What’s so Wrong With Paid Growth? Stop Looking Down on it
For as long as I’ve worked in media, publishers have maintained a clear bias about traffic sources. Did the bulk of your audience come to you organically (aka from search)? You were doing well. Did you have to pay for your audience in some way? Your business was unsustainable.
And while I am painting with a broad brush, I understand why. With organic traffic, the content is the primary reason someone is coming to your site. For paid, there was this perceived perception as if the only way you could get someone to your site or platform was because you had to pay. You tricked the reader in some way.
This is wrong on both sides. From an organic perspective, we operate at the whims of the platforms and how they choose to rank things. Why else do top media brands run articles like “What time is the Super Bowl?” On the paid side, some of the most highly engaged audiences I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with have come from email lists that were built with millions of dollars in paid acquisition.
How you acquire a user is far less important than what you do when you have that user. If users are landing on your site organically and they’re bouncing because you’ve given them a horrible experience, who cares that you didn’t pay? Your business is going to struggle. It’s the same thing from a paid perspective. If you’ve got to consistently pay to acquire new subscribers because you can’t retain your old ones, you’re screwed.
The most important thing you should worry about is what you do when that user—irrespective of where they come from—lands on your site. Are you giving them the content that they want? Are you giving them the ability to sign up for a great newsletter to lengthen your relationship with them? Or are you arbitraging them with the belief that you’re going to get a ton more traffic for free and continue monetizing?
If the answer to that last question is yes, you’re in for a rude awakening because traffic is getting harder to acquire. It could get a whole lot worse.
Devastating News
TollBit released a report in February that has been stuck in my head. In it, they reported that “AI chat bots on average drive referral traffic at a rate that is 96% lower than traditional Google search.” That’s devastating.
If these chat bots become the default way of consuming information, the way publishers have historically grown is over. You might be diversifying your traffic from other platforms, which will help, but the traditional playbooks are done.
So, how are you going to get people to discover your content when the vast majority of them are stuck in the chat bot? You’ll have no choice but to pay. Even those of us that already have an audience will have to pay because we want to grow and there is a natural churn that occurs even with the best publishers.
If the traditional playbook said that you create unbelievable content with the hopes that people will hit your site, engage with it and then hopefully stick around for more content, then what does the new world look like? In big part, the content itself could become less important from an acquisition perspective and, instead, becomes the means of retaining the user.
Consider how marketing was done prior to the internet. You bought lists and sent direct mail, paid for promotion on the newsstand, attended events, etc. You had to put money to work to get your subscriber base up. In many respects, the user would get the magazine in their hand, look at it, judge it and then determine whether they wanted to subscribe. You paid first to acquire the user’s attention and then retained them with the quality, aka the content.
This is the same strategy for digital media companies. You pay to get a targeted user to your site, but what then?
The problem with paid acquisition is that people think it’s the most important thing. It’s not. Great distribution cannot overcome bad product. And that’s just not the case anymore. It’s becoming more expensive to acquire users. The proliferation of crappy newsletters supported with programmatic ad networks and co-marketing has made this true. And so, you need to be able to keep your paid readers around for even longer than the earlier newsletters did.
I judge the quality of a user that’s acquired through paid sources by the effort that goes into them signing up. If the user has to make a conscious decision to engage with the content or sign up, they’re likely to be a higher quality reader. If, however, it happened with almost no friction, they’re probably not going to care as much. This is why I have been so against all the co-marketing out there. The user didn’t have to type their email a second time; with one click, they get a few newsletters. That’s not a quality reader.
This is also why it’s so important to pick a niche and stick to it. If you can more tightly couple the content you’re creating to the paid audience you’re acquiring, two things will happen:
- You’ll be able to spend more to acquire the right reader rather than paying less to acquire any reader.
- You’ll keep the reader around for longer, allowing you to monetize them for far longer and improve the LTV, which brings you back to #1.
At the end of the day, all publishers will have to get comfortable having a paid acquisition component to their business. If your team doesn’t have this muscle yet, it’s time to start learning. Understand the LTV of a reader, be very intentional with your CACs and make sure that you’re acquiring the right readers. It’s just another part of building a media company.
