A presidential election year has the potential to be a boon for news and politics publishers when it comes to drawing in and monetizing audiences. But even though 2024 is a lot like 2020 on paper, platform performance issues and an unreliable ad market may make this election cycle less lucrative than hoped.
For Newsweek's global chief commercial and growth officer Kevin Gentzel, this means testing out new audience growth strategies and revenue streams to get back to growth this year. "We did end the year with some growth, which was great, [but we] didn't achieve what we set out to accomplish in [2023]. But I feel like we strategically started to sow seeds throughout the year that we knew were going to strategically benefit the business, our readers, brand partners, and start to develop other core commercial aspects of the company that we're beginning to see in 2024 and beyond," said Gentzel.
As we all know, Facebook referral traffic has fallen off, other social platforms' referral traffic has also fallen off. And our audience development team got very interested in experimenting with WhatsApp, for instance ... And we've seen a significant amount of audience come to us now from WhatsApp - I don't think they even call their product a newsfeed - but it's interesting, and I've been experimenting with that. We also have been leaning into Reddit more and more and we find that platform is a successful one for the reader journey for us.
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