Your media publishing brand is scaling rapidly. This means a number of things; you’ll be seeing more visitors flocking to your website and, as a result your content production, will need to scale. Additionally, the increasing numbers of visitors to your site gives you an opportunity for greater revenue generation.
In this article, we will outline the key considerations, opportunities and challenges faced when a media brand is going through a period of rapid scaling.
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How to maximise your revenue
Yes, advertising is crucial, but most publishers in today’s digital landscape of ad blocking technologies, VPNs and paywalls must diversify and explore multiple income streams to remain competitive.
In fact, WARC found that advertising is the main income stream for only 14 per cent of digital publishers.
Reuters Institute of Journalism found that publishers have an average of six different revenue streams. So, whether you run a scaling sports news WordPress blog or a growing membership news subscription website in the property space, you could be overlooking significant revenue streams for your brand.
The most common revenue streams for publishers
– Branded content / native advertising
– Paywalls and membership content
– Affiliate marketing
– Display advertising
– Monetising your data
At Powered By Coffee, we have worked with numerous publishers to optimise their membership websites. By optimising your membership website performance, as we did for Prospect Magazine, you can retain subscribers, as well as attract an increased number of new members.
How to ensure your servers can cope with increased demand
Scaling presents increased demand. What this means in its most basic form is a higher number of visitors to your site. This places strain on your website’s infrastructure. When demand is at its most concentrated – think Black Friday for e-commerce websites, or during a breaking story for a publisher — your systems can become overstretched, and when worst comes to worst, your site will crash.
This isn’t just an inconvenience for your tech resource and your readers – site crashes hit your bottom line. Downtime can mean lost subscriptions, lost advertising impressions (crucial to optimise your ad yield) — hence revenue — and visitors abandoning your website out of sheer frustration.
When your website is crucial to your organisation’s functioning, the importance of hosting stability cannot be overlooked. As a publisher, your website is your main marketing tool and your primary source of revenue. As a result, employing methods to ensure you limit the possibility of damaging downtime is crucial to your brand’s continued scaling. Investing in technical solutions will ensure your website performance and hosting can always be relied on.
We’ve previously explored how serverless hosting can benefit a scaling media brand website on our blog.
Benefits of serverless hosting for a scaling brand:
· Unlimited scale – serverless hosts offer unlimited scalability. This is because, with serverless hosting plans, you won’t have server limitations. With serverless, your hosting bandwidth expands as you grow
· Security – customer data is not reliant on a primary database for security, so the likelihood of customer data being compromised is reduced significantly
· Reduced costs – what you get is what you pay. With serverless hosting, you only pay for the traffic your website receives, unlike with traditional hosting methods, where you may end up paying for resources you don’t even use
Bear in mind that serverless hosting is mostly beneficial for rapidly scaling organisations. Smaller scale projects can be more suited to traditional hosting. So, before you choose which hosting method to follow, it’s a good idea to understand your timescale for scaling.
How to simplify the content publishing process for your editorial team
As your organisation scales, so does the need for your brand to publish more content to satisfy the increased demand from your readers. Yet, with more content to research, produce and publish, the greater the demands on your editorial team’s time.
There are tools which can help save your editorial team time during the editorial process. Our blog on the 5 ways Gutenberg can improve your media brand’s authoring experience explores how WordPress’ recently overhauled editor can make publishing new content more efficient.
Gutenberg can save time during the content publishing process in a number of ways:
· Reusable blocks – Gutenberg blocks allow writers to set up programmable styling presets which can be used time and time again. By investing time in the setting up of block templates, which will be used throughout different types of content — such as a news article or press release — your publishing team will save time on the publishing process, freeing up time for more creative pursuits
· WYSIWYG – with the Gutenberg editor, what you see is what you get. This solves the age-old problem of text editors never quite accurately displaying what a live post will appear like in preview mode. With accurate page previews, content publishers have to spend less time reviewing and revising articles for publication
How to improve website performance despite additional content
More content means a slower page load time, right? No, not necessarily. There are a lot of steps you can take to ensure your website loads quickly, even when your content inventory expands by a large degree.
If you run a membership subscription website, we’ve previously emphasised the importance of smooth metering to improve page load speed for every visitor across a website.
Efficient metering is essential for publishing websites which rely on a subscription model to generate revenue. We helped Prospect Magazine rebuild their paywall, as an example. This current affairs publisher was running with a tiered subscription model, yet it was struggling with a paywall which was causing premium content to leak to users with free accounts and causing slow page load speeds.
We helped by rebuilding their metering system to be more reliable. As a result, we reduced page load times across the board from over eight seconds on average to less than one second.
What are the knock-on effects of a slower load time?
According toNeilPatel.com
· 40 per cent of internet users abandon a website that takes over 3 seconds to load
· A 1 per cent delay in loading can lead to a 7 per cent fall in conversions
So, if you’re looking to increase conversions on your publishing website, whether you ruin a membership website or a site which relies on ad revenue as its primary revenue stream, byn lowering your site speed page response, you have a greater chance of increased conversions.
Let’s grab a coffee
To discuss the technical requirements of your scaling media brand, give us a call or send us a message, and we’ll talk about your project goals.
