Own Thy Audience

According to Search Engine Land, zero click searches rose to 65% in 2020. It's interesting because Google then responded to this claim, alleging it as false, and that, “In reality, Google Search sends billions of clicks to websites every day, and we've sent more traffic to the open web every year since Google was first created.”  To put an end to the debate, we decided to call in Chelsey Heath, NEWS SEO strategist at Trisolute Software Corporation, Hisham Khalil, CEO, Content Ventures Investments , Tarek Abougabal, Director of Sales - MENA, iZooto and Nash David, Director of Content Marketing, iZooto. The panel discussed what zero-click content means for publishers, the difference between visibility on Google Search and Google News, how SERP has evolved and much more. Tune in now!

Gen Z is a tough nut to crack, but engaging with them is now more crucial than ever. Tapping into this audience has marketers pulling their hair. They are social, proactive, and most importantly have massive spending power. How should one reach out, grab their attention and retain them?   Ayush Wadhwa, founder and creative director at OWLED Media, who himself is a podcaster and an influencer opens up on how GenZ can be engaged.  Here is what is covered What is the sutra to build a GenZ audience on social? Does GenZ engage in email? Dipping toes into Augmented reality and Virtual reality Underrated engagement hack for driving your podcast? 101 of influencer marketing for businesses out there.  Encouraging genZ to subscribe 

What is your top priority when it comes to ranking? Do you focus more on Google News or Google Discover? How do you measure the impact of link building alone on organic performance of the site? When so many other on-page and technical factors could also be contributing to the performance. These are some real burning questions that editors and SEO guys have been asking, for quite some time now. Which is why we got Kyle on the podcast. He had tons to contribute to the topic and also shared his viewpoints on core web vitals, amp and his relationship with editors.

Did you know that NEWS articles have less than 48 hours to rank on Google? The bread and butter of newsrooms, have a very small window to shine. Which makes getting your NEWS SEO on point even more important? So how do you do that? Listen in to Barry Adams in this episode where he talks about nailing NEWS SEO, the difference between NEWS SEO and classic SEO, and why URL and site name are no longer important.

Imagine waking up on a random day and losing 98% of your traffic and millions of dollars of revenue to Facebook? And then going ahead and creating India's biggest regional OTT platform? That's the story of Vinay Singhal, the founder of STAGE.  In this episode he has extensively talked about what it takes to create an ultra niche product like STAGE, the vision behind it and how it has grown to become Bharat's own Netflix.  He has also focused on how he establishes maximum audience ownership, and his views on how ready India is for subscriptions.

Google every once in a while throws an update bomb and it is usually a nerve-wracking experience for publishers. Monetizing has been a challenge for publishers and still is, especially with updates making drastic changes. It becomes vital for publishers to know everything about an update to act accordingly. While E-A-T, played a central role in 2020, the Core Web Values have become an important ranking factor in 2021. Jeremy Fermont, the Director of Business Development at Multidots will talk all about the new update and tell you all about what needs to be done to make your mark out there with CWV.  About Multidots Multidots is one of the most popular WordPress development agencies in the world. They help content publishers and digital agencies to accelerate their performance. Enterprise brands and global corporate groups such as Storyful, which is a NewsCorp Venture, National Associations of Broadcaster, Accenture, and MIT are few of their customers who trust them with complex and large scale WordPress and multi-platform implementations. What is Core Web Vitals all about Three pillars of page experience and how to measure them? Jeremy's experience when it comes to content and page experience How to improve the CWV score? Top 3 things Jeremy advises customers. SEO tools you recommended to measure the CWV performance?  Multidots being a WordPress-focused agency- top 3 things advise your customers to do

In a recent study of DNR 2021, the median number of subscriptions held by those who pay for news was consistently 1. This means that it has become tricky to monetize the audience through subscriptions. How can publishers stand out with their subscription offerings? What should they do to make the readers pay? Abhishek Dadoo, founder and CEO, Few Cents, talks about all this and a lot more in this episode.  What should mid-size and small publishers do to get more subscriptions  Building a subscriber funnel Who is a never-subscriber and how can they be encouraged to try out subscriptions?  How should publishers make sure that subscribers retain and not churn? ​​How can marketing play a role to increase subscriptions?  How can AI help along this journey?  What are important things that publishers need to look at when it comes to choosing a payment gateway? 3 things publishers need to keep in mind while starting off with subscriptions? Other revenue options for various audience segments that publishers need to look at North star metric publishers need to track

