair is a seasoned media leader with over 20 years of experience at Haymarket and Future Publishing and now runs his own consultancy, Quested Consulting, where he’s been helping media companies around the world tackle the biggest challenges.
In this episode, Alastair shares insights on why engagement is crucial for both user experience and monetisation in today’s media landscape, and how focusing on quality content can grow a more loyal, returning audience.
If you are too busy or not a big fan of watching recordings, here is a slightly edited transcript that you can browse through at your convenience:
Francesca Dumas (00:29)
Thank you so much for giving me some of your time today. Would you mind introducing yourself properly, please? And tell me a bit about your experience so far.
Alastair Lewis (00:37)
Not at all. It’s great to be here Francesca and thank you so much for inviting me. My name is Alastair Lewis. My background is and has been in magazines. Particularly I’ve spent 20 years working at Haymarket in the UK and future publishing. And then for the last five years I’ve been running my own consulting business, Quested Consulting. I’ll talk a little bit more as we get into the conversation about some of the projects that I’ve been involved with there, particularly around engagement. But I also, in the last year or so, I’ve taken over as CEO of FIPP, which is the International Trade Association for publishers, media owners all over the world, particularly looking to expand their business and expand their knowledge of what other publishers and other businesses are doing in markets outside of their own. So our tagline is connecting global media and that’s very much what FIPP is all about. My role as CEO is really a kind of concierge service to connect publishers, media owners in different markets around the world.
Francesca Dumas (01:58)
Thank you for that. And I’m particularly excited about this conversation because I think your expertise and your background is a little bit different from some of the ones that we’ve had so far. We’ve talked a lot about news, we’ve talked a lot about hyperlocal, but I don’t think we talk a lot around the magazine side and those kinds of publications. There are so many similarities, but we don’t necessarily always bring them together. So I’m really looking forward to this chat.
What does audience engagement mean to you?
Alastair Lewis (02:36)
It’s a big one to go with first, isn’t it? It’s the key question. And honestly, to me, audience engagement really means monetization. I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot. And fundamentally, I believe that unless you have good audience engagement, positive audience engagement, I think in today’s world, especially, you will struggle to deliver a monetizable business model.
You will struggle to deliver revenues from those readers. And that could apply across a range of different revenue types. But for me, engagement is as much as anything a proxy for an ability to monetize your content.
Which to me it’s pretty important.
Francesca Dumas (03:29)
It’s interesting because I’ve had a lot of conversations where people find it very difficult to link audience engagement with that bottom line. It’s a really complex cycle.
What was your original view of audience engagement? Has it changed at all?
Alastair Lewis (03:52)
Well, funnily enough, when I first started working in media, which was in a year that started with a one not a two so quite a long time ago and frankly, not quite pre internet, but, certainly pre the web as we know it today, and selling in print, I sold advertising.
And I remember distinctly one of the lines that we used to kind of churn out all the time to our advertisers was, obviously we can’t guarantee response.
This is slightly different. This isn’t audience engagement but talking about advertising that was placed in print magazines in those days, which were essentially a broadcast medium.
You published the magazine, you printed the magazine, you distributed it, sent it out to newsstands and indeed to subscribers. But you didn’t really have any indication of to what extent that magazine was being read, which articles were being read, which articles people were spending longer on than others.
Unless, (and obviously we did conduct reader surveys, and that was very important to gain an understanding) but it was always such a key facet that the advertisers had to essentially trust in us that their adverts were going to reach the right audience, and know clearly they wanted to engage that audience to respond to whatever call to action it was that those advertisers had.
So in the last 10, 15 years and with the advent of digital, obviously that flips, and we now have so many ways that, from both an advertising, but also obviously then, content perspective, the data that we’re able to get insights on and analyse from our audience, from their user journeys, which articles they’re clicking on, how much time they’re spending on those articles, and all of the other great metrics that are available to us, actually start to enable us to be able to go so much deeper in understanding user journeys.
