Digital Publishing Strategy Evolving for Companies

Digital publishing strategy news: the latest in eCommerce, events, social, and subscriptions

Here’s the thing about digital publishing strategy: It never stands still – especially during this exciting time for the industry – and companies are continually adapting. We’re here to help!

In addition to our best practice posts, case studies, and free handbooks, we also offer news on digital publishing trends, inspired by the headlines of the day. One of our favorite sources for those headlines is Digiday, and this week, they provide several stories of great interest to multiplatform publishers trying to keep up.

Let’s take a look at some recent trending topics in digital publishing strategy news: 

Digital Paywall + Subscriptions 

Subscription pricing strategies and tactics are getting to be like snowflakes: Each one is unique. While we highly recommend contrast pricing, how you execute that is wide open, depending on your product.

The Financial Times – one of the trailblazers of smart subscription plans – uses contrast pricing, and now they’ve added an intriguing wrinkle – a one-month trial subscription for $1. Its current tiers include $335 and $481 annual plans. But Digiday points out, this approach is less about converting subscribers (although that is of course part of it), and more about driving up engagement, which is their prime advertising metric.

eCommerce

Former Times reporter Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs‘ Food52 – a site for home cooks – makes two-thirds of its revenue from product sales, Digiday reports. These products include dishes, totes, and more.

eCommerce is on the table for all niche publishers.

“What I see them doing well is the quality of community content; they focus on the content first and brought in a shopping element, and it feels native,” Skimlinks CEO Alicia Navarro told Lucia Moses. “The big challenge that all merchants have is beating the behemoths, and best thing they can do is beat them with the experience and the exclusivity of the products.”

Events

This one’s in the wheel house for Mequoda Members. One of our core beliefs is that event production is a crucial best practice for any digital publishing strategy capable of integrating it.

Digiday reports that a few legacies, especially in the UK, are emphasizing it more than ever by investing in owned event spaces: Condé Nast with its College of Fashion & Design; Guardian News & Media with its Guardian Space; and Hearst with its Good Housekeeping Institute Cookery School.

WhatsApp

It seems like there’s a new social platform to master every other day. We’ve got you covered on a good number of them. For publishers looking to incorporate WhatsApp, the learning curve is a little steeper right now, Digiday reports, because it involves a lot of labor to sync up eyeballs with WhatsApp’s distribution system.

“Still, for the publishers putting work into WhatsApp, the platform is worth the effort,” Ricardo Bilton writes.

Huffington Post UK Social Media Editor Chris York “said that the click-through rate for WhatsApp alerts is ‘insanely high’ compared to Twitter and even Facebook. While the numbers vary depending on the story, click-through rates for Huffington Post WhatsApp can be as high as 60 percent.’If we had as many people signed up on WhatsApp as on Twitter, that would translate to some massive numbers,’ York said.”

Do you have any digital publishing strategy news to share? We’re always ready to hear the latest, so let us know in the comments!

To read more from this roundup of digital publishing strategy news, visit Digiday.

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