According to Google's Andrey Lipatt Sev, links are one of the three major ranking factors in Google. Newsrooms strive to build links but most are unaware of the different ways to do it. But it goes without saying that link building is crucial especially in the long run. Easier said than done, it has become tricky to rank well on search engines. While some say that off-page SEO is dead, Michel strongly disagrees with it and tells us why.    In this episode, we have Michael Bertini, an SEO expert who specializes in enterprise-level SEO. He talks about how one can build links, measure success, and how to maximize it, and reveals some untold secrets of link building.    Important to get a link back, and if ‘no follow' links are better than do-follow links in Google's eyes Measuring the success of link building Earn a backlink from authoritative sites  Off-page SEO for new publishers  Ranking on Google News  Influence of social media mentions in a news publisher's performance in Google News SEO  Embedding the anchor text and full URL links in news releases?  Unlinked mention and the approach.

Did you know that the Google search team has a 160-page document ( book ) that outlines how the search algorithm works? Even better - Google updates this every 6 months.    If you are an SEO, it really qualifies as your first starting point. Question is - how many people do you know to print that document and keep it on their desk? This is why Lily Ray stands out. Also, because she usually DJ's in the New York circuit..   But back to where we are. News, SEO, and EAT. Lily has expertise in EAT. And in this conversation, I got a chance to ask Lily about how news publishers should go thinking about their implementation for EAT. Of the various things that matter, EAT has a massive impact and most publishers haven't quite cracked it yet. We chat about the outlook on AI content, the need of building trust with the audience, and most importantly how newer publications have a shot at establishing their expertise. Lily's updates on Twitter and LinkedIn are fire and her default position on SEO is - optimize for the user and Google will follow. Google has been saying this for.....  Wait. Forever.    Tons of new learnings and a fresh breakdown of what EAT means for news publishers. Go ahead and give this a listen. 

Building vs Buy is a decision that almost every software category struggles with. Software is eating the world. Building new tools, products, solutions is easier than ever before. The only question that remains is - Should you build it or let someone else build it for you. This is what Vivek and Aditya Bhelande - founder and CEO @ YuktaMedia sat down to answer. Aditya has been selling software to publishers and media businesses for well over 5 years and he has had his share of adventures. Right from deals going cold because internal teams wanted to build it to teams circling back after 6 months to resume sale negotiations, Aditya has seen it all.  Aditya talks about the build vs buy dilemma and breaks how teams should approach this problem. Build vs Buy is a frequent conversation even internally at iZooto. We often resort to Wardley maps to figure out what is it that our customers want the most and what is it that will help us unlock maximum value. Wardley Maps is an incredibly powerful framework that helps builders, founders, product managers to identify what is it that they should be investing their time in building and what is it that they should be buying off the shelf.  Listen to Vivek and Aditya chat about all things media and answering the question of build vs buy.

Building an audience-first culture has become critical, now more than ever. Marketers are gunning for ways to build an audience to take their business to new heights, but most marketers do not know how to begin. It becomes tricky when you have to just rely on experimentation without any playbook in hand.  Bonnie Roche has been helping publishers build an audience for many years now. Bonnie, in this episode, shares her operating playbook to build an audience-first culture where she talks about how one can start building an audience, how it is essential to inculcate the audience-first culture within the team, and how to build a loyal audience.  Key points covered -  Impact of the audience first culture for the editorial team Operating playbook she has been following for years Brands in the media ecosystem that share the values of audience first culture Change in the content consumption and what it means from an audience development standpoint Increasing subscription retention and loyalty

Podcasting is the new low-hanging fruit for pubs looking for new revenue streams. The podcasting ad revenue in the US has crossed $700 mil last year with News podcasting leading the charts. But all said and done, scaling it needs an expert intervention. And that's exactly why we invited Wil Williams, a co-founder at the Hug House Productions, to address the challenges and their workarounds while monetizing a news podcast. Here's what the episode will help you learn - Though podcasting as a new revenue stream is all lucrative, why are some newsrooms still holding back? The go-to playbook for podcast monetization. What to do exactly after you're done publishing a podcast? Sure ways to find out if a news podcast will be a success. Metrics that news companies can track once an episode starts gaining traction among their listeners. #1 thing digital publishers and media companies should do in order to retain their listeners. Advertising or branded content.

