The Krehbiel Group - Something I Learned Yesterday

Once we all have AI agents, why will we need platforms? In today's podcast I look through the futurescope to see how personalized AI agents will affect both publishers and platforms (like X, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). I’ve been saying for a while that AI will be very bad for publishers, because why would you go to a website to find an answer when AI can simply give you the answer without all the fuss? A publishing optimist would rightly point out that there’s more to a content website than answers to specific questions. Sometimes you don’t even know what the question is, other than something vague like “what’s going on?” Also, a website can provide other things, like a community. But that’s not today’s topic. Yesterday I was thinking about how publishers can divorce themselves from platforms. It annoys me that everybody has to jump through Google’s hoops, and that if you want to succeed on LinkedIn, you have to play their silly games to win with their algorithm. Why not declare independence? Why not focus on creating a direct relationship with your market on your terms – independent of Google and social media and all that? As I gazed through my futurescope and studied how people will be consuming content tomorrow, I realized that the big losers might be the big platforms. AI agents will make them unnecessary. Right now, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, and all those assorted criminals have a few things you don’t have. First, they either reach out and grab content from all over the internet – that would be Google – or they have useful idiots like me who willingly create original content and post it to their sites. LinkedIn, Facebook, X, etc. I’m willing to put my content on LinkedIn because that allows me to piggyback on the second thing they have that I don’t have, which is a very large audience. Third, they have a team of programmers running tricky algorithms to maximize all of this for their benefit. To sell ads, get premium subscribers, etc. But in tomorrowland, I’m going to have an AI agent on my phone that will know me even better than the platforms do right now (which is scary), and it will be able to find content I want to consume, people I want to connect with, conversations I want to be a part of, and so on, effectively making a platform like LinkedIn seem like 1990. In other words, everyone will have their own customized “platform” on their own smartphone. In this scenario, the owners of content websites won’t be jumping through Google’s hoops, they’ll be jumping through the hoops created by these AI agents. For example, let’s think of a few things I do on a daily basis. 1. I look around at developments in media and publishing. That’s a piece of cake for the AI agent. It can provide me with a summary, a link to the article, how to contact the author, etc. There’s no need to go to the platform. 2. I create content and post it to 47 different sites. The AI agent will be able to manage that for me, and consolidate all the comments. Again, no need for a platform. 3. I engage in interesting conversations with my peers. There are several ways an AI agent could manage that, and none of them would require a platform. So, what do you think? Which will AI kill first, publishers and content websites, or the platforms?

Today, some speculation on how to stay a step ahead of AI Three ideas were crashing and melding and reforming in my brain the other day. Gall’s Law. Planned cities. And Esperanto. Remember Gall’s Law? I mentioned it a while back. It’s the idea that complex systems can’t be designed from scratch. They have to evolve from simpler systems that work in the real world. Brasilia is an example of a planned city. A few geniuses decided how they thought a city should be, but it turned out people didn’t like it. It was a big failure. And Esperanto was a language created by linguists. It’s very logical, but nobody uses it. These three concepts have one thing in common. There are some things that experts can’t design. They have to develop organically through real-life experience, mostly because even the most genius expert can’t anticipate what people will actually want or prefer. People are weird. How does this apply to publishing, and content-based websites? And what does it have to do with AI? Two things. 1. Publishers should pursue a radically user-centric approach to website design. 2. This might be something AI won’t be able to do for quite some time. Let’s compare the geniuses who designed Brasilia to your genius web designer. Both are legitimate experts in their field. They know a lot. I’m not trying to downplay or discredit that in any way. These are experts who know their trade. Still, expertise only goes so far. It’s only in the rough and tumble of real-world interaction that you can make a successful city or a successful website. What does being radically user-centric look like? * Market research - Demographics - Goals - Pain points - Motivations * Develop personas based on findings * Content research - What are your users’ questions? - What formats do they prefer? * Architecture and navigation - A/B testing * Visual design - Emphasize readability, legibility, a clean, responsive design * Personalization * Community Yesterday I discussed the fear many publishers have about an AI-dominated future, and one of my examples was searching for a recipe. What I hate about recipe websites is that they start off with two pages about Aunt Mable and her summer picnics, where I just want the recipe – which is exactly what a chatbot would give me. Much to my chagrin, I found that some people actually like that stuff. So a “user-centric” design would allow me to skip straight to the recipe and allow other people to read about Aunt Mable’s summer picnics. Can AI do that? Is AI able to imagine different possible responses to a design, and then implement it? I don’t think so. At least it won’t be able to do this for a while yet. The bottom line is that one response to AI is to go all-in on the hectic, weird, irrational, unplanned, chaotic nature of human experience. Don’t try to think and plan better than AI. Try to be more human than AI.

Here’s the bleak future of publishing. Google, openAI, Bing – all those creepy, crawly things – have bots slurping up your content right this minute. They’re using your content to train their AI so they can replace you. In just a little while from now, people won’t have to come to your website much at all. They’ll ask AI a question, and they’ll get their answer. Maybe that’s inevitable. Maybe there’s no way to stop that train. But there’s no reason to lay down on the tracks. Resist. The New York Times is taking the lead here. They’re changed their terms and conditions to forbid the use of their content to train AI. It reads, in relevant part … "The contents of the .. the Site, are intended for your personal, non-commercial use. ... Non-commercial use does not include … training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system." You will rarely hear me say this, but bravo New York Times. All publishers should follow their lead. Will that stop the downfall of publisher websites? I don’t think so. It might delay it, but it won’t stop it. Chatbots are getting better and better, and people will use them more and more. Have you ever done a recipe search, or looked up how to mix a certain cocktail. Instead of getting an answer, you get two pages of nonsense about somebody’s aunt, and then you might get the recipe down at the bottom. That sort of thing is over. Thank God. But other types of informational sites will suffer the same fate. So what does the future hold? It’s hard to say with great certainty, because we don’t know what the 2024 version of ChatGPT will be able to do. But here are some ideas. * Have a unique voice with a personality. * I don’t like this suggestion, but some people think you should focus on storytelling. * Go deep into a niche. * Focus on user-generated content with quizzes, polls, and surveys. * Don’t fight AI. Use it – with your own content – to create a better experience for the user. But in the meanwhile, please, get your head off the railroad track and start blocking AI bots. Resources New York Times terms of service https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014893428-Terms-of-service

