Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

The hires for two global correspondents — one based in Europe, the other in Asia — will be announced soon. In October 2021, the Post said told Digiday that it doubled its climate team to 10 reporters and three editors. In February, it announced further plans to expand and double the team again.

Given the topic spans coverage areas across the newsroom, the number of people covering this beat is now “closer to 40,” said climate and environment editor Zachary Goldfarb.

Goldfarb said the growth of the team is due to climate being “one of the biggest stories of the century… It’s a combination of mission and evidence of how readers respond to that mission.”

The challenge, of course, is continuing to “grow our audience to understand the importance of the climate stories,” Goldfarb added. “We do see a very large audience for climate stories already. And one of the big motives behind this expansion, and especially using all these new formats of storytelling methods, is to bring the story to a much bigger readership.”

The Washington Post declined to share data to support this claim — or provide advertiser figures that would support this expansion. A Post spokesperson said: “This expansion is both a reflection of reader appetite and interest in this coverage as well as the enormity [and] news value of this story.”

Elspeth Rountree, an audience development and social media strategist and consultant, said “data should inform everything… I’m sure [The Post is] looking at numbers and making a bet based on those and what they think is going to make a return.”

In the coming weeks, The Post will also roll out four new editorial initiatives from this team without a sponsor. A new vertical, called Climate Lab, will house data-driven stories, visualizations and interactive features. Three columns are also coming out soon:

A climate advice column and newsletter, so far unnamed, will provide information on how to live a more “green” life and will launch in early 2023

“Hidden Planet” will be written by deputy weather editor Kasha Patel for a so-called light-hearted take on how the planet’s changing and will launch on Nov. 28

“Animalia” by staff writer Dino Grandoni will cover animals, wildlife recovery and discoveries and will launch on Nov. 28

The new columns and features are “more personable” to reach younger people, Goldfarb said. “We’re trying to make sure there’s something for everybody.”

The team’s growth is also part of a strategy Krissah Thompson, managing editor of diversity and inclusion at the Post laid out back in February to produce more visual, data-driven and explanatory stories as well as social media content. In June, an Instagram account was created to house The Post’s climate coverage. That account has more than 35,000 followers, compared to 6.3 million followers for the Post’s main Instagram account.

Ollie Joyce, global chief transformation officer at Mindshare, praised this strategy. “The large majority will likely see [content] in a newsfeed, and the ability to communicate visually and quickly is critical,” he said in an email.

Advertiser support for climate coverage

Last year, publishers were seeing increases in advertiser requests for climate and sustainability content. Back then, Michelle Chong, group director of planning at Fitzco, said that while the ad agency was seeing an increase in media opportunities related to sustainability and climate change, their clients weren’t sending out more RFPs in this category. In an email, she said this hasn’t changed.

However, Fitzco’s research “has consistently shown that environmental issues and sustainability are important topics to younger skewing audiences. The focus on social, along with visual representation of data, aligns with the type of content a younger audience consumes,” she said.

Joyce, on the other hand, said interest in sustainability content from advertisers and consumers “has undeniably trended upwards through 2022.”

However, it remains an increasingly competitive space — to draw both readers’ and advertisers’ attention. Publishers from The New York Times to The 19th have hired for this beat in the past year. Publishers like the FT and Bloomberg have hubs dedicated to climate and sustainability coverage as well.

Marketers are looking for three things when determining where to spend around this category, Joyce said. Among them include higher-income audiences, since “consumer interest in sustainability tends to increase with affluence” and quality content, as “a number of publishers prioritize quantity over quality over the past few years and that was disappointing.”

No doubt a stressful time, this year only seems to have been exacerbated by the uncertainties of the economy and what this will do to consumers’ budgets, which has the potential to upset the amount of revenue media companies can earn off of affiliate commerce.

And yet, some editors are hoping their editorial strategies — honed for upwards of a decade at this point — will be enough to bolster this business. “All we can do is make sure that all of our content is optimized for the people who are ready to spend money,” said Jon Phillips, editor-in-chief of Foundry’s PCWorld and TechHive publications.

That optimization has started to look different for each individual publisher, from changes in editorial calendars and the frequency of article updates, to how products are selected for round-ups. Here’s a look at how publishers have optimized their pre-Black Friday commerce playbooks.

The earlier the better

At Reader’s Digest, the production of gift guides and holiday shopping content begins in mid- to late-August, according to Bryce Gruber, a senior shopping editor at Trusted Media Brands. Aside from small updates or product additions to particularly well performing content, “for the most part, Halloween is when Christmas ends,” she added.

After all that content goes live by the first week of November, Gruber said her focus pivots back to evergreen content, like best pillows, or semi-evergreen articles, like cozy winter items, for the remainder of the fourth quarter. Only one or two people on her team are tasked with staying on top of last-minute deal coverage or adding updates to holiday posts through the rest of the quarter.

Freelance journalist Jill Schildhouse, who writes commerce content for Reader’s Digest, Travel + Leisure, Brides and others, said the end of the third quarter is her busy period when it comes to holiday shopping assignments. “I started getting gift guide assignments in September [and] actually, I think I’m done with all of them now and have been for maybe a week now,” she said in a conversation with Digiday on Tuesday. Still, this year has had fewer holiday assignments than normal, which she chalked up to the folding of a few publications she typically contributed to in years past.