And if you can understand those user journeys and you know where people have been, and are likely to go, then you can start to, and obviously we can measure response through clicks and activity on advertising and that whole world of kind of smoke and mirrors, is, which is where we were, disappears.
There it’s a far more transparent marketplace. It’s a far more direct relationship. And actually, that then puts the onus on us, as content producers and publishers, to really get to the bottom of understanding what is going to engage our audiences best. What is going to have them spend longer, have them coming back to our sites, to our pages, to our articles and of course, we therefore know that those users, those people that are returning more often, those people that are engaging more deeply with our content are going to be those users that are more likely to become paying users.
Whether that’s a subscription, whether it’s an engagement on an advert or an e-commerce affiliate link, whatever the revenue model is, having a higher engaged percentage of users will result in a higher revenue. So that’s really why for me, engagement becomes a proxy for improved monetization.
Francesca Dumas (08:05)
That’s so interesting. We’ve gone from talking about, you know, a world where it was almost six cents, but do we know what our readers want, what is going on? And then, we sell our six cents to this world, to a world where, we can track what’s going on. We are expected to track what’s going on. And in some sense, it makes it harder and easier to sell to those advertisers.
That relationship with the advertisers has changed so much. Have you got any comments on that side? It must look so different to what it used to be.
Alastair Lewis (08:37)
Believe me that there have been times in my careers in more recent times when I wished I could have a slightly less transparent picture than we have, or wish that we could be back in the days of saying I can’t guarantee you response when an advertiser can come straight back and say well, we’ve only had x volume of clicks and or, an x percent of click through rate and therefore the revenue is down but ultimately that’s a great problem to have.
That’s a great place to be in, because that’s what drives quality.
And I really believe that another reason that engagement is so important is because of that link with monetization and improved user experience. Then focusing on engagement, focusing on those metrics that are going to increase the likelihood of return of users, of longer time in that article, means that we’re hopefully only really driving quality up.
And we have seen the earlier days of digital publishing, and until relatively recently, I think we have seen and I’ve certainly been involved, in digital businesses that have been really driven by a drive for scale, and reach, and high volume of numbers, and an audience, which with a sort of more programmatic model worked pretty well and delivered some decent revenues based on scale. But I think often that came at a cost in terms of quality.
And I think that what we’re seeing in the more recent times, that certainly, the last five years or so, is hastened by the drive for publishers to have a much clearer picture of their first party data to not be so reliant on third party cookies. Painful many of those conversations have been, and painful though some of the decisions that as publishers and businesses we have had to take, I think that in the medium to long term, the impact on quality is only positive.
And will only continue to be positive in terms of producing better quality, probably lower volume overall, but better quality of content. And that in turn hopefully gives us better routes to monetize that, and to continue growing businesses.
Francesca Dumas (11:02)
It’s interesting, there are ways of doing it. You’re either going down the scale route or you’re going down the quality route. And that also has a massive impact on trust with our brands, depending on where you go.
There is a whole conversation around, the aims of this engagement and what it looks like if you are going down the scale route or the quality. The engagement part is so crucial to that, to understand how it’s impacting the rest of the business. And that was one of my questions.
In your experience, what aims does audience engagement strategies tend to deliver on most?
Alastair Lewis (12:19)
Well, I think first and foremost, the aims that it’s hitting are enabling you to produce better targeted content. If you are working to improve your engagement metrics, then you are going to be improving the quality of your content.
You’re going to be growing your returning audience. You’re going to be hopefully achieving your strategic goals of building a loyal and engaged audience. It’s something that actually, it’s interesting to look at the difference between magazines and newspapers in this space.
Traditionally, many magazines, not all, but many magazines have been born, have always been probably indexed higher for engagement in that way because they’ve tended to be special interest niche areas.
