#132 — New models for media in 2021
Happy New Year! We're kicking off your regularly scheduled curation of publishing news today. It's the first working week of the year, so in this round-up you can expect lots of 2021 predictions and strategy highlights. Plus: useful tips for SEO & affiliate marketing. Enjoy!
💯 Top picks
10 things public media should forget and consider in 2021
"To think that life after 2020 will follow a linear path, you’d be kidding yourself. And the ripples of 2020 will continue long past this year."
💸 Business models
Your reading list to start 2021 off right
Learn from these media strategies to kick the year off.
New models for media
"In 2020, many media outlets saw record traffic due to the pandemic. It’s only natural to assume readership numbers will fall in 2021 as life (hopefully) returns to some version of normal."
[Report] Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions
"This will also be a year of economic reshaping, with publishers leaning into subscription and e-commerce – two future-facing business models that have been supercharged by the pandemic."
Twenty years of TPM — and a shift to memberships
"From 2016 until now, our focus has been almost exclusively on membership growth and everything that goes with it. We still sell direct ads, and we still drive programmatic revenue, but it was clear that memberships were the core of our company."
Newsletter internships = the new foot in the door?
"If I were starting out in media right now in 2021 (or graduating from J-school this spring), I would probably be looking at this growing class of newsletter jobs and betting on them as a more realistic way to get a foot in the door."
✍️ Modern journalism
Is Substack the media future we want?
"Substack, like Facebook, insists that it is not a media company; it is, instead, “a platform that enables writers and readers.” But other newsletter platforms, such as Revue, Lede, or TinyLetter (a service owned by Mailchimp, the e-mail-marketing company), have never offered incentives to attract writers."
Our old models of journalistic impact need to change
"Plus: How newsrooms “pressured from the top” cover their corporate bosses, studies of the “Serial effect” in podcasting, and Facebook’s role as an infrastructure for local political information."
💻 Technology
How to rank well on Google this year
Google published what they look for when ranking websites, here's a quick reference list.
What you need to know about affiliate marketing
Find out how to boost your revenue strategy, increase traffic, and get started with affiliate marketing as a publisher in these short interviews with affiliate experts.
🤷 WTF?
[Podcast] The World, Remade
"How the pandemic has shaped our future: from the built environment, to the way we work, to the way we learn."