In a country like India, there are 121 languages which are spoken by 10,000 or more people in which has a population of 121 crores. Just having content in one language does not cut it. Not anymore. The need to strategize to put together a plan to serve readers with content based on the language and region is now more important than ever. Optimize the website content according to the region the reader is in or the language that they prefer consuming information. But coming up with an SEO strategy is where most publishers get stuck.  Chanpreet Singh has been doing all things SEO for over 2 decades now. In this episode, he will open up his operating playbook so that you can start off with optimizing your SEO strategy.   Important points covered  How should a digital publisher zero down on the languages? What parameter does Google use to identify if a page is targeted for a particular region? Different subdomain or different subdirectory? What performs better and why? Should publishers go multi-lingual, multi-regional, or does it make sense to optimize it for both?  How should one optimize for multilingual search?  What are the things that need to be in place before starting off with off-page SEO? How should publishers mitigate duplication content? How should one measure and track if their regional content is performing well?

42% of businesses fail because there is no market need for their product. Well, building a new product is not easy. Sometimes it so happens that one ends up building something entirely different from what would provide value to their audience. And just like that, all that effort goes down the drain. That's why achieving product-market fit becomes critical. It could make or break a product's success in the market.    In this episode, Arie shares the checklist that you need to follow every time you build a new product. He has helped build many products for KapanLagi Universe managing the full product lifecycle, from the requirement to launch, and has also led the product team of CNN and CNBC Indonesia.    Important points covered- Process of building new products Things to check off before starting off with building a product for the readers 3 must-ask questions every product manager should ask readers before working on a product How to adapt and evolve in this ever-changing market. Once the product is built, what's next? How can one find out if it was poor marketing or lack of product marketing fit if the results are not as expected? The most effective way to find out a product-market fit for an existing product Key metrics to track for a product that is just built?  Monitoring and analytic tools publishers should make use of 3 publishers, one should draw inspired from Tips and strategies for all things growth?

Podcasting has been in the marketing arena for quite some time now. They have surpassed the video wave, making audio as a medium one of the best ways to engage the audience. 80% of people listen to all or most of each episode, whereas the average reader spends just 37 seconds reading a blog post! Podcast is an intimate channel and has become a companion be it while commuting, talking a walk, or taking a break on a lazy Sunday afternoon.    Unlike the video medium, which requires dedicated attention, the audio medium gives one the freedom to multi-task, helping marketers boost engagement like none other. And it is needless to say, the number of podcasts on various platforms has shot up like crazy!    In this episode, we have Rob Walch, who had started podcasting way before Apple started supporting podcasts and had helped Senator Edwards, the first politician to have a podcast, produce one. Rob shares his 16 years of podcasting experience, points all the do's and don'ts, shares the secret sauce to kickstart a podcast and outlines what marketers should be tracking.

With the duopolies ruling over, revenue from ads has become unreliable. Publishers are on a hunt for ways they increase their revenue and build their own audience. On the other hand, readers are hungry for authentic news in this era where fake news and privacy breaches are rampant. Finding news that is trustworthy and reliable has become a real challenge. The reader revenue model has seen quite an adoption, especially in the UK where readers pay for exclusive content. India is not far behind. Readers get what they pay for and publishers increase their revenue. Nandagopal Rajan tells us where the reader revenue model stands in the Indian landscape and shares insights on the what, when, and how of starting off with the reader revenue model.

Indian traffic monetization is the holy grail for a lot of publications today. Revenue models (advertising and affiliates) that work wonders in the US market, offer slivers for the traffic coming in from the Indian subcontinent. Where does the gap lie and what could possibly help bridge it?   Ankit Aggarwal, former Head of Marketing @Uber, after spending almost a decade testing out various monetization strategies that work for the Indian traffic has a lot to share. He's got new trends that you can straight-away implement to bag the $$. In this episode, he also covered why some of these trends might not work in some scenarios, what can be the possible workarounds here and what does the adoption for these new trends look like.   Here are some of the things you'll learn from this conversation - Major challenges that publishers are coming face to face while monetizing this Indian traffic. Why is the same revenue model (advertising and affiliates) working for the US market and not so much for the Indian market? Other revenue trends that are gaining grounds to monetize Indian traffic.  How long will it take for the Indian market to follow a similar adoption? Tune in to know more! 

