Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

The key details:

Diversity and inclusion in the industry still needs work, according to agency execs.Media companies built for Black audiences discussed their growth, content programming and recently opened creative studios and video production hubs. TikTok announced its first ad revenue share program, TikTok Pulse, for advertisers to appear next to top, verified creators’ videos with the creators receiving half of the resulting revenue.Twitter announced expanded partnerships with publishers like Condé Nast, Essence and Fox Sports, and sports leagues like the WNBA — as well as new deals with Revolt and E! News.

Diversity in the media industry is still a work in progress

The first half of the third day of the NewFronts was dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion and Black-owned media businesses.

The first panel included Deva Bronson, Dentsu Media’s evp and head of brand assurance and publisher-direct investment (digital and print); Sheryl Goldstein, IAB’s evp and chief industry growth officer; Soon Mee Kim, Omnicom Public Relations Group’s chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer; and Gila Wilensky Xaxis’s U.S. president. 

The panelists gave scores on how the industry is doing in terms of diversifying workforces and the industry and making them more inclusive, as well as representing diverse audiences in ad campaigns and content. Scores ranged from C to D ratings.

“I think it’s up to us as agencies to push [our clients] in this regard. That’s why they work with us. That’s why they work with agencies to show them what the trends are in the industry, to be forward-facing, to get them out of their comfort zone,” Wilensky said.

Digitas hosted a panel to spotlight “The Beauty of Blackness,” a new feature-length documentary about Fashion Fair Cosmetics, the first national makeup company for Black women. Available on HBO Max, the film was created by Digitas, Sephora, Vox Creative, Ventureland and Epic Digital. “It is important to tell this story now because our stories have been taken from us, manipulated or used against us,” said Kiana Moore, director of “The Beauty of Blackness.”

Another panel — featuring Goldstein; Paula Castro, Google’s multicultural creative business partner; Johanna Lara, YouTube BrandConnect’s head of sales strategy and programs; and Earnest Pettie, YouTube’s trends insights lead — discussed how marketers can reach diverse communities by working with creators who can speak to those audiences authentically.

“We take a look at who we’re trying to reach based on audience affinities and what would make sense. In addition to taking a look at their views, we look at the historical [trends]— to make sure there’s an accurate, relevant relationship and that the creators that we’re recommending are a brand fit… That starts with the brief,” Lara said.

Insights are also pivotal to “understand what it is the user wants, and how we can actually help their brand partner and really tap into that authenticity factor for the consumers,” Castro said. Analyzing data and experimenting with different creatives is also key, because “what works for a general market audience might not necessarily work for a multicultural audience,” she said. For example, multicultural consumers “over-index on mobile usage,” especially on YouTube, Castro added.

Blavity

Morgan DeBaun, founder and CEO of Blavity, pitched the company’s publisher networks and its five owned and operated media properties. These channels share stories for Black millennials around entrepreneurship, technology, travel, lifestyle, music and entertainment, including flagship title Blavity News. DeBaun noted Blavity’s tech-focused vertical AfroTech’s efforts in the metaverse and NFTs and urged advertisers to support its work in Web3. New programming includes original shows and IP in partnership with TBS and Pinterest, providing branded video opportunities for advertisers, DeBaun said.

Revolt

Hip-hop-focused media company Revolt, founded by Sean “Diddy” Combs and Andy Schuon, told marketers it has 14 projects currently in development for digital and social platforms. Revolt recently opened a production hub to create unscripted shows and a creative content agency called #000000 (“black” in hex color code). During the presentation, Revolt announced a partnership with sports publisher Overtime to create a sports franchise “with a hip-hop lens.” The company also announced its acquisition of digital publisher Rap-Up. In 2021, Revolt added over 100 new video advertisers.

