SODP Dispatch - 21 April 2023

Happy Friday!

Let’s circle back to the subject of AI – more specifically, how publishers can benefit from small-scale experimentation with AI.

Our managing editor, Andrew Kemp, discusses the subject in his weekly Editor’s Note column:

As the months roll by, it’s becoming ever clearer that generative AI is not only here to stay but will have a profound impact on the publishing industry in the long run.

While major publishers have been experimenting with AI for a number of years, it appears quite a few have now created dedicated teams to oversee AI initiatives within their companies.

This isn’t something that should alarm smaller publishers. There’s a reason prompt engineering roles are commanding such high salaries — the task of making generative AI working within an editorial flow is no mean feat and may take years to perfect.

The SODP team is experimenting with AI as well, albeit in an extremely limited capacity. We’re a long, long way from even considering using it as part of our article writing process, but we do see its potential for limited use cases.

Continue reading

EDITORIAL OFFICE HOURS

EDITORIAL OFFICE HOURS: LOCAL NEWS PUBLISHERS STRATEGIES

The goal of this Office Hours session is to use a data-driven approach to understand how local publishers in Australia are building audience reach and monetizing their platforms.

In this session, Andrew and Vahe will cover:

• A breakdown of the research methodology

• Exploring the findings and reviewing the conclusions

• Examples of content strategies that work or don’t

• Dissecting content strategy challenges and opportunities+ more

WHEN: 27 April 2023 | 4 PM Sydney (AEST)

Grab your spot

FROM STATE OF DIGITAL PUBLISHING

DIGITAL TOOLS

WHAT IS HUMIX AND HOW DOES IT WORK?

Digital publishers, whether they produce video content or not, can appreciate the seemingly insatiable demand for this media.

Video content in all its forms has come to dominate the digital landscape, with demand for everything from social media snippets to docuseries exploding over the last five years. Moreover, the number of people downloading or streaming video content has also grown steadily.

Publishers see the potential of video content to expand audience reach and generate ad revenue, which is why news organizations are embracing TikTok. But understanding the potential for video content and leveraging it are two completely different things.

Publishers with a video strategy are constantly looking for new ways to make the most of existing content, while many print-focused players are stuck weighing the strategic risks of plunging down the video content creation rabbit hole.

These are the challenges that Ezoic — an adtech platform focused on serving publishers — has sought to address with its Humix video network. Ezoic designed Humix to help publishers either increase their ad revenue from existing content or simply get started in the video monetization space.

What is Humix and how does it deliver on these ambitions? Read on to find out.

Read more

PRODUCT REVIEW

NICHEIQ REVIEW FOR 2023

Keyword research, competitor analysis and content gap analysis are the foundational tactics upon which any good content strategy is built. Which is why almost every SEO tool in the market offers these services as a part of its core suite.

However, there’s a catch.

Most SEO tools are designed for every kind of website — content, eCommerce and B2B. In other words, they’re generic, all-purpose tools meant as a one-size-fits-all solution. In a hypercompetitive publishing environment where more new content is being published than at any other time in history, this can take the edge off the tool just enough to impact its ability to help a site rank.

Which is where Ezoic’s NicheIQ comes in.

Read more

RECOMMENDED NEWSLETTERS

THE WEBSITE FLIP

Save hours searching through broker listings. Get 10+ websites & aged domains for sale weekly. Receive case studies with growth tactics. Apply the strategies to your sites to expedite growth and position for a flip. Learn more

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

TOOL

Check out LinkPatrol – a WordPress plugin that cleans up your outgoing link profile. Learn more

TOOL

GPT for Sheets™ and Docs™ is an AI writer for Google Sheets™ and Google Docs™. You can use it for all sorts of tasks on text: writing, editing, extracting, cleaning, translating, summarizing, outlining, explaining, etc. Learn more

BITE-SIZED INDUSTRY NEWS

SEOThe Google Search Console page experience report is going away. It will be replaced by a content page that links to Google’s general guidance about page experience. Read more

TECHTwitter is being removed from yet another big B2B platform. And this time it's one of the biggest companies in the tech industry – Microsoft. Read more

AUDIENCE GROWTHFlipboard brings editorial curation to Mastodon with ‘desks’ for news and discovery. Read more

AIAn analysis of Google's C4 dataset, a snapshot of 15M websites used to train LLMs, shows that half of the Top 10 sites were news outlets like The New York Times. Read more

RESEARCHAbout half of Americans have listened to a podcast in the past year, and most of those listeners come across news content. Read more

SEARCHGoogle's is rolling out a new "Subscribed Content" report in Search Console for publishers using Reader Revenue Manager. Read more

Copyright (C) Want to change how you receive these emails?You can update your preferences or unsubscribe