Alan Jay's has been working on the “internet” for the last 30 years. Let that sink. From being an active community contributor in is University days, he went on to create the biggest movie fan community, IMDB on UseNet group. It went to the World Wide Web in 1993. In this conversation, Vivek and Alan chat about Alan's journey of building IMDB, his experience of building community-driven businesses. Alan also talks about how he views Google, paywalls for content, mistakes publishers often make while crafting their reader revenue strategy. 

In 2016 when ad revenues were still growing and publishers were hesitant to use paywalls, Piers Fawkes and his team decided to set up their own paywall. A decision that made them lose around 2 mil site visitors. It wasn't of course the first paywall in the world, but it was the start of Wallkit. In this conversation, Fawkes narrates his story of establishing one of the most successful subscription businesses, with the perfect checklist for you to transition into one.

Robert Cialdini - author of Influence and Chelsey Heath have a thing in common - they both teach at the Uni of Arizona. While Cialdini focuses on the fundamentals of marketing, Chelsey teaches Search Engine Strategy - whose curriculum changes every semester. In this conversation, Chelsey, helps us understand how news SEO has evolved over the years, early trends in voice search, and video publishing. Full of nuggets and actionable insights, that would make you sit with your notepad and pen as you listen in.

In early 2015 when Quintype began, their founders Chirdeep and Amit realized that most publishers are facing the same problem of creating an interface that lets them run their workflow, each of them building the same workflow, reinventing the flywheel over and over again.  Initially, digital publishers had 2 sets of solutions to choose from - the open-source model - consisted of platforms like WordPress, Jumla, with customized plug-ins that publishers managed on their own and if they wanted to scale, they'd hire a team of developers that would help them build WordPress for scale.  large media houses- they wanted to go down the path of building their own CMSs because there are a lot of things that are custom to their own workflows. The problem that the people at Quintype realized was that in the former - a lot of plug-ins were not tested with each other and wouldn't really work together and most of the time would end up crashing the system; whereas in the latter - keeping up with your codebase and catching up with what Google and Facebook are releasing on the publisher landscape is a tough task for most publishers. During the conversation the question of build v/s buy came up, since the publishing industry is a legacy business and huge media houses prefer to build their own CMSs, and why according to Chirdeep that mentality needs to phase out? His answer was very on the point, that a lot of media houses wanted those readily available plug-ins to be customized with their workflows - which is why they prefer building. And if you look at them now, most of them have landed on creating the same piece of software. A work engine, a rule engine, creating content, distributing content to various channels.  Quintype was quick to realize the pattern of 90% of these software being very similar to each other. And that is what they created, a platform generic enough to go into the industry and specific enough that publishers can build and custom according to their workflows.  It's fun to realize that the requirements that were customized a decade ago have now become standardized, and this is exactly why buying software makes much more sense.  The company describes itself as a digital publisher platform and not as a content management platform. How would Chirdeep differentiate between the two? Is this just industry jargon or there's more to it.  Here's what he had to say -  CMS is what everybody is used to. A content management system can be as simple as an individual blogger creating and publishing content.  Whereas, larger publisher houses have departments and teams, and they have roles and authorization. Someone who is responsible for publishing content for the sports section, should not have authority over the entertainment section. The need to have that separation of concern was present, as well as having an asset management tool too.  Also, a CMS usually powers just one system whereas here a digital publisher platform can be powering a lot more, the website, the mobile apps, screen less interface, sending information to Alexa, Google News, etc. All these syndications of information are automated. It is one way of powering people to do way more things in a better fashion.  When asked how have newsrooms evolved with time, since Chirdeep has a ringside view, he said, back in 2015, everything was print first and then editors would choose what would go on the digital front. Now there's a paradigm shift - things are more digital-first, where the focus is on the quality of the content, finding the right SEO keywords, Meta data, and then sending the relevant content out of it to print. A lot of new-age publishers are digital-only.  There has also been a transition from mobile-first to mobile heavy to mobile-only, and now we are exploring all sorts of content on mobile devices. What then should be the right time for publishers to start thinking about a mobile app? Chirdeep answers, tech has evolved so much that there is hardly any difference between PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) and mobile apps. PWAs are available offline, just like mobile apps, they can have features like push notifications, home screen icons, all of which were earlier just exclusive to mobile apps. Chirdeep recommends having a mobile app when you have a niche audience that is continuously coming back to your site, for example, The Ken, which strongly focuses on startups. Or you have a lot of direct traffic, which happens when you are one of the leading brands in a particular section. Although engagement on mobile apps is always higher than on PWAs. A user on the web would read 1 or 2 pieces, whereas would end up reading 4 to 5 on an app. And to ease this process, Quintype provides templates that publishers can choose from and develop an app for iOs and Android, within a matter of days and in return have to pay a small licensing fee for it.  The next segment in the conversation was the big question of publishers moving beyond advertising as the only business model for them.  They are now looking at models of paywall, membership, community, eCommerce. And as a publishing platform what role did Qunitype see itself playing here? Chirdeep predicts trends moving more towards a reader-centric business model but only for content pieces that are more niche or have in-depth research behind them.  For this, Quintype has a product Accesstype, which lets publishers set up the entire site for monetization through reader revenue. He also mentioned the different levels of plans that can be used in this model, providing different levels of access to information.  As an organization that is centric to India and South East Asia, what trends were seen in terms of adoption, both by publishers and also by end-users. Is the end-user now willing to pay for content? While almost 30% of the total audience pays for content in the Scandinavian nations, and around 10-15% of the audience in the US, the percentage is fairly low in India and SEA, almost around 1%. Mainly because these countries are habitual to accessing free journalism, but the trends are changing gradually because a large chunk base is willing to pay for news that is well researched or niche.  To conclude, it continues to be a significant piece of the monetization pie but a lot of publishers are now looking at alternatives in terms of eCommerce widgets, affiliates, a lot of publishers also use social media branding. It does not seem like publishers will stick to just one business model.  The last question of this extremely insightful conversation was how did Chirdeep see the pandemic change the way publishers are operating on day to day basis?  To which he answered, things are turning more digital, India and SEA still rely a lot on print, with 70-80% of the revenue coming from print for them. The pandemic although made them accelerate more towards digital, where in the first two months of the pandemic, traffic went off the roof. They thought that with time it would go down but turns out the publishers are doing really well. They have accelerated their digital-first strategy, trying to figure out what does the post-print world look like, and what can they do to populate their funnel more and more.

