Media Voices Podcast Media Voices

Focusing on key digital advertising accounts makes sense for publishers, but there is huge revenue potential in the small and medium sized businesses that publishers once served as a matter of course in their print publications.
This is the latest in our Media Briefs series of short, sharp sponsored episodes – just 10 to 15 minutes – with a senior executive from a vendor working with publishers to make their businesses better.
In this episode, Peter speaks with Christian Scherbel, CEO of Smartico about what opportunities there are for publishers to service small-business accounts online, and restore local digital display advertising revenues.
This Media Briefs episode is sponsored by Smartico, enabling more than 500 publishers worldwide to access the untapped revenue potential in digital display advertising for small and medium sized businesses.
Combining the power of AI with human creativity, Smartico’s Smart Ads Solution builds high-impact ads from existing advertiser content. Using just a URL, print ad or social media post Smartico will create engaging ads including built-in instant landing pages for your advertisers.
Learn more about how Smartico can help grow SMB advertising revenues on their website or email Christian to request a free demo.

On this week's episode - the last of the season - we hear from James Cridland, Podnews editor and radio futurologist. Podnews is a daily email newsletter about everything podcasting, and is one of the smartest setups we’ve seen in terms of its supporter structure, monetisation and automations. 
James tells us how he’s found the sweet spot between his technical, editorial and audio skills, why classifieds were a surprising success story for him, and the balance between newsletter growth and revenue.
In the news roundup the team discusses the launch of the Guardian's dedicated cooking app Feast, and asks what adjacent apps like cooking or games platforms offer to the parent brand.
Sign up to our daily newsletter to stay in touch until we come back for the next season by heading to voices.media, or check out our Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summit agenda and tickets at publisherpodcasts.com.

On this week's episode Edward Hyatt, Director of Newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal takes us through staying abreast and ahead of changes to the SEO landscape. From personal experience he outlines the differences in SEO strategies between subscription and non-subscription publishers, the changes in the SEO landscape over the past decade, and the potential impact of AI on SEO for publishers.
In the news roundup the team discusses the news that Forbes has been using a made for advertising (MFA)  subdomain to game the digital advertising ecosystem. Since 2017, Forbes was using tactics that have long been condemned by anyone who cares about quality media - and we discuss the likelihood that they are the only ones. According to a US Association of National Advertisers (ANA) survey conducted last year, MFA sites received 21% of all ad impressions and 15% of digital adspend, despite being widely considered as a low-quality medium for advertising. So, what (if anything) can be done?
Sign up to our daily newsletter and community forum at voices.media.

This week we hear from Chris Minasians, Director and Editor at TotallyEV, an independent site dedicated to articles, reviews and interviews about electric vehicles. TotallyEV has recently hit 5 million views on YouTube, so he discusses building an audience through video reviews, and what it takes to run your own reviews site - including getting access to vehicles - as a solo publisher.
Minasians also explores the differences he's noticed between his electric vehicle coverage on TotallyEV, and his more consumer-focused tech reviews on his other YouTube channel TotallydubbedHD, from audience engagement to relative revenues.
In the news round-up, Chris (Sutcliffe!) and Esther run through a busy week in audio and podcast news. We ask where people listen to podcasts - not Google Podcasts any more - and whether podcasters are seeing any benefit from Apple's promotion of paid shows. There's also the first agenda sneak preview for the Publisher Podcast Summit...

This week we speak to The Telegraph’s Head of Newsletters Maire Bonheim, and Deputy Head of Newsletters David Alexander, about the publisher's newsletter portfolio. We talk about why The Telegraph and others are prioritising newsletters, how newsletters can be used at different stages of the subscriber funnel, and what they’ve learned from a community-focused approach to their Politics newsletter.
Marie and David also discuss building a live event from a newsletter brand, and the value of newsletters as a retention tool for the subscriptions-focused publisher.
In the news roundup we have a good chat about The Atlantic’s announcement that it is profitable and has hit the 1m subscriber milestone. We discuss the extent to which investing in high-quality content (longreads, mostly) creates a virtuous circle when it comes to growing subscriptions.
Sign up for our own daily newsletter and community forum at voices.media

On this week's episode we hear from Jane Ferguson, an award-winning journalist with a huge amount of experience covering wars and conflicts the world over. She tells us about how wars often bring the issues around modern journalism – mistrust, disinformation, lack of resources – into the starkest focus, and how the democratisation of tech is making the job of journalists covering war both easier and more difficult.
In the news roundup the team discusses the news that French authorities have levied a fine on Google for its unauthorised training of AI tools upon publisher content, and ask to what extent this is justified and its relationship to the ongoing acrimony between Google and publishers. Esther makes several excellent segues.
Sign up to our newsletter and community forum by going to voices.media.