Association of Online Publishers

The innovation revolution: how product development is charting a course to revenue diversification

Date: 07 Mar 2024 , 9:00 - 12:00
Charlotte Street Hotel, London

Our CRUNCH series continues to be supported by our TAB partner Google

As the digital publishing landscape continues to evolve in the wake of the deprecation of third-party cookies, how are digital publishers building the foundations for future success, whilst continuing to diversify their revenue and build out audiences? We joined leading digital publishers and industry experts at AOP CRUNCH this March 7th to hear how they are are leaving the cookie-cutter strategies behind and investing in commercial and editorial product innovation to open up new revenue streams and create better opportunities to engage with their audience.

Bitesize

Communication and education are essential – both for your commercial team and for clients. Publishers are sitting on a wealth of first-party data and insights, with tools that provide a 360-degree view of their audience, but work still needs to be done to ensure people fully understand the value of these tools.

Data is valuable, but the real strength for publishers is the insights that are derived from this. AI could provide new opportunities to turn insights into ‘so what’ moments to inform strategy decisions, particularly when working with clients who are at the beginning of their transformation journey.

Contextual has historically been one of the biggest strengths for digital publishers, and it will continually to be so. However, it’s about re-packaging what’s always been done in a new, tech-enabled way that will excite clients.

Challenge your definition of high-value users. As publishers develop more granular audience segmentation strategies, there are new opportunities to bring together different data sets and create better offerings for clients and for use internally by commercial and editorial teams.

More collaboration is needed across publishers to develop solutions to common challenges, such as sharing insights to develop a better understanding of our audiences and offering the same taxonomy across multiple touch points. However, this needs to be balanced by continuing to lean into our individual strengths and USPs to differentiate the offering from different digital publishers.

Partnerships are everything, and digital publishers need to strengthen relationships with advertisers and agencies. This will help publishers to be in the room as a strategic partner to deliver more effective campaigns, and also to ensure agencies have a better understanding of the tools and solutions available so that they can keep those in mind for the next pitch they’re responding to.