If I’m into travel, I will engage with/ buy a travel magazine, and I will undoubtedly spend longer reading that content whether that’s digitally or in print, than I might a selection of news articles that I’ve got sort of passing interest in and that are, as we used to say, tomorrow’s chip paper or whatever.
But I think that that’s an area that magazines have actually been able to really kind of lead the way in terms of understanding, really understanding their audiences and really being able to carve those niches and create content and experiences that engage those users.
And it’s something that we’ve always done in terms of directing and commissioning the types of content that we know are going to resonate best with our audiences.
Francesca Dumas (14:29)
Let’s maybe talk a tiny bit about measurement, because it might look quite different when you look at the news brands compared to magazines. How should we be measuring this engagement in your opinion?
Alastair Lewis (14:47)
It’s a great question because my opinion is to try and keep it as simple as possible. There are so many metrics, there are so many, you know, and you can have very complicated algorithms and models that look at recency and frequency and volume of content.
You can make all sorts of ratios based on time on site and depth of read. Ultimately for me, a user is engaged if they are, spending a better amount of time on that article and returning to the site. So the key metrics for me are returning users.
So I would look at, particularly in a news environment, is this user coming back to my site more than once a week, more than four times in a month.
And if they are, and actually if it’s twice a week, eight times a month, then I’m pretty confident that those are my most loyal users, and those are the people that I want to really be focusing on in terms of how I capitalise, by either a subscription model or whatever revenue that is.
The first metric I would look at, is definitely kind of loyalty returning uses within a period. The second is time on time within the article. It’s relatively simple and I know that there are more sophisticated and deeper ways of measuring that. And I would always be open to look at it.
But fundamentally, if I know that my users, A, are coming back regularly and B, are spending longer on certain types of content than others, then those are the metrics that I’m going to really look at in terms of understanding which content I should be doing more of, what user needs those articles, let’s say, are catering to, and understanding the trends therefore between the content that is tending to engage users for longer, and get them coming back more frequently.
Francesca Dumas (17:21)
And what are the challenges in this and the hurdles that we’re experiencing? Why aren’t we doing it better? What’s stopping brands from engaging better in your opinion?
Alastair Lewis (17:34)
Well, think there’s quite a lot of positive movement in this space.
So I think that we’re doing a lot better than perhaps we were, when everybody was just focused on scale, scale, scale and volume of numbers. But one answer to that question is, we still have a demand for scale.
Most publishers, again, whether in the magazine side of things or the news side of things, it’s the same. Probably the majority of our revenue still today comes from some more of a volume led approach. Largely, that is advertising driven.
And so as editors, as business owners, publishers, product directors, whatever role they are, we continuously have this tension between needing to hit certain scale goals that will in turn deliver certain revenue expectations against sometimes making decisions that will reduce the capacity for scale but in the slightly longer term increase the opportunity for engagement and you know those are difficult decisions to make for publishers, for MDs, for editors, whoever, because fundamentally, our job is to deliver the budget this week, month, year.
And first and foremost, that’s what many of us are going to be measured on, in terms of success criteria. so I think if we can start to build engagement, higher up the sort of strategic vision for a business, and have engagement metrics built into our overall objectives and visions. That will, and does start to impact on the decisions that are then made about which types of content, what platforms, what kind of different opportunities we offer, our audiences in order to get them engaged, and hopefully start to see an improvement in that area.
Francesca Dumas (20:01)
I love that response because I’m hearing it’s a strategy problem. We’re not engaging as well because we’re making decisions based on money. And we’ve had so many different responses to that question. So that is really nice to hear. Maybe let’s talk a little bit more about those strategies. Of course, we need to decide on a strategy. So Have you have you experienced any engagement strategies that you’ve seen that have proven really effective?
Alastair Lewis (20:32)
The Financial Times made a decision about 10 years ago that they were going to put their focus, their emphasis, made a strategic decision to target reaching a million digital subscribers on the FT by… I can’t remember. I’m going to say it was a million by 2020, let’s say. And actually, the FT really stuck to that overall strategic ambition of hitting a million subscribers.
