Digiday Research: With ad businesses suffering, publishers turn even more to subscriptions
This research is based on unique data collected from our proprietary audience of publisher, agency, brand and tech insiders. It’s available to Digiday+ members. More from the series →
The impacts of the coronavirus outbreak are still just beginning to be felt on the economy. In media, the global pandemic has meant a forecasted drop in ad revenue and event revenue for publishers. About 88% of them say they will miss their forecasts for the year.
In response, publishers are also ramping up focus on certain parts of their business.
A new Digiday Research survey on the business impacts of the coronavirus outbreak has found that 40% said spending more resources on building their subscription businesses is their biggest priority, while 32% of them also indicated that branded content programs and “virtual events” are now taking up more of their attention and resources.
But for many, spending more resources simply isn’t an option. Some of the publishers who took this survey said that they “aren’t spending resources because we can’t afford to.” Another said: “We’re not reallocating resources, we’re diminishing resources.” Others are cutting any sort of spending radically, including on overheads like office space.
According to our benchmarking research, the priorities before the outbreak were growing direct-sold ads, programmatic ads and branded content revenue. Subscriptions were the fifth priority for most publishers heading into the second-quarter, just as the outbreak started to make its presence felt in the U.S.
More in Media
Creators are ditching Substack over ideological shift in 2025
The writers who left Substack in early 2025 represent a second wave after an initial burst of Substack creators left the platform in January 2024.
How Dotdash Meredith enlisted OpenAI to boost its contextual ad product, with Lindsay Van Kirk
Dotdash Meredith’s gm of D/Cipher discussed the publisher’s OpenAI deal in a live recording of the Digiday Podcast at last week’s Digiday Publishing Summit.
Publishers left guessing how Google’s March 2025 core update will reshape search
Google’s core updates, which happen multiple times a year, change its search algorithms and systems and have the potential to make or break publishers’ traffic.