SODP Dispatch - 20 November 2025

9 Best CRM Solutions for Publishers in 2026

By Sachin Kumar and Samuel Fatola

Publishers face a 75% customer churn problem. The media and entertainment industry's average retention rate sits at just 25%—meaning three out of four audience members walk away. This is not a content problem. This is a relationship problem.

Customer relationship management systems have shifted from nice-to-have infrastructure to survival equipment. Publishers who treat CRM as a contact database are missing the point. The platform's value lies in its ability to unify subscriber behavior, ad operations, content performance, and revenue data into a single operational view that informs every decision from editorial to sales.

The question is not whether to implement CRM. The question is which platform can handle the complexity of modern publishing workflows without requiring a dedicated technical team to maintain it.

Our analysis evaluated nine CRM solutions across 20 criteria including content management integration, audience engagement tools, ad revenue management, analytics depth, automation capabilities, and native media sales workflow support. We weighted each factor based on its impact on publisher operations and scored platforms against three publisher profiles: small operations, mid-market companies, and enterprise organizations.

HubSpot leads for mid-to-large publishers who need marketing automation and CMS integration. Magazine Manager dominates for print-digital hybrid operations managing ad trafficking and production workflows. Pipedrive wins on simplicity and cost-effectiveness for smaller teams focused on ad sales pipelines.

The report includes detailed feature breakdowns, pricing transparency where available, and market fit scores that match platform capabilities to publisher size and operational complexity.

⛳ Drive & Dine at Rustic Canyon Golf Course

Thursday, December 4, 2025 | 12:00 PM | Moorpark, CA

Retention.com is hosting an invite-only golf day for marketing leaders at Rustic Canyon Golf Course, one of Southern California's most beloved minimalist designs known for wide fairways, strategic bunkering, and pure playing conditions. The afternoon brings together 16 hand-selected leaders across four fourballs to swap growth strategies between drives. Green fees, dinner at Rustic Canyon Grill, and drinks are included—just bring your clubs. This exclusive event offers the rare combination of strategic conversation and world-class golf without the networking theater that dominates most industry gatherings.

Get on the list ▸

Find your customers on Roku this Black Friday

As with any digital ad campaign, the important thing is to reach streaming audiences who will convert. To that end, Roku’s self-service Ads Manager stands ready with powerful segmentation and targeting options. After all, you know your customers, and we know our streaming audience.

Worried it’s too late to spin up new Black Friday creative? With Roku Ads Manager, you can easily import and augment existing creative assets from your social channels. We also have AI-assisted upscaling, so every ad is primed for CTV.

Once you’ve done this, then you can easily set up A/B tests to flight different creative variants and Black Friday offers. If you’re a Shopify brand, you can even run shoppable ads directly on-screen so viewers can purchase with just a click of their Roku remote.

Bonus: we’re gifting you $5K in ad credits when you spend your first $5K on Roku Ads Manager. Just sign up and use code GET5K. Terms apply.

Use code GET5K now

By Vahe Arabian

🔬 Experiments Are Not Tactics

Most publishers treat A/B testing as headline optimization, button color changes, or send time adjustments. This is tinkering, not experimentation.

The problem is not the test itself. The problem is starting with what to change rather than why to change it. Without a clear, measurable hypothesis tied to audience behavior, experiments produce inconclusive results or chase vanity wins that don't move revenue.

Top-performing publishers approach testing like scientists. They identify a friction point, build a hypothesis around audience behavior, and run the experiment long enough to gather statistically valid results. They don't test for the sake of testing. They test to solve specific problems that impact retention, conversions, or revenue.

Three experiments that worked:

• Content depth vs. breadth: One publisher focused on fewer topics in greater depth rather than spreading effort across many subjects. This depth-driven strategy boosted engagement and conversions because it directly supported the business goal of increasing loyal readership. The test ran long enough to remove seasonal anomalies.

• Paywall trigger psychology: Rather than limiting readers to a fixed number of free articles, an engagement-triggered paywall activated after 45 seconds of reading. This targeted high-intent users, converting 38% compared to just 8% for a monthly article meter—3x subscription revenue.

• Newsletter timing by content type: A straight "send time" test (9 AM vs. 5 PM) produced negligible differences. The breakthrough came from matching content type to reader routines: morning briefings for early risers, deep-dive reads for afternoon. Open rates increased by 22%, with downstream gains in on-site engagement.