Someone who transitioned from print media to digital media knows audience behavior is different in both. As an analyst, Karla's first principle for analyzing data is looking past those vanity metrics, somewhere publishers often get lost. And one such vanity metric for her is pageviews. According to Karla, the focus should be on the engagement meter of the user and not the page views. A strong believer in quality over quantity. In this episode of Own Thy Audience, she was strongly led by her principle of being "Data driven, not data led". Especially with 2020 being such an eventful year, publishers need to focus wisely. She also openly accepts her obsession with mailing lists and advocates their massive importance. When asked about working with renowned editors, and finding the right way to coax them to give in to numbers, she adopts a methodological approach, and always believes in providing a lot of context to her research.  Tune in to this wholesome conversation over audience, data, metrics, tools, and some controversial choices made between Microsoft Excel and Google Data Studio.

It is no secret that monetizing traffic for publishers is still a challenge. How do a carrier billing and telco partnership company find a place here? What does an ideal checkout flow for subscribers look like? With disposable incomes varying across the globe, how important are pricing experiments? And what kind of pricing experiments should publishers try? These were some of the many questions that we had for Andrea Boetti, the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Fortumo. With the experience of working with more than 100k, Andrea was just the right person for this. Head over to know more.

Vivek Khandelwal was recently invited over as a guest to the SaaS Growth Show with Raj Swaminathan. He talked about the iZooto journey of 60 Billion Notifications Per Month, 1100 Customers & the $1 Million ARR From India & South East Asia, and our global expansions.  The conversation covered some important points like: 1. Owned Media Channels - Often Overlooked & Underestimated For Customer Engagement & Retention  2. News & Media - The Publishers Is An Underserved Vertical Mostly Given Up To The Biggies For Monetisation  3. Obsessive Focus On Delivering One Promise Removing One Pain Area For The Stakeholder - Speed Of Delivery @ Scale  4. Using the "Freemium" Model as a "Foot In The Door" Strategy To Induce Trials / POCs Can Convert Latter To Paid Customers 5. Land & Expand - Upsell & Cross-Sell Growth Strategy To Increase Value Of Business From Existing Customers 6. In High Language Barrier SEA Markets - Going After & Acquiring Top Customers Creates FOMO & Cascades Into Automatic Interest & Pull From Other Prospects In the Niche. 7. Innovative Co-Marketing & Strategic Alliance With AdPushUp To Fuel Growth In New Markets

While giants like the Washington Post were busy focusing on the international market, InsideNova stuck to the local communities. They knew there's more to news than just politics, but also roads, schools, employment, etc. And today in these tough times, it is paying them off just right. Situated around Northern Virginia, this media house has a huge presence with around 100k followers, an email list of 80k+ subscribers and 0.5 to 1 million unique visitors on the website every month. Their CEO Bruce Potter joined us for a conversation and answered tons of our questions around how have they transitioned from being a conventional newspaper to going absolutely digital, their advertising revenue getting affected this pandemic, the various silver linings that they have found for themselves, and what are some trends that he thinks are never going to come back once this pandemic gets over.

