‘Race to the bottom’: Top publishing execs sound off on the biggest challenges in the industry

At the Digiday Publishing Summit last month, hundreds of industry leaders gathered to discuss building products to monetize audiences, sifting through data and incorporating insights. Here’s a quick look at five major takeaways from our most recent summit. The key hits:

  • Publishers that are focused on the top line are depressing the entire business.
  • To create effective subscription products, you have to constantly test, learn and iterate.
  • Apple News+ puts publishers in the position of becoming production houses, and they lose their connection with the consumer.
  • When trying to scale an events business, the key is partnerships.

 

More in Media

How a German publisher JV is turning LLM visibility into a premium brand buy

Germany’s BCN, the joint-venture commercial arm of three major publishing houses – Hubert Burda Media, Funke and Klambt – is rolling out a commercial product that helps brands get properly surfaced and described inside ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants, not just on traditional search results pages.

AI podcast experiments march on with Forbes’ new daily audio briefing

Forbes bets on AI-generated audio with a five-minute daily news brief. Stories are selected by product, editorial and an internal AI tool.

How USA Today Co. is trying to beat AI Overviews on World Cup news

USA Today Co. is using AI tools to beat AI Overviews in the race for World Cup search traffic around breaking news.