You used to buy Microsoft Office. Now you have to subscribe to it. Allegedly that’s so you can get updates, but we all know that’s not the reason. Like so many other companies, software companies want to get in the subscription business because it’s a good business. Recurring revenue is great. Don’t sell razors, sell razor blades. Even refrigerators have a subscription component these days, with replaceable water filters. The one-time sale is out of fashion. Along those lines, there’s something odd happening right now with books. When you buy a book – a real book, in print – it’s yours. You can keep it forever. You can pass it down to your kids, or you can sell it or donate it. It’s a “one copy, one user” model. Movies used to be that way. You could buy a movie on a DVD, and it was yours. Now, they’d rather sell you a streaming service – or, when you buy the movie, the digital copy lives permanently inside the vendor’s walled garden. But what about eBooks? Is an eBook more like a physical book, or a movie, or a song? Once you buy it, is it yours? Can you loan it? Can you sell it? To be consistent with the physical book model, most libraries have a limited number of copies of eBooks, and only allow patrons to borrow those copies. For example – and by the way, this is an oversimplification – if the library has 5 copies, only five people can check out the digital version at a time. The reality is that different publishers have slightly different rules about that, but the way I characterized it is close enough. The “Internet Archive” (IA) is a very different animal. It scans printed books and makes a digital edition available to anybody. Most of those books are public domain, but many are not. The IA claims to only allow one person at a time to read the copyrighted books, but that claim fell apart in court. The IA was distributing more copies than it actually possessed. During COVID, the Internet Archive turned off this one to one rule and loaned digital books freely. Corporate publishers are, allegedly, pushing for the right to demand recurring payments for e-books, akin to digital movies or music. That doesn’t sound great, but it does make some sense in light of the fact that a physical book will wear out over time, and will need to be replaced, while a digital book will not. This has all gone to the courts, and four major publishers aim to redefine e-books as rental-only media, limiting what libraries can do with them. This raises some interesting questions for publishers – even those who don’t sell books. For example, if only current subscribers have access to the archive, does the subscriber have the right to download works, which they can presumably access after their subscription has ended. To put it more generally, “the digital edition” is a different sort of a thing than a printed work, and publishers might want to reconsider their pricing and terms and conditions in light of those differences. Now – to answer the question from my opening – which is an allusion to Alice in Wonderland, of course – “The Raven” is a work by Edgar Allen Poe, and it’s similar to a writing desk in that a printed copy of the raven is a physical object just like a writing desk. Resources A Book Is a Book Is a Book—Except When It’s an e-Book https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/internet-archive-lawsuit-libraries-books/ Hachette Book Grp. v. Internet Archive https://casetext.com/case/hachette-book-grp-v-internet-archive-5

Avoid these all-too-common mistakes with your e-newsletter sign-up Email is becoming more and more important to publishing companies as search traffic gets scarcer. And I predict it’s only going to get worse. Also, email is your own thing. You own it. You’re not dependent on any platforms – and that’s the right place to be. You don’t want to be at the mercy of somebody else’s algorithms if you can avoid it. So let’s talk about your e-newsletter sign-up form. Make it pop Does your sign-up form look like part of the landscape? You know, there’s a logo here, and a banner ad there, and mixed in with all the boilerplate website junk is your email sign-up form. Has it become one of those things people ignore by habit – like an ad? You don’t want to make it flashing, rotating, hot pink, but think of ways to make it pop and not just blend in with the furniture. Put it above the fold, of course Use an eye-catching design with contrasting colors, and a creative graphic, if you can Make it work on mobile Make it compelling How are you selling it? Most people have very little interest in getting yet another newsletter. You have to catch their attention and make it worthwhile for them to get yet one more. Use a compelling, benefit-oriented headline, and change it from time to time Have a very clear call to action, and don’t use “submit.” Make it benefit oriented, like “get weekly updates.” Add a freebie if you can. A special report download. Make it easy Don’t use too many fields. If you have to collect more than just an email address, consider getting that later. First, get the email address. Make it fast First impressions are important. Make sure you promptly send a confirmation email. In a later episode I’ll talk about some of the other best practices, like what should be in your confirmation email, and how you encourage on-going engagement.

Bo Sacks picked an article for distribution by Jim Edwards called “Why the future of digital-only local news maybe small, focused and based on email.” The reality is that not that many people care about what we call “news.” This has always been the case. When people bought print newspapers, they weren’t necessarily reading all the political stuff, and what journalism advocates say is “essential to save democracy” and all that breathless, self-congratulatory banter. They were reading the sports page, the comics, the obituaries. They wanted to know what movies were playing this weekend, and who has the best deal on tires. As all those previous components of the daily paper moved to other places, so “the news” was all that was left, and it’s a harder sell – as newspapers around the country are finding. The fact – whether it’s sad or not is up to you – is that not many people care about news. The standard business model to keep the news afloat in the internet age was advertising. At first, that worked decently well, but ad rates keep going down, and they’ll continue to do so. So the economics of local news keep getting worse. But there are bright spots. Some digital-only, local newsrooms are doing well. At least as compared with other news operations, so “well” is a low bar here. But the ones who are doing well focus on email. That’s partly because both Google and Facebook are not prioritizing news in their rankings, so … where is the news site going to get the traffic to support the ad revenue? Email. And more and more revenue is coming from subscriptions. Anyway, this is all consistent with what I said in an earlier podcast, that email might start to displace the website as the main means of content delivery. Keep an eye on that. However, ringing in the back of my mind is Troy Young’s evaluation of email in a recent People vs. Algorithms podcast. He doesn’t like the tabs. He can’t prioritize what he wants to read, and when. And in many interfaces, like Google, there’s no preview. Put simply, it’s a lousy experience. How can that get fixed? I have some ideas. Someone can design a better email interface – one that’s focused on the reader, not on ad revenue. Along those lines, email could be read and organized in a reader app where you would have more control over how things are displayed. Something involving AI agents might disrupt the whole concept and create a completely new interface. Troy Young suggested something along those lines in the same podcast. What does this mean for publishers? What do you do while you’re waiting for somebody to fix email? There are no great answers. You could create your own app, but there’s a huge app fatigue. People don’t want more apps. As I’ve said many times, there should be one “reader app” to rule them all, but … who knows. Maybe Elon will do that in X. I’m not holding my breath. I think the best you can do in the short term is to re-think your emails to try to overcome some of their shortcomings in the structure of the email itself. That’s a big topic … for another day. Resources Why the future of digital-only local news may be small, focused and based on email https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/regional-newspapers/why-the-future-of-digital-only-local-news-may-be-small-focused-and-based-on-email/