Why most tests fail:

• No behavioral hypothesis—testing headlines without asking why a reader would care

• No segmentation—treating all users as if they behave the same

• Vanity metrics over meaningful metrics—clicks instead of conversions or LTV

• Short timelines—stopping before 95% statistical confidence or a full behavior cycle

What top performers do differently:

1. Start with a measurable hypothesis tied to business outcomes. Not "test newsletter send time" but "hypothesis: professionals check email during commute; sending at 7 AM will increase open rates among high-value subscribers by 15%."

2. Isolate one behavioral variable at a time. Testing headline tone and paywall position simultaneously makes it impossible to know what drove the result.

3. Segment audiences by actions, not demographics. New vs. returning, skimmers vs. engaged readers, direct vs. search traffic—behavior predicts response better than age or location.

4. Measure real results. Retention, conversions, revenue. Not just clicks or opens.

5. Run tests for at least 14 days or until reaching statistical significance. Weekly patterns, news cycles, and external events create noise. Patience removes it.

6. Document learnings to inform the next test. Institutional memory compounds. Without documentation, each team member restarts from zero.

When experiments are designed with intention, they stop being random guesswork and start becoming a repeatable growth engine.

The goal is not testing volume. The goal is solving the behavioral frictions that limit revenue growth.

Raconteur staff cut in half following Technology Advice takeover | Press Gazette

Business publisher Raconteur has reportedly been reduced from 32 staff to around 15 following its acquisition by US-based Technology Advice in September 2024. Sales teams were hit hardest, with finance, marketing, and data teams also cut. The six-person editorial team was halved through one redundancy and two unreplaced departures. Senior leavers include CEO Will Brookes and head of audience marketing Kyri Rousou. At the time of acquisition, Brookes stated the deal was "designed to scale Raconteur further" and increase global reach. Sources report Technology Advice senior leadership has pushed titles to use AI to reduce article writing time and installed tracking software Activtrak on employee laptops, monitoring websites visited and time spent away from screens. Technology Advice has not responded to requests for comment.

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Brief Cloudflare outage disrupts multiple sites | MediaPost

Cloudflare experienced a brief but significant outage Tuesday morning, causing widespread internet disruptions. Affected entities included X, Shopify, Coinbase, Moody's, New Jersey Transit, and Downdetector itself. Gaming sites League of Legends and Valorant also went down. The outage peaked around 8 AM ET and returned to normal by 11 AM ET. Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht stated: "Earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us." The company denied malicious actors were involved, attributing the problem to an automatically generated configuration file overwhelmed by traffic. Cloudflare confirmed a fix was implemented and services were back to normal.

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SEO's future is governance, not content | Search Engine Land

Daniel Cheung argues that Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) exposes the limits of traditional SEO tactics. Generative engines compress multi-touch discovery into single answers, stripping away context publishers control and leaving brands fighting for representation in answers they don't own. The solution is not more content—it's governance. SEO leaders must audit where product names are inconsistent across regions, where entities are unlinked, and where brands fail to articulate core problems clearly enough for LLMs to stitch coherent answers. The shift requires measuring demand signals and share of mind against core problems rather than clicks and impressions. SEO leaders who can't evolve from traffic shops into knowledge architects will be replaced, not rebranded.

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Google ships Gemini 3 to Search AI Mode on release day | Search Engine Journal

Google integrated Gemini 3 Pro into Search's AI Mode—the first time Google has shipped a Gemini model to Search on its release date. Available now to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the U.S., Gemini 3 upgrades query fan-out so Search can issue more related searches in parallel and better interpret user intent. The model introduces generative UI features that build dynamic visual layouts around queries, including interactive physics simulations and custom mortgage calculators embedded directly in answers. Deeper query fan-out means Google can access more pages per question, potentially influencing which sites are cited during complex searches. The updated layouts and on-page tools now compete directly with traditional search results.

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European publishers demonstrate subscription scale beyond U.S. playbooks | INMA

INMA's Readers First Initiative reveals 50% of revenue among 66 studied media companies now comes from digital sources, with top performers generating twice the digital revenue needed to cover newsroom costs. Alma Media's Kauppalehti implemented Mather Economics' AI-powered dynamic paywall Sophi, discovering article length doesn't correlate with value and niche coverage holds hidden worth among micro-audiences. Germany's Stuttgarter Zeitung refocused on quantified local audiences, creating teams around automotive industry employees and parents with children under 11. Mediahuis Ireland scaled from zero digital subscribers in 2020 to over 100,000 by mid-2025 through cross-departmental experiments, now targeting 200,000 by 2030.

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