And they worked throughout the business, at all levels of the business. Everybody understood that strategic ambition and everybody understood what their role could be, whether they were journalists, whether they were a designer, whether they were an IT person within the business.
Everybody involved in that business knew very clearly what the ambition was, which was to reach a million digital subscribers.
And therefore, if you know what that strategic imperative, that strategic ambition is, then you can make decisions both big and down to very small that say, yes, well, will this help us to achieve that overall ambition? Yes or no.
And if the answer is not yes, then you have to, cut it or significantly be able to justify why you’re not helping in that ambition.
So, you know, there are, people far better qualified. And it’s in fact, a whole team of people at FT who do a great job in helping other businesses understand and explain what I’ve just described. But ultimately it worked, right?
They hit that target of getting to a million digital subscribers actually way before their deadline. They’re now onto about the third or fourth version of it. And it really is just a very fantastic example of setting out a strategic ambition that then is delivered by everybody in that business, sticking to it, understanding what their role can be in delivering it and, you know, engaging the audience and getting users to come back more frequently to spend longer on their articles, using data to understand which segments of their audience and which types of content delivered that those higher engagement metrics is ultimately what led to their success in delivering that volume of subscribers.
So that’s a very kind of big example and we’re not all the FT and we don’t, you know, the FT has a great opportunity because it is essentially a single brand business, many other companies have a more complicated kind of portfolio approaches, and centralised teams that have to work across different types of product, different types of papers or magazine brands that target different audiences. And it’s not always that easy in all honesty to set a vision like that.
But I would then look at, as an example of engagement, I’d look at some of the much smaller publishers that I’ve been lucky to work with on the program that I’m running with my business partner, Jez Clifford.
We work with 11 local news publishers here in the UK. And everything that we do with that group of publishers is really aimed at helping them to establish their own reader revenue models.
And we know that, as I said at beginning, that reader revenues really are driven by engaged users. So finding ways to grow and improve those engagement metrics are the very best ways to start, to be able to grow and indeed launch a reader revenue strategy.
I would even just use examples of a paper like the Maidenhead Advertiser who has been predominantly print based for the last 120 years of its existence. Have only really started to develop their digital capacity in the last four or five years.
We’ve been working with them for the last couple of years, and just seeing how they have been able to use newsletters actually, as a really good way of engaging their local audience.
So they’ve got a great newsletter called Your Community Matters. It focuses on the kind of hyper local stories even within quite a big area that they cover in Maidenhead and Windsor in the south of England.
They produce a weekly newsletter that just pulls together stories that are really locally based around the communities that they serve.
And that has been tremendous for them in, has gained a lot of traction. They’ve done a really good job at targeting the signups for that newsletter.
Just sort of simple things like attaching the signup for the newsletter to each of the articles as they’re published by promoting the newsletter on other channels and other newsletters. And they’re in a position now where they’ve got several thousand subscribers to that newsletter. They are incredibly loyal.
They have a fantastic 60 % plus open rates and really strong click through rates on those newsletters. And they’re now in a position where that could become the gateway to potentially a paid newsletter opportunity.
It might be something that people would be prepared to pay for. Or actually, it may be that the newsletter is a way into continue to foster to build that engagement with that particular set of users and they become more likely then to subscribe to the broader paywall subscription offer that Maidenhead have got in place.
But what they’re doing, what I really like about it is, that they recognise, well, the open rate is fantastic, and it’s a proxy right? That’s engagement. What better again? What better metric than, say, 60 % of people every week that receive this email are opening it. They’re engaged. You don’t need much more complicated metric than that.
Francesca Dumas (27:45)
It just proves a point that you made at the beginning. You don’t need to be the FT to have a really clear strategy of what you’re trying to aim for. And it sounds like that one hyperlocal example is so good. We’re moving from print to digital. Is that the strategy? How would they describe it? What would it be in their case?
