On the second day of Web Summit 2014, digital native players from Business Insider, Vox Media and Contently gave their thoughts on future models of journalism, media revenue, and more.
The importance of carving out a loyal core audience from the internet’s endless stream was stressed by heads of leading digital media sites at the Web Summit in Dublin today.
L-R: Henry Blodget (Business Insider), Jim Bankoff (Vox Media), David Carr (The New York Times). Courtesy Web Summit
In the morning, Business Insider founder Henry Blodget and Vox CEO Jim Bankoff were grilled by the New York Times’ David Carr over their approaches to content, building an audience, making money, and more.
Blodget said that he was confident that digital players like Business Insider and Vox Media, which includes SBNation, Vox.com, The Verge and more, had figured out the future model of journalism.
Carr asked whether publishers should be worried that their content might up as an adjacency to the business of platforms like Facebook.
Jim Bankoff said that there had to be a business proposition for media brands to thrive on these platforms.
“If there isn’t an economic proposition, ultimately, for companies like ours or the New York Times, then ultimately they’re not going to work. There has to be a consumer proposition, and there has to be a business proposition for the partner.”
However, it is still important for media brands to stay focussed on building a trustworthy relationship with readers, he said.
“People have an affinity for your brand…if they like what they see, they come back,” he said. “They discover you on search, and if they like it, we get them as a customer coming back. They may prefer to navigate to us via Twitter, or via Facebook, but more and more, if they like what they see, they come back. That’s called brand building.”
Blodget agreed that Facebook and other networks are “an incredible source of distribution,” but disputed the idea that people no longer visit homepages directly.
“Homepages are dying? Maybe bad homepages are dying,” he said.
Despite this, he said that the stream effect now means that publishers have to understand that their readers won’t visit their site alone each day.
“When we started, people said ‘you’ve got to figure out how to imprison people on your site.’ Turns out it’s a terrible idea. And if you look at Google, Google made its entire business out of giving you a link that you like, and sending you elsewhere. Really, the whole idea is that the internet is the publication.”
Jim Bankoff said that future media revenues will increasingly flow from native advertising.
“It’s here, and it’s growing. What we’re hearing is that marketers want to act like publishers in the sense that they need to build brands, they need to tell a story, they need to create a mythology around their products. How do they do that? They do that by creating content, and making sure that content finds its audience…that’s what we do well.”
Blodget backed this up, saying that “there is a huge pool of advertising spending,” pointing to the move to programmatic advertising as an attractive proposition for both advertisers and media companies.
Later, Contently founder Shane Snow also talked about possible future revenue models for journalism.
He said that although brands will increasingly compete with media organisations for audiences, they could help save the ‘dying’ journalism model.
Pointing to examples such as Mashable and BuzzFeed, he said that there was opportunity for media to start selling their own technology to marketers and other publishers.
He also predicted that philanthropic brands will increasingly donate to journalism ventures, as people realise the value of good journalism to society.
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