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Affiliate Marketing Publisher Guide for 2021 – All You Need to Know

Everything you’ll need to know from starting out as a publisher to the future of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing’ is a term you’ll hear thrown around a lot in the digital space and yet you may not understand what it actually means. It’s been around for a long while online and has proven to stand the test of time. You may be asking yourself, what is it really? Is it for you? And most importantly, how can you do it well? 

In this Affiliate Marketing Publisher Guide, we’ll cover what affiliate marketing is, how it works, the differences between ‘affiliates’ and ‘merchants’ and the different ways to generate income as an affiliate. We’ll also discuss the future of affiliate marketing, how profitable it can be, and offer you some insider tips to get you started as an affiliate.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing whereby an affiliate  (also known as a publisher) generates awareness and sales for a merchant (also known as a brand or an advertiser) and is subsequently awarded commission for the sales they make.

The way in which they go about creating their sales differs, which we’ll cover later on, but the most important factor in affiliate marketing is that the publisher acts as a middle man between the product or service and the end consumer. 

A publisher may be able to reach audiences in a way that the advertiser couldn’t or wouldn’t achieve alone, generating more sales through the awareness they create. 

Some publishers consider affiliate marketing a passive income stream, as other than the initial set-up, they don’t have to change what they’re doing to begin generating revenue. This is certainly true in some cases, particularly if the publisher already has an engaged and dedicated audience. Having said this, at ShareASale we view affiliate marketing as something that is constantly evolving and therefore there are always new ways to adapt and improve your marketing program to maximize profit for yourself and the merchants you choose to work with.

Essentially, affiliate marketing is a digital form of traditional word of mouth marketing. A merchant creates a valuable product and a publisher tells their friends (followers, visitors, subscribers or email list) about it.

How does it work?

Depending on the type, publishers generally make a recommendation or promote a merchant’s product or service to their own audience, with a particular link to the product page or advertiser website. That link, also known as a deeplink, is specific to the publisher and can be used by the merchant to track the number of clicks and sales their link has generated. The publisher is then paid a fee by the retailer as a reward for creating awareness and assisting in the sale. This fee may be in the form of a fixed payment, or as a percentage of the final sale amount made.

As a first time publisher, you’ll have to join an affiliate network, request to join merchant programs on the network, select products or services to promote and create your own affiliate deeplinks. It may sound complicated, but we can help you with all of that. 

Who is a publisher in affiliate marketing?

In affiliate marketing, there are no restrictions on who a publisher can be. An individual or business of any size who wants to maximze their existing audience or create new revenue streams can become a publisher. Publishers may use a website, blog, social media and other digital networks to encourage sales or traffic to an advertiser’s service or product. 

Essentially, a publisher is running an advertisement for the advertiser, but this ad can be packaged in a range of different ways. 

Different publishers have diverse approaches to speaking with their audience and as such, an advertiser may need a variety of publishers to assist them in communicating to an array of market segments. 

What is a merchant in affiliate marketing?

A merchant is a brand or business with a transactional website, who are looking to reach new audiences through creating partnerships with publishers. Their goal is to create more brand reach and ultimately, sales for their business.

Affiliate marketing is often one very valuable part of a larger marketing strategy. Therefore, it’s important for retailers to find suitable and vetted publishers to promote their brand, service or product.

A merchant can also place parameters around how their desired offering can be promoted. For example, only certain images can be used, or selected words that should not be mentioned. Additionally, merchants are able to approve and invite publishers that they would like to work with to their affiliate program. This allows retailers the control to decide where their brand is featured and on which publisher platforms.

The difference between a merchant and a publisher?

Though they both wish to increase sales and maximise profit, the advertiser is the one who owns the brand, product or service. The publisher is a suitable promoter of the product, who creates traffic to the advertiser’s website through consumers clicking on their publisher-specific links. 

What is an affiliate advertiser?

An affiliate network is where all these things come together. You may also hear affiliate networks referred to as an affiliate marketplace. 

At ShareASale we connect driven publishers with relevant brands and businesses. Through our easy-to-use platform, both end users can come to suitable agreements, which in turn create long-standing and mutually beneficial partnerships.

Networks such as ours have a dedicated platform where advertisers can notify a wide range of publishers about their available affiliate programs. Publishers can review these programs and available products from many different retailers and decide which could be suitable for their audience.