Alastair Lewis (28:12)
Well, the strategy is moving from print to digital. It’s building a digital revenue capacity and capability. The way of doing that is by fundamentally increasing the numbers and the percentage of loyal readers coming back to your site. So, we measure loyal readers as anybody that comes back five times or more within a month to the site.
And then, actually Google today on their news consumer insight tool have three types of users, casual readers who are the sort of fly by night people, that will come and go as they please, loyal readers that return five times or more in a month, and then email readers.
So Google themselves are recognising that traffic generated or the users that are coming to your site, having been led through a newsletter are far and away the most loyal and most engaged segment of users that you will have on your site.
So using those kind of tools, whether it’s Chartbeat, whether it’s the new NCI tool that Google themselves produced by the Google Analytics, but understanding which types of article engage email readers most. That then leads you to be able to commission and plan and produce content on a regular basis that is not led by a flat plan, not led by pages that need to be filled in the newspaper, but that’s actually led by things like user needs.
You can’t make up news, you can’t dictate, you can’t decide what what stories are going to be coming up in the next week. But you can plan around the types of approach, the types of users, and the types of article that you know are going to most likely attract those loyal and email readers. And in doing that, you’re going to put yourself in a much better position to start a reader revenue strategy.
Francesca Dumas – (30:34)
There are the difficulties with large and then the difficulties with small, and they’re very different. And part of it is because, people care about what’s happening in that local area, they’re attached to it.
There’s always an affiliation with something that makes people interact. But in these examples that you’re giving me, how do you see audiences engaging and interacting directly with editorial teams?
It’s so important to understand who that audiences is, what they like. Is there anything that you’ve played with or experienced, where you’ve seen it done really well or potentially really badly? That engaging directly with them piece.
Alastair Lewis (31:23)
Well, funnily enough, I’m going to go back to start with and think about the fact that actually, local newspapers and indeed national newspapers have, I would say, always done this quite well. Think about letters pages. Think about the interaction that it not necessarily two way always, but, you know, that interaction of getting people to write in, to express their opinion, express their view on a particular topic, complain about a topic, praise, whatever it is.
Those kind of letters pages have always been some of the most read and most popular sections within news, local news and others.
So it’s not a new concept, but clearly we’ve got so many more ways now of having that kind of direct interactive.
Relationships between audience and the newsroom effectively, you know, we encourage our cohort of publishers to use really simple tools like Hotjar, to ask questions of their audience, to fundamentally help better understand what they’re getting out of a particular piece of content, where they prefer to see that type of article, which user need or other, that content is fulfilling.
So we’ve seen some great examples of that, and indeed sort of using it to survey an audience. I think we don’t see that there is lots of opportunity for more kind of user generated content on local news sites.
I don’t think that local publishers have really grasped that opportunity yet, if I’m honest. It’s quite an exciting area, particularly actually with the advent of AI. I think there are better ways to moderate it.
I think that generally speaking, people have been a little bit cautious about having all of their readers’ views and opinions published broadly across the site, and have had reasons why they’ve not necessarily always wanted to do that.
But I think that better, quicker, easier moderation tools and ways of presenting and re-presenting that content are a fantastic way to build that community.
It’s so important, and we see it in social media, we see it in Facebook local community pages, and groups, and many of us I’m sure, I’m not the only person today, pretty much the only reason I still have a Facebook account is actually because the local community pages for where I live are a really useful way to know what’s going on in my kind of very hyper local area, of the village that I live in and understand why there’s a traffic jam at 4pm this afternoon or why there was a police car going up and down my street last night, whatever it is, those are actually really important engagements and I think that it’s a development that we will see more of in the weeks and months to come with local publishers starting to find ways to do that better.
There’s no doubt that interactivity in that way, and I come back to local news and to print, I was involved with one of our cohort on a focus group that we ran for.
