The changing tenets of monetisation policies for web publishers

The web publishing industry in India has changed a lot in the recent past due to the COVID pandemic and several government decisions. With the COVID-induced lockdowns, the content consumption patterns of audiences have changed.

For publishers, it has become imperative to create valuable content, as they all operate in a competitive space.

During a panel discussion at the third edition of MGID presents Digipub Week, industry experts delved deep into the changing landscape of content consumption habits and the best monetisation policies for web publishers.

Moderated by Andrey Korchinskiy, head of publishers, MGID Global, the panelists included Anushrav Gulati, head - indirect revenues, Times Internet (TIL); Gaurav Arora, senior vice president and chief revenue officer, Jagran New Media; Hemant Jain, senior executive vice president and head of digital business, Lokmat Media; Pradeep Gairola, vice president and business head - digital, The Hindu; and Pankil Mehta, chief business officer, Alchemy Group.

In his initial remarks, Gulati of TIL said that his platform has seen the total user engagement go up by 50 per cent across multiple touchpoints, over the last two years.

“There is an increase in long-form articles and video content consumption. The expectations of users for engaging content, have gone up. Hence, we have started leveraging long-form journalism. While focusing on revenues from ad sales perspective, our efforts on subscription have also gone up.”

Arora of Jagran New Media believes that video monetisation has evolved a lot, in terms of production and ads. “Over the last few years, we have evolved from being a generic advertiser to an evolved one. We look at brand safety very closely to deliver the right kind of ROI to advertisers.”

Highlighting some shifts in audience consumption habits, Gairola of The Hindu informed that his platform saw a dramatic increase in podcast and video consumption.

“Podcasts did not exist for us two years back. Now, we have a podcast every day and are planning on more podcasts in future. Podcasts will be more of a sponsorship model. Today, it can deliver a critical number that the advertisers are looking for.”

Another trend that Gairola mentioned is the dramatic increase in newsletter format. The platform currently produces about 20 newsletters each week. “Unlike earlier, today, our newsletter is not pushing the user to the website. Now, we give the user a complete experience wherever he is. We feel the consumption should happen there itself.”

For Jain of Lokmat Media (a Marathi news website) the last few years have witnessed a shift from feature phones to smartphones. And, with more people having access to affordable bandwidth on their mobiles, he predicts that we are soon moving towards a mobile-first economy.

“In Maharashtra, the two categories that perform very well are: local politics and entertainment. Entertainment includes Bollywood, Marathi cinema, television, etc. We saw a significant jump in our traffic during COVID. Many experts said that once things are back to normal, the traffic would also reverse to pre-COVID level. But it didn’t happen. This clearly highlights the paradigm shift in the manner in which content is consumed today,” mentioned Jain.

Speaking about a publisher’s approach when it comes to choosing an adtech partner, Mehta of The Alchemy Group said that there is a massive shift in the way publishers work with adtech partners.

“Publishers are quite choosy about the partners. Limiting the partner and ensuring that they get more strategic value is a massive shift in the industry. We are seeing a rise of programmatic solutions, but it primarily works in favour of big publishers,” added Mehta.

The entire session can be watched here:

Digipub Week 2022 is supported by MGID (Presenting Partner) and AndBeyond.Media (Associate Partner)

MGID:

MGID is a global advertising platform helping brands reach unique local audiences at scale. It uses privacy-first, AI-based technology to serve high-quality, relevant ads in brand-safe environments. The company offers a variety of ad formats, including native, display, and video to deliver a positive user experience. This enables advertisers to drive performance and awareness, and publishers to retain and monetize their audiences.

Every month, MGID reaches 900 million unique readers, with 200 billion ad impressions, across 25 thousand trusted publishers. For more information, please visit: www.mgid.com

AndBeyond.Media:

AndBeyond.Media is a global SSP providing new-age ad tech solutions to publishers. Our holistic platform with technology at its epicentre caters to more than 1000 media publishers & content creators. Being in the industry for over 7 years, our sole aim is to optimize operational efficiencies, maximize yields and provide programmatic solutions in order to monetize and generate incremental revenue through advanced and varied adtech solutions.