On my whiteboard I have a list of six things publishers can do with their content. * Update me * Educate me * Keep me on trend * Give me perspective * Divert me * Inspire me I don’t focus on those last two, but I try to do the other four. But it’s not always easy to do one or more of those things every day. Here’s the scenario – I’m finishing dinner and I realize I don’t have a topic for tomorrow’s podcast. Yikes. What do I do? Then I realize, “of course I have a topic.” I’m a creative guy who knows a fair bit of stuff, and I have lots of resources to draw from. * An email, like Bo Sacks, * A web article, * A post on LinkedIn, * A conversation with colleagues, like Bold Minds, or the Magic group, * Notes I’ve taken from past conferences, * A conversation at the bar, * Articles I’ve written, * Talks I've given, or * Just out of my fevered brain. And yes, sometimes I do question whether I can keep up the daily cadence. It is a challenge, but that’s part of my reason for doing it. “We do not do these things because they are easy, but because they are hard.” One of the key things I’ve learned is to focus on steady improvement. You’re not perfect out of the gate, but you can fine tune your methods as you go. * Check your appearance. I’m not trying to get a date, but I don’t want to have a piece of spinach in my teeth either. * I stand when I record the podcast. It just feels better. * Use captions in your videos (I use FlexClip to create them, but there are other tools) * Edit the captions – sometimes they come out odd * Start each show with a cold open to grab the listener’s attention. * Give some context to your podcast. Say what it’s about, for whom, etc. * Just recently I learned to give an intro that says how long the show will be, which requires me to record that part last. * Change the thumbnail for each episode * Ask questions to get interaction. * Invite people to subscribe, share, call you, etc. * Use file naming conventions. When you create a podcast, you generate a lot of files. I start with the raw video, then I have the captioned video, then I have the final. I have to name them differently to keep from going crazy. It’s good to have music on your show, but be sure to use royalty-free music. Google has a collection. If at all possible, sleep on you idea before you send it into the world. Create your podcast the day before and think about it. There are two situations where I flirted with the edges of appropriateness, and after sleeping on it I decided to dial it back. I’m glad I did. It’s better to be silent and to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. “Perfect is the enemy of done,” but you have to put on a good show. It’s hard to find the balance. Be a guest on other shows, and consider having guests on your own show. Ask for the money – whether that’s likes, shares, a plea for a job … whatever it is you want, ask for it. Don’t freak out if you make a mistake. You can fix it in edit. (By the way, I use Movavi Video Suite for editing). You don’t need super-fancy equipment. I record on my webcam and I have a Fifine microphone. It’s not too expensive. Wear a different shirt for each episode Save some ideas that are not time dependent – for vacations and such. Have a structure for your podcast. You’ll get tired of it, but your listeners won’t. Say your name or your business name every time. Finally, I have not yet learned the secret of distribution. I publish my podcast to LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Rumble, my website, and to Spotify, which distributes to other feeds. So far LinkedIn has been the best for me.

In today's podcast I show how to use the person and device frameworks to fine-tune "personalization" use cases in a customer data platform.

“Deterministic” is a bit of an exaggeration If you’re learning about or investigating CDPs you’ll often run into the question of deterministic vs. probabilistic matching. That has to do with the rules you use to merge profiles. So first let’s address that issue. Why are you merging profiles at all? What’s the point? One of the purposes of a CDP is to take data from multiple sources and merge those records into a single customer record. That is, one place where you have all the information on your customer. Deterministic matching is an approach that relies on exact matches between certain attributes to match different customer records. It usually matches on an email address or a phone number, but it can also use a postal address, a customer ID, or other values. As a practical example, a CDP might have a profile for your desktop computer and for your smart phone. It doesn’t know you own both of those devices, but if you enter the same email address on your desktop and phone, the CDP can merge those two records. Probabilistic matching uses statistical algorithms and machine learning models to identify matches based on the likelihood that two records belong to the same person or entity. You might use probabilistic matching to merge two customer records if they have variations on the same name – like Robert Smith and Bob Smith – if they show similar content interests, and also come from the same IP range. There are two important points here. 1. Deterministic matching is never deterministic. 2. You need to employ a sliding scale of confidence based on your use cases. On that first point, consider this story. When my mother was getting older, she didn’t have the energy to do all her own Christmas shopping, so she asked my sister to log in to my mother’s Amazon account – on my sister’s computer, at my sister’s house – and buy presents for the grandkids. Based on so-called “deterministic matching,” this would identify my sister’s computer as my mother’s computer. You might say that’s an edge case – and I’ll get to that in a minute – but if you think about it, there are a lot of situations where this sort of thing happens. Identity can be a bit murky on the internet. Marketers tend to have a preference for things we can measure, sometimes to the exclusion of other real-world factors. I call this measurement bias – it’s similar to numeracy bias, where you prefer something that’s expressed as a number – and it’s something you need to keep in mind. I recommend employing a sliding scale of confidence. When two profiles have the same account information, you can be pretty sure that you’re dealing with the same person on those two profiles. But if two profiles show exactly the same content interests, you really can’t be certain those are both the same people. The key thing is does it matter to your use case? If you’re creating profiles solely to drive ads on your site, it’s no big deal if you mistakenly merge records that aren’t actually the same person. But if you’re dealing with financial transactions, healthcare records, credit reporting and things like that, you need to be very careful how you merge profiles.

Today is the first of a multi-part series based on a presentation I did at the Martech conference. When you’re building out a customer data platform you need to focus on your use cases, and in order to build successful use cases you should examine them from two different perspectives: first, from the data you collect from devices, and second, from the perspective of your customers as human beings. I call these two the device framework and the person framework. To understand this, let’s back up to some fundamentals. The internet is based on a request and response system. For example, my Android phone sends a request to Krehbielgroup.com, and the web server sends a response. The point is that people don’t visit websites. Devices do. So let’s walk through the device framework. 1. A device makes a request. 2. That device has activity. 3. You collect identifiers on that device. 4. You try to resolve devices to a person using those identifiers. There are different use cases for each step of that framework. For #1, you might target iPads differently than iPhones. For #2, you can target every device that views content with a particular tag, like “retirement.” For #3, try to collect identifiers – like IP address, location, usage patterns, or better yet, an email address – that will help resolve to a person. For #4, try to match all the devices a person uses to a single person. The device framework is somewhat like the measuring left-brain side of things and the person framework is somewhat like the creative right-brain side of things. A person is a much more complicated thing than a device, because one person can have many devices and many personas. The person framework goes like this. 1. A person 2. Has many devices 3. Has many identifiers that 4. Resolve to different personas People try to hide their identity by using different browsers, different devices, incognito mode, etc. Many people also don’t buy into the tech nonsense of “bringing your whole person.” Facebook wants one profile per person, but people compartmentalize their lives. They have a work life and a home life. A professional life and a hobby. They might want to keep their political or social views separate from their professional image. I’ll go into this in more depth in a later podcast, but for now, just remember that you need to think about devices and people on two separate tracks. Once you’ve been through both of those, re-evaluate your use case to make sure it addresses all the little wrinkles and exceptions and weirdness you discovered by using these two frameworks.

A while ago I got an email to this general effect: “we notice you haven’t been responding. We won’t email you as often from now on.” Is that the right thing to do? I’ve seen other efforts like this that give you a chance to re-engage before the sender takes you off their list. The reasoning behind such a campaign is the sender risks a negative impact on sender score by continuing to email unresponsive addresses. Some of them might even end up as spam traps. I started a conversation on LinkedIn about this, and asked my friend Jeanne Jennings from Email Optimization Shop what she thought. She pulled in a couple of her friends from Only Influencers, a community of email marketing professionals, and it started a very interesting discussion, which I’ll summarize briefly here. Jeanne doesn’t recommend purging these names because an email’s effect goes beyond what you can measure by opens and clicks. For one thing, if the recipient views the email with images off, the sender’s ESP won’t register the open anyway. And even if the recipient only sees the subject line, preheader text and preview pane, the sender might get the point across and drive sales. Jeanne’s comment reminds me of the effect of online ads. Hardly anyone clicks on them, but just seeing the ad has an effect. Samantha Iodice of The Sauce Experience added, “Not opening does not equal unengaged,” and Dela Quist of AlchemyWorx offered some infographics to that effect. Samantha recommends overlaying purchase data with non-openers, and segmenting them out to try different methods to re-engage them. Comparing engagement with purchase history sounds like a very good idea. Jeff Mungo of Data Axle took the other side, saying the sender risks a hit on sender score the longer the sender keeps unengaged people on the list. He recommends one best, last-ditch effort to people who haven’t engaged in 6 or 12 months, and then to take them off. What interests me about this discussion is that even among competent, data-driven professionals with lots of experience, you won’t always get one answer. As Thomas Sowell says, “there are no solutions, only trade-offs.” You can’t run a business waiting for a perfect solution. You need to understand the risks of different strategies and then use your best judgment and take your chances. Resources https://www.linkedin.com/posts/delaquist_emailmarketing-engagement-audiencemanagement-activity-6726822031347720192-gQQK/