Imagine wanting to write a book that helps people grow professionally, starting a blog for it, and then slowly realizing you can make a whole business out of it. Oh now that I come to think of it, isn't this what Ben Aston at Black + White Zebra did beautifully? What started in 2011 as The Digital Project Manager, is today a fully bootstrapped company providing communities thought leadership in emerging digital disciplines. They turn typically boring and uninteresting things into fun activities to learn and grow. Ben believes that today people do not just want to save time but also focus on personal development and professional growth.  A man who loves being his own boss, and believes in compact teams, tells his side of the story in a very candid conversation with Vivek Khandelwal. Tune in.

New York Times is the epicenter or gold standard of journalism, and a huge chunk of the credits go not just to the incredible team of impeccable journalists but the SEO team which is always on its toe to get the perfect content out. Claudio Cabrera has been working for the New York Times for the last 4 years now. What started with 2 people is now a combined newsroom effort. In this conversation, Claudio talks about his journey at NY Times, his biggest superpowers - having been a journalist and now an SEO expert, and do SEOs really hate paywall so much?  The discussion also covered the subscription business, and if its the main KPI for NY Times. He also revealed his favorite SEO tools, tune in to discover.  https://bit.ly/31RHXDj

"Today is an interesting term because it is changing so quickly" Jonny Kaldor, CEO, and co-founder of Pugpig left us wondering when he said this while discussing the latest trends in the media publishing industry.  According to him, the most important of them is the use of audio, especially podcasts. And the reason to use them amplifies more especially during these tough times. When earlier a virtual event would see 70-80 attendees, today the number soars to 800-1000. He also emphasized the benefits of having a separate audience for separate products with separate prices. To know the reason why, tune in.

Veronica Magan who is the Director of Digital Growth and Innovation at Access Intelligence, said, "Audience is the people that you market to."  She joined us to discuss why media businesses need to go beyond social media and other search engines to reach their audience. Her emphasis lied strongly on email marketing, especially for her niche audience.  Listen in for more insights.

10 years ago, no newspaper would have thought that one day their daily copies would slowly lose their values. Did we while growing up ever imagine that instead of receiving a piece ever morning on our doorstep, we'll be receiving one ever morning in our inbox? A lot has changed and a lot yet remains to be changed. As for media publishers, one thing is for certain. They know their real asset is their audience and the importance to own it.  Joining us for this episode of Own Thy Audience is Ben Ilfeld, Head of Product at the Venture Beat. Someone who has been in the digital publishing industry for a decade and now a publisher himself. He well understands audience engagement, retargeting, and audience development. The major discussion would revolve around these points: How is advertising different - today vs then?  What did audience development look like in 2010? And how different is it today?  How difficult or easy was user acquisition back in 2010 vs today?  Getting an existing user back does wonders for a website. They consume more, they engage more. More likely to spend and so on. How is this problem being tackled today? Audience ownership vs building following on social platforms. How should media businesses balance this out? 

You spend months and years to gather that audience on Medium. You ran campaigns, gave them offers, and even went so far as to give luscious discounts. But all this to what? What if one day medium just decides to take it all away. Then? How will you showcase all your hard work then?  For this episode of Own Thy Audience is Ben May, the founder of The Code Company. Someone who has been in the digital publishing industry for more than a decade now and understands the importance of audience ownership. The major discussion revolved around these points: Understanding the concept of ownership on the internet How content creation does not imply owning the value generated out of content How can creators get maximum value from their content Comparisons - WordPress vs Medium. Email list vs Facebook page, your marketing list vs social following

In this episode of Own Thy Audience, Vivek Khandelwal, founder, iZooto, gets candid with Vahe Arabian, founder, State of Digital Publishing.  Their conversation revolves around the transformation that NewsFeed and Search results have been seeing.  They compare the past with the present and predict what the future holds.  Hop in for more!