We assist advertisers to create specific links for the publishers they’re working with and then track all the necessary data to enable both parties to review and analyse their performance in order to make informed decisions going forward.

Different types of affiliate publishers

As previously mentioned, there are different ways for a publisher to approach their affiliate marketing. Often, but not always, a publisher requires a website to begin working with affiliate programs. However, there are now other digital spaces and platforms where affiliate marketing is not only possible but can see a great return on investment. By investment here, we don’t just mean money, it can also mean the time and effort put into creating clickable content. 

Website owners 

This is the most general overall type of affiliate publisher. Webmasters are quite simply website owners. This term can also be used to refer to website creators, who may assist a publisher in creating a site they can use for their marketing efforts. They may place deeplinks on their websites in the form of banner ads, create content and blog pages or form subsequent websites that lead through to an advertiser’s website. 

Search affiliates 

Search affiliates will often employ a further step in their affiliate marketing strategy to garner leads. This can mean using Search Engine Optimization (SEO), creating Google Ads, Facebook Ads and other paid advertising to push their audience into a sales funnel, leading to the advertiser’s product. This method can be very beneficial; however, there are some factors to remember. 

It’s important to note that as a search affiliate, you’ll often incur the advertising cost yourself. Here you’ll need to calculate your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) to ensure you’ll still be making a profit on the payment made to you from the advertiser per sale you create. Don’t get confused with Cost Per Click (CPC) on your ads, as a click may not necessarily convert into a sale and you could lose money if that consumer purchase is not actually made. You should also be aware that some advertisers don’t allow paid ads to their products, as they may compete with their own marketing strategies. 

Bloggers 

Blogging is an excellent and very popular style of affiliate marketing. These days blogs can take many forms and bloggers often have niche audiences who are very dedicated to their content. This is where affiliate marketing can thrive. 

Bloggers create content in which they share their thoughts and opinions. Though over the past few years there has been a large-scale awareness of audiences’ understanding that they are being ‘sold to’, blogging is still seen as a sincere form of online communication. There is a level of trust between a blogger and their audience, which can flow through to an advertiser and their product, given the correct placement. 

As is true across all walks of life, trust is something that is difficult but rewarding to build. This is especially true for brands who are trying to market to an audience who have a level of marketing awareness scarcely seen before. Consumers now want to feel a level of authenticity from the companies they choose to purchase from and having someone they already trust advocate for a brand can bridge that gap toward trust a lot sooner than the advertiser may have been able to achieve alone. 

Voucher Sites 

Vouchers have always been a popular form of marketing. A large portion of consumers are driven by price points and the knowledge that they are receiving an offer or discount can encourage them further to make that all-important sale. 

Voucher sites work with multiple advertisers and consumers to create or push discount codes. Some sites work with their passionate user base providing the site with voucher codes they know work, whereas other sites work with the advertisers directly to use their chosen codes. Some do a combination of both. Most importantly the links the publisher uses to push the consumer through to the site are affiliate links and are tracked. 

This can be very beneficial to an advertiser as some consumers will make purchases from sites over others purely for a financial benefit and having their brand placed on a platform such as this exposes it to these consumers. 

Some advertisers attempt to separate themselves from this style of marketing as they view it as devaluing their brand, which it has the ability to do. Having said this, in some instances using voucher site publishers still increases traffic and awareness as well as pushing up their profit further than it would have been without it. Direction on brand alignment and profitability assessment is something that is very important to think about when working with or as a voucher site. 

Review Sites 

A popular way to become a publisher is to create a review site that is purely focused on reviewing products and brands. As previously mentioned, consumers now have a level of awareness about brands marketing directly to them and instead will look to have their peers provide advice on where they should be spending their money. 

Consumers don’t necessarily need to know the person giving the reviews to view them as valuable in their purchasing decision, though that level of trust certainly does help. Platforms like TripAdvisor and Yelp use this model to power their entire business, so it can be a valuable way to market products. 

As a publisher, creating a review site or simply contributing to a review site can be an extremely profitable way to promote your links to a market that is already willing to make a purchase. If a person is researching reviews for a product or service they’re primed to buy, they are already towards the bottom of the sales funnel and are just hoping for someone to send them in the right direction. 

Email Marketing 

Email marketing has existed for almost as long as email has existed. When Ray Tomlinson invented the email in 1971, we’re sure he didn’t intend for it to be used as a mass marketing system. However, the first-ever email marketing style message was sent out in 1978 and due to the sheer novelty of this type of message, it is said to have subsequently generated $13 million. The rest is history. 