Publishers should consider text-to-speech to open up new ways to reach their subscribers. What does “content” mean in a world of text, graphics, audio, video, and even virtual reality – with many variations on each of those themes? The question reminds me of a talk I gave years ago in which I was trying to explain the American magazine market to some Chinese businessmen. They thought it should be a simple matter to take a print magazine and turn it into a digital magazine. I said they were right, in the abstract, but in practice, not so much. They were imagining a single content repository that fed both the print and the digital editions. But what usually happens is a complicated and tangled mess. The editor writes a story, then it goes to layout, then the editor makes some changes, then it gets cut further to make room for a photo, etc., so the version in the print magazine becomes very different from the version in this fictional content repository. There are solutions to that problem – or half-way solutions, anyway – and I don’t endorse the idea of a single content repository going to both print and digital, but you get the picture, and the purpose of this story is to set that up that image in your mind for purposes of today’s topic, which is text to speech. Some people would rather listen to an article than read it. But creating an audio version of an article requires a lot of production, and if an editor changes something, it has to go back through production again. But what if there was a way to convert text to speech that bypassed all that, so that when an editor amended an article, the audio version was immediately updated? That’s the point of an article Bo Sack distributed a few days ago, titled “Schibsted invests in text-to-speech to engage audiences.” They’re in Norway, and there’s been a huge increase in podcast listening over there, and Schibsted wanted to ride the wave. There’s a follow-on effect from podcasts that drives popularity of other audio formats. Even with subscription news services. “You can read your newspaper,” Lena Pederson says, “but if you also can listen to the news, then it’s more opportunities in your life to use your subscription.” That is, providing audio increases engagement. Some people would argue that it would be better branding if the authors and editors read their own work. There’s a kind of authenticity to that, and some people think that sells. But not every writer has a good voice, and tracks recorded by humans require editing and such. However, “Beyond Words,” which is the technology they chose for this venture, does allow them to clone a popular voice and use that in their text-to-speech conversion – which sounds pretty cool. There’s also the issue I mentioned above about day 2 edits. Text-to-speech technology can make an audio version of the current version of the article, even if it gets updated. I like what they’re doing here, and I particularly like two things. The audio is served from their website. That means they control access, and they have all the stats. When you put audio on a podcast service, you can’t limit access to subscribers, and you don’t get as much data on usage. This is something to watch, or … jump into, if you’re so inclined. Resources Schibsted invests in text-to-speech to engage audiences. https://www.inma.org/blogs/product-initiative/post.cfm/schibsted-invests-in-text-to-speech-to-engage-audiences

Today I want to talk about the allure of yes, the illusion of yes, the discipline of no, the need for standards, a useful compromise, and why you need a no man. The allure of “yes.” * “Yes” is the pleasure of possibility. It can be exhilarating. It opens up new opportunities. * People who say yes are regarded as “team players,” which looks good on a review. * People like to hear yes, because it affirms them. * Yes counteracts the fear of missing out. * When you say yes you put yourself in a position to learn and do new things. The illusion of “yes.” * Accommodating requests seems like progress. Lots of things may be getting done. * Saying yes is easy, but doing what you promised may be heard. I saw a funny quote on LinkedIn that’s relevant. “We do not do these things because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.” * Saying yes may imply a competency or ability you don’t really have. The discipline of “no.” Think about that for a minute. Who likes “discipline”? Discipline is sweat, cold showers, and boring food. Discipline is something imposed on me that limits me. It’s not fun. But “no” does some good things. * Keeps you on focus. * Limits mission creep. * Keeps resources under control. * Keeps things predictable, like workflow. * Sets boundaries. * Allows you to stick to your principles. * Is better for timelines. * Eliminates short-term variations. * Allows experts to make decisions, because you have to have some credibility to say no. * It weeds out bad ideas (which are most ideas). It’s better for your co-worker to say no than your customer. “Yes” and “no” require standards. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to something else, and vice versa. Yes and no decisions have to be made in the context of a general project or business framework. You have to have a mission, goals, timelines, etc. “No” helps you stick to those principles. “Yes, and” is good for creativity, as I explained in a previous episode. “No” is a tool for focus. “No, but” can be a useful compromise. Sometimes I say there are two kinds of programmers. “Yes” programmers and “no” programmers. The “yes” programmer wants to please, but then he finds out it’s not that easy. The “no” programmer wants to keep things within the limited parameters that he can be sure of – that he knows will work. “No, but” can be a good path forward. Explain why you can’t say yes, based on appeals to the project framework, or timelines, or resource limitations, but listen to the underlying vision and try to find something like it that does fit. You need a no man. Many job descriptions highlight the need for a “team player,” but as we’ve seen, that can mean a “yes man” who will happily hop down every rabbit trail and you’ll end up doing lots of stuff that doesn’t contribute to your goals. You need some skeptics on your staff. You need the difficult person who calls things back to reality – who remembers budgets and timelines. You need somebody who will say “no.”

Have you ever seen a futuristic movie or TV show where a character asks a computer a question, and the computer replies “here’s a list of articles to read”? Of course you haven’t, because while the search engine results page (SERP) was a wonderful improvement on directories and link farms and such, it’s obviously a transitional thing. It was a step towards what we now have the ability to do, with large language models, which is to answer the question. But in order to answer all these questions, the LLM has to be trained on a lot of information. And right now – right this very minute – companies are training their LLMs on your content. They’re crawling your site, slurping up the intellectual property that you rely on to make a living, with the goal of displacing you and making you irrelevant. Are you going to let that happen? I hope not. So here are the four things you need to do right now. Modify your robots.txt file to exclude these monsters. That file tells crawlers whether or not they can index your site. But since you can’t trust them to honor what you say, you also need to … Have you IT folk block access at the server level. Those two steps are designed to stop them from indexing your content, but you also need to make it both clear and legally enforceable. So … Change your terms and conditions to say that your content cannot be used to train LLMs. Start training your own LLM on your content. Someone might say, “It’s hard for you to kick against the pricks,” stop trying to fight it. This is just the way it’s going to be. Or they’ll give some other lame excuse for why it’s in your best interests to do what’s actually in the best interests of Google, Open AI, Bing, etc. Tell those people to soak their heads. There’s nothing inevitable about where this is all going. The lawyers have hardly gotten started yet. Right now you need to work to protect your stake in the future. It’s possible, for example, that there might be a central place where people ask their questions, and that system routes the question to some other LLM – like yours – to get a detailed answer based on your specific expertise. So rather than Google (or whatever will replace Google) slurping up your content and providing the answer, the Google engine will say, “Ah, this is a question about 401ks. I need to ask the Kiplinger LLM about that one.” Then Kiplinger can make an arrangement with Google to monetize that search. I’m not predicting things will turn out that way. There are lots of possibilities. I’m only saying that’s one possible future that protects the publisher’s intellectual property. The way we’re going now, there will be no protections. Publishers will lose. Case closed. So if you want to have any chance whatsoever to maintain your rights to your content, do the four things I mention above. If you want to chat about it, give me a call. Resources 'The New York Times' Prohibits Scraping Of Its Content For AI Training https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/388219/the-new-york-times-prohibits-scraping-of-its-co.html?edition=131300 AI Report: “Any media company banking on legal intervention to protect copyright might be disappointed” https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/ai-report-any-media-company-banking-on-legal-intervention-to-protect-copyright-might-be-disappointed/

