New survey: Digital publishers reveal strategies for growth

For some publishers, social media is the cornerstone of any good strategy. For others, programmatic is the No. 1 focus in 2020. The best strategy to keep a digital publication growing all depends on who you ask. To build a picture of the most effective digital strategies, Marfeel invited publishers from around the world to participate in the Big Publisher Survey of 2020. The survey drew 129 publishing executives representing publications of all sizes, with some reaching up to 100 million monthly readers. We made sure to reach out to publishers of all verticals and types, including those that are not our customers. These executives described their strategies and the technology they are using to grow their audience, keep readers engaged and increase their ad revenue. The responses were filtered by audience size and specialization to find out how growth strategies need to be adapted as the audience grows. The report explored five key themes across every stage of the publisher journey to discover underused technology and strategies publishers can employ to skip ahead in their evolution. Publisher evolution patterns emerge The strategies for growth revealed in the survey tended to follow a common three-phase pattern for all participating publishers: First, you write great content to build an audience; next, you optimize your online experience to keep that audience. Only then can you really start to work on diversifying revenue. Here are the key highlights from our report: It’s only when traffic starts to reach a certain maturity and publishers manage their traffic acquisition well through quality content that publishers will organically feel the need to transition. So naturally, when a publisher gets enough traction from its audience, it makes business sense to invest in returning readers. Phase 2: The experience matters What comes next is the user experience. Once audiences start to hit 1 million to 10 million readers, publishers become far more likely to target growth by improving their mobile experience and other technical enhancements. Despite this, when asked about monetization strategies into 2020, 74 percent of monetization teams surveyed revealed that they are using programmatic advertising in their monetization mix. Since programmatic is still gaining traction, with server-to-server header bidding receiving wide adoption in 2020, there is still plenty of room for growth for programmatic advertising in publishing. Evolving alongside technology If the Big Publisher Survey of 2020 revealed one thing, it’s that every publishing success starts with a great story. But, today, a great story alone is not enough. In order to evolve even faster, publishers have to adopt technology and strategies that would usually be required in the next stage of their growth. Based on my experience, I have seen that niche or forward-thinking publications thrive because they manage the difficult art of balancing great content production, short- and long-term readership acquisition and sophisticated monetization. By adopting the right new technology, publishers of any size will set themselves for accelerated growth and will reach new heights.Download the full publisher growth strategy report here. About Marfeel Marfeel is the publisher platform revolutionizing the way publishers and bloggers create, optimize and monetize their mobile websites. Marfeel has developed a whole suite of hands-free features to increase metrics across the board for four main factors: website performance, page speed and loading times, traffic acquisition and retention, and ad revenue. The platform now delivers over 1 billion monthly mobile sessions from global publishers, making it extremely likely that you have experienced a Marfeelized mobile website.

New survey: Digital publishers reveal strategies for growth

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