How to monetize content in a privacy-focused future
As privacy laws and practices tighten, and third-party cookies crumble, online news media and brand content producers face an uncertain future for how to measure, monitor and monetize their audiences. But Tameka Kee, deputy managing director of the Advertising Research Foundation’s nonprofit subsidiary CIMM, sees a promising way forward. By building meaningful connections and providing valuable, empowering experiences for audiences, media can sustainably monetize content and thrive in a changing world.
Kate MacArthur: What are the most promising news monetization models that you're seeing emerging?
Tameka Kee: Events. There are slightly more intimate and curated experiences where people get the chance to meet journalists and to meet speakers that they may not have met before. Then there are the big events like a food and wine festival. Those are particularly unique areas of growth for local news, especially because they're a source of community and information. Think of a renewable energy meetup in a town where they're starting to consider whether they should even put EV chargers in, and a local news organization could theoretically bring in someone from Tesla.
MacArthur: How can news organizations demonstrate the value of their content in a way that resonates and encourages audiences to pay for it?
Kee: The organizations that foster a sense of community are able to get people to pay them. It's not about making money from the information you provide. It's about making money from the way that you allow information to empower people and feel more connected. There's also an opportunity in creating moments of respite or enlightenment from the deluge. As a perfect example, The New York Times has subscriptions and ad revenue. It also lets people just pay for the crossword or for the recipes. They're paying for these moments that matter to them and that they deem valuable.
MacArthur: Cookies aren’t ending, but there's a move to get away from them. How should brands adjust?
Kee: Some of it is contextual, and that's understanding the content on the page, but also the context of the situation that the user is in when they're consuming content. There’s also research starting around the mentality that the person is in when they're listening to that content. And you don't need cookies to determine the mindset they’re in. You can use far more information than that to create a profile. You can also do that using opt-in signals, as opposed to signals that you have to opt out of. There are also unified identifiers from companies like ID5, LiveRamp, Trade Desk and TransUnion. And there is a big shift toward adopting these alternative identifiers, because they're a bit more reliable than cookies, and the rise of more privacy-focused, regulation and technology is going to warrant that.
MacArthur: AI is becoming really important. What's the advantage of AI-powered personalization as it relates to monetizing news?
Kee: The first benefit is not about AI personalization. It's literally about content creation. It allows the team to extend the life of an individual piece of content, and then you can monetize that content, and you didn't necessarily have to hire an additional person on the creative team to help you do that. Personalization is a thing. The caveat is it doesn't stand alone on its own. And it also requires engineering support on the news organization’s team. You can't just take ChatGPT and make it work for your news organization. You still need someone who can figure out how to make it work.
MacArthur: How do Europe’s privacy regulations shape how U.S. advertisers build relationships with their audiences and manage their data?
Kee: There are some companies that don't even offer their content in Europe now because of GDPR. There's a big push for a national privacy law in the states, especially from the advertising industry because complying with privacy regulations on a state-by-state basis can be expensive and burdensome for smaller organizations. Moving forward, it's going to come down to companies being able to explicitly articulate to the feds, to the state and to the user what you are doing with this data, who are you sharing it with and how.
“It’s not about making money from the information you provide. It’s about making money from the way that you allow information to empower people and feel more connected.”
MacArthur: How does social media apply in a cookie-less world?
Kee: Studios like Warner Bros. or Paramount have learned how to use social to drive traffic back to their apps. In the past, they wouldn't have wanted to put clips on at all. But now they're like, “We'll put as many short-form snippets of our episodes as possible. When you want to watch the whole thing though, you come back to our app.” That's the way news organizations need to work with social media — using social as a place for discourse, dialogue, laughs, additional content. But you still have to drive traffic back to whatever owned and operated place you have.
MacArthur: People initially saw pivot-to-video as quaint, but now are focusing on video first. How should news organizations approach video, particularly with younger audiences, to maximize engagement and revenue?
Kee: Video is not optional. Your site may not be video-first, but you must always have a video component if you're going to engage or grow your audience moving forward. The easiest thing to do is use AI to create snippets of content that can drive users back to whichever owned and operated environment you have.
← Read previous | Read next → |