Handling Local news in personalization models can be challenging.
Medium will de-amplify Generative AI generated content from its platform and will actively evolve its personalization system to spot and de-amplify AI written content.
Differentiation typically comes from building authenticity on your core product, i.e., editorial product. This involves owning more of the value chain:
Owned Identity
Owned Network
Owned Media
While the above gets your driving factors in place, the next aspects define how much you can amplify. This includes:
There are various fundamental aspects of an editorial product business. Most of these businesses have been edged out of the amplification factors:
Distribution: We’ve lost distribution to SEO, Social, platforms like Substack, etc. The only owned media channels that exist now are: website, mobile app, and newsletters.
Selling advertisement: Companies find it more efficient to buy advertisements from ad-networks on search and social than directly via publications.
Advertisements in print and TV give much more revenue than digital.
Print and TV | Digital | |
---|---|---|
How is it sold? | Advertisements in print and TV are sold directly by the news company. Given that, 100% of the revenue belongs to them. | Online, most quantity of advertisements is sold indirectly by ad networks. Given that, the publisher loses out 30-40% of ad revenue to the ad network. |
How is reach measured? | In print and TV, it is assumed that the entire circulation (MAU) is reading. | Online, one can precisely calculate the DAU, which for most news websites turns out to be only 3-8% of MAU. |
Brand Premium | There’s is a prestige to advertise with big news brands. | It isn’t feasible for brands to select that they want to advertise with a specific publisher. |
Bid up or down | Sometimes companies will bid up to block out competitors from advertising on specific print and TV channels. | Ad engines force publishers to bid down, i.e., whoever has the lowest price will get the ad. |
Implication on content | Premium content is valued. | All content is measured against page view. Hence, a detailed investigation is measured against a cat video. |
When Steve Jobs returned back to Apple in 1997, he famously cut the product line by 70% down to 2 desktop devices and 2 portable devices!
Rule of thumb: If you can’t explain it and choose for yourself, then surely your customers wont!
Avoid phrasing decisions as binaries. Reality is nuanced. Hence, it is better to phrase decisions as “We want to do X while maintaining or growing or reducing Y.”
It is always advisable to have one major source of revenue and then diversify by having multiple minor streams of revenue that de-risk you from that major source of revenue. For example, YouTube’s revenue split is 1:3 between subscriptions and advertisements.
Why it matters:
There are different forms of revenue models:
Some of these revenue models can be in opposition to each other and make commoditized businesses complicated. This in turn mandates the need for propensity models.
Allocate 5% to 10% of the content on which Artificial Intelligence algorithms and multi-arm bandit can test out different SEO hacks and observe causality, i.e., is it resulting in an improvement in the SEO score of those pages.
Why it matters: Currently, SEO is a cat and mouse game with Google.
Model performance metrics
Determine important attributes
Identify the most influential rows
Reduce variance