We had 10 or 15 readers in a room, physically in a room and it was a great opportunity for the newsroom to talk to them directly and understand how they interact with the brand. We had one reader who was a young 18 year old student in the town and she spoke really eloquently about the fact that actually what the paper meant to her, came so much from when she was younger, and her mum would always cut the pictures out when she was featured for her gymnastics or whatever it was, that she had been featuring in.
And when she had a picture in the paper because she’d won her award or reached the final of the competition, her mum still had all those pictures. And I’m sure we’ve all got stories like that from our own history.
I’d love to think that that’s an area again, that within digital space, that as local news publishers we can kind of really start to capitalise on. Because there’s so much opportunity there, and for so many people, one of the reasons for accessing that local paper is to you know, see whether they’ve got a picture of someone scoring a hat-trick in the football match or scoring runs at cricket, or whatever it is.
It’s the first place that you go to, and I think that there’s no more engaging content than frankly than seeing yourself or your friends or family featured in the pages of a paper or magazine or a website that you want to engage with.
Francesca Dumas (37:27)
I agree so much. Obviously on the UGC side, if anyone is listening to this and doesn’t know, that’s what we focus on. It’s one tiny piece of the bigger, bigger engagement piece. But it is that emotional side that gets people act when they care and I think that’s so important. They either care because it’s a need, they either care because it makes them happy. There’s a lot around that motivation that people have.
One of the brands that we’re working with, you’ve just made me think of this instantly, is Farmers Journal, for example, who are also trying to move from this print world to this digital world, but they want to tap into that emotional piece. And a lot of that is through children. And we talk about, we’re aiming for younger audiences. A lot of brands are actually talking about, 30s, really, or maybe 25 is maybe the youngest, because before that they probably can’t pay.
But actually there’s a whole world where we allow those even younger people to engage by uploading their photos, their pictures.
Farmers Journal do a colouring page in their print every week. And then there’s a QR code and people can upload their, you know, and it’s just a page full of children’s colouring in and it’s amazing. And obviously it’s, you’re so proud to be in that. It’s such a nice moment, isn’t it? It’s really emotional.
Maybe on this, we can talk a little bit about trust. Reuter School of Journalism has highlighted, you know, high standards, transparent approach, lack of bias. Fairness in terms of media representation is really important. Do you, have you ever experienced or seen any strategies or examples that have created trust really well, that really use this engagement or ways of attracting new audiences? Is that something that you’ve seen?
Alastair Lewis (39:20)
Well, trust is absolutely fundamental and we will only build successful digital reader revenue models if we gain the trust of our audiences and fundamentally, people are not going to pay unless they trust what they’re reading. It’s a massive issue to overcome, I think, for news generally, globally.
Too many people are getting too much news from sources that are not necessarily as trustworthy as others and delivered through, but delivered through platforms that they do trust.
So social media platforms that perhaps as a user, somebody might trust, but with content that’s being posted from all sorts of nefarious and different channels.
But because it’s delivered through the platform that they trust, they’re taking a certain amount of belief in that. That’s a bit of a tangent, but trust is absolutely key to everything. And actually, you look at in the kind of B2B space and you only need to look at a lot of sort of former magazine publishers, legacy magazine publishers have found great success from building communities, like Farmers Weekly actually, and others by building communities around areas of work, essentially helping people to do their jobs better, helping them to build their careers and providing trustworthy content, trustworthy networks and access to those people that will enable them to do a better job of whatever it is that they’re doing.
And because they’ve built that trust and because they’ve hired really reputable journalists and specialists in that area, those special interests of B2B publishers are able to charge some really fantastic premiums for the content that they’re, and it’s not just for the content, it’s actually for the experience.
So you look at a kind of membership model, you look at the kind of approach that some of those brands are taking, that’s kind of 360 – so you get access to events, to one-on-one opportunities to meet with editors and to meet with specialists in an area.