Not all publishers are able to wipe their hands clean of holiday content this early in the quarter, however. 

PCWorld and TechHive, two consumer technology publications from Foundry, will have employees working on both Thanksgiving and Black Friday, like usual, to get all of the deals content published and updated when sales go live. While some U.K.-employees don’t have the holiday off, the U.S.-based team will receive comped days to take off later in the year or next year, Phillips said.

As for Black Friday content, it starts in earnest the first week of November, with articles being refreshed almost daily with new links and information added. But it’s really a “year-round effort,” according to Phillips, to make sure that these posts are updated quarterly and to signal to Google that the websites are still an authority on Black Friday deals in each vertical.

For the New York Post, the addition of Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale in October, as well as several other retail shopping events that cropped up around the same time, changed this year’s editorial calendar quite a bit.

“Having another ‘tier one’ event that came before [Black Friday] definitely shifted things up,” said Jackie Goldstein, vp of commerce at the New York Post. “Suddenly there was another Black Friday moment of sorts, [which] shifted the amount of time that we would have dedicated to some of the Black Friday content.”

The way publishers approached their Q4 commerce strategies this year slightly varied from previous holiday seasons. This is due in part to a flurry of retailers initiating shopping events in October — more than a month before the tentpole shopping holidays of Black Friday and Cyber Monday — but also because consumers had shown early signs that the state of the economy was likely going to change their shopping habits this year.

Future’s CRO Zack Sullivan told Digiday in September that his team pivoted to writing more round-ups of the best value products in any one category versus solely focusing on the top performing and therefore more expensive option.

“Inflation is sort of a double-edged sword. Everyone is looking for deals because they’re really alarmed by increasing consumer prices, so that would suggest this is going to be a great Black Friday. At the same time they have less money to spend,” said Phillips. 

Picking products and the PR problem 

What’s been similar to every other year, however, has been the avalanche of emails pitching products that end up in the inboxes of writers and editors this time of year.

“I get about 400 unsolicited PR pitches a day,” said Schildhouse, and while some of these product pitches have been known to make their way into gift guides, the massive amount of inbounds to sort through is overwhelming in an already busy season.

Both Schildhouse and Gruber launched personal Substack newsletters that are aimed at mitigating the problem. When assigned a gift guide or round-up, the writers will send out a newsletter that includes the parameters for products they’re looking for, such as products that are distributed by Amazon Prime, have more than 500 ratings and an average of four stars or higher (a Reader’s Digest requirement), or are listed on affiliate platforms like Skimlinks.

“Jill Schildhouse’s Call for Pitches” and “Bryce Gruber’s Sharing Opps” have each garnered thousands of PR followers since their launches last year in October and the beginning of 2021, respectively. 

While the New York Post’s commerce team will look at celebrity trends and which products are viral for the season for inspiration, trends found within data are a large part of their strategy this year. Goldstein said her team will look at the highest conversion rates on specific products or brands from previous years’ posts to make decisions about which items are highlighted again this year. 

Playing with pricing models 

At the recommendation of the New York Post’s search team, Goldstein said, “we do our [first round of gift guides] in October, and we don’t really expect much in the way of transactions [during that month],” but it’s necessary to get those articles up in order to achieve a higher search ranking once shoppers are ready to press the buy button. 

Finding a way to monetize that content during the month of October, which is typically down in affiliate commission revenue, is also important, so Goldstein said her team will modify commerce pricing models to a cost-per-click model (CPC) on applicable products. Typically, the NY Post prefers a hybrid model of cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and flat fee pricing the majority of the year, and come November when transactions increase, she said her team will switch back to prioritizing hybrid.

“We do have some shoppers, but I would say [they’re in a] window shopping phase [during October], so we will try to think a little bit more strategically about CPC during [that] phase of gift guides,” Goldstein added. “It’s not a complete must — it’s just something that’s nice to have.”

At TMB, Gruber said she isn’t beholden to finding products based on commission structure. “[Our publisher] wants the edit teams to have genuinely editorial voices, where we’re not beholden to [a] retailer [that] is offering 10 cents more or 1%,” she said. Further she added that a CPC cost structure is typically not priced well enough to support the cost of the content production. 

CPC pricing ranges anywhere from $0.10 to $2 per click, according to a couple sources, but Gruber said that the vast majority of those offers are for pennies, just four to six cents for every click.  

Phillips added that while he works with his company’s affiliate team to understand and optimize pricing models, his editorial team is not told to only select products with one particular pricing model or commission rate. The affiliate team may go in and switch certain product pricing, however, based on performance and time of year. 

“We’re predicting an increase [in Q4 commerce revenue], and I don’t think it’s a market-wide trend that would be driving that. I think it’s because we’re savvier than ever on how to create the content around Black Friday,” said Phillips, who declined to share commerce revenue figures for the year or how much the commerce business contributes to the brands’ total overall revenue.