Publishers must approach technology as an investment, not an expense
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to success for publishers in a highly competitive marketplace. Investments, particularly those that address the individual needs of each publisher, are crucial. A publisher’s choice to invest in technology – or not – can drastically affect the performance of its business.
Wise Investments
When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post in 2013, it suffered from pages bloated with lines of extraneous code that caused severe slowing in page load times. Bezos decided to invest in custom page template software to streamline its design code, subsequently cutting its page load time by 85 per cent.
The Mobile Conundrum
Now, the one channel that has seemingly perplexed almost every publisher is mobile. Competent advertisers and publishers know that you cannot attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole by resizing a desktop banner ad to fit in a mobile device, and a few publishers have proactively chosen to target the mobile generation.
Quartz is one of those publishers. It took a digital-only, mobile-first approach to reaching its audience and focused on social sharing and high-value native ads. It made user experience a priority and ensured that its site was built upon responsive design, which, as a pure web and mobile publisher, was crucial to increasing reader retention and loyalty. Its technology investment paid off, quickly and handsomely. Two years after its debut, Quartz surpassed 10m monthly readers in the US, reached eight figures in revenue and moved into a larger office in New York City to accommodate its growing staff.
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