For media companies, information technology has always held transformative power. Sometimes, change overtakes us. Sometimes it empowers us. Sometimes – and the current example is AI – it could go either way, and it is up to us to create a positive outcome.
Let’s take a long look back. When I launched LocalMediaInsider in 2012, technological change was forcing industry transformation. I watched Clark Gilbert explain the Innovator’s Dilemma to newspaper publishers for the first time. But with a few notable exceptions in small, economically healthy markets, the industry tanked anyway.
Associations merged with a gun pointed at their heads and began to solicit funding from Google and Facebook, which had already absorbed 80% of local ad revenues. By 2024, the top ten newspaper chains had devoured almost half of the remaining 6700 newspapers, with three public companies – Gannett/Gatehouse, Digital First/Tribune, and Lee/BH – holding the largest share and almost half of the remaining dailies.
Niche publishers were more independent, entrepreneurial, and economically healthy. Their information was unique. Their audiences more engaged. Their advertisers have fewer choices.
The fact that there was little non-profit funding from META and Google for most verticals was probably fortuitous.*
However, while niche media’s profit margins are often sizeable percentage-wise and the industry overall escaped consolidation, teams remain small. Keeping up with the pace of technological change, audience needs, and advertisers’ marketing preferences will be an existential challenge in the next decade.
Scaling up can mean either adding titles or going deeper into the niche by adding new services and revenue models, options unique to their categories. What to do first, second, and third is a critical decision.
Our goal for NichePublisher.Biz is to provide business intelligence and a community that allows independent niche media to thrive in the decade ahead, given the increasing pace of change and the emergence of AI.
This means we’ll help publishers shorten the technological learning curve, find critical insights, and connect with peers facing similar challenges. Our success will be determined not at the end of 2024 but at the end of 2034.
My late mentor, Bob Kehoe, advised consultants to start with the easy stuff, and then the hard stuff. This was good advice. Today, however, as technology moves faster and faster, the easy stuff needs to be done simultaneously with important stuff like audience-building. Time is not always our friend.
Based on these observations and your feedback, I want to share our priorities this year for helping members own their niche and grow their companies:
- Helping small teams find the right tech and business strategies to use it
DIY sales and AI create efficiencies that promise to catapult some companies to new levels. We’ll test and share the best tech and field-tested strategies for cutting steps and share them in a searchable directory.
- Growing media-owned audiences
A newsletter is no longer just a promotional vehicle for the website, but increasingly a core distribution channel. Acquiring opt-in phone numbers will also be critical in the future for many niche media.
These owned audiences create a barrier to entry and the predictability of push marketing. We’ll look for the best peer-shared strategies that are laser-focused on building the owned audience.
- Selection of and strategies for revenue models that support your core value proposition.
A revenue model should fit like a jigsaw piece into the business model. The best ones leverage your team, audience and/or advertiser relationships. Subscription-based media may add services or courses, while advertising-based media may opt for webinars, events, or additional titles. Choosing an exact fit is a critical decision. Increasingly the number and quantity of print issues also fits into the decision-making process. In 2024, we’ll share the best combinations – based on use cases and expert insights – to build your niche.
- Getting the digital basics down
Great editorial only goes so far without the right distribution channels and advertising strategy. Some successful niche publishers still come to us wanting to create this critical digital infrastructure but not knowing where to start.
Competitors now include ad agencies, associations, event producers, entrepreneurs looking for a niche, other publishers, internal marketers, and even, dare we say it, advertisers with media channels.
In 2024, we’ll offer more resources for members committed to getting the digital basics right.
- Ways to connect with like-minded executives
Who does your circulation manager talk to? Other circulation managers at niche media? For that matter, who do you talk to if you consider adding a new title?
This year, we’ll look at ways to create and help you find supportive, private advisory groups composed of top people in the same field. One initiative is software that supports secure, private discussion threads by job title, and we are looking for ways to protect these groups. We are super impressed by Industry Dive, but if you have a high-value B2B niche they may be interested in, you may or may not want them finding out too much.
- How new generations are shaping niche media
In a recent conversation, Kirk MacDonald convinced me that not only are multiple generations now working side-by-side for the first time in history, but that they think, work, and behave differently. A new generation, Alpha, is on the rise, steeped in gamification and entrepreneurship, sometimes before they are even teenagers.
So this year, we will explore the research on these new generations and how to incorporate findings into your company plan.
- The fact versus fake challenge
Niche media have the significant advantage of higher trust. But there is more to be done with the rise of AI, especially in an election year.
We all have communities. But 2024 will be the year we’ll look for easy ways to build trust inside them and how to convey journalistic values externally. We believe AI is not just a transformation opportunity for efficiencies but will further decimate trust and allow journalism-based media to rise above the fray – if we have a collective plan. We’ll show you resources available and easy ways to incorporate them.
In summary
This is what we’re up to and why! We don’t have all the answers, but we think these are some of the right questions.
Hope to see y’all at the Niche Media Conference in April, where we’ll learn more and meet new friends.
*Anyone in doubt about authoritarian governments’ insidious use of META should read Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa’s biography, “How to Stand Up to a Dictator.”
