The vast majority of people who work in search and digital marketing are unfortunately woefully unaware of the challenges that face large publishing companies. Those that do like Brent D Payne are few and far between, but provide a very different viewpoint on how search works and benefits companies.
There are a number of issues that are specific to large publishing companies. Some of them need to change, and some of them bloggers can really learn from. I’m going to highlight some of these problems and look at what others can take away from big publishers.
Every time the ‘secret cabal’ of publishers and Google is mentioned bloggers throw up their arms and harrumph. There’s good reason for this, but what most bloggers fail to realise is that large publishers spend a lot of time and money on producing quality content. They have had to really adapt their methods of working to try to compete with the ‘instant-ness’ of blogging. The people that are employed aren’t doing it for fun, they are paid and trained journalists. I know some bloggers are also paid journalists that are making a living from it, but for the most part, they aren’t part of a larger organisation that relies on its content. I can write this right now and it makes no difference to my monthly income – I’ll still get paid. But if I was producing content that had the sole purpose of driving people to my site and there was no traditional conversion event, you can be damn sure I’d be writing a lot more and covering my site in ads. Link-bait and multiple page articles ahoy!
Publisher problems
Traditional publishers don’t have a conversion event. The majority of professional blogs do and of course ecommerce sites do. From filling in a contact form to enquire about services that you offer, signing up for membership, subscribing to a newsletter, downloading a file, buying a product to clicking through on an affiliate link. These are all actions that either directly generate revenue for the blogger or ecommerce site or will generate revenue. Traditional publishing companies generally don’t have these conversion events on their site. They rely on display ad revenue.
We all know though that display advertising doesn’t work for either the advertiser or for the publisher – click through rates are terrible, and display ad revenue rates are terrible too. How do large publishers work? There is a team of paid staff on each site, typically consisting of an online editor, deputy editor and a number of staff journalists and contributors. If the site has a corresponding newspaper or magazine then some of the print staff will also spend part of their time on the website. That’s five or six salaries to pay already. On top of the journalistic staff there’s also a sales team – a centrally shared team who have responsibility across a number of sites and magazines and who allocate ad revenue to each site and magazine or paper. That’s another bunch of people who need paying from the revenue from the site. Sitting above all of those people is a publisher and sometimes a group publisher, both of whom need to get paid.
Aside from all of these people there’s a whole raft of central services, IT helpdesk, accounting, marketing, development teams, network operations, recruitment, training, and not to forget the people who make sure we’ve all got enough stationary and are compliant with Health and Safety laws. All of these people need to get paid. How many bloggers have to support all of these people? Now perhaps you can begin to see why publishers are a little protective of their content.
Of course, having all these people to pay makes it really, really hard to make a profit, but it also provides you with sites like The Guardian, The Telegraph, The New York Times, The Tribune, Bikeradar, Total Film and T3.
The simple answer to the revenue issue that traditional publishers face is to charge people for content. But we’re all used to free, so who’s going to pay? I’m not, I’ll just go elsewhere. The other answer is to slim down the teams, and engage people more. Create conversion events, add value to the stories you’re publishing – if you’re reviewing something, tell people where they can buy it, and find the best price for them. Tell your visitors to do something, have a strong call to action.
Traditional publishers have long realised the value of the internet, and in the halcyon days of the web, when revenues were strong, they invested in content management systems that were on the cutting edge. Unfortunately for them, the cutting edge very soon becomes a blunt instrument online, and their amazing systems weren’t able to keep up with what’s needed to ensure you’re at the top of the organic search results for the stories you’re writing. Simultaneously display ad revenues decreased and many publishers were stung by not being able to recoup their investment in the cutting edge. Couple this with the rise in blogging and simple, well designed, and easy to use free content management systems and traditional publishers are in trouble. Turning around the thinking in a large organisation is like steering an oil tanker, it takes a lot of time and is very, very hard. Bloggers and smaller sites however are lithe, simple and often open run on an open source CMS – development costs are minimal and there’s a lot of support out there.