Black Enterprise

Site traffic to Black Enterprise, the 50-year-old business publisher, grew by over 1300% since 2019 to nearly 13 million visitors a month, said deputy digital editor Selena Hill. She shared various programming produced by Black Enterprise, including the “40 Under 40” list and summit, a biweekly video podcast for women entrepreneurs “SistersInc.” and video interview series like “New Norm” and “Hip Hop Enterprise.” Hill also highlighted recent branded content deals with advertisers like Merrill, Hennessy, Prudential and T-Mobile. Black Enterprise sells display and video ads, which can be purchased programmatically.

TikTok

TikTok announced its first ad revenue-sharing program for creators and publishers called TikTok Pulse. The new contextual ad product lets advertisers pay to appear next to the top 4% of all videos on TikTok, in the app’s “For You” feed. Creators and publishers with at least 100,000 followers will be eligible to participate in TikTok Pulse and receive 50% of the revenue from ads running around their videos. The revenue-sharing program presents a new way for creators to make money from their content on the TikTok platform and is supposed to provide advertisers with some peace of mind — thanks to an “inventory filter” that aims to ensure TikTok Pulse ads are running next to verified content.

The top videos change daily, and are determined by “the highest level of brand suitability,” viewer engagement, video views and “creator engagement signals,” said Jiyai “Ray” Cao, TikTok’s managing director, global head of monetization product strategy & operation. TikTok Pulse ads can be bought through TikTok’s Ads Manager platform at a fixed CPM, according to Sandie Hawkins, TikTok’s gm of North America global business solutions. Buyers can use TikTok’s brand safety filter or third-party verification. TikTok Pulse also provides third-party brand viewability and sales lift integration, as well as post campaign audience reporting, Hawkins said. “We’re already seeing strong commitment from the world’s largest brands and agencies, such as IPG Media Brands and OMG,” she added.

TikTok Pulse offers advertisers 12 content categories to place their ads next to videos in the For You feed, including beauty, fashion, TV and movies, auto, pets, gaming and cooking.

More than a billion people (most of whom are millennials and Gen X’ers) globally use TikTok each month, Hawkins said. People on the platform are “spending a movie’s worth of time each day with TikTok,” she added.

In a similar fashion to the NewFronts presentations by Snap and Meta on Tuesday, TikTok’s event for advertisers featured a range of successful creators from the platform, who were brought on stage to discuss their work with brands. Videos featuring TikTok creators are twice as engaging as those without, said Sofia Hernandez, TikTok’s global head of business marketing. Brands that partnered with creators on TikTok saw a 26% lift in brand favorability and a 22% lift in brand recommendations, Hawkins said.

Twitter

Twitter announced it will be the first social platform to test an integration with iSpot, NBCUniversal’s first cross-platform video-certified measurement provider. The partnership aims to offer advertisers who purchase Amplify sponsorships (where brands can play to place ads next to videos from Twitter’s content partners) from NBCUniversal additional insights to better understand the incremental audience generated from their Twitter media campaigns. Views to publisher content for Amplify increased 20% year over year to 227 billion views, said Robin Wheeler, vp of U.S. client solutions at Twitter.

Twitter also announced a new pilot program coming later this year around major global events, such as sports events. The program will allow advertisers to promote and run pre-roll on live event pages featuring real-time highlights. Wheeler also teased live shopping events — currently in beta — will soon be available to brands, with content and commerce from publishers like Condé Nast, NBCU and Hearst.

JP Maheu, vp, Americas at Twitter, said Twitter had 226 million users in the first quarter of 2022, up 16% year over year.

The social media platform has new and extended deals with publishers and sports leagues to reach diverse and fan-based communities:

Revolt will bring music, lifestyle, entertainment, sports and social justice content to Twitter, including hip-hop podcast “Drink Champs,” the Revolt Summit and “Revolt Black News Weekly,” a news show covering issues occurring in Black communities.E! News will debut a Twitter live stream show called “While You Were Streaming,” covering big TV shows and new seasons, such as Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” Disney+’s “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” and Bravo’s “The Real Housewives.” The show will feature host Danielle Robay and rotating guests.FOX Sports will bring in-match previews and live pre-game shows for every FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 and FIFA Women’s World Cup Australia & New Zealand 2023 match to Twitter, available for sponsorships and advertising.

