Online entertainment publisher Digitalbox is launching a series of highly-targeted sites aiming to deliver the “super engagement which is increasingly favoured by the platforms”.
The new “verticals strategy” has begun with the launch of Emmerdale Insider, which includes existing staff moved over from Entertainment Daily as well as others.
Two more new sites are planned to go live before the end of 2024.
Referring to Google’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) criteria, Digitalbox chief executive James Carter said sites dedicated to specific football clubs were an example of the sort of content favoured nowadays by the search engine.
He said there is a “move away from sort of generalists towards specialists” and that it appeared that the “E-A-T algorithm would raise a very distinct, focused offering around one club ahead of the generalist view of football from writers that cover every club”.
Digitalbox’s business model is largely based on driving high volumes of traffic on sites optimised for mobile, which it says allows it to achieve significantly higher revenues per session on advertising compared to other publishers.
Digitalbox has reported revenues for the six months to 30 June up 32% to £1.6m with adjusted EBITDA (stated before depreciation, amortisation, impairment of goodwill and intangible assets and share based payment charges) up from a £100,000 loss in the same period in 2023 to a £300,000 surplus.
Entertainment Daily ‘blocked’ by Google
Digitalbox’s biggest brand by both revenue and audience is Entertainment Daily, which covers soaps as one of its main verticals.
At the start of 2023 Entertainment Daily was “blocked” by Google in search, news and Discover leading to an overall drop in visits of 27% for the year. It eventually regained visibility in November.
But the brand’s turbulent relationship with Google continued again this year.
Digitalbox said that in January and February of this year Entertainment Daily saw “significant volumes” of traffic coming from Google but it was then hit badly by the March core update.
“While we anticipated broadly stable advertiser demand across the period, we did not anticipate Google’s algorithm blocking our biggest brand,” it said.
The team has been able to reinstate the site’s presence in Google search and News traffic but not in Discover.
“We remain focused on tactics to get the site reinstated across all three key channels after a further Google Core Update in August,” the accounts said.
Carter said: “We’ve managed to regain traction around search in the middle of the H1 period, but I think we expect further challenges going forwards.”
Daily Mash tops 4,200 subscribers
Despite most of the business being based around advertising, satire website the Daily Mash has a subscription model that now has more than 4,200 subscribers.
The Mash Premium offering, which provides unlimited ad-free access to the site which contains some restricted stories, has increased in price from £20 per year to £30. This means that at the new higher price the paywall could bring in more than £126,000 annually. The Daily Mash made just under half this (£59,000) in the first half of the year.
However the brand, which is also publishing a book before the end of the year: The Daily Mash Class Wars – A Field Guide to Being British, was the only Digitalbox site to make a loss (of £56,000) in H1.
Digitalbox has more acquisitions in the works
Student site The Tab, which was bought in 2020 and paid back the purchase price in 18 months, saw traffic up 3% and delivered a positive contribution every month since achieving its full repayment. Although its model is based around UK universities, the company said its central team’s entertainment output had increased traction in the US.
Satirical website The Poke was acquired in December 2022 and has now also fully repaid its acquisition costs after 18 months. The company said it had a “strong six months” with audiences up 21% and session values also seeing growth after Digitalbox’s Graphene ad stack had been integrated for a year.
Digitalbox’s most recent acquisition was TV Guide, with a £550,000 deal announced in May 2022.
It said the site repaid 31% of its acquisition cost in the first half of 2024 amid a series of technical improvements and a 30% uplift in traffic as well as an editorial expansion into content about streaming shows.
Carter said more acquisitions are in the works, including potentially some sites that have been hit hard by Google changes.
Despite turbulence in search, Carter said Facebook has remained "relatively strong" for Digitalbox.
The publisher switched on Facebook's invitation-only performance bonus programme in February which allows creators to earn money for engagement with photo, text and video posts.
Carter said: "Effectively they're rewarding content creators for engagement. So it's a pivot away from their previous monetisation models, which were quite basic: if you publish a video on Facebook, it could be monetised by a mid-roll ad or a post-roll ad being delivered around your content, you'd get a direct share of that revenue.
"They've stepped away from that, and they've moved towards the longer you can keep people on the platform, the more engaged they are, the better... we've done quite well from that in the past six months."
Carter said the UK digital ad market was "slightly down" in the first half of the year compared to H1 2023 but was "relatively stable... compared to the previous choppy years that we've had".
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