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Finding New Audiences for Your Content
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Finding New Audiences for Your Content
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Hello. Welcome, webinar listeners. I'm Jake Zarnegar, as Stephanie noted, I head up business development here at Silverchair and I'm going to be the host and moderator today. Today's discussion is centered around strategies for finding and connecting with new audiences for the high quality and, in many cases, expensive to produce content published by our prestigious organizations.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Our speakers today are Ha-Hoa Hamano, Senior Product Manager of Emerging Platforms at NPR (National Public Radio), Gabe Harp, Senior Manager for Digital Products at the MIT Press, and Kristen Twardowski, Library Sales Manager for Duke University Press. Underlying our topic today is what I like to call the three R's for publishers-- reach, revenue, and resilience.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Reach, as in finding and connecting with audiences, whether that be adding completely new audiences or reaching your existing audiences in new ways. Revenue, as in developing a sustainable funding model to support this execution and this expansion. And finally resilience, the concept that a publisher with diverse offering is better prepared to adapt to changes in audience behavior and market dynamics, be they voluntary or forced changes such as the current pandemic.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: But before we get started, I have to say it's pledge week here at Platform Strategies. That's right. It's time to pick up the phone and pledge your support for the high quality programming that you love. [PHONE RINGING] Oh! Look at that. We're getting pledges coming in now. [LAUGHS] I hear the donations pouring in. Sorry, Ha-Hoa. I couldn't resist. Now, over to you.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Thanks, Jake. Love it. Mugs, tote bags. You know, we're all here for it. Thank you so much, Jake, for setting the virtual stage, if you will, for this panel discussion. I also want a shout out and thank Will and Stephanie at Silverchair for putting together this panel with Gabe and Chris. And I'm so thrilled to be part of the series and definitely the discussion for today.
HA-HOA HAMANO: I'm going to jump right in because I want to give enough space for everyone to engage and ask questions at the end. I hear that that is the most thrilling part of the series. So super quick for those that are unfamiliar with NPR, National Public Radio, we're a non-profit multimedia organization. And our mission is to work in partnership with member stations to create a more informed public, one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of ideas events and cultures.
HA-HOA HAMANO: So many of the folks I'm super lucky to regularly interact with formally in the building now virtually unequivocally say this mission is why they love working for NPR. And I want to highlight the in partnership with our member stations. Some folks think of us interchangeably between our member stations and NPR, and that's OK. Give a shout out to your local NPR station in the comments if you know it.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Because you're a savvy scholarly audience, I want to give you additional context. And so, there are 270 members of NPR. The stations are independent and locally owned and operated, and so there are over 1,000 stations. Radio towers, if you will. And thanks to the member station, 95% of the US population is within listening area of a station carrying NPR programming.
HA-HOA HAMANO: So the programming, like Morning Edition, All Things Considered and The Hourly Newscast. And so via broadcast, we reach nearly 30 million Americans every week.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Ha-Hoa, just to let you know, we're not seeing slides for you.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Oh goodness. You're right. I do know technology. I promise.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And I'm seeing as you're talking folks are listing there local stations with pride in the chat.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Thank you. I see that too. I'm a little distracted by that and super thrilled to see that folks know it. So I am sharing now.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great We see it.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Great. So that was our radio side and folks are all shouting out their stations. And so, I appreciate that and this is the part where I come in on our digital side. And so some of you know us from podcasts like How I Built This, Invisibilia, and Code Switch. And others know us from npr.org, our website, or social media, or apps like NPR One. So when you combine our broadcast audience-- so the audience, our stations, and where you hear that programming, our fantastic lineup of podcasts and our online audiences together, we reach more than 100 million users every month.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so what does that mean when we have that balance of audience, our longstanding broadcast audience and our shifting listening behaviors on digital, the side of the business that I work on? This is a little bit of an older study, but certainly something that had been feeding into a lot of the cues that we've been getting with listener behavior.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Our audience panel study in fall of 2017 said 50% choose broadcast is their favorite platform, but it no longer dominates an NPR day starting point. 50% listen to it on the radio. That means the other half listened to it on other platforms and not just the radio. So this quote here is I think pretty pointed in this time. Folks aren't in the car, so where else are they listening to NPR?
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so some of them when they're on the go, it's on the phone. When they're home or at their desk, it's npr.org. So we see that obviously in our shifting behaviors and certainly where my side of the building and the office focuses a lot of their time. So for folks that had a single platform that only listened to it on podcast, for example, that only listened to it on the radio in their cars, the reasoning was it's a habit.
HA-HOA HAMANO: There's familiarity. Satisfaction with what they already know. It's easy, right? But for a multi-platform listeners, that convenience is also an ease factor that it matches the platform to the environment that they're in. And so that's where we needed to step up and really reach those folks.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And apologize for not seeing the initial slide, but it is really about meeting the audience where they are. That's my charge in our division and certainly for NPR as a whole is meeting our listeners where they are. And so what does that mean to reinvent radio? Some of the behaviors are pretty obvious in a lot of the other listening platforms that you have on your phones and other devices is that it's on demand, that it starts from the top.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Again, some of us have disrupted habits and now in the morning routine, the evening routine. And so, when you-- Others of us who have developed this habit know at 9:01, Morning Edition is on. I know that this is where I'm going to get my morning news right off the top. But others of us, it's 9:05. It's 9:07.
