Media Briefing: Publishers say Amazon Prime Day sales were up but commerce revenue remains ‘hard to predict’

According to four publishers, commerce revenue earned from Prime Day-specific coverage was up as much as 99% year over year, while conversion rates were up anywhere from 6-30% compared to 2023. And publishers credit that to a change in content and distribution strategy in response to Google’s recent algorithm changes.

“I thought it was going to be a really flat year,” said Riva Syrop, president of Apartment Therapy Media, who told Digiday prior to the event that it felt like the “power” that Prime Day commands for generating commerce revenue has waned in recent years as more retailers launch competing, concurrent sales events. But after the event wrapped, she said revenue earned from Prime Day-specific coverage was up 99% year over year while revenue generated from coverage of competing retailer sales was down. Total revenue growth for the two-day period balanced out to 19% year over year.

Forbes Vetted, its commerce recommendation arm, saw similar year-over-year revenue spikes from the July event. Cory Baldwin, executive director of commerce content and strategy at Forbes, said that commissions earned from coverage of the Prime Day, spanning July 16-17, increased just over 88% year over year.

And while theSkimm’s vp of commerce, Sam Baker, said she anticipated revenue to be flat or slightly up year over year for Prime Day, she was “pleasantly surprised” that total sales were up 25% and conversions on Prime Day coverage was up 30% year over year. She declined to share total revenue from Prime Day. 

Meanwhile, Gallery Media Group’s CRO Chris Anthony said that total revenue for July’s Prime Day sales event was flat this year compared to 2023, inline with previous years’ trends. July’s Prime Day tends to be less of a spike for commerce revenue compared to Amazon’s October sales event, when audiences are more in a holiday shopping mindset and go for pricier purchases, he explained. 

That said, GMG’s overall conversion rates for Prime Day were up 6% year over year, and revenue earned on specific shopping categories like clothing and fitness were up 14% and 20%, respectively, which Anthony said was unexpected. 

Strategic planning 

One challenge publishers faced this Prime Day is the algorithm changes that Google rolled out, which not only impacted referral traffic from the search engine, but also impacted search rankings for some commerce content. Now, product reviews that feature unique editorial descriptions outperform listicle-style commerce coverage, which means publishers dependent on search traffic for Prime Day had to go back to the drawing board.

Syrop said that while past Prime Days, her team could rely on “laundry lists of all the best deals,” this year they went more of a product recommendation route, writing articles or creating videos about specific items that editors have tested. “That’s where we saw huge increases,” she said.

Anthony said that GMG also went the standalone product or brand review route instead of putting a bunch of affiliate links into one post, which meant a volume increase in Prime Day coverage this year. 

Baldwin said Forbes Vetted’s evergreen content has taken the biggest hit from Google’s algorithm updates, leading the team to put more emphasis on deals coverage throughout the year to capitalize on the benefit of timeliness. For Prime Day, its primary deal article, which highlights the best deals for Prime Day, saw the best conversion, given its thorough descriptions and price comparisons, as well as regular updates that began weeks prior to July 16.

Meanwhile, theSkimm took a polar opposite approach, given its newsletter distribution strategy is the largest contributor of conversions. And since her team “never prioritizes” search, Baker said they don’t have to bend to Google’s whims. Instead, her team focused on the products and categories theSkimm’s audience would be most interested in, having surveyed them ahead of Prime Day about which products they were hoping would be on sale, and used that to craft a handful of category-specific Prime Day newsletters.

As a result, theSkimm’s Prime Day Amazon beauty guide newsletter yielded a 62% conversion rate. “It’s not just about serving the best deals, but about really focusing on the individual audience and what they’re hoping for. That was maximizing our conversion and our increase of sales year over year,” Baker said. 

Commerce is still an unpredictable business

Even though Prime Day seems to have outperformed expectations, publishers aren’t convinced that their commerce businesses holistically will triumph in 2024. 

“For us, ‘24 compared to ‘23, it’s not going to be a banner year,” said Baldwin. “The Google search volatility has impacted our evergreen content so it’s been hard to predict [commerce] in the way that we were able to last year. It’s been a little more all over the map.” 

Anthony agreed that 2024 is not looking like it will be “a growth opportunity necessarily for commerce.” Instead, he said he’s viewing it as a year of “innovation, experimentation and testing” to determine how to decrease dependency on Google referral traffic, tweaking email strategy and improving social commerce conversions. The latter of which he said is showing positive uptick, with 10% of commerce conversions in June coming from Instagram alone.

TheSkimm’s commerce business is a little more stable, given most of their conversions come from its newsletter distribution. Baker said every month to date has experienced year-over-year growth, though she declined to share exact numbers or percentages. 

And prior to what has become a “phenomenal” July for commerce revenue, Syrop said the business was the one revenue line that was flat compared to last year. But now, she said she has “some hope for [commerce revenue] being up slightly year over year now … You have more people who seem to be more game to spend money. So it seems much more encouraging as we go into the back half,” she said.

What we’ve heard

“I think that you can liken it to procrastinating to study for an exam … [Google’s announcement] gives opportunities for [marketers] to focus on things that are third-party cookie deprecation adjacent. Things like first-party data strategy. That is just a good strategy for marketing, regardless of whether cookies will be deprecated or not.”

