- 💰 Hubspot-owned Trends is made available for free, after being a paid product since 2019.
- 💼 The Trade Desk is hiring away journalists with experience at all the major ad trade publications.
- 📰 Consumers know brand content when they see it, according to exclusive new research from Toolkits and National Research Group.
Hubspot makes Trends free
Trends was a rarity in the world of brand publishing: A paid content product owned by a brand. Now, the Hubspot-owned property has become free-to-read. Announced last week, Trends is now “Trends TLDR,” a weekly free email newsletter that says it can help people stay “ahead of the curve,” and will share research, wisdom and tips.
Trends was launched in June 2019, born as an attempt to diversify The Hustle newsletter’s revenue away from being 100% reliant on advertising. Two years later, Hubspot acquired the company, and Trends along with it. Last year, Trends had about 15,000 paid subscribers and was priced at $300/year. It produced business reports and research and the subscription also gave buyers access to a community of business owners and founders.
It’s not a surprising move; revenue from Trends was largely irrelevant to Hubspot, which generated over a billion dollars in revenue last year. When Toolkits spoke with Hubspot’s senior director, Brad Wolverton, he said the goal with media was reach – not revenue. But keeping it a paid product also helped ensure discussions in the community were of higher quality, he said.
Now free, Trends is a more straightforward top-of-the-funnel publishing endeavor, using content to attract an audience to which Hubspot can then market products and services.
Monetizing content operations has been an on-again-off-again trend in brand publishing. A select number of brands are now selling ad space on-site and within email newsletters in an effort to build new revenue streams, or even just offset content creation costs. But paid content is a different and perhaps more challenging beast. In Hubspot’s case, charging audiences may end up being less lucrative than simply giving them content for free and lowering customer acquisition costs.
Consumers know brand content when they see it
As brands increasingly produce and publish their own content in an attempt to reach and engage with audiences, some observers have pointed to “blurring lines” between content funded by brands and that funded by more “traditional” media companies. But according to new research by Toolkits and National Research Group, consumers say they know brand-funded content when they see it.
The Trade Desk’s hiring spree
In an attempt to build up its publishing chops, The Trade Desk has been hiring a stable of notable advertising trade journalists: Former Adweek EIC Stephanie Paterik, former Digiday reporter Ilyse Liffreing, former AdAge reporter George Slefo, (Slefo has since left for Attain), and now, former AdAge-r Zharmer Hardimon as data and insights editor. The company has staffed up quickly on reporting and editing talent for The Current, which had an inaugural presence at this year’s Advertising Week and in Cannes, and has been covering the ad and digital media industry comprehensively. Meanwhile, Adweek is on its fourth owner in six years.
Google’s top content exec decamps to Amazon
Natalie Zmuda, head of all global content at Google, left the company for a product management role at Amazon, where she will bring an “editorial lens to products.” At Google, Zmuda ran one of the longest-running brand publications out there. Think With Google covers news and analysis about marketing and advertising for a B2B audience of decision-makers in marketing and advertising. Here’s our podcast with Zmuda earlier this year, where we discussed her approach to content.
The Vitality Report
Cigna’s newsroom surveyed 10,000 U.S. adults about health, mental health and wellness. The result is a comprehensive look at the emotional, environmental, financial, intellectual, occupational, physical, social, and spiritual states of people in the U.S., and a good example of brand publishers using data as the foundation for content.
Data bite
Content measurement tool Nudge found that 2.44% of people drop off each second while reading content. In the time you read this, 22% of people left.
Governance, shmovernance
Andreessen Horowitz, a VC firm that has invested in AI, warned that new rules governing the use of content to train LLMs will “significantly disrupt” the investment community’s plans for the tech, according to comments submitted to the US Copyright Office. Generative AI chatbots have been freely taking intellectual property – much of which is owned, copyrighted and created by publishers – and using it to train models. New rules from the government around how the tech industry can use this property appear to be on the way. A16Z, for its part, thinks the tech industry should be allowed to use whatever content it likes, at all times, for free.