This week, the world celebrated International Women’s Day (IWD), which is full of accomplishments and achievements acknowledged by other female leaders and professionals or by themselves.
The 2024 theme for International Women’s Day is Inspire Inclusion. The inspiration for inclusion in leadership positions and contributions to industry events (including our own) in the past year is why we would like to mark the occasion with stories from professionals within the State of Digital Publishing Industry.
Sindy Nguyen
Head of Search, Digital
Nine
“My favourite question to hear in the newsroom is “Did you get SEO advice?”. Since I’ve joined Nine, I’ve helped enhance the culture of search in the office. The SEO team works hand in hand with the journos – we go to news conferences and pitch ideas, we optimise their stories, we supplement ideas for their explainers, we hold master classes and so much more. Our relationship with the journos is what makes me the most proud and working so closely together has meant we’ve been able to grow search to become the number one external referral source of traffic for our site.”
Aimie Rigas
Director of Audience Development, Publishing
Nine
“I’m proud to have had my skills shaped by intelligent female leaders in the past — in fact, I’ve had more female bosses than male. I’ve focused on elevating women within the leadership roles in my team, too. We push to be representative of our audience, whether it be by the number of women on the team, how many are writing opinions, or the number of diverse case studies and experts in articles. The mastheads aren’t perfect, but we strive to be better every day, not just on IWD”.
Stephanie Fried
Chief Marketing Officer
Fandom
In sharing her experience on SODP’s podcast, Stephanie said, “I was interested in Fandom because it brings together a lot of pieces for me. Certainly, my passion and interest in television and music are a big part of our platform, as well as movies, gaming and content that I’m personally passionate and excited about. So it’s nice to work on something that you love. Certainly understanding also, you know, consumption around entertainment, what consumers are looking for. And I was really fascinated by Fandom’s data, which sits on top of, you know, 40 million pages of very, very deep content. These aren’t pages like one scroll of the mouse. These are pages that are 100 scrolls of the mouse. And so there’s an understanding of every single part of every TV show, movie, game, what people actually care about, the characters they love and why, and the connections across all those different IPS.
I was excited to be able to provide and drive insights out of that data for Fandom and advertising partners and really use that to build better products and experiences for fans. So, I was really driven to bring that to life, really give that 360-degree experience to fans, and turn Fandom into a true fan platform with more than 350 million users per month.”
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Stephanie Solomon
Chief Revenue Officer
Foreign Affairs Magazine
Stephanie is a veteran innovator in our industry who has been able to restructure, operationalise and improve direct revenue streams of legacy publishers through customer data and full-funnel marketing, and having retention as the core indicator of success.
During WordPress Publisher Success Week, she shared a masterclass on what Foreign Affairs Magazine took to become platform-dependent and a niche-thriving business. Here are some snippets of her success.
Starting with her current role as Chief Revenue Officer, “At Foreign Affairs Magazine, I oversee all of the business side, so everything from subscriptions, which is my main focus since that’s our major revenue driver, but also advertising, newsstand production of the magazine, product, web analytics, digital marketing and content marketing. So it’s the whole backend, and it’s a wonderful small group that we have here. We have the most amazing team, which wears lots of different hats all the time. But we feel and understand our brand mission deeply, and that’s why I look forward to talking to you all today about taking a niche product like this and helping it punch above its weight in the current media environment.”
On rebounding their newsstand revenue, Stephanie recounted, “Newsstand sales are a necessary evil. And while they’re expensive, they’re a great form of above-the-line advertising, but new stands are disappearing, so the best places to get magazines these days are at airports or in bookstores. We lost over 50% of our newsstand sales during the pandemic. It was devastating, and I was pretty convinced at the end of 2020 that we were not going to have a newsstand channel anymore, which had major ramifications not for revenue. Still, it is the best form of advertisement because when a new issue comes out, you can see it and flip through it. It’s very rare to have that kind of sampling. But we took the opportunity instead to redo our distribution completely, pulled back on hard-on places that weren’t selling, and reallocated our copies. We wound up cutting our draw by more than a third.
Slowly, as international travel returned and people started diving back into books, our sales have come back to pre-pandemic levels but with a third fewer copies going out. So we see an efficiency of over 45% on the copies that go out, which means that almost 50% of our product sells, which is remarkable as the industry average is closer to 20%. We were not that high before either, so we’ve also raised the prices during this period. We went from $12.99 to $16 per issue on the newsstand, so we are back to the same levels with a third fewer copies going out and almost $3 more per copy being earned. So it’s a rare success story regarding channels bouncing back from the pandemic”.
Throughout her session, she also discussed how having just started with Foreign Affairs Magazine, it took them almost a year to completely redo the user funnel and onboarding process in order to make a bottom-line impact on retention and renewed subscriber sales for a two-million-per-month publication. Now, they are platform-independent and continuing to grow sustainably by being mission—and audience-led.
Nikki Chowdhury
Digital Audience Lead (SEO, Shopping & AI)
Vogue Australia, GQ Australia and Vogue Living
“Reflecting on 2023, I feel really lucky to love what I do! As the end of the year draws near, here are some highlights:
- Leading Digital Audience in A.I, Shopping and SEO at Vogue Australia with the brilliant Angelica Xidias
- Worked on Vogue Codes with Francesca Wallace and the Vogue Australia Team 🙏
- Hosted the “The World in 2030” panel at my alma mater, University of Technology Sydney, as part of Vogue Codes Campus 🎓
- Hosted “The Metaverse Generation” at Carriageworks at Vogue Codes Summit
- Published my piece on the future of A.I., ‘Rage against the Machine’ in Vogue Australia’s 2023 October issue 🤟
- Attended the inaugural SXSW Sydney 2023 🎉 and saw Amy Webb(!) speak
- Spoke to Dr Zena Assaad about A.I ethics, and cats (extensively).”
Nikki was also a panelist at SODP’s Pubtech 2023 event session covering Search Generative Experiences. I appreciated her experience and thoughts on how brands will become the trusted source for consumer decision-making in 2024 and her savvy background in search.
The talent of our aforementioned female publishing leaders has genuinely demonstrated their influence in shifting organisations to a more inclusive and sustainable growth model. A unique opportunity exists to advance inclusion and inspire others’ commitment to a more viable future.
