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A presidential election year can be a boon for news and politics publishers when it comes to attracting and monetizing audiences. But while 2024 looks a lot like 2020 on paper, platform performance issues and an unreliable ad market could mean this election cycle will be less profitable than expected.
For Kevin Guentzel, Newsweek's global chief commercial and growth officer, that means trying new audience growth strategies and revenue streams to return to growth this year.
“We finished the year with some growth, which was great. [but we] What we were trying to achieve could not be achieved [2023]. However, we began to strategically sow seeds throughout the year that we knew would strategically benefit our business, our readers, and our brand partners, and began developing other core commercial aspects of the company that we would start to see in 2024. I feel like that. And beyond,” Guentzel said.
On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Guentzel explains how his team generates referral traffic from alternative platforms, why it's hard to get political ad dollars, and how Newsweek is launching new subscriptions. He talked about how he plans to monetize his readers with the service.
Below are highlights from the conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Alternative platform for audience referrals
As we all know, Facebook referral traffic is decreasing, and so are referral traffic on other social platforms. And our audience development team was very interested in experimenting with WhatsApp, for example… and we're now seeing quite a bit of our audience coming to us from WhatsApp – I don't think they even call their product a newsfeed – but it's interesting. And I've been experimenting with it. We're also leaning more and more towards Reddit and finding that platform to be successful for our readers' journeys.
Pursuit of political advertising
I have a lot of experience with political advertising, and what we've found over the last few cycles is that political advertising is very focused on battleground states. Even if you use some of the platform's targeting features, [advertisers want] At a really low level — I mean, you're going to get to certain zip codes in undecided battleground states — that's, frankly, Facebook territory.
Now, media companies [like] Can Newsweek and others in our space have access? Absolutely. Do you think this year will be big for us? That remains to be seen. In my experience, it's usually the campaigns that run parallel to the election cycle that are a little bigger. I mean, it could be advocacy…I think there will be more revenue because of elections. We don't yet know how much.
niche subscription
I think that's important [to share] Specificity and clarity of intent when building a subscription business. … So a big priority for us this year is to develop what you could almost call a real estate development of our ranking, the Newsweek ranking… For example, if you think about the ranking of the top hospitals in the world. Let's. The hospital's executives are extremely proud of being ranked among the world's hospitals. [Best] Hospital Listing … We started thinking, for example, that there might be an opportunity to build a community with CEOs of globally ranked hospitals. [Best] Hospital listings, perhaps including a membership model…This is a new business for us to develop, nurture, test and understand. And I think that's how we feel like we can build a membership model with a certain niche of people. If that goes well, it could lead to more testing in that area.