Here's a partial transcript of an interview with Michelle Drewek of Lessiter Media. [Michelle] Thank you for having me, Greg. [Greg] You looked at what I had to say about “data without customer feedback,” and you had three very interesting observations. The first had to do with average session duration. Can you unpack that a bit? [Michelle] So when I came more into the data role within my position here, I was looking at some of the legacy stats that our upper management team is looking at. And one of them that I questioned a bit was how they were looking at the “average time on page.” (This would be a universal analytics metric for those who are working in the GA4 world.) It would tell you the average time on page as an average for your site, but you could see the page by page breakdown, and I questioned why we were looking at that because average time on page could vary drastically for a video versus a few paragraphs or an entire feature, and the number isn’t telling you much. So we switched that up and I said let’s look at the average session duration, trying to keep people on the site for a longer period of time – be that through multiple articles or through one extensive article. That helped us make some decisions about content – whether long or short form was working better for us. But now that we’re in the GA4 era, we have a new “average engagement time” metric, which is a lot more helpful in getting to a more narrative-based number. But again, you still need to have some of that context. Context is everything when it comes to data. If you’re going off straight numbers, you’re not really going to learn much about how your content is performing. [Greg] So you were able to use that to adjust how you were doing content on the site. [Michelle] Yes, absolutely. Over time you’ll see shorter form worked great at one point, but then all of a sudden people wanted longer form content. Of course SEO plays into that too. Now you want to have your short video but also the long form content to help with Google. So it really helps to evolve your strategy along a bunch of different parameters. [Greg] You also have an interesting way of qualifying stats on page views. What is it that you do? [Michelle] I’m always quantifying page views month over month and year over year, but we could have one article that performs really well one year, and that could make the metrics skyrocket and make it look like this year we’re knocking it out of the park. That’s where I take the data and say, hold back, let’s take this one out and look at our average page views without the anomaly. Then we can look at things like seasonality. There might be certain topics or certain industries that play well. Then you identify an article that’s strong seasonally, and you can plug that into next year’s strategy and find a couple more topics like that while the energy is hot behind that topic. That can help you in terms of context and knowing how the numbers are fluctuating, but also why they’re fluctuating, and then making decisions off of that. *** The full interview can be seen here. https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/08/16/analytics-tips-from-a-pro-how-your-data-can-deceive-you-if-you-dont-have-the-larger-context/

Don’t go against an entrenched business with a half-done product Welcome to my daily podcast, where I pick at least one insight from the word of publishing and try to explain it in about three minutes. Generally speaking, social media for me means LinkedIn. I don’t really care about X, or Instagram, or – heaven forbid – Tik Tok. But I like to skim whatever Bo Sacks thinks is interesting, and he circulated “Starting to unravel: Why Threads has struggled to keep up its early momentum” by Pierre de Villiers. Most of us know that Threads took off like a rocket. In its first week it got about 100 million users. When Meta launched Threads, there were a lot of reasons to be optimistic about it. Twitter (now X) seemed to be flailing about, and a lot of people were rooting for its demise and were looking for an alternative. Threads piggybacked off a huge Instagram userbase. It was very easy to set up a Threads account. Let’s face it – there’s a lot of hatred for Elon Musk. I really don’t get why, but I also really don’t care. It’s just a fact to be considered. A lot of people felt Twitter had become too negative, and they wanted a more positive experience. They hoped to find that in a new platform. I think #4 was a naive hope. The reason Twitter is a mess is because people are a mess. That reminds of people who are looking for the perfect church. The problem is that as soon as you join it it’s not perfect anymore. Anyway, after Threads’ meteoric rise, things slowed down, and now it’s not looking that great. Maybe it’s going to follow the Gartner Hype Cycle. What happened? There wasn’t much marketing for Threads, and there still isn’t, but in a way it didn’t need marketing because of the Instagram connection. The bigger issue was that people were unimpressed with its features, so they stopped using it, which becomes a downward spiral, because that kind of platform depends on people using it and believing that other people are using it. What’s interesting to me about this story is what it says about the very popular MVP concept, which stands for “mininum viable product.” That’s a product with enough features to attract early adopters, validate the product concept, and then improve it through user feedback. That’s a good idea for a new product, but it doesn’t seem like the right way to tackle an entrenched product, like X. The Meta team may have thought they had a wave – with the confusion at X – so it was time to surf, even if the product wasn’t up to snuff. Only time will tell, but right now it’s looking like the launch was premature. Resources The Meteoric Rise of Threads And Its Future As A Twitter Clone https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeirevzin/2023/07/10/the-meteoric-rise-of-threads-and-its-future-as-a-twitter-clone/ Minimum Viable Product (MVP) https://www.productplan.com/glossary/minimum-viable-product/ Starting to unravel: Why Threads has struggled to keep up its early momentum https://www.fipp.com/news/starting-to-unravel-why-threads-has-struggled-to-keep-up-its-early-momentum/ AI and the Gartner Hype Cycle https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/06/16/ai-and-the-gartner-hype-cycle/

