- 🎰 Penn officially launched Bet, its sportsbook with ESPN, a few months after the casino operator sold Barstool Sports back.
- 🚕Ridesharing app Lyft has relaunched its publication, which will now house both its original brand journalism, as well as the company’s press releases and other communications.
- 🎤 New research shows that brand content that is produced by professional journalists is likelier to be trusted.
Penn’s Bet launches
Penn officially launched Bet, its sportsbook venture with ESPN, a few months after the casino operator ditched Barstool Sports and its related drama for Disney’s deeper coffers.
In an ad released to promote the new venture, anchor Scott Van Pelt is front and center – one example of why Penn agreed to pay ESPN $150 million for a licensing deal, betting that it’ll be able to parlay ESPN stars and enormous audience to help it get ahead. (Currently, DraftKings and FanDuel dominate the $9 billion market, as the FT points out.)
Van Pelt and other ESPN hosts will play a big part going forward: They’ll recommend bets for users on the new ESPN Bet app. The company will also integrate Bet branding on ESPN more widely in the coming months, in an effort to lure the ESPN audience over to Bet.
Why it matters: 2024 is going to be a make-or-break year for the sports-betting x media trend. Under the terms of their agreement, ESPN is allowed to activate a termination clause within three years if the new service doesn’t gain much traction. And it’s going to be an uphill battle, considering the advantages Fan Duel and DraftKings already have. Both of those companies have made content a centerpiece of their marketing strategies with FanDuel TV and DraftKings Network.
Penn already took a loss with its purchase and subsequent sale of Barstool. Now, it’s pouring money into this licensing deal (it will also spend about $150 million in marketing ESPN Bet) in the hopes that it’ll have better luck there. The gamble is if ESPN content will be enticing enough for users to leave other betting apps to come over to Bet – and if the company can grow market share fast enough to make it worth it for ESPN.
Lyft relaunches its publication
Ridesharing app Lyft has relaunched Rev, its brand publication, which used to live in a dedicated section of the Lyft site. Now housed at lyft.com/blog, the site combines Rev – the company’s brand publication featuring stories and data about Lyft riders and drivers – and its blog, which housed its press releases and product-focused communications. Jason Tanz, who runs the site, calls it a “single source,” and said in a post that the site is also relaunching its Rev newsletter, which will include all the articles, news and features.
Why it matters: Many brands have recently spun off their brand publications, going as far as to house them under new URLs, in an effort to distance that work from the company itself as a way to gain audience trust. But there may be something to Lyft’s strategy: New research we published just last week found that audiences are likelier to trust brand content when there is clear labeling showing who funded it and produced it.
Why brands hire journalists
Consumers trust brand content more when it’s produced by professional journalists and when it clearly discloses who it’s funded and created by, according to new research by Toolkits and National Research Group.
In a survey of 1,007 digital content consumers, 43% said they’re more likely to trust branded content if it is created by professional journalists. Forty-eight percent said it had no impact, while 9% said it would make them trust it less. Clear labeling indicating that the content is created by a brand also helps engender trust: 42% said clear disclosure makes them trust brand content more, while 13% said it makes them trust it less. Forty-five percent said it had no impact. The factor likeliest to drive trust in brand content was an existing relationship with the brand (54%), while a close second was the presence of data and statistics.
Why email is a powerful monetization opportunity for brand publishers
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Robinhood’s Sherwood sees growth
Stock trading app Robinhood may already be seeing some benefits from Sherwood, its independent media arm that is set to formally launch next year. In its latest quarterly earnings, the company said that while “other revenues” overall declined to $31 million in Q3, seasonal headwinds were “partially offset” by Sherwood Media’s ad revenue. The company hasn’t broken out how much exactly Sherwood is bringing in, but the company is looking to expand the media subsidiary’s offerings dramatically in the coming months, with new newsletters and events on the horizon.
The brand publishing monetization opportunity
Brands are increasingly attempting to monetize the content they produce and publish directly, turning what was previously a marketing activity into a source of revenue in its own right.
For companies that have invested meaningful resources in publishing operations – and in many cases hired journalists and borrowed strategies from “traditional” media companies – monetizing their content more directly may seem a logical next step. For some, the desire to explore monetization is underpinned by a need to diversify revenue streams, while others are attracted by the opportunity to offset their costs.
Traditional publishers cut staff
The traditional media industry is undergoing serious cuts, as the ad market for publishers continues to be volatile. In the past few weeks, Recurrent Ventures, Bloomberg Industry Group, Vice Media Group, G/O Media, Conde Nast, the Washington Post and CNBC have all made cuts – Axios reports that nearly 20,000 jobs have been cut across media as of October, more than six times the number of job cuts compared with 2022 so far this year.
The era of paid distribution
Publishers of all types looking to 2024 are realizing that the days of organic growth may be over, and in order to drive traffic to their sites and content, they will need to pay. Platforms are driving this shift, as they continue to deprioritize links and priotize natively posted content.