Content strategy should focus on value play and not on volume play

As content has grown leaps and bounds with immediate availability, the attention span of readers becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information. It directly affects the revenue from readers, subscriptions and also from advertisers.  

exchange4media in association with Taboola recently organised ‘The Publishers Round Table’ on the theme ‘Decoding newer monetization strategies for digital publishers.’ The session was chaired by Chanan Fogel, Vice President- APAC, Taboola. 

Speaking about newer forms of content and evolving revenue strategies, Pradeep Gairola, VP & Business Head- Digital, The Hindu said, “The urge for newness causes us to explore more, this has helped the media to come with shorter and more engaging content. Personalisation of the experience of readers is an upcoming facet which will enable us to do better. The advertising revenue and the traffic are no longer directly proportional. Large numbers of readers are ready to commit to high quality, well researched and longer form of content. The maximum conversion happens, when people read editorials. Long form content has done dramatically well when it comes to subscriptions.” 

According a recent study the average attention span of digital consumers has fallen from 12 seconds to seven seconds. It is not that readers do not have the time to go through everything but the world’s attention span is decreasing dramatically. Hemant Jain, Sr EVP & Head of Digital Business, Lokmat asserts, “When this time span is considered, it has a huge impact on our strategies and mapping what the consumer wants in today’s age. There is huge fragmentation in terms of platform where content is getting discovered. Because of the aspect of decrease in attention span, there is a need to re-invent ourselves. Pulling the consumer from the point of discovery to your destination plays a vital role.” 

Samarth Sharma, Chief Business Officer, Asianet News believes that publishers are serving algorithms more than humans. He added, “The attention economy is moving very aggressively in the psyche of the readers. Listening more to the users is important and the cohorts have changed by becoming deeper than catering to age groups or specific geographies.” 

As per industry experts, the ad economy benefits from short attention while the subscription economy benefits from the willingness of the readers to commit their attention to content that is relevant. The challenge for publishers is to cater to both of these.  

Shouneel Charles, Executive Vice President- Digital, Times Now pointed out that a lot of discoverability is happening on search and social and they have set the norms for how the news websites mobile page looks like.  

“At Times Network we put in a lot of effort in delivering video content. Newsrooms, desks and units in India have to evolve. The logic that more page views mean more money is redundant. The overall strategy should involve striking the balance with the right partners on monetization. Besides unique numbers, monetization has now come to the forefront as a credible success metric in the post-Covid world,” added Charles.  

For news publishers there is a need to completely re-imagine their businesses and to ensure that the core experience of the product, whether it is through content, technology or page layout enables the consumer to spend more time.   

Giving his perspective about how the media business is going to evolve, Hemant Jain, Sr EVP & Head of Digital Business, Lokmat explained, “What we define news today will go through a huge shift tomorrow. The old age news media brands will continue to exist and over the next few years they will re-invent. The content strategy should focus on value play and not on volume play. This makes the content much more discoverable and shareable.”  

These experts agreed that in the news media business, great content will continue to take the priority seat when it comes to any kind of business and the economics which has to be created around i