These days consumers are used to being advertised to via email marketing. This is, of course, a double-edged sword. Though people are open to receiving email advertising, it can be difficult to make a cut through the noise. Some publishers and other marketers spend great time and energy building a great email list and nurturing those readers into becoming valuable customers. 

Advertisers may have their own email marketing list already, but accessing a publisher who has developed their own unique list can mean exposing their brand to new customers and potential buyers. 

Social Media 

There is much conversation around affiliate marketing on social media. As the term ‘influencer marketing’ has arisen over the last few years, we have seen growth in the value that this type of publisher can add to the affiliate marketing industry. 

Though in a traditional sense the two differ, this is still a great way for a publisher, influencer or otherwise, to get their affiliate links out in front of their followers. Some social media platforms don’t allow for clickable links to be placed in their content in order to reduce users from leaving their platform. However, there are some social media platforms where publishers can create their own posts or recommend their links on the popular posts of others. We’ve put together this handy guide on where affiliate links can be used across different social media 

Is affiliate marketing profitable for publishers?

In short, there’s no limit to what you can potentially earn as a publisher. However, this doesn’t mean that all publishers will be profitable. 

Some affiliate networks will lead you to believe it’s incredibly simple to be an affiliate marketer. That you’ll simply sign up and be able to quit your day job and make six figures annually, very quickly. While this is certainly possible, at ShareASale we believe there is an art to affiliate marketing, which involves long term strategies.

Although we provide a platform that completely simplifies the affiliate process for publishers and merchants alike, marketing is a skill, which takes time to develop. This is something you should consider when deciding whether or not to become a publisher.

Building an engaged audience takes consideration too, but it’s certainly possible to achieve. Of course, if you already have some form of an established audience, the world is your oyster when it comes to affiliate marketing. With so many advertisers looking to promote their products and work with profitable publishers, there’s bound to be products that will suit your niche. You just have to use an affiliate network like ours to find the right one. 

A great publisher needs to understand their audience and create partnerships that truly benefit the end-user. There’s no point in being a vegan blogger and attempting to partner with a fast-food burger company, it doesn’t align with your intended audience and they will see straight through this. Trust will be lost on all fronts and this benefits no one. 

Will affiliate marketing still work in 2021?

It won’t just work, it’ll thrive. 

In the US alone, affiliate marketing was estimated to be a $6.8 billion industry in 2020. Though the market is constantly evolving and changing, there’s certainly no sign of it slowing down into 2021 and beyond. As the ability to track specific aspects of online transactions is further developed, the industry is set to become even more targeted and the possibilities to turn data into profit will increase. 

We have seen a steadying of users implementing ad blockers in their online behavior lately. However, this does not necessarily mean that cookie disabling, which can impact vital tracking within affiliate marketing, is coming to an end. Instead, we need to find solutions to the ever-changing rules and regulations that browsers subject upon their users.

It’s almost a certainty that we’ll see an increase in voice search. Google, Amazon and other tech giants are focusing on these areas. As such, marketers and publishers creating content compatible with this type of search could see an upturn in sales. To differentiate your content in this space, it’s valuable to consider how people speak a question as opposed to how people type a question. 

Even with popular social media platforms moving toward hiding likes and followers in an effort to remove the perceived social pressures surrounding them, influencer marketing is still on the rise. This shows that consumers are still looking for the kind of advice and guidance when making a purchase that affiliate marketing can provide. 

This also ties into where a particular publisher falls within the customer’s journey. Though in the past the final click in the sale process was rewarded, the future will see affiliates who fit into the earlier stages of the buying process, such as the awareness stage, rewarded more fairly for their efforts. Having said this, it’s important that this influence can be tracked and backed up with data – a section of the industry we’re sure to see developed in 2021 and beyond. 

How to start as an affiliate marketing publisher

To get yourself started it’s best to join an affiliate marketing network, such as ShareASale. Navigating the world of merchants alone can be overwhelming, but with platforms like ours the whole process is completely simplified for you, with plenty of support resources. 

It’s important to consider whether you’ll be building your audience from the ground up or whether you already have an audience you can utilize. If you are starting from scratch, you have a great opportunity to research which niche best suits you and your knowledge base. We advise that you look for areas that are evergreen, rather than trendy topics that might be a flash in the pan. 

