2018 Publishing Year in Review

An FTI Consulting Report

As we do for our valued newspaper and magazine clients at the end of each year, we recap 2018 to inform insights for 2019. So we looked back at our Year-in-Review thoughts from 2015, 2016 and 2017. What we found was interesting:

2015

In 2015 we talked about the ‘the genius of the AND’ and stories around innovation. We suggested that publishing may be in a permanent state of ‘re-invention.’

  • LinkedIn reinvents recruiting: LinkedIn disrupted the $26 billion corporate recruiting market by launching a subscription tool called recruiter accounting for 62% of revenue. Today LinkedIn is continually adding features such as salary insights and LinkedIn Scheduler to increase functionality and engage users.
  • Netflix reinvents content streaming & creation: $41 billion market cap Netflix - then over $6 billion in revenue - transitioned from mailing DVD’s to streaming video over the internet and is now aiming to disrupt original content production with Netflix Originals. Today Netflix's over $11 billion in 2017 revenue nearly doubled in two years.
  • The Washington Post reinvents its reach: 72 million digital unique visitors in November according to Comscore. Time spend per visitor increased 21% up to nearly 15 minutes, with 93% higher mobile visits than last year and made up of 44% millennials. Today the post’s affiliate program has been discontinued. Year to date it has 71 million monthly unique visitors, retaining the audience built through its affiliate program and through distributing its content through a broad set of platform channels.
  • Facebook: just launched instant articles. Today, publishers find themselves steering away from instant articles because of difficulties monetizing them and because of difficulties with difficulties with monetization and data transparency. According to the Columbia journalism review, “over half of Facebook's launch partners for instant articles did not use the format in early 2018.”

Related Insights

Related Information

Published

December 20, 2018

temp Key Contacts

Timothy Thompson

Managing Director

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