Print is far from dead, and these nine lessons are worth your consideration Today I will review and comment on Peter Houston’s article, “Nine things we learned making an indie print magazine,” which I received from Bo Sacks last week. Know your motivations Don’t go into it for the money, he says, but if laughs and learning are a priority, proceed. The Grub Street Journal is a B2B magazine for people who make magazines. Peter also wanted to make it a magazine he enjoys reading. Print media seem to be falling into the “laid back” niche. Print is a luxury item that isn’t just about information. It’s an experience. Print is different — really different In a magazine, you have to think about what’s adjacent to what, and how the content flows. It matters whether the article is a left or a right page. You choose what goes in the center, or in the back. Digital doesn’t have the same sorts of issues. Magazines are manufacturing You have to work with printers, mail shops, distribution channels, and shops. Selling a physical product is very different than selling a digital one. Covers still matter A magazine sits on the newsstand and beckons you to pick it up. It sits on your coffee table as a display, that you want your guests to see. Or it’s what people see when they look at you on the train and you’re reading. The cover says a lot about a magazine. B2B doesn’t have to be boring The craft and economics of a magazine are both well-worn topics — although there are always new people coming into old fields, and times change. Still, Peter wants to have a fresh, interesting, and lively approach that’s “brutally honest, but eternally optimistic.” And fun to read — because people are still people, even at work, and even in their professional lives. Selling magazines is really hard As an indie startup, they can’t rely on other people to take care of distribution and retail. They have to get their copies to market, and they have to get people to their Shopify store. Frack the ‘digital or print’ dichotomy He’s not talking about print vs. digital issues, but print vs. digital economies. Even if a magazine is in print, you need social media, online commerce, and other ways to connect with audiences. Print still needs digital. Community is everything Peter says, “Your friends are everything in this game.” He points to the “1,000 True Fans” dictum (which I’d never heard of), and the importance of being “famous to the family.” Both are crucial when you’re targeting a tightly defined group of readers. You can’t do everything Perfect is the enemy of done. You need to get comfortable with something that’s good enough. I’ll add one comment of my own to all this, which Peter doesn’t address, although we’ve discussed it briefly on LinkedIn. It can be dangerous to think of print and digital editions of the same publication because print and digital are so different. Think of “the publication” in the abstract – irrespective of format. There are two approaches from there. In the first – this is the dangerous one – you limit your concept of the publication to what will work in both print and digital. Imagine two intersecting circles, where the circle on the left is “what print does well” and the circle on the right is “what digital does well.” You’ve limited yourself to the area of intersection. In the second approach, you take the general publication idea and ask “how can I make this the best possible publication in print,” and the same for digital. You might end up with two very different products. But that’s okay. Resources Nine things we learned making an indie print magazine https://voices.media/grub-street-journal/

GENERAL LESSONS ABOUT CONTENT MARKETING --How to come up with material *Always be listening.* I have a good priest friend who says “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I understand that to mean that there’s teaching going on all the time, all around us. We just have to have our ears tuned to hear it. Keep your subject matter in mind and listen for things that relate. * Use what you see and hear. * For me, this mostly means … * Bo Sacks articles * LinkedIn * Podcasts * Guild discussions * Industry meetings (Magic, Bold Minds) * Conference agendas * Webinars * Industry events *Use what you learn in your work.* Listen to what your clients, customers, and co-workers say, and what they struggle with. Think about how those things could help your readers. *Keep an ideas file handy* and jot things down as they occur to you. I always have a pocket-sized notepad with me, and I keep a google doc called “ideas for the next Krehbiel letter.” *Keep particular readers in mind.* Willard Kiplinger told his editors to write The Kiplinger Letter as if they were writing to a particular man in Ohio. You need to know the business of your readers and, as you encounter things, think about how they would affect your readers, and what they need to know. --Style *Cut the crap and get to the point.* Use simple language and no jargon. Everyone hates jargon. *Focus on practical takeaways.* There’s no end of fluffy stuff. Your job is to condense the world of noise into simple, clear concepts that will save people time and help them make money. *Poke fun at things.* I expect people to laugh while reading my letter. *Write to be skimmed.* I keep The Krehbiel Letter short, but I don’t assume everyone wants to read every word. Summarize. Highlight the key points. *Use lists, charts, and graphs where possible.* This can be a struggle, because not everything is amendable to a visual representation, but I always keep it in mind as a goal. *Use stories and anecdotes.* People remember stories better than lectures. *Have a unique voice and perspective.* Don’t be afraid to ruffle feathers or attack sacred cows. It’s fine to be outrageous from time to time. --Seek Advice *Every suggestion or criticism has something you can learn.* Sometimes it’s hard to find, but what your critic said made sense from their point of view. Try to get into that point of view and see what you can learn from it. *You can modify someone’s idea or suggestion.* Your response doesn’t have to be yes or no. *Get help with design, layout, etc.* I used Fiverr to get help with my Word template. I hired someone who’s a better programmer than me to help with my website. I hired another person to review my website and give me strategic suggestions. --Review Your Copy *Have someone else read each issue before you publish it.* Sometimes you should pick a person who knows nothing about the subject matter. My kids have reviewed some of the issues. *Sleep on it.* It’s amazing what your brain does in the background. Write articles ahead of time, let them percolate, and rewrite them a few times. *Ask ChatGPT to rewrite and/or summarize your article.* It will give you new perspectives on your topic. --Reuse *Try to convert everything to another medium. * * Have long and short versions of articles. * Have an article version and a version for a LinkedIn post. * Turn your comments on LinkedIn, bulletin boards, etc., into articles, and vice versa. * Create audio and video versions of your articles. --Print and Online *Make each medium the best it can be.* Print should be the best print. Online should be the best online. Don’t try to find one format that works in both. That devalues each of them. Online * Use images * Use links * Allow yourself some space, if you need it * Try to get comments / interaction / sharing In print * Use good paper * Use color * Use scents --Eat your own cooking *When you learn a best practice, do it.* E.g., autoresponders for your email sign-up page. Show best practices by doing them yourself. *Make steady progress.* I try to make each letter better than the last in some way. For example, with the April issue, I added a signature line.

A subscriber to The Krehbiel Letter told me that one thing he gets from my content is an emphasis on what stays the same during a time of radical transformation. He works in change management, and that's one of the issues people face when the world is changing all around them – that is, what can and should change, and what can and should stay the same? It reminds me of an exercise I used to put my kids through where I'd present a dilemma and ask them if it was a moral question or a cultural question. And that's very similar to what goes on in change management. What's permanent and what's temporary? What can we afford to jettison, and what had we better cling onto? So I thought I'd start to make a list for publishers of things that don't change even while the world seems to be crumbling and morphing and transforming all around them. So here’s a start. I invite you to suggest your own. You have to solve a problem or meet a need. How does your product benefit your customer? Everything depends on trust. If you lose your customers' trust, you have nothing. Efficiency matters. Your margin is your competitor's opportunity. Expertise matters. Somebody has to know when the AI is wrong. Convenience is good, but people will tolerate some inconvenience for what’s truly necessary. You have to have your eye on the horizon and your hands in the weeds. An "intuitive interface" is a childish conceit. Make sure people know how to use your product. Quality can be a selling point, but good enough is often good enough. Humans are creatures of habit -- on both sides of the content experience. Strive for a regular, predictable and reliable cadence. Yesterday's market is gone. You need to make adjustments based on where people are today, and where you think they'll be tomorrow. People like stories, but don't be stupid about it. Nobody wants a story about the weather. They just want to know if they should bring an umbrella. Passion and authenticity are alluring, but sometimes people just want a ham sandwich. Diversify. Who knows what's going to work, and what's going to collapse. Have several oars in the water. Cultivate a relationship with your customer, but also between and among your customers. Strive for long-term value. Finding new customers all the time is tiresome work, and you don’t learn as much from drive-by customers. Use data as much as you can, but check your conclusions against real-life feedback and experience. Keep a wary eye on trends. Most trends turn out to be nothing. But on the other hand, when you’ve got a wave, surf! I think the bottom line is that we all need to make a careful distinction in our minds between what’s changing, or even able to change, and what’s stable. For example, human nature does change, but probably not on a time scale that any of us will benefit from. So you should be a student of human nature, and make sure you put those things on the “stable” side of the ledger. So that’s what I came up with today. I’m going to keep this document handy so I can add to it as things occur to me, but if you have some ideas, please pass them along.