Affiliate networks, especially good quality ones, like to see that you are communicating with a specific target audience and in doing so are building an online community. Quality leads are more beneficial as affiliate marketing isn’t only about reaching every corner of the internet. 

If you already have an established audience, then focus on searching for the affiliate programs that best suit you and your readers or viewers. This is a relatively simple process when using a professional platform. For example, ShareASale has a merchant search tool that allows its publishers to filter and search for relevant brands to partner.

Once you have applied to become a publisher and received your approval, this is when the exciting part starts. Through an experienced and supportive affiliate network, you can really hone your craft in the affiliate marketing world; creating exponential growth and passive income for yourself and your chosen advertisers. At ShareASale we try to continuously provide value and feedback to our publishers to help everyone succeed together and we hope to partner with you on this journey.

The post Affiliate Marketing Publisher Guide for 2021 – All You Need to Know appeared first on ShareASale Blog.

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Media Briefing: As student athletes begin signing brand deals, sports publishers want in

This week’s Media Briefing looks at how publishers are starting to create series and new business franchises around student-aged athletes in both high school and college, now that the NCAA is allowing these players to monetize themselves in name, image, and likeness deals.

Student athletes are now available for brand deals and sports media brands are seeing dollar signsPublishers’ Comscore skepticism rises againWith cautious optimism, publishers are placing more safety protocols on large, in-person eventsThe Washington Post is making all employees get vaccinated, digital publishers like Vox Media and Vice and raking in the cash with film and TV series deals, porn is infiltrating news sites’ old posts, and more.

Student athletes are finally available for brand deals and sports media brands are seeing dollar signs

There is a new cohort of public figures that marketers can now incorporate into their sports media budgets for brand deals: student athletes.

On July 1, the NCAA changed a decades-old rule that prevented current and prospective college athletes from making money off of their name, image or likeness (NIL). Now these 16- to 22-year-olds are in a position where they can make money from endorsements and sponsorships — all the while remaining eligible to play for their college teams.

Already, companies like Panini America, a memorabilia and trading card manufacturer, have penned deals with these athletes, such as an agreement with three college quarterbacks, D’Eriq King, Graham Mertz, and Matt Corral, to make branded footballs, helmets and custom prints that can be used in meet and greet signings with the players.

So naturally, where there are advertising dollars being spent, there are publishers playing to win a portion of those budgets. And the strategy they’re taking is to go beyond the branded social media posts that rely solely on the number of followers the players have, but focus on creating shows and franchises that highlight players’ personalities and passions outside of the game.

Team Whistle, for one, is in the process of filming two new shows for its social and CTV platforms that are personality-led by college athletes on both the men’s and women’s teams and focuses on their lives and side hustles off the court and field:

“Put You On” is a show where every episode a new college athlete takes a camera crew through the city or town where their college is located. It is meant to be a behind-the-scenes look into their lives, including where they like to hang out with friends or eat or study, but does not take place on-campus or during games. The second show, “Side Hustle,” also follows one player at a time, but looks at how these student athletes are in the process of monetizing themselves through NIL deals in between classes and practice. It is a spin off of ‘My Hustle,’ which focuses on professional athletes who are creating businesses outside of their sport. 

The two new shows have yet to secure brand deals, according to Dustin Fleischman, svp of brand partnerships at Team Whistle, which means the young talent featured in the episodes will get the exposure, but not yet be paid. Typically once the company sells its shows to advertisers, any featured talent is paid for their appearances between $10,000 and $150,000, depending on their popularity, as a base amount, he said. This will also be the case for the talent on the new shows.

For now, exposure alone is an important element for this young cohort of talent. Team Whistle’s audience of 4.2 billion views per month gives “athletes that traditionally do not have a large platform” a louder online presence, said Fleischman. “[Our] talent knows they need to be brands, which is the same thing with college athletes, and the only way to do that is to get exposure beyond their social handles.”

Some publishers are seeing an even bigger opportunity with young sports talent that goes far beyond the NIL deals that are just now able to happen. 

Overtime Sports spent the past year actively building an entire business that is designed to circumvent the traditional path to a professional sports career — AKA bypass any former or current NCAA restrictions — to establish the earliest possible relationship with the next generation’s Lebron James or Katie Ledecky or Peyton Manning.