And the reason, as a user, a consumer, reason that you’re happy to pay 500 pounds, thousand pounds a year, whatever that cost might be, is because fundamentally you trust that, that brand, has your best interests, that understands the area that you’re particularly interested in, professionally or whatever that is and, that they’re able to deliver a set of experiences.
Some of it coming via content, some of it coming through live events, some of it coming through digital, whatever the mix is, it’s all built on trust.
Francesca Dumas (42:52)
There’s an interesting piece that you’re saying. We’ve got clearly a lot to learn from that B2B market in some places. Maybe let’s have a moment to just talk a bit about the tech behind all of this, because on one side, I’m hearing from you, it’s about people, it’s about brand. I’m hearing that we’ve not said it in those words, but in a way, there is a brand piece behind there.
But tech underpins a lot of what we do in this world, and we keep talking about AI. It’s the thing that comes up again and again, even though it’s not new, it’s the cool kid on the block in a sense. What role do you see tech like AI or even data analytics playing in this audience engagement world that we’re living in?
Alastair Lewis (43:38)
It’s absolutely fundamental enabler. Tech is the enabler that allows us. It’s what has taken us from that place right at the beginning where we were selling smoke and mirrors and a lack of response, because we didn’t have the tech to know what our users were doing.
We now do have the tech via analytics and all sorts of other tools to know what our users are doing.
AI means that that’s only going to get deeper and better in terms of the transparency. We’re only going to have improved opportunities to really personalise.
And I think that’s kind of one of the important next steps that we will start to see is, even more personalised content and personalised experiences.
And tech fundamentally enables that to happen.
And good use of that tech also actually builds trust, again, with that audience, with those users, that they do and will trust in that technology to deliver them a better experience.
And as publishers, if we can sit at the centre of that circle of trust, if you like, then we’re going to be putting ourselves in a much better position, business-wise.
Francesca Dumas (45:04)
That’s actually an interesting point of view, that tech is going to enable us to build the trust. Because a lot of people think of AI, maybe, the other way. But actually, you’ve got quite a positive point of view of how we are going to decide to use that tech to get us to that point.
Alastair Lewis (45:24)
So I am a kind of glass half full kind of person. I can clearly see the threats that tech represent as well. And there’s a significant threat. I wouldn’t be doing justice if I didn’t mention the fact that I think that same technology poses a really fundamental threat to many publisher businesses.
If, for example, AI, you know, generative search and answers capability essentially stops referral traffic coming to publisher websites, I think that, that will and could pose a really significant and existential threat to publishers in a much shorter time span than any of us would like to believe.
So there’s no doubt that that threat is real, and it’s there, and we all need to understand how we mitigate, that and what steps we put in place to protect our assets and protect the direct route that we have to our audiences.
That’s really what this is about.
But I also believe that tech is kind of inevitable and the progress of technology is kind of inevitable and therefore, if we’re running businesses, look for the opportunities as much as the threats in that.
And that’s why I think, from an opportunity perspective, it’s an enabler. It’s an enabler to allow us to know more about our audiences and to do a better job of serving them.
Francesca Dumas (47:14)
And moving away from tech for one second, let’s maybe talk about, we always talk about the things that we’ve done right and the great stories, but it’s so nice to also mention the challenges and potentially mistakes that we might have made. I know I’ve made a lot in our journey.
Is there anything where you went, well, that just didn’t work. We tried this and it just, it didn’t hit the nail on the head that time.
Alastair Lewis (47:40)
I mean, one example, working with the cohort of publishers that we do is on paper article approaches. So it made a lot of sense to me and no doubt it makes a lot of sense to many people that, particularly in local news, that rather than pay for a monthly or an annual subscription as a user, I might be better inclined to pay on a single article basis to access that content and then move on.
And we introduced that model on several of the sites that we work with, because we felt that would be potentially a really good way for them to monetise the audience without disenfranchising, if you like, those that couldn’t or didn’t want to buy a subscription.
