Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

This is according to the latest Digiday+ Research survey of more than 100 publisher professionals.

Digiday’s survey found that the majority of publisher pros are hybrid workers. Specifically, 53% of publishers said they work in their companies’ offices between one and four days per week, on average.

Interestingly, a significant percentage of publisher pros told Digiday that they work in the office zero days per week on average. Nearly a third (31%) said they don’t work in the office at all during an average week.

Digiday’s survey also found that publisher pros are hybrid workers by choice. Fifty-three percent said their companies don’t have a requirement regarding how many days per week they’re expected to work in the office. Publisher pros who are required to work in the office three days per week accounted for the next largest group — at just 18%.

Publisher pros’ choice to work a hybrid schedule makes sense, considering that 76% told Digiday that, given the option, they would prefer to work in an office some of the time and remote some of the time.

More specifically, nearly half of respondents to Digiday’s survey (46%) said they prefer to work remotely most days, but go into an office some days. A smaller but still significant 30% said the opposite — that they prefer to go to an office most days, but work remotely some days.

Notably, only 6% of publisher pros told Digiday they would prefer to work in an office full time.

So, what exactly are the reasons behind publishers’ clear preference for a hybrid work structure?

It turns out health isn’t one of them: Nearly two-thirds of publisher pros (65%) said they disagree somewhat or strongly that they worry about risks to their health when they go into an office, Digiday’s survey found. Nearly half (43%) said they strongly disagree with this.

But seeing coworkers in person is a big driver for publisher pros’ preference to go to the office at least sometimes. A whopping 88% told Digiday that they agree somewhat or strongly that they enjoy seeing their colleagues in real life. And more than half (54%) said they strongly agree they enjoy the opportunity for face time with coworkers.

More than three-quarters of publisher pros (79%) told Digiday that the change of scenery is another reason they prefer some office time in their work schedules. This reason for working from an office turned out to be slightly less definitive than seeing coworkers in person, however. Slightly more than a third of publishers (37%) said they strongly agree they enjoy the change of scenery of heading to an office, while 42% said they only somewhat agree.

On the flip side, a desire to maintain work-life balance is driving the remote portion of publishers’ chosen style of hybrid work. Forty-three percent of publisher pros told Digiday they agree somewhat or strongly that they worry going into the office upsets their work-life balance. Those who said they agree somewhat with this worry accounted for the largest group of respondents, at a full one-quarter.

Publishers appear to be somewhat split on this issue, though: 37% said they disagree somewhat or strongly that they worry working in an office upsets their work-life balance, with 24% disagreeing somewhat.

Unifying the product stacks of two large publishers does not present as an easy undertaking. And however hard McLean and his team had expected it to be, it was harder. And it took longer. After the Dotdash Meredith merger closed in December 2021, the company expected the product integration to be completed by summer 2022. It’s still in the works. The delay ended up contributing to Dotdash Meredith’s year-over-year digital revenue decline in the third quarter.

“The scale and complexity was certainly unlike anything we had ever experienced before,” said McLean. “And so even though we had our best playbook and best estimations in place, we just couldn’t move fast enough.”

One reason for the delay was the scope of the work. When the company previously had to move acquired publications onto its tech stack, it usually only had to concern itself with one publication at a time, and these publications were relatively younger publications without legacy product baggage. Meredith, by contrast, was the home to publications on the other end of the spectrum, publications like People and Entertainment Weekly that cannot just go dark to ease the integration process. In all, the company needed to unify the ad tech powering more than 40 publications.

“We could just turn things off like Brides, Byrdie, Investopedia. You could stop sending emails for a week if the system wasn’t ready; it wasn’t going to break the brand,” said McLean. “People goes live all the time. Entertainment Weekly goes live — like, you can’t just stop the process.”

Another complicating factor was reconciling the publications’ integrations with Google’s publisher ad server, Google Ad Manager. Even though both Dotdash and Meredith used GAM, each side “had unique account strategy management systems. Both had inventory management. Both had targeting systems. And figuring out exactly how to stitch that together was the most complicated,” McLean said.

Eventually, though, the 500-plus-person product development team from the two companies was able to sort out the ins and outs of Meredith’s properties. By October, 95% of the traffic to Meredith’s properties was running through Dotdash’s publishing and ad tech stack.

“We moved over a million pieces of content, migrated or killed about a hundred or two hundred thousand pieces of content in cleanup and then retrained hundreds and hundreds of editors on new CMS systems. It was a very busy year,” he said.

And the work isn’t over. Just last week Dotdash Meredith completed the migration of Eating Well, a food publication that exemplifies the edge cases of what Dotdash Meredith’s product teams have had to deal with. 

“They have really complicated advanced nutrition [content] that most nutrition providers for our recipes wouldn’t even offer. So we had to figure out how to build that whole new capability into the platform, whereas most of the other food brands were pretty standard,” said McLean.

Asked when he expects Dotdash Meredith to be 100% complete with the integration, McLean said, “I’m optimistically thinking we’re going to be done in Q2.”

By then, Dotdash Meredith’s product team may have another technology to integrate into its tech stack: ChatGPT. The company has been outspoken about not using OpenAI’s generative AI tool to produce content, but it is looking at opportunities for ChatGPT to aid its editorial teams responsible for content creation, such as by helping to identify topics for potential coverage.

Asked if that meant integrating ChatGPT into Dotdash Meredith’s content management system, McLean said, “Into the CMS, into helping us figure out where there are content opportunities. But then you have to put your actual human head on and be like, ‘Should the brand write about that even though that is a hole in the market?’ It can help boil that ocean of the internet for us in some really interesting ways.”