“Gamification” is a decent tactic, but it fails to meet customer objectives in both customer engagement and customer success. Companies need to emphasize their customers’ priorities and real needs. This episode illustrates the problem using the example of a Grammarly email. I appreciate the Grammarly plugin. I’m a decent writer, but everybody can use a tip now and again. But there’s one thing about Grammarly I don’t like. Their little green doohickey keeps putting itself right where I want to put my cursor. It gets in the way – especially when I’m filling out a form, or something like that. It got so annoying that I just logged out. It wasn’t worth it. Grammarly noticed this after a week and sent me an email. Now you might think the email would ask “what the heck?” or “is anything wrong?” or something like that. Nope. It just assumed (1) I was taking a break from writing, or (2) I had accidentally logged out. There’s a self-awareness problem going on here. That got me thinking about the differences between customer engagement and customer success, so I asked ChatGPT to tell me the difference. Here’s my slightly edited version of the list I got. Customer Engagement includes … Dialogue and building a rapport with customers, Feedback, reviews, and suggestions, Personalization, and Brand loyalty. Customer Success includes … Onboarding, Training and support, Regularly assessing customer satisfaction, and Aligning the product’s capabilities and how it’s used with the customer’s objectives. According to ChatGPT, “customer engagement” focuses on creating a strong connection between the customer and the brand, while “customer success” is more directed towards ensuring customers are meeting their goals. The labels don’t matter. I would say there are three important things here. It’s not about you, or your brand, or checking off all the boxes on a list of tasks. It’s about ensuring that your product is helping your customer do what he needs to do. In order to do that, you have to think outside the constraints of your discipline, or whatever model your company is using to measure and manage engagement, Customer Success people should learn from Customer Engagement people, and vice versa. Let’s apply this to the email I got from Grammarly. I’m going to read you the opening paragraph. We're not seeing any writing activity for you last week, so unless you were taking a writing break, you might have accidentally logged out. Please log back in so we can keep you up to date on your personal records and general greatness. That sounds like an email from somebody who’s bought into gamification. What’s important – from that point of view – is that I keep up my streak. My “personal records” and such. In fact, right after that paragraph is my “Grammarly writing streak,” with my “next achievement.” Whatever the heck that is. Then there are some charts showing a bunch of metrics I don’t care about at all. All I want to know is whether I need to put a comma here. Somebody at Grammarly has narrowed the concept of customer engagement down to this gamification thing. Don’t blame them. They probably learned that at a marketing conference. But gamification has absolutely nothing to do with why I use the service. I realize gamification is a powerful tool in some settings. But gamification helps the company get the user addicted to a certain behavior. Here’s the question you need to ask. Is the behavior you’re tricking a person into in their interest, consistent with their goals, or is it only in the company’s interest?

Do publishers even need a website? Is email the better method for content delivery? I was reading an article about how La langue francaise increased their registered users by 450%, and half-way through I thought, “so why do they need a website?” La langue francaise wanted to encourage readers to create a free account as part of the journey towards becoming a paying subscriber. They looked to The New York Times and to Semafor for inspiration. On Semafor, you can read a little of an article, and then it prompts you to sign up for the e-newsletter relevant to the article you’re reading. It’s super easy. You enter an email address and you’re done. There’s no password, no “click here to verify” or any of that. La langue francaise created three different registration modules with unique value propositions for each section of their site. That’s smart, at least in the abstract – I couldn’t review what they’ve done because my French is limited to a few dialogues I learned in 7th grade, and I think I can count to 49. Back to business. This “email only” approach makes the first step in the registration process very easy. Unlike Semafor, La langue francaise does require the reader to confirm his email. The next step is the dynamic paywall, where they took their cues from the Times. It’s based on how much content a reader has consumed, whether they’ve completed a quiz, or other things. They use Poool for that part. The overall strategy seems to hinge on three things. First, that giving up your email to read an article is a fair trade that many people are willing to do – especially since we all know we can unsubscribe or block emails that we don’t want. Second, they apply a little pressure on the website to get people to take the next step to subscribe. But third, even if a reader never subscribes, he’s still getting the e-newsletter, which has some value in itself – both to the reader and to the publisher. Then the question becomes how much of the content do you deliver in the email itself. That seems to be a ripe area for testing. The email could have … A link to the article on the website A summary of the article, plus a link to the website, or The entire article. Right now, publishers usually view email as a channel to get more subscribers on the website, but I can easily imagine a future where more and more content is delivered through the e-newsletter, and the website becomes more of a conversion vehicle. It’s the website that drives people to the e-newsletter in that view of things. That would be an interesting model. You could even have a free and a paid version of the email, where free subscribers get five stories, and the headlines that the paying subscribers get – just to tease them. In other words, email could become the dominant form of content delivery. It’s worth a thought. Resources https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/how-la-langue-francaise-increased-registered-user-acquisition-by-450-thanks-to-a-bittersweet-strategy/ How La langue française increased registered user acquisition by 450% thanks to a “bittersweet” strategy

Find another way to say these words and phrases if you can: FOMO. Engagement. Low-hanging fruit. Content is king. Deep dive. Synergy. Disruptive. Pivot. Innovation. Share of voice. Brand equity. Awareness. Storytelling. Are you sick of hearing those words and phrases? Probably. Most of us are. I'm going to argue that buzzwords are simultaneously annoying and necessary. They're annoying because people often string them together in meaningless eruptions of jargon. It sounds impressive (I guess) but doesn't mean anything. People often to resort to buzzwords to sound like they know what they're talking about. They're almost like business filler words. Better them "um" and "like," but only slightly. But they're necessary because there's a sense in which they're giving us an insight into the current zeitgeist. They're pointing at something that's resonating with people at some level. Think of a buzzword as the manifestation of an emerging trend, or idea. Consider the term "disruption" as an example. While it may have been diluted through overuse, and I get tired of hearing it, it encapsulates something we see in the seismic changes going on in various industries, and it highlights a strategy, or a mindset, that companies need to keep in mind. If you're not disrupting your business, somebody else will. In the same way, "authenticity" became a popular word because people so many things seem inauthentic. Buzzwords may often be used flippantly, but their persistence shows that they're reflecting and amplifying some underground cultural current. So what do we do with them? Treat them like whiches. Not the ones at Halloween, but the ones people often use when they should have used "that." Try to replace a buzzword with another word or phrase. That will force you to make sure you're focusing on the meaning of the concept. When the buzzword actually fits, back it up with data or examples to give context, and to substantiate the usefulness of that word in that circumstance. A buzzword is like a symbol. It’s supposed to encapsulate a larger meaning. I suppose it’s like an emoji, which, like buzzwords, can also get annoying, but I think it’s more like the word “democracy.” People don’t usually just mean democracy, they incorporate a lot of other concepts into that word, like freedom, self-determination, that sort of thing. So by all means hate on the indiscriminate and meaningless use of buzzwords, but also take some time to think about their utility, and the message they’re trying to convey.