Called the Overtime Elite League, the digital sports publisher not only drafted a group of 30 16- to 18-year-olds from all over the world to play basketball together in this new league, but also built an entire 100,000 sq. ft. basketball facility in Atlanta and assembled an accredited high school program for the athletes to finish their degrees while also learning about financial literacy and personal wealth management, according to CRO Rich Calacci. The first season of the Elite League will begin this October.

The idea is to create an alternative path to the NBA where the players are all fairly compensated for their time, Calacci said. Each athlete earns a six-figure salary while playing in the league with an additional signing bonus. If they choose to go to college after graduating from the league, they are given $100,000 in funding to pursue higher education. They are also given disability insurance, equity in Overtime and collective rights to any merchandising of their likeness. The only caveat is that they give up the chance to play basketball as part of the NCAA in college. 

Granted there are significant upfront costs that Overtime has needed to put forth, the upshot for the media company is the ability to create live sports content, something it currently does not license from any of the major sports leagues or colleges, giving it the ability to start competing for ad dollars in that space.

“Brands are all trying to solve the same problem, which is, as younger viewers meaning 18- to 34-year-olds are watching less live television, how do they find a way to engage these viewers in a passion for them, and do that on social media?” said Calacci. 

Not only that, but the 24/7 access to Elite League members gives Overtime an opportunity to create not just sports content, but personality-based lifestyle content with the players as well, giving them the chance to hone their own talent, Calacci said. 

For years publishers have become more and more like talent management companies by either featuring popular creators in their programming or creating their own personalities in-house, like BuzzFeed or Bon Appétit or any publisher with a YouTube business, so this feels like a natural next step for media companies, according to Gabe Gordon, co-founder and managing partner of Reach Agency.

Barstool also announced earlier this month, just days after the NCAA changed its regulations, that it was launching Barstool Athletes, a talent agency for student athletes that will use its owned and operated platforms and social reach to magnify the talent they sign.

“These kids already have two jobs — they’re athletes and they’re students. They don’t have content teams and not all of them are as good at making content. But where they don’t have significant reach [on their own social handles], a publisher can [use] its paid media and existing channels to make [these athletes] have an even bigger [online presence],” said Gordon. “Publishers make a lot of sense from resources, sales, and amplification standpoint.” — Kayleigh Barber

What we’ve heard

“The amount of anxiety that people are feeling, myself included, around returning to close spaces, I think you’re going to see a dip in productivity as people go back into the offices. [Employees] are going to struggle with commuting, they’re going to struggle because how they interact with people has shifted so much, and when you force that environmental constraint, [employees will say], ‘It’s 9 to 5, I’m going home and I’m not looking at that computer again.’”

— A CMO of a digital media agency on concerns about productivity during the return to an office

Publishers’ Comscore skepticism rises again

The rollercoaster ride of 2020 changed a lot about the way publishers sell ads. And those changes have some media executives feeling freshly resentful of Comscore, the perfectly imperfect measurement firm that still plays a pivotal role in how ad buyers allocate their budgets.

With larger portions of digital ad budgets being spent programmatically (and in tighter windows), and as more direct deals focus on first-party data that both buyers and sellers bring to the table, publishers are grousing again about having to write big checks just to be considered for RFPs.

“The days of saying, ‘We’re this big compared to somebody else’ are over,” said an executive at one publisher that uses Comscore. “Now people say, ‘I need 10 million actionable impressions on people who are looking to buy blue jeans.’”

This executive continued, “Today, whenever we get a big RFP, we just go to our programmatic partners, or to Liveramp or The Trade Desk and say, ‘Give us a cap on how many people we have as auto intenders on these kinds of cars’ or whatever it happens to be.”

When Comscore first grew into the leading measurement provider, direct, site-wide deals were much more common, and third-party measurement and tracking firms were few and far between. As programmatic ad selling has grown and matured, there are many more places an ad buyer can go to find information about audiences and which sites they are visiting. “The DSPs know sites better than Comscore does,” said an executive at a second publisher that uses Comscore.

Comscore declined a request for comment on this story. 

That is one of several reasons why traffic measurement has taken a back seat to other initiatives, particularly cross-platform measurement, audience segmentation and activation. 

And it is keeping some prospective publishers from pulling the trigger on becoming customers. “It comes up every month,” one executive said, who asked not to be identified when discussing a prospective business partner. Even though being measured in Comscore helps mid-sized publishers get considered for RFPs —  “It’s critical to get in the door,” that executive said. Those that don’t have sizable direct sales businesses might not get significant value out of paying for measurement, the executive added. 