And I’m sure there’s a combination of factors involved, but honestly that model just hasn’t caught on with users.
It hasn’t really established itself in the way that I fully expected that it would.
As users for some reason, I think we have all been slightly conditioned by the likes of Netflix, Spotify and all of the other kind of monthly subscription and membership products that are out there in the market.
And for some reason, even though much of the logic defies that, as users at the moment, we’re just not seeing people take up that opportunity to buy access to single articles for, 20p a pop or whatever it is.
It may well be something that comes back around and might change in the future as technology improves and as payment gateways improve and make it even more seamless, but at the moment I would use that as one example of a strategy, a plan that we put in place that hasn’t really hit the mark.
Francesca Dumas (50:22)
It’s funny, it’s one of those that like financially makes sense when you look at it, but emotionally users don’t click with it. And I think that happens a lot. Like it’s the same as when you go to the restaurant with your friends, you’re having a great time until the bill comes and everyone’s face slightly drops and that everyone doesn’t like that uncomfortable feeling. There’s a lot that defies logic when it comes to emotions for our users and also for our teams, and how they’re going to approach innovation, everything going on.
And maybe one last question because we have spoken about so much and it’s been so good. Around impact – what is an engagement hack?
That you have either experienced, or for someone coming into engagement for the first time or thinking about doing it, is there anything that you’d recommend they do straight away, like really focus on this? One hack for me.
Alastair Lewis (51:27)
Yeah, I would say that probably the one hack I would use is to perform a kind of audit on a period of your content, let’s say a month’s worth or ideally two months worth of content, to perform what we call a kind of red/ amber/ green exercise, which takes those articles across that period of time.
And it ranks them via whatever metric, just take page views in the first instance, particularly in a news environment, and understand and start to see how many of those, so you might say that anything that gets beneath 1,000 page views, depends obviously on the scale of your business, for the sake of openness, anything beneath 1,000 page views over that period of time is red.
Anything between 1,000 and 3,000 or 5,000 is amber.
And anything that does 5,000 page views or more during that period is green.
You could apply the same methodology using a more engagement metric like time on site. Anything that has more than one minute, anything that has less than one minute is red. Anything that has between one and two minutes time on site is amber. And anything that has more than two minutes time on site is green.
Either way, you will very quickly see that you have a scarily small percentage normally.
A scarily small percentage of those articles that are coming back green, a slightly better percentage that are amber, and far more than you would like to believe that are showing as red.
In other words, what that really helps you, the reason I say this is a hack, is that what that really helps you to immediately see is where you prioritise your effort and where you then start to be able to recognise what links the green articles, the green content, what’s the sort of secret sauce, what’s the link between all of those that do seem to be performing well. And then, and similarly, obviously with the red, and with the red, that’s a great way to actually be able to say, well, you know, maybe we should just stop doing articles about the local bowls tournament or whatever it is, because actually it takes half a day for so-and-so to go and to write that up.
And frankly, if that content is taking more time to produce than having that time spent reading it over that period, then you have to ask yourself whether it’s worth doing.
So it’s a really good way of being able to identify the types of content, the types of approaches that are working and that are not working.
And we’re all operating in teams that don’t have additional resource. We’ve all got to be able to, frankly, prioritise the kinds of efforts that we’re putting out there. So this is a really good way to, as much as to start doing things, but actually to recognise what you should stop doing.
And when you can stop doing two things, that means that you can start doing two new things, which hopefully are going to add to your green for the next month.
Francesca Dumas (55:27)
Is that what you’ve been doing with your consultancy with the different brands? You start off with something a bit like that.
Alastair Lewis (55:32)
That’s one thing that we do with them.
Francesca Dumas (55:38)
It’s something that I feel like I should do with my general work day as well. Yeah. Thank you so much, Alastair, for your time. Such amazing examples. I really enjoyed it!
Alastair Lewis (55:44)
Great, same here.