Did you know that in Tier 3 cities of India, the search icon, or the magnifying glass that you see in the Amazon app was interpreted as a table tennis racquet? Such an irony.  Amazon's forte is Product Search and Recommendations. This is why Amazon had to reinvent it's App for it's Bharat strategy. There are 100's of other examples where What-Worked-In-Lucknow didn't work in Etah. Or What-Sold-Like-Hot-Cakes in Jaipur never caught the user's eyes in Bhilwara. Cracking vernacular India is the new holy grail for everyone. But it takes more than just translating your app into the regional language. Building any product that hits the masses in a country where 780 languages are spoken and culture changes on every 100th milestone in a daunting task. The exact thing that the team at News18 seems to have mastered. They have not only built a news and media product that serves this audience, but they have also now started championing monetization of this audience. Sounds almost impossible right? That's what we will unravel in this conversation with Sudipto Nandy - Head of Product at Network18 and Sonakshi Sinha - Lead on Monetization at News18. 

SEO is critical for any website out there. But knowing that and actually taking the right steps towards it, makes all the difference. Truth be told, it is a tough nut to crack. And it has especially been a pain in the a** for publishers, bloggers & media site owners, irrespective of whether they have a million pages on their site or are just starting from scratch. In this episode, we have Michael Bertini laying it out for publishers on what they should be doing to ace their SEO game. Here are a few points covered in the episode - Does the meaning of SEO change with the size of business? Thinking about strategy from ground zero for large media houses. How do things change? 3 things that publishers need to focus on for their SEO AMP and SEO - How do they go hand in hand? What changes Mobile SEO and its importance Battling the Google search algorithm updates and how should publishers plan for this Importance of repeat traffic/loyalty as a ranking factor for publishers. The strategy of backlinking for large websites

This is possibly one of the ripest times for publishers. People are devoting a lot of time to screens and the base is increasing. Subscribers although have a large content basket to choose from and this makes the competition tough. That is when content recommendation comes in picture. A large chunk of the industry uses this tool and the popularity is increasing each day. Some questions still remain unanswered though. How critical is content recommendation for digital publishers, and its impact? The dilemma of investing in content recommendation or not and the factors that make this decision? Is personalization a publisher thing or only meant for e-commerce and what is the right time to invest in content recommendations?   Join Sandeep Amar and Vivek in this episode of Office Hours as they discuss all these questions and ponder over more such topics.   Sandeep, a digital leader with a professional experience of more than 20 years, with 10 years of experience of leading large digital teams. Someone who has worked with India.com, ZEE and Penske media JV and is now with Indian Express Digital. He has Delivered multi-fold growth in audiences and revenue in all roles. At Indian Express Digital, grew traffic by 250% in 10 months and became the number 2 publisher(on comScore) in India(from number 7). Increased revenue by over 100%, and achieved 20% profits in year one. At Times Internet Limited (as Head of – Marketing, Sales Strategy(B2B marketing) and Audience Engagement), grew traffic by over 250%, and reached undisputed number one on comScore. As the sales strategy leader helped grow the revenue by 2.5x in 2.5 years to 150 crores(in the year 2012)

Name one who has not been affected by Ad Fraud. It's everywhere, and everyone has been its target. Hard-earned money has been lost, time has been spent and the results have still been null. But good news, solutions exist. This episode of Office Hours, we have Deepankar Biswas joining Vivek. Deep, who is the co-founder of BotMan, will discuss the various threats and myths around Ad frauds. The intensity of their impact and how well can we overcome them. Deep is the co-founder of BotMan, a company he started in 2008. Apart from this he is also the founder of Offergrid Private Limited and has served as the director of Astuon Networks for almost 4 years. He is also the winner at ET - Power of Ideas, and has been in the industry for more than 20 yrs and possess a deep knowledge of ads, AdBots and Ad Frauds. 

The world's facing a pandemic, people are at their home, working. What are publishers doing? They know the time is ripe, screen time is going to increase multifold and this is their cue. They have plunged into building their audience. But what about retaining the same audience? In the first episode of Own Thy Audience, Vivek Khandelwal and Shubhangi Srivastava bring to you strategies that will not only help you grow but also retain your audience.

A small preview episode to a whole series of Marketing especially in the Covid times.  An episode of fun and laughter, where the host Vivek Khandelwal and Shubhangi Srivastava talk about changing times and its impact on Publishers and their significant audience.