But like so many media love-hate relationships, publishers still feel like they can’t leave. “I proposed [dropping Comscore] to our audience measurement team recently,” the first executive said, “and they acted like I suggested we jump out the window.” — Max Willens

Numbers to know

$1.7 million: The amount of money the fact-checking media company Snopes raised to fight lawsuits. Legal fees account for about 20-30% of its annual revenue, according to a report by Axios.

$3 billion: The amount of money that will be spent on influencer marketing in 2021, a 33% increase over the previous year.

11%: The percentage of Comscore 50 media companies that give most American internet users an opportunity to manage what kinds of data those sites can collect and use.

<19%: The percentage of The Washington Post’s total workforce that has self-reported themselves as Black as of the publication’s latest workforce demographic report from June 30. This percentage has decreased by about 6% since 2016 when a quarter of the publication’s workforce self-identified as Black.

With cautious optimism, publishers are placing more safety protocols on large in-person events

The Delta variant is here and spreading — but so are in-person events. Media companies are planning to gather thousands of people this fall to try to recover revenue losses from the canceled or postponed events that turned virtual (and oftentimes free) last year when the pandemic was raging.

But in-person events now come with a whole host of challenges that didn’t exist in 2019. More precautions need to be taken to ensure events are safe to attend and instill confidence in attendees to actually show up.

The list of potential safety protocols Group Nine is implementing for in-person events is long, according to Lindsay Leaf, svp of experiential marketing at the digital media company, who plans to start an in-person franchise in September in a location yet to be announced. Among those requirements will be:

COVID testing as well as vaccation and mask mandatesAir filtration systems and temperature checkingQuestionnaires to attendees and contact tracingSanitation stations, capacity reductions and cleaning crews

But the most unexpected one could be “enlisting an infectious disease epidemiologist to provide up-to-date guidance and oversight on flow and event components,” Leaf said. She did not say in what capacity this person advised the executive team and whether this person was a full-time position or contracted.

All of this costs money, however. These extra precautions in light of the pandemic “will add hard costs to our budgets,” Leaf said. The price won’t come from ticket sales. Instead, the company will likely be covered by brand partners “who recognize the importance and necessity of implementing these safety measures,” she said.

Attendance to Group Nine’s larger events is expected to range from 1,000-2,000 people, Leaf said. In total, Group Nine had 530,000 attendees to its virtual events.

While The Atlantic’s events scheduled for this fall will remain mostly virtual, the publisher plans to bring back in-person audiences “for a handful of events,” said Candace Montgomery, svp and gm of AtlanticLIVE. The capacity, of which, will be about 75 people, according to a company spokesperson. All of the virtual and live fall events will be free to stream and attend.

Safety protocols for The Atlantic’s events will mirror its office protocol, which requires all in-person guests to “attest to being fully vaccinated, and to wear masks indoors in accordance with the CDC’s latest recommendations,” Montgomery said. “Things are evolving by the day, and we’ll need to be flexible and ready to keep adjusting as needed.” (The Atlantic’s offices started opening last week to fully vaccinated staff.)

Safety protocols for Forbes events are still under development, specifically around how to manage vaccinations and testing, but the media company is planning to resume in-person events this fall as well with hybrid or virtual components for each event, said Sherry Phillips, chief marketing officer at Forbes. “We are working with third-party vendors that are experts in health and safety,” she said.

Each venue, capacity, location and current local and federal guidelines and mandates have to be taken into consideration when planning events these days, Leaf said, especially while “safety protocols are constantly fluctuating. (The CDC’s official guidance was updated on Tuesday, now recommending wearing masks “in areas with substantial or high transmission” in indoor public settings, despite vaccination status. Cases in the United States have gone up 145% in the last two weeks, with an average of over 63,000 cases as of July 27.)

Publishers’ efforts to protect event attendees from infecting one another largely come down to respecting an honor system. There “is definitely a level of trust when it comes to filling out a questionnaire in the same way there is when we go anywhere in public these days,” Leaf conceded.

And media companies have multiple plans should these in-person affairs need to pivot back to virtual or postpone due to the Delta variant.

Virtual events during the pandemic have attracted an audience, despite the oft-spoken “Zoom fatigue.” The Atlantic says it drew 4.5 million views to its more than 40 virtual events in 2020 — and had 50% more attendees to virtual events than for the whole of 2019. The publisher expects 40% YOY growth in event revenue this year. Last year, Forbes events had over 50,000 registrants for 66 events hosted in the latter half of the year.

