For audience development, less is more

Audience development roles became ever more challenging in 2023 with Big Tech pivots, new platform launches, and the unknown threats and opportunities of generative AI. In 2024, we’ll need new frameworks to help us prioritize the places we go to to meet our audiences.

2023 timeline: The year of “post-platform” fragmentation

• A snafu by Meta resulted in Facebook traffic dropping so precipitously that the reverberations were felt across the industry. Meta and the platform formerly known as Twitter seemingly entered a race to the bottom as audience drivers to publishers.
• Google’s foray into AI-powered answers led to any number of predictions of the potential impact on search traffic, with “somewhere between 0 and 100%” perhaps the most helpful forecast.
• Information scraped from journalism was increasingly retold by ChatGPT, Bard, and Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience).
• While the sunsetting of Facebook News and Instant Articles impacted traffic for many publishers, the gradual abandonment of Google AMP by publishers was a welcome taking back of control (Condé Nast brands have been gradually — and successfully — removed from AMP throughout the year.)
• The New York Times and The Economist turned podcasts into a subscriber-only benefit, and more organizations used AI to offer narrated audio. While NYT launched Audio following its earlier acquisition of Audm, the podcasting app Stitcher shuttered.

By the middle of the year, it looked like we were entering the “post-platform era.” But then came the new audience touchpoints.

• The arrival of Threads, WhatsApp Channels, Instagram Broadcasts, and the soon-to-launch Facebook Channels added to not only the list of places to share stories, but to the list of places requiring fresh treatments. Side note: Check out Teen Vogue’s first foray into Threads, Vanity Fair’s WhatsApp Channel, and Them’s Instagram Broadcast Channel for your queer horoscope. Meanwhile at Condé Nast, we also launched stickers and channels on messaging app Viber (see this Wired example), LinkedIn Newsletters (Vogue Business), and Reddit business profiles (Vanity Fair).
• TikTok started to recommend longer videos, while the Facebook and Instagram algorithms started prioritizing shorter ones.
• Audiences demanded YouTube Shorts on mobile, while TV was YouTube’s fastest-growing screen size as audiences’ living rooms habits changed.

Most importantly, in efforts to deepen direct relationships with the audience — and in some cases take back control from the all-powerful platforms — audience development teams developed newsletter, homepage, and app strategies for both the stories and the utilities that drive habituation.

2024: The year to prioritize audience needs

With a seemingly limitless number of platforms on which to meet and engage audiences — but still a finite number of hours in the day — teams will need to develop frameworks to understand where to start, stop, and pivot. One framework to try is user needs.

In 2023, we updated our “user needs” at Condé Nast, determining that our audiences have six needs:

• Update me
• Inspire me
• Divert me
• Educate me
• Guide me
• Connect me

We added “guide me” to an earlier iteration of needs — and started thinking about newsletter audiences with that need. For example:

• Audiences need to be “guided” when shopping, and the “new arrivals” curated shopping experience has become a destination in itself for Vogue.
• The Goings On newsletter from The New Yorker (with Substack-inspired subscriber exclusives) is my personal favorite guide.
• “Connect me” isn’t a new user need, but you should know that younger audiences want to participate. While community is nothing new (ask the Ars Technica community member who has commented 100,000 times over the past 24 years), audiences want to find new ways to express their own values.

In your efforts to prioritize and select the channels to focus on, user needs is a useful framework. Look at the core content model I shared this time last year. Consider which stories meet which needs — and the role of each platform or channel. While Instagram may “inspire” or “divert,” and Apple News may “update,” the distinctive journalism that engages core paying subscriber audiences via newsletters and homepages may “educate.”

Less is more

The good news is that less is often more. Inboxes don’t need more newsletters, they need fewer that better respond to an audience need. Readers don’t ask for longer explanations, they want bullets and brevity. Without careful curation, commerce audiences get choice paralysis and decide not to click. Subscribers don’t want to see every story — but they do want to ensure that they don’t miss the most important ones.