5 Key Takeaways From Digiday Publishing Summit 2023

Team Jobbio recently travelled to Miami to join the biggest names in publishing at the Digiday Publishing Summit

From the demise of the third party cookie to generative AI’s impact on journalism, the publishing industry has faced a challenging year.

But where there’s challenges, there is opportunity and over the course of the event, the team joined media leaders to hear about growth areas across the sector.

1. Brand safety

The good news is that ad revenue is flowing back into the market but brand safety remains a growing concern and news outlets are resorting to blacklisting certain words and phrases to prevent advertisers from being associated with negative news.

While this reasoning can backfire and exclude key advertisers from pivotal moments, for example advertisers being excluded from coverage of Coco Gauff winning the US Open because they had previously blacklisted the word ‘shot’, Blair Tapper, SVP at The Independent US and Josef Najm, Programmatic and Partnerships Director at Thomson Reuters agreed that the only way to get around this issue is to keep educating advertisers and advertising agencies.

Swapping Dublin for the Digiday Publishing Summit 2023 in Miami

2. Full disclosure

Advertisers are also demanding more transparency surrounding reporting and ROI.

And due to the demise of the third party cookie—30% of users are now choosing cookie-blocking browsers or opting out of sharing their data with third parties—publishers are increasingly resorting to probabilistic modelling to project their audiences based on the minimal first party cookie data they do have.

3. You pay for what you get

Subscriptions continue to be a primary focus with multiple publishers seeking out new ways to yield higher fees per subscriber.

Speaking about the opportunity subscriptions present, Sebastian Tomich, Chief Commercial Officer at The Athletic shared that he believes all media companies should have subscriptions as part of their revenue streams (The Athletic started off as subscriptions-only, amassing 1.2 million subscribers before being bought by The New York Times in 2022 and opening the site up to ad revenue).

4. Swipe up

Social media fragmentation is also a growing concern as Facebook and X (formally Twitter) no longer generate the website traffic they once did. TikTok’s prevalence, particularly among younger audiences, has also presented a unique set of challenges that publishers with limited resources are struggling to manage.

5. Techno logic

When it comes to AI’s immediate impact on editorial content, Charlotte Owen, Editor in Chief at Bustle shared that in her experience, generative AI isn’t a quick fix when it comes to producing content with limited resources.

Instead, she advocated for the use of journalistic ethics and transparency to retain the trust of readers, but did share that AI can help journalists with their research and also provide email templates that are tactful and helpful when breaking bad news to clients.

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