PPC and traditional publishers
Most traditional publishers don’t spend, or don’t spend much on PPC advertising, even for their brand terms. The most recent article I’ve seen advocating PPC spend on brand terms is from Brian Carter at Search Engine Journal. Brian makes some really good points, but for a publisher relying on display ad revenue it’s simply not worth it. Why? Conversion events again. If you rely on display ad revenue, where the CPM is £10, you need the CPC on any terms you’re bidding on to be less than £0.01 if your visitors look at just one page. If your average number of page views per visitor is 7 you could spend £0.07 CPC to break even. How many keyword terms are that cheap, even those for you brand name? You’re better off bidding on your brand name for subscriptions to your paper product – except of course your affiliates will be doing that too, pushing the CPC up.
SEOs, agencies and publishers
This is where the problem lies for publishers. SEOs, SEMs and agencies see large publishers as a great opportunity, and rightly so in many cases. The issue however is that with a reliance on display ad revenue the ROI simply isn’t there for publishers. So while agencies will make recommendations on how to improve onsite and offsite optimisation for natural search, and can spend a long time looking at how to run profitable PPC (based on the keyword terms that generate the highest number of pageviews and cost the least per click) the returns for publishers in a lot of cases quite simply isn’t there. This to a large extent is why you will very rarely see PPC campaigns running for the great content that is there on publishers sites.
Traditional publishers also seem to have not realised that there appears, in my opinion and correct me in the comments if you disagree, a bias towards blogs. In part I think that this may be because freshness of content is easier to determine in a blog structure as compared to a custom CMS. There is some resistance to using content management systems like WordPress or Typepad – one example of the rationale behind this being that the code has not be quality controlled and could lead to vulnerabilities. I have a degree of sympathy with this as a hacked install of an open source CMS could be very damaging to a big publishing website’s brand equity. Remember what happened to the New York Observer’s site? You can still see that they’ve got problems with their Drupal installation.
Learnings
Bloggers and large publishers can learn from each other. Publishers need to look at becoming more lithe and agile with their online properties. Having real accountability for all the staff employed on a given site would force organisation heads to take a long hard look at if a site is truly profitable, or if a site is a vanity play. Using open source platforms could lead to a significant reduction in development costs and an increase in SERP rankings due to the ‘freshness factor’. Bloggers hopefully can understand better the pressures on large publishers, and realise that in fact often they are not competing, they have frequently already won – by dint of simply understanding that they must convert something in order to make money, and bloggers tend to have a tighter rein on their finances.
The ‘secret cabal’ of large publishers and Google meeting is nothing for bloggers to fear, more to celebrate as they can rest assured that they are outperforming old media, large scale publishers in so many areas and they are scared.
Bloggers, keep a tight rein on your finances, stick to doing what you do well and you will continue to succeed. Publishers, keep producing quality content, be realistic in your aspirations for online and learn from smaller, lither organisations and you too will succeed.
Finally, SEOs and SEM agencies, publishers do have money to spend, they are willing to listen to your ideas, suggestions and pay for your reports, but it takes a long, long time to change things in organisations of the scale of most big publishers and time is money. Provide publishers with alternatives to simply increasing page impressions, in order to increase display revenue, work with them on other options that involve creating conversion events and you’ll be onto a winning strategy. Show publishers how they can use their content for diversifying profit lines quickly and reducing reliance on display advertising and you will have happy clients.
Many publishers will have bought and sold several print or online properties that they still hold rights over, they will own some great domain names. Repurpose that old content for online, ensure there are conversion events and then you’ll be able to bring your PPC team in to maximise both parties’ ongoing revenue stream.
Image credit: mfophotos on flickr
Tags: agencies, blogging tips, digital marketing, publishing, search engine optimisation, SEO
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Couldn’t have said it better myself James, fantastic post and a deep and even-handed appraisal of the challenges that both publishers and the agencies vying for their money face.
Looking forward to more content from you…