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You've mentioned before that the forum is a big source of income mark.
Will that be served through these new revenue share systems then?
I've only heard a bit about it but I thought it was more for news articles and features.
I have no idea.
It all depends on the audience take up of the new app channels and the rates that the single ad per story actually pays. Since most ads are delivered through a marketplace it'd the marketplace that will decide the eventual worth of that placement. Until they turn it all on we won't know. This DOES give me sleepless nights. Our margins are very tight and something as disruptive as this new publishing model from the Big3 could go either way.
I'm still not sure how this works for you though. As I understand it the stories you are referring to are the ones on the rest of the site, not the magazine nor the ads on the forum pages so you would still lose the revenue from the forum? (unless of course the assumption is that all new content in consumed through the app and the web site and forum still exists but isn't the way most people get to your content ( runs off to review his own website 🙁 ))
Websites as destinations for content consumption are endangered, at least as far as the media is concerned. You still need websites to sell stuff directly. Journalism tho will be served mostly via apps from the Big3. The forum will stay and will be as busy as it is normally but I expect revenues from it directly to decline. It's the stories we publish and write ourselves that will be carrying the revenue burden in the future. Ads displayed around our stories already generate a lot more revenue than ads in the forum per page impression.
Publishing has never been a simple business model but it's getting more complicated at the moment. The challenge is to adapt.
Ads in print magazines I look at not least as they typically use quality photography. The issue with online ads is in many cases they are very intrusive and they materially slow down web page load, I'd are negative additions Print ads may make the magazine slightly thicker but they don't stop you turning straight to the page you are interested in.
We all need to understand unless we pay for content, see ads or allow our data to be harvested there will be nothing to look at. Other forums I use have ads and they have sponsored forums. We cannot expect something for nothing.
"blox" 🙂
Another couple of thoughts.
If ads where less intrusive I'd be happy to have them switched on even being a subscriber, eg non animated banner ads which don't slow down load time / cause constant re-rendering.
I wonder what the value of ads per user is (confidential I know), perhaps users would be prepared to pay that in order not to see ads. It maybe be as little as £1 or £2 per annum ?
The reason ads are currently all flashy and animated is because they perform better than non animated ads. No matter what we all say bout flash = annoying.. the actual reality is flashy = clicks.
We see this every day when we analyse the performance of the ad campaigns that we run directly.
The reason that particular nugget of marketing reality won't matter so much in the new publishing era of ads in apps is that app ads can't be avoided. They are inline with the content so you eye will always scan across it to get to the content on the other side. So it doesn't have to quite as flashy and animated to score that subconscious 'hit' that all advertising works on.
Up until now content has been delivered on big desktop screens where content is in one area and ads in another (Excluding interstitials and pop-ups) so the ads have always had to work hard to get your attention because they are not directly in your sight-line. They are over to the side and so they have to jump up and down and shout 'EXCUSE ME!' to grab your attention.
Now content can be delivered in a really nice way on mobiles via apps the ads can stop shouting ta you and start chilling out a bit more since you are going to see them anyway.
You can test this out by looking at our stories in the new grit.cx app that contains a free news feed (Coming to Singletrack shortly) and in the Google Newsstand app for ios and android. There's a single ad mixing it up with the content of the stories but it isn't half as annoying an experience as ads on a website. It's another reason why in the near future you won't actually use the internet directly - you'll use an app instead. It's just a nicer user experience than using a browser.