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We sat down last week with Jacob and Aaron Oberman from Omeda to learn more about the 2023 AMO Summit. There's a lot for publishers to look forward to, starting with a dynamic roster of speakers, and several opportunities to network and discuss pressing questions facing digital media today.
Read on for Flexpress's summary of the event, a few themes we anticipate will arise during the proceedings, and our forecast for top concerns for publishers in 2024.
Still need tickets? Get them on Eventbrite. 2023 AMO Summit is Thursday 10/26 from 9 a.m.-5:30 p.m. ET @ The Paley Center For Media.
The event will resonate for those in B2B and consumer media companies, and will showcase insights from brands with established sustainable business models. There are opportunities to connect with like-minded media practitioners in between thoughtful sessions, including an evening networking reception sponsored by Omeda.
Meet with Flexpress's Justin DeMaris, CEO & Co-founder, and Amy Fuchshofen, Senior Director of Product Management & Board Member, who will be attending in person, or touch base with our team after the Summit.
Book time with Flexpress →
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Revenue is always top of mind for any business, and that's never more true for digital publishers than when ad spending is down, or search engine algorithms shift. For publishers feeling the pinch from recent ad market or algorithm volatility, there are ways to recover lost ground and boost earnings.
In a recent article, The Sales-Audience-Edit Teams Relationship, A Media Operator discusses the traditional divide between business and editorial teams within a media company, and also why and how to bridge that gap in order to help a publication thrive. When editorial team members understand how the business works, brands have informed and creative problem solvers on their side. Likewise the business side can learn to make suggestions to editorial teams as audiences they'd like to pursue rather than a list of articles to be written. This approach allows editorial teams to do what they do best, speak to readers, while helping the business meet objectives, and circumventing the age-old tensions between revenue and editorial teams.
Flexpress has experience helping editorial and engineering teams boost revenue. To that end, Flexpress's goal for this year's summit is to discuss the best ways to use SaaS to "growth hack" revenue, increasing earnings sooner rather than later, and in a way that engages editors and writers in the process.
Five ideas comes to mind:
If you'd like to discuss how to growth hack publisher revenue, contact us.
We're eager to hear the story of Flying Media Group from Craig and Preston at the AMO Summit. Craig bought Flying Magazine in July 2021, and has since added AvBuyer, Airline Geeks, Sky Allies Capital, and others to their portfolio.
In talking with Flying Media Group (who uses Flexpress), as well as other active buyers in media M&A, there are a few recurring themes we've noticed:
#4. GA4, everyone!
We're looking forward to hearing the feedback from publishers during the SaaSification in Media session. In particular, we're curious to learn about any pain points that have arisen to due the switch from Google Analytics UA (Universal Analytics) to GA4. Analytics is one of the most important SaaS platforms for publisher data, and Google's revamp of its SaaS solution has left some publishers scrambling to figure out data discrepancies, and understand gaps in data or platform functionality.
On the CMS front, there are more changes to the SaaS landscape, as Drupal 7 prepares to sunset this year. Publishers, as always, are having to adapt.
Flexpress Analytics products can help publishers glean actionable insights from their data even as Google Analytics' core functionality changes, and our CMS product with headless frontend is a step towards greater stability for brands contemplating a new platform due to market changes.
Need help with Analytics or CMS? Contact us.
Sure, many people at a media conference in 2023 are going to want to talk AI. As publishers face a new reality, different attitudes towards this emerging tech are being adopted. That said, if AI is here to stay then publishers need to make it work for them.
Nikkei Business Publications' Yasuo Metsugi and Yuko Tanaka say that AI will replace human roles within their company in the future, and that readers will accept AI created content in cases where human creativity is not required, in this piece from Media Makers Meet.
Bustle Digital Group editor-in-chief Charlotte Owen says her organization is thinking of AI as a sales tool and also a guide of what to not do in content creation, in this Digiday piece.
So does Owen think generative AI will take writers’ jobs? “I bloody well hope not,” she said.
We've been hearing that publishers are frustrated with the ups and downs of relying on platforms and monetization streams they can't own, including Youtube, Amazon Onsite Publishing, Medium, and Facebook. These companies control monetization levers completely, and we've heard several horror stories of platforms reducing or shutting down traffic and earnings in an instant.
As a result of some of these scars, we think the industry will start seeing more YouTube creators, podcasters, TikTokers, and others posting content to their own websites and capturing subscribers there.
One final theme heading into the AMO Summit from our perspective: the proliferation of single-point SaaS solutions managed concurrently by publishers. In a recent DoubleVerify survey, 73% of publishers indicated that their organization spends “too much time manually processing inventory performance and revenue data" and 80% stated the excessive time spent on data collection and processing “limits our ability to optimize inventory performance and revenue.”
Publishers need better outcomes. We've noticed lots of publishers manage more than 30 separate SaaS solutions to get data about their audience and track which content earns the most revenue.
At Flexpress, this is one of the biggest issues that we're solving by providing a single dashboard view of audience and revenue data. All in one place. In the Flexpress dashboard, publishers can track ad performance metrics, adjust ad display rules, manage their affiliate marketing program, view analytics to see content performance and revenue by url, author, and more.
Schedule time to meet with Flexpress at the AMO Summit here.
Interested in chatting more about the AMO Summit, growth hacking revenue, or publisher SaaS? Send us an email.