Twitter and Condé Nast announced an expanded multi-year content deal across video, Twitter Spaces (its audio product), Moments and live events (the latter of which was the focus of Condé Nast’s NewFronts presentation on Tuesday.) TJ Adeshola, head of content partnerships at Twitter, said Twitter’s live stream of Monday’s Met Gala drew nearly 8 million views. Highlights from Essence’s events (including the Essence Festival of Culture and the Global Black Economic Forum) and weekly clips from Essence’s digital video series will now be available on Twitter, as well as monthly Spaces produced by Essence on trending news, events and Essence cover stories.The 2022 WNBA season marks the sixth year of the sports league’s partnership with Twitter and will include a slate of 12 live games that people will be able to watch on the social platform. For the first time, the @WNBA account will also regularly host Spaces throughout the season. Content will include polls, player interviews and moments and new franchises. Adeshola said sports video views on Twitter were up 26% year over year in the first quarter of 2022.

Commerce vs. advertising

The key hits:

As publishers go after commerce revenue from affiliate partnerships with brands, advertisers are seeing them less as a brand awareness vehicle and more as another avenue for driving direct sales.Some publishers complain this can lead to less money coming in from certain clients that formerly existed as advertising clients. For smaller clients with lower budgets, being able to secure attribution from those deals is more valuable than splashing out for a brand awareness campaign, while still getting in front of that publication’s audience. 

Commerce is becoming a more established slice in media companies’ revenue pies as part of the ongoing effort to diversify business models. But as publishers form dedicated commerce teams to forge affiliate partnerships with brands and sell products like guaranteed placements or branded reviews, publishers’ ad sales teams are fretting over losing clients to their commerce counterparts. 

During a working group discussion at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colo. — which are held under Chatham House rules, meaning Digiday could share what was said while maintaining the executives’ anonymity — publishers revealed shared angst that some advertisers weren’t renewing ad campaigns because they were scoring significantly cheaper deals for commerce placements at the same publication.

“Has anyone seen their commerce teams sell deals that look like your normal sponsor deals for like a tenth of the price?” said one executive. “You get this other team that has a whole other side of connections, and you look at the overlap between these brands and then you start seeing one deal not renewed. And then you go look at the commerce content they ran in November on Black Friday [and their] biggest performing article made [the company] $4,000 but last year, [that client] bought a $150,000 package for [Black Friday].”

The problem is “hitting a head right now, especially after the pandemic,” thanks to e-commerce skyrocketing and publishers chasing after that revenue, said David Spiegel, a media executive who previously was chief revenue officer of G/O Media and before led sales at Vox Media’s New York Magazine.

“That’s the challenge of having different revenue-driving functions that can satisfy the same partner in different manners,” Spiegel told Digiday in a phone interview. As DTC brands focus on direct-to-consumer sales versus retail placements, this challenge accelerates, he said, because they’re exploring more avenues to place links to products in exchange for a commission fee, giving publishers an opportunity to become a retailer in some regards. 

But that also puts publishers in the position of only being seen as an avenue for generating sales, versus a brand awareness destination. 

Problem 1: Small budgets and client motivations 

Of course, a lot of this issue is going to hinge on the client itself. Some brands have limited budgets, so commerce teams offer cheaper alternatives to large ad buys. Others, however, are seeing an opportunity to get the best of both worlds with the commerce offerings from publishers to get in front of those audiences through a specific product link and spending the rest of their budgets on a splashy experiential campaign or broad social media push.

“It’s certainly a topic of conversation internally for us,” Eve Epstein, svp and general manager of Leaf Group’s home lifestyle brand Hunker, recently said over a video call. “Where I think there is potential for some of that overlap is with some of the smaller DTC brands or independent brands that don’t have huge budgets to begin with [and] tend to be very performance-oriented.” 

