In brief … Use data as a source of and a check on product ideas. A customer data platform is a great tool for this. Don’t confuse what people like with what they’re willing to pay for. Look for ways to turn customer interactions into data. Editors’ opinions are great, and the idea from the…
An interesting exercise in disaster planning is to imagine what you’d do if all your current sources of revenue disappeared. Bob Hoffman’s Adscam makes a persuasive case that programmatic advertising might as well have, because it’s mostly garbage. It may have stopped returning results and you didn’t notice. I often say that every business book…
I recently had the privilege of moderating a discussion with Dr. Mark Stiving on pricing. The webinar was sponsored by Renewd, which is a great organinization for companies in the subscription or event space. Here are a few key takeaways. Sometimes the problem is your product portfolio, not your pricing. You should be thinking about…
If you’re starting or contemplating a relationship with a Customer Data Platform provider, you’ll regret it if you don’t take these CDP implementation issues into account. A CDP can be a great tool, but if you’re not careful, it can be a disaster. Read through these common mistakes carefully, and have an honest (and skeptical)…
Some people don’t have time to read. I get it. So here — you can listen too. The podcast feed is available here.
In this 12-minute video I explain the benefits publishers can reap from a customer data platform by outlining 14 use cases. The list is not exhaustive, but it will give publishers an idea how they can benefit by implementing a CDP. Things such as … Customized emails in response to a visitors online activity Encouraging…
Examples of the metaverse are silly and childlike, and people aren’t using it. Meta is falling short of projections for their version, called Horizon Worlds. Most “worlds” get no visitors. The appeal of the concept is the ability to interact with a virtual world, but to make that happen would require a full-body suit that…
Trusted content is king. (At first I said “trustworthy,” but that’s not right. It doesn’t matter if the content is objectively trustworthy. It matters whether the readers trust it.) If you’re a publisher, you hire professional writers to create fantastic content, and then some amateur takes up the topic as a hobby and creates a…
You may have seen the recent Bo Sacks post with the headline “Magazine readers prefer print.” One interesting thing about the results is that even younger magazine readers prefer print. Not to the same degree as older readers, but it’s still a strong preference. At the same time, there is a strong move towards digital…
ROI is very important, but it’s also a bit of a myth. It’s tempting to think that ROI should be easy on the internet. After all, websites run on computers, and e-stores use databases, and we can track links and clicks and such, so that when you boil it all down it’s just math. We…
A recent Bo Sacks post included this interesting paragraph. “Norwegian publisher Amedia reaches 2.4M readers daily across all platforms. It uses a machine learning algorithm to identify characteristics of user behavior that indicate happy and satisfied customers. The algorithm analyzes up to 70 reader behavior statistics and boils it down to a single number called…
(If you’d rather listen to me explain this, I did a LinkedIn video on this topic.) Let’s say I have a service on the Fair Labor Standards Act. It covers the whole Act, but the subscribers are always calling and asking the editors questions about chapter 4, which covers whether an employee is exempt or…
I enjoy podcasts, but one of my frustrations is that I’m usually listening to a podcast at a time when I can’t (or can’t easily) take notes — despite the fact that I always carry a little notebook in my pocket. I usually listen while I’m running, walking, or driving, and it’s not easy to…
(I wrote this in April of 2016, but it’s still an important message.) This article — Publishers: Weigh The Risks Of Platform Content Distribution — makes a lot of good points about the dangers publishers face when they put their content on a platform. Unfortunately, it starts off with a very common but fundamentally misleading…
A few years ago a publishing colleague asked about some of the simple subscription management plugins that work with WordPress. The question took me back to the days when I was first learning how incredibly complicated circulation systems can get, which also reminded me of the early days of iPad. When Apple first got into…