What we’ve covered

Now hiring: The FTC seeks ad tech and social media experts as it shifts its approach to investigating data abuses:

Staff from the FTC’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection convened on Tuesday to evaluate research on issues including ad tracking and targeting practices and algorithmic tech. As the industry hunts for clues for how the agency will approach data privacy issues under new, potentially more aggressive leadership, the focus of the event serves as an indicator of how the FTC might steer its enforcement attention toward going forward.

Read more about the changes to the FTC’s research practices here. 

LinkedIn looks to premium publishers as a way to drive subscriber revenue:

Linkedin launched a pilot program last month called LinkedIn Premium News, which gives LinkedIn Premium members greater access to content published by sites that use Piano’s paywall technology.LinkedIn Premium members get five credits every month to unlock paywalled content they discover on LinkedIn and read on publishers’ websites. LinkedIn expects to send the participating publishers a stream of highly qualified leads for their own subscription products.

Read more about LinkedIn’s Premium News pilot here.

How Yahoo is experimenting with platforms and partnerships to grow its audience:

Yahoo is on a mission to drive brand affinity across its portfolio by turning casual readers into fanatics who are willing to spend money with the media company.In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Joanna Lambert, head of consumer at Yahoo, said she wants to reach 900 million monthly, paying users by further enticing them with shoppable videos, online sports betting partnerships, cross-brand content offerings, and more.

Hear more about Yahoo’s audience diversification efforts here.

In some California privacy cases, analytics trackers are in the crosshairs — and violators could be charged by the cookie:

As enforcement letters stream out to advertisers, social media sites, data brokers and ad tech firms from the California Attorney General’s office, it is clear that California Consumer Privacy Act enforcement is not just about data breaches.Multiple lawyers Digiday spoke to say letters companies have received, ask them to provide details about data sharing specifically in relation to their use of cookies and other tracking technologies for ads and analytics. 

Read more about updates to CCPA enforcement here. 

The Financial Times plans to open 2 more U.S. bureaus to target ‘global Americans’:

The UK-based publisher is opening new bureaus in Houston and Hollywood, part of the company’s plans to reach more readers in the U.S. by further investing in the sectors — and the hubs — where American companies are dominant players on a global scale.U.S. readership accounted for over 40% of FT.com’s traffic in the week leading up to Election Day in 2020, Spiegel said — usually, it makes up about a quarter to a third of the website’s audience.

Read more about The FT’s expansion plans here.

What we’re reading

The Washington Post is mandating coronavirus vaccinations for its employees:

The D.C.-based news publisher announced on Tuesday that proof of vaccination will be a condition of employment for all of its staffers ahead of the return to office, which is set for September 13, according to The New York Times. The Post currently employs over 1,000 people and will also require any in-office contractors and guests to show proof of vaccination.

Gannett is feeling bullish about making money on NFTs:

The publisher of USA Today and hundreds of local newspapers and news sites in the U.S. and U.K. sold its first non-fungible token (NFT) for $8,000 last month, the Press Gazette reported. In the Q&A with Gannett’s chief product officer, Kris Barton, he revealed that NFTs pose an opportunity to monetize the coverage of breaking news and historical events by giving consumers a new way to collect that coverage and own a piece of monumental moments.

VidMe was bought by a porn company and now some publishers’ old posts are NSFW: 

The Washington Post and New York Magazine are two publishers that currently have pornography links embedded in old articles from the last decade, Vice reported. The now-defunct video hosting platform Vidme let its old domain expire, so a porn company bought it and now all of the Vidme links redirect to graphic pornography videos, creating a significant problem for publishers. 

Publishers are cashing in on streaming deals:

Working with streaming companies on new series and films is proving to be very lucrative for some digital publishers, The Information reported. Vice Media is expecting its studio business to earn about $750 million in revenue in 2022 from projects like “American Gladiators” for ESPN and “India Predator” for Netflix. Group Nine’s studio business represented nearly 15% of the company’s total revenue in 2020. Vox Media has sold 50 film and TV projects over the past 15 months to Netflix, Amazon and Apple, CNN and HBO.

The post Media Briefing: As student athletes begin signing brand deals, sports publishers want in appeared first on Digiday.

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