Does your site you show readers how they can support your work?

Today’s Back to Basics will help you improve returns by adding dedicated sections and pages to your media website.

Threads adds analytics tools in a bid to grab more of X’s market share

Meta has added new creator tools, including analytics and new draft options. It’s a sensible play before the platform is fully monetized. Once post popularity correlates with payment, knowing how content performs will be critical to creators and businesses. For now, these updates are limited to the web version.

This positions Threads to be a worthy alternative to X, which continues to experience a user drop-off—upwards of 30% in the last year. With more than 200 million users and growing, Threads is considered X’s main competition, easily surpassing Bluesky and Mastodon.

It’ll be interesting to see how Threads succeeds with advertising, which is rumored to roll out this year. X has experienced a 50% drop in ad revenue over 2023-2024, according to its largest shareholder Elon Musk. This “exodus of advertisers,” as Futurism writes, is likely a big reason X is now considered (by the Wall Street Journal) “the worst buyout for banks since the financial crisis.”Taking advertisers to court for no longer trusting the platform will probably do little to improve the situation. With some advertisers concerned about brand safety on X, Meta could draw in a considerable part of the ad revenue X has lost this year.

A few updates on AI in journalism

Perplexity, the AI search engine that has been criticized for ignoring publishers’ demands for compensation, has announced it’s donating $250,000 to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism for an initiative to study the future of AI in journalism.

The relationship between AI and publishers is getting more official, with more major publishers making AI content deals with OpenAI and other GenAI companies. Prorata.AI, for example, has already got publishers like FT and Axel-Springer to license their content in exchange for revenue sharing “on a per-use basis,” meaning theoretically, the publishers would get paid every time their content is used to generate new text. (It’s still a bit unclear what happens when AI-generated content is derived from other AI-generated content, which is derived from journalists. Who would get paid in that scenario, and how accurate the text would be after this repeats a few times? How is AI’s recursive self-feeding issue being addressed in these deals?).

Back to Basics #5: Show readers how they can support your work

Publishers miss out on potential revenue by failing to make clear all the ways a reader can support the brand’s mission and pay for products. It’s important to highlight opportunities for would-be premium members, sponsors, or advertisers.

It’s simple, but often overlooked. If a media business is looking to become less reliant on display advertising, it’ll need to increase the eyeballs on blocks and pages that encourage readers to become paying members of the community. For paid memberships, a detailed, engaging page that summarizes member benefits is a great place to start. Field & Stream does this really well:

Another example: Firecrown Media’s FlyingFinance.com, a brand that speaks directly to the company’s audience of aircraft connoisseurs, offering easy financing for plane purchases. It’s certainly a creative revenue stream for a media business! The website features a form in the hero section of its homepage. This is a straightforward lead generator, allowing the company to get valuable information about prospective buyers.

A final example: the Lean In website features several blocks with clear calls-to-action for visitors: lead a group, learn about company programs, or read a report.

Finally, without dedicated pages for sponsorship or advertising on your website, potential advertisers may get confused or lose interest. It’s vital to at least create a media kit and publish it on your site.

If you need media kit inspiration, check out Travel + Leisure’s, published here.

Other Websites Doing it Well

• Punchbowl’s premium memberships and sponsorships pages

• Industry Dive’s advertising page