Category: In the News

“The first half of the year was nuclear winter — and that was across the board,” said Jim Spanfeller, CEO of G/O Media, citing layoffs and the economic insecurity that came with the start of the coronavirus crisis. 

However, as publishers pivoted events programming to virtual, which began to be accepted as the new normal, they started to gain traction.

For example, G/O Media’s Black news and culture-focused brand The Root shifted The Root 100 and The Root Institute events to virtual in 2020, and the change didn’t deprecate sponsorship revenue compared to previous years. The events were sponsored by Google and Target, respectively.

But generally it wasn’t easy going. Group Nine held fewer events in 2020 compared to 2019, so revenue from that side of the business, mostly from sponsorships, was down year over year. Group Nine wouldn’t share specific numbers, but less events meant less opportunities for sponsors, said Group Nine CRO Geoff Schiller. Many of its events are tied to the entertainment industry, so “the volume dip was driven by entertainment industries’ challenges because of COVID,” Schiller said.

The company does not see the events business getting back on track completely until the industry and the world can safely return to in-person events. “When it does, we can make up for it and intend on again leading in the space,” said a spokesperson.

There were silver-lining plays for some publishers. Time, for example, created “Time100 Talks,” a virtual series spun out of its flagship “Time100” franchise that brings together leaders in different fields to discuss solutions to global problems.

The ‘Talks’ “didn’t exist in March of 2020, but now is a tentpole [that] I don’t see leaving our brand anytime soon,” said Ian Orefice, head of Time Studios. Sponsors for Time100 Talks in 2020 included P&G, State Farm, Citi, Siemens and DBS, among others. Time also partnered with TV networks like ABC, CBS, NBC and Nickelodeon to support its largest franchises. “Person of the Year” and “Kid of the Year” will return to broadcast in 2021, Orefice said.

Forbes says virtual events have allowed the brand to reach more people and drive deeper engagement with its audience. In the second half of 2020, Forbes held 66 events that reached over 50,000 registrants from 188 different countries. Last year was the eighth annual Women’s Summit, which usually hosts up to 500 people. The event pivoted to a free, virtual experience, and 23,000 women registered to attend. 

“It was not just a pivot. We invented a new business, which we fundamentally think is here to stay,” said Jessica Sibley, CRO at Forbes.

At the beginning of the pandemic, virtual events had “a very negative connotation,” said Patrick Garrigan, global head of Bloomberg Live. The team’s first hurdle was to tell sponsors and partners to “bear with us,” and get on board with the idea of virtual events.

“Audiences change, and they were willing to accept this as a meaningful way to connect at this moment,” Garrigan said.

Once the company had a couple of events under its belt though, Bloomberg sold all of its 2020 events inventory by July. “We exceeded our projections in virtual events by nearly 2X,” he said, without giving exact figures.

As 2020 wore on, capabilities, investment and resources improved to provide better events programming to audiences and sponsors alike, publishers interviewed for the story said.

“Sponsors are generally not interested in supporting ‘just another online meeting,’ so brands who have been successful in the past year with online events have invested in reimagining the shape and texture of the programming for virtual delivery,” said W. Joe DeMiero, CEO of experiential agency Hawkeye. “The most successful sponsor integrations we see tend to integrate the sponsor’s brand into the interactive parts of the event.”

Group Nine took the approach of telling sponsors that virtual events could live beyond the slated time and that content from the events could be distributed on different platforms.

“The big question from brands was, ‘If I’m not in the local vicinity of the venue… how am I experiencing it?’” Schiller said. The answer from Group Nine was that content would be distributed and amplified on social platforms, in a similar fashion to the way influencers share content from events with followers to amplify brand integrations. “This is why we try to make earned media such a focal point of our strategy -— brands can drive even more value,” Schiller said.

Many publishers are scaling back to focus on marquee events featuring more sponsors. The Atlantic, for example, is halving its event programming to around 20 events in 2021, that despite drawing 4.5 million views to its virtual events in 2020, and 50% more attendees than for the whole of 2019. 

“Instead of trying to do everything, we are really delivering on the key topics and the content we believe our audience needs most, and delivering those experiences throughout the year,” said Candace Montgomery, general manager of AtlanticLive.

The goal is for the events business to make up 15% of The Atlantic’s overall revenue for 2021, she said. Prior to 2020, events revenue contributed as much as 20% of The Atlantic’s overall revenue.

“Everyone’s business was affected by this drastic change in the world… but we have positive outlooks on how virtual business will support our overall business,” Montgomery said. 

While sticking to predominantly virtual events in the first half of 2020, most publishers said a hybrid of virtual and in-person events will be the new normal for the foreseeable future.

“We are never going to think of a live in-person event as a live in-person event anymore,” Spanfeller said. “It’s always going to expand beyond who can attend at the moment or virtually or who can catch up after the fact through video or other kinds of applications.” 

Most of the publishers interviewed for this story said they are looking into adding paid events in 2021.

One idea Spanfeller posed is having people pay for an in-person event with potential live VIP experiences or networking opportunities, with free event registrations for virtual attendees to tune in. 

Others will likely follow suit, but with major logistical shifts.

