Newsweek Tries to Niche Down to Build Loyal Audience
Newsweek reaches some 60 million humans via its website, newsletters, events and more. While enviable, the nearly century old publication has realized it needs to do better in retaining and engaging its audience.
The solution? Go niche—specifically in healthcare, at least to start.
“We’re leaning into some of that expert coverage, knowing it won’t drive as much audience, but the audience it will drive is smaller and more valuable to us,” Josh Awtry, senior vice president of Newsweek, told AMO.
Its strategy? Blend the high volume top of funnel with third-party data. “An example would be the CEO of a major pharmaceutical corporation may have come to Newsweek for a cute pets article… the trick is we have to know who they are, and we have to be able to funnel them towards the expert content we have.”
The magazine has also added a rail on the left side of the homepage where they highlight “insightful commentary from Newsweek’s community” in an attempt to offer readers more value and keep them coming back. The strategies are being devised in response to the fact that increasing scale and reach is no longer the most reliable long-term approach for media.
“It was a great short-term strategy, but time and time again, we just keep seeing the cautionary tale of what happens when you write for an algorithm, and not for human beings,” Awtry said. “We are still spending a lot of time writing content for new readers, and that means leaning into Google Discover, which is still a rich traffic source, but not making that the end. That’s the start of a relationship with readers.”
Squeezing more value out of readers requires better engagement, cultivating conversations and increasing the frequency of return visits.
Niches Make Riches?
Newsweek is attempting to identify various niche topics both for consumer and B2B audiences. The site already sends out a daily pets-focused newsletter, Pawsitively, and is looking to partner with pet influencers to bring greater voice to the content and eventually offer AMAs with them, or even SMS text message exchanges.
But the area that is farthest from its core is its attempt to reach readers in the healthcare industry. To bolster this coverage, Newsweek hired Alexis Kayser last year from Becker’s Hospital Review to be its healthcare editor.
What Newsweek is now trying to do is identify which of its readers should be shown this content. To do that, it’s using third-party data to identify if someone works in the healthcare industry, but the hope is that readers will register and sign up for newsletters so Newsweek can gather first-party data.
“If they sign up for the pets newsletter, and we happen to know that person is a healthcare expert through data matching, we might put a bug within that pets newsletter, saying, by the way, we do have this great healthcare business newsletter over here,” Awtry said.
So what do B2B media executives think about Newsweek’s strategy? AMO spoke to Chris Ferrell, founder of Endeavor Business Media, and Sean Griffey, co-founder and former CEO of Industry Dive.
Chris Ferrell, Endeavor Business Media
Ferrell moved from consumer media to B2B a decade ago because the latter was a better business—but not necessarily an easy one.
“It sounds like they are thinking about it the right way,” Ferrell said. “Audiences that are more niched are more valuable to advertisers. The more you know about your audience, the more valuable that audience is.”
In B2B, however, it’s not enough to write for an industry, he said. You have to write for specific job functions within said industry.
“Advertisers don’t want to reach health care generally, they want to reach the HR department in healthcare, because that’s what their software does. or they want to reach the finance department in healthcare, because that’s going to be a decision maker.”
Ferrell suggested that the better approach for Newsweek would be not chasing any one industry, but rather, to go after specific job functions commonly found in all companies.
“If I was sitting at Newsweek, I would be thinking about it more along the tactics of the way Morning Brew did, for example. And think about it as, I’m gonna find all the HR people. I’m gonna find all the marketing people. I’m gonna find all the finance people, because there are advertisers who are interested in segmenting the world that way. They’ve got a large enough audience that they’re going to have a significant number of small business owners and marketing executives and finance executives that then they can put in front of companies.”
Sean Griffey, Industry Dive
“I’m skeptical that they can make this work,” Griffey said, primarily because B2B requires a depth of analysis and coverage that consumer media often misses.
“Consumer media writes about what happened, but what B2B media writes about when we’re doing our job is what it means to the industry and what comes next. And that comes from real in depth analysis and living within those markets. And that’s what great B2B journalists do, is they live within those markets.”
Griffey also agreed with Ferrell that to get B2B right, you have to write to the job and not the industry.
“It’s not enough for an executive pharma company to read the story. We need a drug manufacturer or someone in clinical trials patient recruitment to read certain types of articles,” he said.
The other issue is that good B2B media embeds itself into the market, helping with brand awareness, content creation and helping fill advertisers’s sales pipelines. Without that, and with only programmatic ads, “you really aren’t going to capture the value of a B2B audience.”
“Most of the consumer media revenue teams aren’t structured to reach out and sell direct in a way that captures the value of the audiences, if they manage to get them.”
“If we serve an audience in a way that provides them value and helps them navigate a complex world, then the monetization will come easy. But if we try to serve everyone, that’s not the point of B2B, that’s not the point of any media, to be honest. That’s how media got in trouble … they just decided they’re writing for anyone that comes in through a search engine or through a social media social network.”
