Sustainable news media: 5 short video tutorials


Build a community based on relationships, not a mass audience

Build a community rather than an audience. Intimate relationships with loyal users are more important than having massive numbers of page views or users.

In this video you will learn how to build an online community, deepen the relationship with them, and finally monetize the relationship.

Here are some articles with more and deeper information about the topic:

The common elements of 20 viable news business models

Examples from four continents. These business models work for independent media producing quality news.

This research started when our colleague told us he was worried about the future of quality media. He saw traditional media failing as businesses because they were not responding effectively to the challenge from digital media.

Versión en español

And, as happens at universities, we decided to do a paper to identify viable business models. Ultimately we identified 20 examples of sustainable quality journalism from four regions–Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the US, and Latin America. Then we examined the elements of their business models to see if there were promising paths forward

You can see a summary of some of our research here, in which we found five elements that all of these organizations exhibited.

Why you need to hire your own dedicated salesperson

If you have your own salespeople, you will generate many times more ad revenue than if you depend on ad exchanges or tech platforms to sell ads to you.

You may already have a solid team of journalists and specialists in technology and social media marketing. But that isn’t enough. You need to hire at least one person who specializes in sales of advertising, subscriptions, and other products.

We’re going to discuss why you should do it, who you should hire, and how much to pay the person.

But we can’t afford it

You have a limited budget, so you might think you can’t afford to hire a salesperson. You might not realize that you probably are paying sales commissions of anywhere from 30% to 50% of the revenue from every ad you run on your website.

Versión en español

Who gets that money? Google, Facebook, and other automated advertising intermediaries. They take a cut of every ad. This is revenue you are giving up.

So why not bring all the money in house, with your own salesperson? In the short term it will be a cost. In the longer term, it’s an investment. If you don’t have the cash, run a crowdfunding campaign to bring a person on board. This is the complete blog post about the issue.

How native advertising helps independent news media

Native advertising helps independent media by aligning the values and ethics of advertisers with those of the publisher.

Although publishers sell conventional ad spaces like the platforms, many quality-news sites are offering something different–native advertising. So, in this post I’m going to tell you what’s different about native advertising, how to make mission and monetization work together, and what some of the risks are.

News of a different kind

Native advertising –also known as sponsored content or advertorial (publireportaje in Spanish)– mixes characteristics of editorial content and advertising. It has become a major revenue source for many independent news sites. As described in the Tow Center’s Guide to Native Advertising:

“Native ads take on the appearance of real news stories, and are crafted by people inside news publications who want to create and spread commercial messages that don’t look like traditional advertisements that overtly push product . . . . [T]his practice borrows credibility from the newsroom in order to enhance the value of the ad created for clients.”

The Tow Center, Guide to Native Advertising

The complete blog post is here.

How to avoid the perverse incentives of the ad ecosystem

Independent news media need to know how ad fraud works and the steps they can take to protect their credibility and that of their advertisers.

Lately I have been diving into studies about how the digital advertising ecosystem works. The system is automated, driven by opaque proprietary algorithms. Those algorithms are designed to maximize targeting of ads to individuals’ tastes and behaviors while also minimizing the cost to the advertiser. It looks like an efficient business model. But it hides disinformation.

The winners in this system are the world’s largest search and social media platforms, Google and Facebook. That’s because they have collected the largest databases of user behavior and tastes–billions of users on each platform–and the most sophisticated systems for targeting ads to those users. This efficiency translates into low prices for ads, so the platforms attract more than half of all digital advertising revenue globally.

Here you can read the complete blog post.