“There is real potential for hybrid events, such as having a small gathering in person, and then amplify it to a much larger audience virtually who don’t want to travel or companies that don’t want to pay for travel,” said Sherry Phillips, svp of ForbesLive.

“It just takes infinite flexibility,” she said.

Agreements Google has made to pay publishers participating in its nascent News Showcase program spotlighting their branded content have been conducted on an individual, bilateral basis, said Richard Gingras, Google’s vp of news. Gingras told Digiday that in his experience, publishers would rather work out deals individually.

“My general sense of publishers, frankly, is that they prefer bilateral,” said Gingras. “It’s a matter of law. It’s not really a matter of our preference.”

But Maribel Wadsworth, president of Gannett’s USA Today Network and publisher of USA Today told Digiday if collective bargaining between publishers and digital platforms were made legal here, “having the ability for publishers to negotiate collectively would be an important start. Ultimately, what’s most important is achieving proper recognition of the value of quality, original reporting.”

David Spiegel, vp of digital revenue at LA Times publisher California Times Group took a more nuanced view, suggesting that smaller or niche publishers may want to bargain collectively for better leverage if given the chance.

“I think scaled national publishers will think they can be best served by negotiating independently, but it would be smart for niche groups to band together, especially in areas that Google needs” such as local media and service-oriented content that pushes people to its search services, he said.

Google has signed News Showcase agreements with 500 publishers in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Germany and the U.K., including its most recent high-profile partnership with News Corp in Australia. The company used the program as leverage in reaction to demands by the Australian government that the company pay publishers for links and article excerpts it features in search results.

“News Showcase deals in Australia ensure that Google will not be paying for links and article extracts in search results,” said a Google spokesperson. So, unless policies in Australia change, said Gingras, “We’ve reached an approach that allows us to be comfortable staying in Australia, allows us to be comfortable doing the right thing in pursuing these good faith negotiations with publishers in the country, and not breaking [Google’s] core principle with regard to the internet and free linking.”

A push for collective publisher bargaining
As publishers struggle to compete in a digital media and ad environment dominated by Google and Facebook, they’re looking to what’s happening in Australia as an indication of what might be possible to level the playing field here in the U.S.. Australia last week passed a news media bargaining code, which requires digital platforms to compensate news publishers when they feature their content on their platforms. If a deal can’t be reached, the law calls for mediation to determine how much the platforms must pay publishers.

Meanwhile, news outlets here in the U.S. have pushed for legislation giving them safe harbor against antitrust law, allowing them to conduct collective bargaining negotiations with Google and Facebook. When it was first introduced in 2019, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act was backed by several news publishing groups including the American Society of News Editors, the National Newspaper Association and the News Media Alliance which includes The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, among its members. The legislation is intended to ensure that negotiations benefit all publishers rather than just a few with large market share. A similar bill is expected to be introduced in the coming weeks.

Google won’t launch Showcase in the U.S. without several publishers
Gingras said Google News Showcase discussions with publishers here can be expected to take place “over the next couple of quarters at least.” And launching the program here will require signing deals with multiple publishers. “Showcase is not something we would launch with just two or three publishers,” he said.

Executives from two U.S.-based publishers Digiday spoke to, and who asked to remain anonymous, suggested they are open to learning more about the program, but haven’t been approached yet by Google. One publisher expects to discuss it during an upcoming regular quarterly partnership check-in with Google.

“We have not been offered anything around News Showcase and have not yet been told that they are doing anything with it for U.S. publishers yet,” said one of those publishing execs.

Others declined to comment on the Google program at all, indicating that the talks could be sensitive. The New York Times declined to discuss the program with Digiday. So did the Local Media Consortium. “While the News Showcase is an interesting topic to wax on, the LMC board has adopted a position of not speaking publicly to it or similar activities,” said Christian Hendricks, president of the group, which negotiates deals for members with partners including Google, Facebook and jobs listings firm Monster.

Larger publishers will get more money
Google over the years has clung to the idea that the distribution it brings to publishers is so valuable that it shouldn’t have to compensate media organizations for it. However, it’s evident from the way Google determines News Showcase payments that it derives value from the content and the audiences publishers deliver.

Because larger publishers produce more content and have better traction with national and local audiences, said Gingras, “Large publishers with very large audiences will get fees under Showcase that are beyond what, say, a small publisher with a small audience will get.” He added, “It seems fair and appropriate to adjust the structures in that fashion.”

A company spokesperson added in an email that Google’s “globally-consistent funding model” for News Showcase also factors in “objective criteria including audience size and what paywall-ed publications charge users for digital access.”

Publishers have told Digiday they worry that the program is just another way to steer their content under Google’s control. But News Showcase does cover the cost of limited access to paywalled content, and when clicked, News Showcase articles open in a publisher’s website, whether paywalled or not.

“We purchase some additional free clicks to allow users to sample their content,” said Gingras. He said the paywall access feature is designed to drive engagement and subscriptions on publishers’ own sites.

To access paywalled content for free, people might have to provide registration data, said Gingras. In some cases, Google might automate that process using information it already has stored about a user. But he stressed, “We provide the customer identity to the publisher, but they get to own that relationship.”