There was one question that needed answering at the PPA Festival in London on 6 May — what should publishers do now that the platform ecosystem no longer needs them?
From Google serving publishers’ content in AI Overviews to social media sites suppressing posts that contain external links, the overwhelming trend has been walled gardens becoming walled prisons.
The good news is that everyone present at Wednesday’s event was awake to that reality. Few expect those walls to be lowered, and there was a healthy dose of scepticism that, even when one channel does unexpectedly start generating referrals, the traffic will be reliable or sustainable.
Publishers aren’t just on the same page about the problem, either. Katrina Broster from the Financial Times best expressed the proposed solution, which came up again and again in the talks. Focus on brand building, she said, with a ‘build it and they will come’ type attitude. In the current climate, she explained, readers are looking for trust and authenticity above all else. So the best bet is to make journalists your ‘superstars’, offer a quality product and let the shoddiness of your competitors do the work.
It may seem like a strategy that makes more sense for elite titles like the Financial Times and New York Times than it does for us publishing plebs [Editor’s note: the author speaks only for himself here], but even representatives from relative minnows Free Soul and Motor Sport Magazine said that they had shifted their marketing spend up the funnel. Building brand awareness and trust appears to be how most publishers believe they can escape the clutches of the platforms.
Other solutions proposed — try video; quality over quantity; affiliate marketing — were logical and modestly helpful but seemed to lack scale.
One panel offered ‘liquid publishing’ as the best operating model for the new media environment. Essentially, this means using AI to adapt content to multiple formats, tweaking it to the preference of the target audience. Using new tech to make the process more efficient and adaptable has to be a good thing, but I didn’t quite see how it addressed publishing’s real issues. Others thought the shift to bot-driven web traffic opened up opportunities for titles, but that seemed to be switching one walled garden for another.
In the end, no one really answered where true growth comes from without platforms. The nearest to an answer came from Polemic Digital’s Barry Adams, who said that the most successful publishers today are the ones who are focusing on retaining their current audience rather than acquiring new ones. In other words, perhaps those publishers who have accepted the pie has permanently shrunk, and have learned to be grateful for the meagre slice they have.