We’re kicking off 2025’s first season of The Publisher Podcast by talking to Jim Bilton, Managing Director at Wessenden Marketing and Brandlab Research. Jim produces bimonthly research and updates on the business of content distribution through WessendenBriefing, and has decades of experience consulting for media businesses.
In this episode, we explore the standout publisher product trends from 2024, what publishers are investing in this year, and how optimistic everyone is feeling. Jim also highlights some B2B and B2C publishers to watch this year from his surveys, which surprisingly are almost all legacy companies.
Email Jim Bilton mentioning The Publisher Podcast to claim a free edition of his bimonthly content distribution round-up WessendenBriefing.
Here are some highlights, lightly edited for clarity:
Standout publisher product trends from 2024
2024 was an absolute blur of activity. In terms of what people are doing, I don’t think there are any particularly ‘new’ things that are out there. It’s the people, the product mix, the platform mix is shifting, and by brand, the whole fragmentation piece has accelerated tremendously.
When we’re talking about any particular issue, whether it’s AI through to other [product] developments and routes to market, it varies a lot by product category. A lot of the coverage is about newspapers, and I think newspapers have a very different future to magazines. So you’ve got dailys, regionals, weekly titles which are in this crossover area, then you get into magazines; weeklies, monthlies, bookazines, and one-shots, which then overlap with books.
Each one of those in pure supply chain, whether it’s a digital supply chain or a print supply chain, have got very different pulse rates and different requirements. And I think news has hijacked the agenda, whereas there’s a lot more – and a lot more positive stuff – going on in what we used to call the magazine business.
M&A pressure building
When looking at how 2025 is going to be different from 2024, pressure has been building up in the M&A market. Mergers and acquisitions had slowed down – they dropped significantly 2022 to 2023 and certainly in terms of private equity, and there are people who have been building up significant war chests.
That’s going to be released in 2025, and some of those deals, perhaps more than AI, will have a more immediate effect on the shape of the landscape, who your competitors are, what they’re actually doing. So I think there’s an interesting M&A year ahead.
Collaboration will also be big for a lot of operations who don’t have the scale as individual companies and whether it’s basics, sharing back office functions, getting together in terms of promotion, possibly the retail supply chain. There needs to be more of a joined-up industry approach for newspapers and magazines to defend its space in retail.
Opportunities publishers may be missing
The big investment areas still – and have been consistent over the last few years from the MediaFutures survey – are tech stacks and people.
People are becoming increasingly expensive, knowing what skills the organisation needs, do you outsource it, do you retrain existing people, do you bring new people in? Generally they’re younger and more digital and ‘cheaper’ than some of the older, more experienced executives within an organisation.
But the enabler of everything is tech stacks, and that’s where I think the investment is going for the smarter operators. The people who are delivering some really interesting stuff at the moment have been investing in tech for two or three years minimum to come up to where they are at the moment. So there are these long-term investments, if you can afford them.
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