DMG Media’s Rich Caccappolo: this is the year to fix the industry’s mistakes

The first session of the Future of Media Conference 2024 is a fireside chat between Dominic Ponsford from Press Gazette and Rich Caccappolo of DMG Media.

Rich Caccappolo, CEO, DMG Media

DMG Media’s 2024: how was it?

Growing revenue, growing profit — but making some changes that they think are critical to their future.

“There’s a great chance for us to fix a lot of things that are broken, to right a lot of wrongs.”

The digital side is where their growth is, and so where their investment is. He thinks they have the benefit of an owner who always focuses on the long term, on the ongoing sustainability of the business. “That gives us more than an opportunity, a requirement to not think short term,” he said.

He believed that Google’s privacy sandbox was just not ready — and he thinks that their back away from it is a good thing. He expects them to continue working on it, but also that when cookies finally do go away, that there will be multiple solutions in their place. Maybe even something from Apple for Safari?

“One of the biggest mistakes we made was letting ourselves get commoditised.”

We never had enough attribution, he suggests. And the emerging models will give us that and allow us to compete better with the tech platforms.

The Mail’s paywall

He suggests that the great benefit Mail Online has is a lot of direct traffic. There’s big concern about how AI will impact traffic — but with a substantial proportion of their traffic coming direct, they’re less exposed to that. Even at its height, Facebook was never more than 10 to 12% of the business.

If you don’t have direct traffic now, it’s harder — and he’s worried about colleagues whom are still dependent on search. But they also wanted to add subscription revenue. And they needed data for that, particularly data about intent. And you need to broaden your offering into audio and video. That means doing well on other sites — you need to do the sort of content that works on TikTok if you want to be on TikTok.

He describes what they’ve done as a “subscription platform” — they can test pricing, they can test bundling. There are a lot of options in what they’ve done. They’ve expanded their video offering, they’ve expanded their commerce business. That diversification has made them more robust against a hit to any particular revenue line.

Critically, they wanted to build subscriptions without hitting their existing scale — and that’s why they went with Mail+ — more from the Mail, rather than paywalling what they are already doing. And it changes the way they think about content. It changed the way the newsroom plans their day.

The Digital Markets Act

This started in Australia, agues Caccappolo. It got watered down as it passed through the parliament, but it was conceived as a way of publishers raising a flag when the platforms treated them unfairly. Now this has come to the UK, we need to be fighting for it. It’s not just about payments from the platforms — that’s not going to be enough to save us.

We should be able to say when they’ve treated us unfairly. Like, for example, the recent update that killed white labels for publishers.

“Bad regulation is worse than no regulations, and I’m fearful it could work out that way if we don’t get involved. We need something that’s beneficial for everyone, including small publishers.”

Gen Z and news

Figures over the summer show that young people are engaged with the elections — but they’re engaging on the platforms. And so we have to go there. Being there is a way of making them aware of the brand — and hopefully get them to the site. But the Mail has never had as big an audience as it now across the site, and all the platforms.

“We’re really excited about that. We’ve had some good partners, and I hope TikTok will support publishers more directly.”.

Gen AI and AI Overviews

He finds it challenging to discuss AI because he feels the terminology is still in flux. There’s the training end, and then there’s the scraping into results. “We’re coming up on 22 months since ChatGPT was released, but nobody is doing anything truly innovative with it,” he said. Some efficiencies, sure, but what else?

They haven’t signed a deal, and he thinks they’re too focused on how AI is being used today, and how it will be in the future. They are consciously blocking the training agents.

But he thinks that the attribution model needs to be sorted — and once that happens, there will be a rush to unlock their content. It’ll be just like search today: people will be asking why their content isn’t being listed.

“We all made the mistake of letting ourselves be commoditised. We now have the chance to reverse that. I urge everyone not to take the short-term gain, and for all of us to work together with an eye on the long term.”