– Rachel Cascisa, vp of platform adoption at Epsilon, on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

Ad category market check 

Publishers are feeling more optimistic about the state of the ad market this summer than they were this time last year, but some advertising categories are helping to fortify that sense of security more than others. 

Categories that are up: 

By and large, publishers came to a consensus that the following categories have been strong performers so far this year: 

• Pharmaceuticals
• Finance/Insurance
• Retail
• CPG
• Luxury/fashion
• Corporate/B2B 

Categories that have room to grow:

• Entertainment – “I don’t think anybody would say anything differently just based off of the post-strike content desert, but media and entertainment in particular experienced some softness [in the first half of the year],” said Geoff Schiller, CRO of Vox Media. 
• Political – This category is tricky because while publishers are by nature seeing an increase in this category in a major presidential election year, there is still a bit of a struggle when it comes to competing for candidates’ campaign budgets against CTV or traditional television companies. Some publishers, like The Guardian and Newsweek, declared their ambitions to go after political ads earnestly for the first time this year, and according to Newsweek’s head of advertising sales, Danielle Varvaro, the category has been steered largely by local political candidates. 

Publishers are divided on: 

• Auto – While some niche and lifestyle publishers like Apartment Therapy Media and Gallery Media have reported an uptick in ad dollars from auto advertisers this year, larger news publishers reported it’s nothing of note compared to the typical deal sizes they receive in this category. The likelihood is that auto advertisers are expanding their digital media strategies to include more partners, with ambitions to target specific demographics that are regular audiences for smaller, topical media sites. 
• Telecom – The inverse seems to be happening in this category. While bigger publishers, like Vox Media, seem to be experiencing an uptick in this category, smaller enthusiast brands are noting a bit of a slow down.

Numbers to know

<5%: The percentage stake in BuzzFeed that hedge fund owner Varun Gupta now owns, adding another name to the list of minority investors in the digital media company that are hoping to turn the business around. 

$114 million: The total U.S. revenue X brought in during the second quarter, a 25% drop quarter over quarter and a 53% decline year over year.

$1.4 billion: The amount of money Meta is paying in a settlement with the state of Texas over Facebook’s use of facial recognition technology, which the platform company has since discontinued. 

What we’ve covered

Perplexity’s new rev-share publisher program is live, but not all pubs are sold:

• Artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity hopes its new Publisher Program will get the artificial intelligence company back in the media’s good graces after receiving a number of cease and desist letters from publishers. 
• At its core, the Publisher Program is a revenue-share deal based on revenue made from advertising on Perplexity’s platform — a business it has not yet launched but is planning to have operational by the end of the year. 

Learn more about the program and why some publishers are hesitant to sign on here.

Why YouTube and TikTok creators aren’t going all-in on AI-generated videos:

• the arrival of generative AI tools capable of creating everything from scripts to thumbnails can be especially enticing.
• But there are also reasons for creators not to hand over their YouTube channels and TikTok accounts to the likes of ChatGPT and RunwayML.

See why video creators aren’t yet embracing AI here.

Microsoft report highlights AI efforts around election misinformation and harmful deepfakes:

• A new report from Microsoft highlighted key challenges, opportunities and urgencies that come with protecting people from the dangers of AI-generated content.
• The report was published amid growing concerns about AI-generated content this election season. 

Read the top takeaways from the report here.

What we’re reading

PubMatic and Magnite add new fees for publishers: 

According to a report by Adweek, two of the largest supply-side platforms (SSPs), Magnite and PubMatic have added an additional fee structure that charges publishers that have bespoke programs aimed at connecting them directly with clients and media buyers. 

U.K. politicians accuse Washington Post CEO Will Lewis of deceiving police: 

Lewis has been accused of intentionally misleading British police in an investigation of Rupert Murdoch’s media company (now known as News UK), in order to shield evidence of alleged crimes. NPR reported that Lewis allegedly concocted a false security threat in January 2011 in order to delete millions of emails between 2008 and 2010. 

AI powered search engines gain more ground and more media partnerships: 

This week, OpenAI launched a new artificial intelligence-based search product, SearchGPT, while AI search engine Perplexity announced a new publisher program that is meant to compensate publishers with a revenue-share model. Axios reports that unlike the content licensing deals that publishers and AI companies have been striking, the rev-share model for these AI search products may give publishers more leverage. 

Rupert Murdoch wants to protect Fox News from his heirs, but he may not be in control of the succession plot line: 

Murdoch is attempting to cut three of his children, James, Elisabeth and Prudence, from the family trust in order to prevent them from making changes to News UK’s portfolio after he passes – namely selling off Fox News. But Vanity Fair reports that the business may already be cracking under the weight of scandals and alleged crimes from Rupert’s reign.

Trump was interviewed at the National Association of Black Journalists conference, despite member disapproval: 

On Wednesday, former President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump participated in a Q-and-A style session at the organization’s conference in Chicago, ruffling many members’ and attendees’ feathers that he was invited to speak in the first place, the New York Times reported. In response, speakers for the event, like journalist and activist Raquel Willis, took to X to announce they will not be speaking and boycotting the conference.