These brands either don’t have the luxury of allocating $3 million to a brand awareness campaign or reaching a minimum spend of $50,000 for a branded content deal, but they can afford a guaranteed placement in an editorially curated product round-up post, Epstein said. She would not share the average cost of a guaranteed placement. Brand awareness “is not necessarily something they come to digital publishers for,” she added. “And that is probably where the biggest possibility of that overlap or that conflict could occur.” 

Problem 2: Internal silos limit communication 

But the other factor contributing to this problem comes from teams being siloed within publishers’ and advertisers’ organizations.

“If you have a client where their affiliate marketing business is separate from their brand marketing business, those two channels are relatively separate. Unless you’re commanding significant scale on either side, you’re never going to be able to connect the dots for the client,” said Spiegel. 

The more walls there are on the publisher side, the less communication can occur between teams to discuss the history of relationships with each brand and the rates they previously paid. 

“We have a brand affiliate team and we have an affiliate team that is focused on just affiliate content, and we also work in lockstep with our advertising side of the business to really make sure that we’re not eroding direct deals,” said another exec in the DPS workshop.

Epstein agreed that “aggressive communication” is the most important strategy for avoiding this issue. Once a brand approaches Hunker looking for affiliate opportunities, her team immediately asks the sales team for the brand’s history with Leaf Group. From there, she said understanding both current and prior goals are helpful in explaining to a potential client why a hybrid deal that includes both upper-funnel brand awareness and lower-funnel affiliate opportunities can be mutually beneficial in achieving the client’s goals.

“The more traditional organizations that have not rolled e-commerce or affiliate into the [purview of] chief revenue officer and have it sitting in a separate world are really selling themselves short,” said Spiegel. “They’re setting up a lower-cost model that’s performance-driven and doesn’t offer the benefits that a publisher really brings, which is that combination of brand marketing, awareness, and recommendation to purchase.” — Kayleigh Barber

What we’ve heard

“I find that Reels really cuts off the video that I’ve made and something is wrong with the editing feature.”

— Instagram influencer Katie Sands who is this week’s guest on the Digiday Podcast

The Rundown: The New York Times’ Q1 2022 earnings report

The New York Times is making progress on its goal of accruing at least 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027. This is fortunate because the publisher’s advertising business has hit a rough patch that the company expects to only intensify in the second quarter.

“It was our best start to the year in terms of subscriber growth since the launch of the digital pay model in 2011, except for Q1 2020, which was when the pandemic started. We added 387,000 net new digital-only subscribers in the quarter, including new subscribers to The Athletic after the acquisition on February 1st,” said The New York Times president and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, according to a copy of her prepared remarks released alongside the company’s Q1 2022 earnings report on May 4.

The key details:

Total revenue – $537.4 million, up 14% year over yearSubscription revenue – $372.0 million, up 13% year over yearAdvertising revenue – $116.3 million, up 20% year over yearDigital advertising revenue – $67.0 million, up 13% year over yearDigital-only subscription revenue – $226.8 million, up 26% year over yearTotal paid subscribers – 9.1 million, up from 7.6 million in Q4 2021Digital-only paid subscribers – 8.3 million, up from 6.8 million in Q4 2021

The good: Subscriber growth

Of course, it helps that the news publisher’s purchase of The Athletic added 1.1 million subscribers to give the Times a tally of 9.1 million total subscribers by the end of the first quarter of 2022. The Athletic wasn’t the only boost to the Times’ subscription business, however. 

The Times attributed a year-over-year doubling in its subscriber conversion rates “in large part to continued enhancements to our use of machine learning to determine when to ask non-subscribers to pay,” Kopit Levien said in the prepared remarks. She did not disclose what exactly that conversion rate is, though.

When it comes to subscriber retention, the publisher’s 19 subscriber-only newsletters seem to be playing an important role. The newsletters have helped to lower its subscriber churn rate, with “almost a third” of the Times’ news subscribers receiving at least one of the subscriber-only newsletters, Kopit Levien said.

