Visiting FIPP 100 in Madrid. The stark realities facing publishers

When I founded Full Fat Things in 2010 I’d recently left The Economist. Whilst I was at The Economist I worked on a great website with a brilliant business model. They charged for content! Who would have thought it would be possible on the internet. They were doing it in the year 2001 when I joined and probably before. Archaic paywalls and payment providers existed then but the whole thing worked and customers happily purchased the print edition as well as the new shiny web edition. 

The Economist also loved display advertising and even all the way back then we managed to make it personalised to the audience based upon demographics etc. The paywall would site slightly further back on the site in good advertising years and would lock more content in slow advertising years. How simple, yet effective!

When I left The Economist to start Full Fat Things I was immediately surprised to see companies loving advertising only as a revenue model. We still have some customers doing this now as customers of Full Fat Things. I love all of our customers equally however I’ve always wanted our publishing customers to make more from the content they produce.

So it was a complete joy to go the FiPP conference in its centenary year in Madrid this month to hear the general state of the industry. 

Here is a brief commentary on the points that kept coming up…

Ad revenue is falling

Ad revenue is dropping globally for publishers quicker than before. Programmatic revenue is falling through the floor. Publishers continue to need to know more about their audience to be able to sell to them. This of course leads to…

First party data is EVERYTHING

First party data is EVERYTHING. Audiences should be thought about in terms of quality of connection and not quantity of number.  Therefore it is fine to allow our audiences to shrink if they are paying for a great connection. So lock up that content away from free eyes and seek that customer connection. Own that connection with the customer, learn about each other and make each other happy. It’s time to have a good old fashioned relationship with your customers. It is time to know more about your customers than Google and Facebook do.

Paywalls and regwalls should be in place to trigger first party data collection and then detailed collection of activities. I’m careful not to say analytics here as people just automatically think about Google Analytics but that is aggregated analytics. I think we need to know what individuals are doing and then segment up rather than segment traffic down from GA and hope that tracks onto users. 

The storm clouds of the AI wars are gathering

OpenAI and other AI providers are eating your data and we've seen Silicon Valley take everything they want without care with things like Youtube blatantly hosting copyrighted material before figuring out how to monetise it. Just handing over data and hoping they send clicks is not the way. The general advice was block AI and bots until you cut a deal with them to get paid. Their clicks are tiny and we don’t think that a new GEO strategy is going to get that click rate back up to Google levels. 

This is made more complex when you have programmatic ads on your properties by the fact that lots of bots in that world need to access your site. AI and Ads effectively make all of this hard. You can't just block all bots but you should also consider that AI providers will buy data from third parties and they also seed from Common Crawl to get their datasets. So if you think you can just block OpenAI, Perplexity and Claude crawlers then think again. 

On a personal note here because Google built a business around the greatest business model in the world with Adwords/Adsense I don’t think the ads business is going away but it will have trouble for a while whilst the AI giants fight like peacocks in the street. 

Membership models 

There was lots of talk about membership models, like the Guardian, needing a really strong brand that they can lean on to carry them through and that if your brand is not of that calibre then merely encouraging people to pay will not be enough.

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Playing for Reach and SEO is slowing quickly

With the prioritisation of reach and SEO being the focus for traffic which is supported by advertising, the quality of the experience once a reader has arrived at publisher websites has diminished. This is damaging brand equity every day and at some point it will be a very uphill struggle to get back from this. Look at this example of how little content you can see on a screen and. not even the full headline. I hate to pick on Reach in this example but it shows that an ads only model is not paying enough to allow for a quality experience. Be careful. 

Closing note..

There was one outlier at the event who had dumped their paywall and they claimed quite impressive growth percentages in advertising but I couldn’t help thinking that their growth was because of removing a paying paywall and I wonder whether their overall revenue had grown.

FiPP was great because of the very international publishing audience. It was great because these messages to publishers above were consistent across the conference from the whole world. 

For fifteen years we’ve helped publishers and for every one we’ve worked with we’ve encouraged learning about their customers through great data collection and we’ve promoted the idea that content should be paid for by registration walls and paywalls. We even have a publisher product that combines subscriptions, paywalls, a great CMS and fabulous publication system integration. 

So just on a personal note I loved having our longstanding message hammered home to everyone that now is the time to go full Jerry Maguire.

Stewart Robinson, Founder of Full Fat Things