The Associated Press creates a test kitchen

Brian Morrissey linked to an article by Mark Stenberg on Adweek about how the Associated Press is trying to diversify its revenue stream. Like every other publisher. But in AP’s case, the’re coming from a different starting point.

They get 80% of their revenue from licensing – which is crazy high – and they only get 5% from advertising. They want to double their ad revenue.

Since they focus so heavily on licensing, you can understand why their current model doesn’t give them much first-party data. In a way they’re writing for their licensees, not for their readers.

They want to fix that, because first-party data is very important in today’s market.

A few things stand out in this story.

The AP focuses on hard news, but Morrissey says advertisers often avoid hard news out of brand safety concerns. But they can still use news to drive traffic. They’ll be live-blog breaking news for that reason.
They want to emphasize direct media buys. Currently they get roughly 85% of their ad inventory from programmatic.
They’re going to do more with photography and especially video, which has higher CPMs than photos.
They want to capture more first-party data.
They want to highlight lifestyle content, like sports and entertainment.
They’re partnering with Sovrn, Nativo, and Taboola. I’ll provide links below.

All of this is to create their own test kitchen to find out what content engages a digital audience. Obviously that will help them in their licensing work.

I used the way back machine to compare their older site with their current site. The major change I noticed is that they moved links to video content higher on the page, included more video content, and called out sports and entertainment content a little more obviously.

I expected to see more promotions for e-newsletters.

But I also expect this will be an on-going mission, and they’ll adjust as they go.

Links

The AP Debuts New Website Designed to Attract More Ad Spend
https://www.adweek.com/media/ap-debuts-website-ad-spend/

Sovrn
https://www.sovrn.com/

Nativo
https://www.nativo.com/

Taboola
https://www.taboola.com/

Matt Bailey’s podcast
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/endless-coffee-cup-digital-marketing-caffeinated/id1130111127