Finally, the Times is moving forward with its subscription bundling plans. In Q1, the Times added Games subscriptions to its U.S. print subscription product, which “had no impact on subscriber numbers,” per the company’s earnings report. And in the second half of 2022, the Times will add The Athletic “into a broader Times bundle,” according to Kopit Levien. Additionally, the Times made some tweaks to how it markets its subscription bundle in Q1. While Kopit Levien did not detail those adjustments, she said, “As a result of these optimizations, bundle subscriber additions in Q1 were the highest ever for a single quarter.”

The bad: Digital advertising disappointment

The advertising picture in the Times’ earnings report is less rosy. While overall ad revenue and digital ad revenue each increased year over year, the latter amount fell “below our expectations,” Kopit Levien said. She attributed the shortfall to several factors, including tech companies spending less on advertising, advertisers pulling back budgets because of Russia’s war with Ukraine “and a broader climate of macro-economic uncertainty.”

The ugly: Digital advertising outlook

The digital ad slowdown is unlikely to be surprising nor unique to the Times. In light of the Russia-Ukraine war, rising inflation and the ongoing supply-chain challenges, other publishers have privately expressed wariness as to whether the bounce-backs their ad businesses experienced from the second half of 2020 through 2021 would settle down in 2022. It seems their worries are becoming reality — case in point: P&G reduced its overall spending in Q1 — and are unlikely to abate anytime soon, based on the Times’ second-quarter outlook.

The Times projected that its Q2 digital ad revenue will hardly grow and may even shrink. Excluding The Athletic, the publisher forecast its Q2 digital ad revenue to be “flat to down low single-digits,” per its earnings report. Overall, when including The Athletic’s expected 2% to 4% year-over-year digital ad revenue growth, the company is expecting Q2 digital ad revenue inch up by “low single-digits.” — Tim Peterson

Numbers to know

<$10 million: How much money G/O Media is paying to acquire Quartz.

1.9 million: The high end of the range of how many users Twitter overcounted each quarter from Q1 2019 through Q4 2021.

38%: The percentage year-over-year increase in Condé Nast’s digital advertising revenue in 2021.

$10 million: The amount of money raised by crypto publisher Decrypt, which has been spun off from ConsenSys Mesh.

150,000: The number of English-speaking subscribers that Le Monde hopes to have by 2025.

3 questions with The Washington Post’s director of video Micah Gelman

The Washington Post has grown its YouTube channel from 1 million subscribers in 2020 to 2 million as of April 16. Pivotal to The Post’s YouTube growth has been upping its publishing cadence, and its focus on breaking news and live feeds. Its large YouTube audience is also an opportunity for the Post to introduce its brand to viewers on the platform.

“YouTube has become an increasingly important way to reach new audiences — audiences that are not necessarily aware of the Post and coming to the Post directly,” said The Washington Post director of video, Micah Gelman.

Live feeds on The Post’s YouTube channel of Kyiv, Ukraine on Feb. 24 and Feb. 25 resulted in over 11 million views, and the channel gained over 65,000 new subscribers in total over those two days.

The Post’s video team dedicated to breaking news coverage grew by four people in the last year, to a total of 10. Live feeds are hosted by Libby Casey, who was promoted last week to senior news anchor.  The video team overall has 62 people, with nine open positions. Roles were recently added in San Francisco and on the weekend supervising team “to grow our ability to be around the clock,” Gelman said. — Sara Guaglione

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

How did the Post get from 1 million YouTube subscribers in 2020 to 2 million today?

The first million we reached at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and the aftermath of the death of George Floyd. The second million is coming in the middle of the war in Ukraine. News events are big drivers of subscription and viewing. We do see significant spikes when there are major news events. The first million [subscribers] was really driven by our breaking news coverage and driven by the live programming that we do. Live breaking news, and the live special reports that Libby Casey hosts have really allowed us to reach bigger audiences and to add subscribers.

Visual forensics has also been a really key piece of what makes our channel unique. We’ve decided we are going to double down on things that are working — visual forensics is in the process of growing. We just posted six roles in visual forensics across the newsroom, not just in video, to support the high interest in that.

