This week on The Publisher Podcast by Media Voices, we’re joined by Press Gazette’s Chief Commercial Officer Richard Jamieson. He takes us for a behind-the-scenes look at how the industry publication makes money, and the huge changes he’s overseen in its commercial strategy over the past few years.
Richard outlines the opportunities he saw coming onto a well-respected B2B brand which previously had limited commercialisation but a really strong audience. He also discusses the results of some big changes to their daily newsletter over the past 18 months, the power of face-to-face events, and Press Gazette’s newly-launched registration wall.
Here are some highlights from the episode, lightly edited for clarity:
Identifying opportunities for monetisation
[When I joined], Press Gazette’s only commercial offering was the British Journalism Awards. So I took a look at the subscriber list of the newsletter. I looked at the demographics of who was coming to the site. I looked at the contributors, and basically the lead base for it. And I thought, ‘We’re sitting on an absolute gold mine here’.
The brief was, how do we monetise the digital assets: the newsletter, the website, can we introduce any other opportunities?
Within the first 12 months, we launched three different sets of events. We really successfully monetised the newsletter. We started selling sponsored content. Advertising started going through the site. We launched a podcast.
It all snowballed pretty quickly actually, because we had a product that was really loved, and really well subscribed to from an audience of senior people. Then we identified the organisations that wanted to be in front of those people and sell their services and products.
Putting a registration wall up on Press Gazette
The content the team produce on Press Gazette is top tier. I think there is a value exchange to be had there, whether that’s personal information or company information, in terms of providing us with a little bit more insight into who’s coming to our site and who’s reading our content, or further down the line, paying for that content.
We tested it a little bit with certain segments of the readership and asked them outright, would you pay for access to Press Gazette? And it was a resounding yes. It’s a little bit of trial and error in terms of finding the right price point as and when we get to that stage, which we’re aiming for H2 this year. But the reg wall was a no-brainer.
We’d much rather have a smaller overall [traffic] number, but a closer relationship and a more frequent relationship with what we call the MVPs – people who are engaging with your content on a more regular basis and are in more of a senior decision-making role. Those are the people that we want coming to the site more regularly. And if that means a drop off in the overall numbers, I think that’s an exchange we’re willing to make.
Advice for effectively monetising B2B media
I would follow this process: Do we have a product that people want to read? Is the content compelling? Is there an audience there? Thats’ step one. If the audience is there, what’s the lead base? If there isn’t a lead base, you’re not going to make any money from it. Typically we would say, are there 2,000 companies worldwide feeding into this sector, whether it’s oil and gas, or power, or packaging.
Wherever you go, you’re going to have a lot of advantages if you’ve got a very well-established title. But I think the principles are the same in terms of, is the content compelling enough to create an audience? Are the audience engaged? Are they coming back? Are they subscribing? If they are, and if they’re an audience that people want to be put in front of and sell their services, their products, then you’re going to be okay.
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