Your client’s email boxes are full, but their mailboxes are empty As print publications continue to lose market share to digital, some publishers are adopting the idea of print as a luxury product. Think of all the ways a print publication can differentiate itself from digital. It can be sensuous. Or, in any event, have more sensory impact. The paper can be heavy and glossy. It can have a nice smell. It can feel substantial in your hand. You can display it on your coffee table. “Haptics” is the science of touch, and there have been some very interesting studies about how physical media affect readers differently than digital media. I’ll provide a link below with some information on that. Print is a very different experience than digital, and while it’s very clear that most content consumption is digital, and will continue to be so (I’m not some Luddite advocate of print) some publishers are finding interesting niches for print. There’s a funny contradiction about print, which is that while a print publication might be more engaging than digital – some studies show that – it’s harder to measure that engagement. We can’t count page views or time on site when somebody is sitting in their easy chair with a magazine. There’s something called the “measurable outcomes bias,” which is when people give more value or preference to things that can be easily quantified or measured. That’s similar to “numeracy bias,” where people are more likely to believe something that’s expressed with a number. I often suspect that a lot of the print vs. digital analysis going on at publishing companies suffers from these biases. But I’m not trying to solve the print vs. digital debates today. I’m just whetting your appetite for this idea. Consider a small-run print newsletter for your key prospects. Think of it this way. Their inboxes are full and their mail boxes are empty. This is a way to set yourself apart and get their attention. Everybody gets a billion emails. But how many people get letters – that they actually want to read. You might know that I do that with The Krehbiel Letter, which is a free, monthly, 4-page newsletter. People love it. It’s a great way to stay in touch with a relatively small group. I’m not advocating doing this at scale, where digital is clearly better. But as a bespoke outreach to a small group, it can be very effective. If you’re curious, give me a call. I’ve learned a lot by publishing this letter, and I can give you some tips. I can even write the thing for you if you want. Resources Why print books are better than digital https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/02/09/why-print-books-are-better-than-digital-and-my-recommendations-for-ebook-readers/

Expanding your market is not always a good idea Fortune’s Chief Customer Officer, Selma Stern, is cited over at whatsnewinpublishing.com as saying “the media industry is far too focused on reach and forgot about sales. As a result, supervisors set the wrong incentives, leading to many new customers being acquired with dumping prices.” Misaligned incentives are certainly a big problem. In my experience, many magazine companies incentivize ad sales in a way that undermines subscription sales, which is pretty dumb. Selma also mentions the very low prices we’ve seen for magazines, which is a somewhat self-defeating way to increase reach. Here’s how that works. Let’s say you have a magazine about video cameras. To get advertisers to buy pages, they want to know how many people get your magazine. But they also want to know that the people who read the magazine are (1) interested in video cameras, and (2) willing to spend some money in that market. If you have 50,000 people who are willing to spend $30 a year to get your magazine, that’s a market that will interest advertisers. Now we get a new marketing director who’s obsessed with reach. Why should we settle for 50,000? Why not 100,000? And to get there, we’ll make ridiculous new subscriber offers, like $5 for one year. We’ve diluted our pool of subscribers. Before we had people who were willing to spend $30 a year. Now we have people who are willing to spend $5. That group is less valuable to the advertiser. And the more tricks the marketing department pulls to get new people in the door – for example, buy this very popular magazine and get our video camera magazine for just $1 – the more you dilute your subscriber base. I have very mild interest in video cameras, but I might spend a dollar to get a magazine about them. There are good things about reach. For one thing, you can get more information about more people, and information is key. I don’t mean that in a sneaky, creepy sort of way, but more information about behavior, preferences, trends, and such, can help with new product development, finding new niches, cross-sales, etc. But there’s a bad side to reach. A focus on reach can diminish quality. For example, if I’m writing to an audience that really cares about video cameras, the authors can geek out with very detailed, in-the-weeds stuff. But if I’m writing for people who are only mildly interested in video cameras, the stories have to be a lot fluffier, which will frustrate the real enthusiasts – that is, your previous core market. The same thing is true on a website. If your goal is to attract more eyeballs, you’re going to tend towards lower quality, more sensationalism, and a short-term focus. You’re not going to invest in serious journalism. You’re going to move towards homogenized, generic content. The future of publishing, I hope, and half-way believe, is in serious, quality content for niche audiences. “Reach” has been a distraction.

If publishers don’t provide a summary of web articles, a browser plugin will Publishers, you want people to read the whole story on your webpage, because you’re proud of every word of it. But here’s the problem. You write it like a mystery novel and force the reader to slog through the whole page – and see all the advertisements – before they get to the nugget they really want. We’d rather have a summary and get the meat up front. Bo Sacks posted an article by Aisha Majid that says a Swedish daily experimented with providing an AI-generated article summary, and found that it actually increases the amount of time people spend on a page. “Unexpectedly,” the article says, “audiences spend longer reading articles that have summaries than those without.” The summaries are created by an API connection from the publisher’s CMS to ChatGPT. Which seems like a smart way to do it. I’ve tried to find a good Wordpress plugin that does the same, with no luck so far, so if you know of one, please tell me. The summaries weren’t always accurate, and the company had the sense to have a policy requiring human supervision of any AI-generated content. Think about that for a moment. That means this new AI-generated wonder actually adds to the editorial workload rather than lessening it. But it’s not a big burden. It’s about 30 seconds. I’d like to stop here and point out a couple questions I have about this story. The first is to ask whether time on page is necessarily a good thing. It is definitely a good thing in terms of SEO. Google ranks your site better if you have higher time on page, apparently on the assumption that more time on page means you’re “engaged” with the content. But I’m not convinced that’s a good metric for the reader. Personally, I’d rather have the content beamed directly into my brain and spend no time on the page, but seriously, if the reader can get what he wants in less time, that’s a plus for the reader, no matter what Google says. And if the publisher won’t do it, a browser plugin will. My second question has to do with their motivation for pursuing this strategy, which is to get more young readers. The word is that young readers prefer having content in lots of different formats. Okay, but why the obsession with young readers? Do they spend more money? Probably not. In my opinion, media companies need to get over this obsession with young readers. And I’m not only saying that because my beard is mostly gray. I’m saying that because media companies need to think about where their bread is buttered. And generally, it’s the older people who are buttering the bread. They have the money. Anyway, the bottom line is that this is an interesting experiment in using AI in a thoughtful and responsible way to address reader needs. It will be interesting to follow this and see how it develops. Resources Swedish daily Aftonbladet finds people spend longer on articles with AI-generated summaries https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/digital-journalism/aftonbladet-sweden-biggest-daily-use-chatgpt-in-the-newsroom/