After that first million, why did the Post start to publish videos more often on its YouTube channel — and how do these videos reach viewers if they aren’t looking for videos from the Post in particular?

We’ve tested a lot of different ideas over the years. We’ve looked at the frequency of publishing, and we’ve looked at the types of stories we publish. We settled on a high metabolism, fast publishing, a steady stream of stories, a lot of focus on live, and a lot of focus on our unique stories — and a lot of breaking news, which I think has made our channel very relevant.

We publish maybe 10 stories a day to YouTube. It’s a higher frequency than some of our peers because we are super focused on breaking news. We did test, maybe over a year ago, lowering our publishing cadence to see what the impact would be if we were publishing fewer videos. That didn’t really work. Particularly people who subscribe to our channel were expecting a faster cadence.

What is the Post doing to drive its YouTube audience to the Post’s website to get them to subscribe?

We tell [viewers] while they’re watching where to find the story on the Post website. There’s messaging about how to subscribe on our live events. We are using links associated with videos we publish to drive people to the Post. There is a special subscription offer we make during our live programs, so people can go to the website and we can bring people in that way. [Editor’s note: the offer gives viewers four weeks free access to the Post’s site.] Every video we publish links back to the journalism that generated it. We do measure how many people are coming from YouTube and then subscribing to the Post. As the audience grows on YouTube, the opportunity to bring people back to the Post grows.

What we’ve covered

Platforms, streamers and publishers pitch celebrity- & creator-driven content and measurement tools on NewFronts Day 2:

Roku, Condé Nast and Snap focused on new and returning programming in their pitches to video buyers.Samsung’s advertising division highlighted a new measurement tool, while Meta didn’t announce any new ad products.

Read more about NewFronts Day 2 here.

Inside the evolution of BuzzFeed’s creators program:

BuzzFeed is rebranding its creator program as it eyes fresh opportunities to work with brands and influencers.This year the publisher plans to double the number of creators participating in its program.

Read more about BuzzFeed’s creators program here.

One year after embracing the blockchain, Time has earned more than $10 million in profit:

Fourteen months after launching its first NFT project, Time has sold more than 20,000 individual NFTs.Sixty percent of Time’s NFT sales happened in the secondary market and totaled $50 million.

Read more about Time’s blockchain business here.

How publishers are experimenting with more homepage personalization sections:

The New York Times and The Washington Post are trying new ways to surface content tailored to readers’ interests and behaviors.The efforts are, in part, designed to help the publishers’ subscription businesses.

Read more about publishers’ homepage personalization efforts here.

Fortune moves into wellness coverage under an expansive new financial deal with CTV:

Fortune has formed a new wellness vertical aimed at growing its audience among mid-level managers.The new hub debuted on April 28 and is underwritten by CVS, as part of a larger two-year deal.

Read more about Fortune’s new wellness hub here.

What we’re reading

Vice Media Group is for sale:
After The Information reported that Vice Media Group is looking to sell its studio business, CNBC reported that potential buyers can opt to purchase the whole media company, which would reportedly be VMG’s preference.

Pressure on Spotify’s podcast business:
Spotify’s venture into podcasting is cutting into its profits, and the company hasn’t been forthcoming enough about the revenue it’s reaped in return to satisfy investors, according to Bloomberg.

The waning White House reporter:
The slower, quieter pace of news during the Biden Administration has made the role of White House reporter less alluring, according to Politico.

Inside the shark tank of the New York Post:
The controversial dismissal of the Post’s digital editor-in-chief Michelle Gotthelf provides a kinda Rorschach test for the cutthroat — to the point of misogyny and bullying — work environment at the news publisher, according to The Cut.

Quartz’s and G/O Media’s clashing corporate cultures:
As unlikely a fit as G/O Media and Quartz appear to be, their corporate cultures may clash even more, such as Quartz staffers that have enjoyed the publisher’s flexible remote work policy being forced to work from the office all but six days a month under G/O, according to Adweek.