The Weekly Bulletin | January 14, 2025

Hi SODP community,

Let’s recap on what’s been happening, the new content, industry updates, tips, and more.

TIP OF THE WEEK

First-party data is a critical asset for digital publishers as it provides direct, reliable insights into their audience's behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns. This data is not only more accurate and privacy-compliant but also empowers publishers to build deeper audience relationships, deliver personalized content, and create targeted monetization opportunities.

In an era of increasing data privacy regulations, leveraging first-party data is essential for publishers to maintain their competitive edge and drive sustainable revenue growth.

Here is where publishers who are seeking to boost first-party data acquisition, consumer trust, and compliance with regulations can get started:

• Progressive Profiling

  Asking for too much data at one go can come across as very invasive. Instead, a better option is to gradually build relationships with your audience while slowly acquiring data by offering innovative content and experiences.
  

• Enforcing Clarity and Transparency

  A lot can go wrong if your teams don't have a good understanding of their responsibilities and limitations about data collection. Proper training and awareness about what to collect, when to collect, and how to use it can help prevent future headaches.
  

• Using a CDP

  A Customer Data Platform can help bring all your audience data across devices and platforms to a single unified interface. For example, The Guardian is exploring CDPs as it is a large publisher that does not impose mandatory sign-in and has millions of anonymous users.

SODP POSTS

Tech Companies Are Turning to ‘Synthetic Data’ to Train AI Models – But There’s a Hidden Cost

Tech companies depend on data – real or synthetic – to build, train and refine generative AI models such as ChatGPT. The quality of this data is crucial. Poor data leads to poor outputs, in the same way using low-quality ingredients in cooking can produce low-quality meals.

Real data refers to text, video and images created by humans. Companies collect it through methods such as surveys, experiments, observations or mining of websites and social media.

Synthetic data is artificially created or generated by algorithms, such as text generated by ChatGPT or an image generated by DALL-E.

In theory, synthetic data offers a cost-effective and faster solution for training AI models.

READ MORE

JOB BOARD

➡️ Condé Nast is looking for an Executive Director, Consumer Revenue Initiatives & Transformation to shape strategy, drive revenue growth, and enhance operational efficiency through resource and process improvements, with a particular focus on expanding the Consumer Revenue businesses (NYC, NY, US). SEE MORE

➡️ Contentsquare is looking for a Senior AI Product Designer to lead the design of intuitive, impactful experiences (London area / France / Spain / Germany). SEE MORE

➡️ News Corp Australia is seeking a Tech Platform Partnerships Manager – a key role tasked with maximizing value from key technology platform partnerships (Surry Hills, NSW, Australia). SEE MORE

COMMUNITY BUZZ

Industry News

➡️ Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2025 – Reuters Institute publishes its latest study. “With subscription growth slowing, new product development is set to be a more important priority in the year ahead.” READ MORE

➡️ Google Chrome's Barry Pollard explained 5 optimization tips for Largest Contentful Paint. Every SEO needs to read this. READ MORE

Social Media Discussions

➡️ Noah Greenberg on LinkedIn:

Which companies are actively hiring journalists for roles that pay over $100k? (also a few over $175K)

An incredible list of roles popped up this week at orgs specifically seeking editorial talent. Are they "traditional" media? Absolutely not. Are they investing in great talent to produce unique and valuable coverage? Big yes. Do they have better business models than most of their traditional media counterparts? Also yes.

CONTINUE READING

These are the highlights for the last week.

Until next!

Vahe Arabian and the editorial team at SODP