HA-HOA HAMANO: It's 9:13. It's 10:13 AM, right? And so, what we still want that experience to be as if you had started from the top. And when you turn on your experience that it's starting for you and only for you. Curated content. Little plug for the upcoming talk from the series. It's super important that this content is fitting into your day.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so for us, our personalized experience will be news heavy in the morning and the afternoon will be a little lighter on the news and drops you into some podcasts sooner. And then certainly on the weekends, our day partying data has showed us that some of the podcasts can even come in even earlier. So shows like Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me and It's Been a Minute and some of the other shows that we have go into your experience a little bit earlier than then kind of news all day every day.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Ubiquitous is the one that I am mostly focused on is that you're not-- well prior to the pandemic, you're not always at your desk all day. There's some sort of transition of your day, of your behaviors, of your habits. And so when you're at your desk, it can be a bigger experience. And when you're at your-- on the go, it can be a smaller experience.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Obviously, the car is a sacred space for NPR. And so, what does that mean when you're in your car and there's certainly a layer of driver distraction? That regulation that's on there-- and so, these are all experiences that can't be just one size fits all. And so what does it mean for NPR to innovate and meet our audience where they are? As a nonprofit news organization, how can we be best stewards of the trust and also embrace experimentation?
HA-HOA HAMANO: I think many of you have heard of the mantra fail fast. That's not always the first option for us, certainly when I first started. But when you are on devices like a smart fridge-- yes that is NPR on a smart fridge in the bottom right of your corner-- on TVs where TVs are a very large visual space. What does it mean to be audio? And a smartwatch, you don't have a ton of real estate to explain the story, explain the visuals.
HA-HOA HAMANO: What does it mean to have an experience there? So I'll give you a superfast Olaf Frozen 2 recap of another emerging platform. And for those that have these devices at home, you might want to mute them. I'm going to use the wake word a couple of times in this presentation. But in 2014, the Alexa enabled Amazon Echo entered the market. And to everyone's surprise, it caught on.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And a few years later with the audience growing-- the NPR audience going there. And we call them talking cones. These talking cones look like a radio. They sounded like a radio and what do we do? How do we go all in on this platform, yet still maintain our business and maintain some optimization on how we go to market and do an experimentation as best we can so that we're not-- so that we're confident in our experimentation.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so, our approach has some foundations in Lean UX. Some of these will be familiar to folks in the digital realm. It's rooted in design thinking, agile methodology, a lot of these buzz words that you may hear in digital innovation. But what was super important to us is that we adapted to our unique culture and time in the market and where we are. Audio, obviously, is in a renaissance right now with a lot of podcasts and audio content finding a mainstream market in the digital world.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so we adapted our process to that. And so a couple of key principles there are collaborative and shared understanding that designers, business stakeholders, software developers, product folks like me are all respected for our individual expertise, but then we share responsibility in these decisions. I think making a decision and going back on it or questioning each other's decision.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Well, tech decided this or the designers decided this. And those heavy questioning of decisions is counter to innovation and certainly counter to efficiency. And so something that we learned very early on that we have that shared understanding and we have that level setting early on. Solving real problems. I think this is a fascinating shift in reframing of a broadcast audience like from our ivory towers, how are we broadcasting to an audience versus really individual curious humans who are having-- who have real problems with accessing direct content, seeing our-- seeing the full breadth of our content.
HA-HOA HAMANO: What are the real problems we're trying to solve? And lastly, continuous validation. Again, with a deeply curious workforce with journalists and digital folks and everyone else, questioned everything. But for me as a product manager, to prioritize always. Hopefully all of this idea generation opens up a lot of questions, but at every stage that we need to prioritize. Is that question solving a real problem?
HA-HOA HAMANO: Does everyone have a collaborative and shared understanding of what that real problem is? And so I love the framing that Jake gave around reach, revenue, and resilience. And of course, Public Radio loves a good complex problem. And so all of these lenses that we take to the new opportunities are touching on a little piece of that of reach of revenue and toggling that balance.
HA-HOA HAMANO: We get revenue, but not a lot of reach. We get a lot of reach, but not a lot of revenue. Does it prepare us for our future, our digital forward future? And so these are some of the really key principles for us when we're making those decisions. And so a direct relationship, again, that tees up front with the pledge drives, it's super important to us that are our audience, our listeners, have that direct relationship with our station which ties into the second part.
HA-HOA HAMANO: That local connection we know is what keeps a loyal and engaged audience. It's not just this voice from DC, this voice from above, that it truly is that local connection that ties into the third piece, which is a delightful experience. That folks who are engaged in our local content actually listen longer. They come back more often. And when we evaluate platforms, or opportunities, or partnerships that they have to hit on all of these key points.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And if we're going to give on delightful experience, we know that there is something outside of our control whenever we partner with a platform. Is that something we're willing to give because the direct relationship and the local connection is there? And so, these are all levers that are the lens that we look at when we're evaluating all these opportunities.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so these are a couple of the phases folks have seen it. And build, measure, learn, we took it up a level to think about it as think, make and check. And so, what's super important for us is that there's equal attention to each phase or that we make a deliberate choice to move on. So everyone wants to jump to the build phase and that's OK. If go to market is the number one thing we need to hit, then we need to say that we're cutting corners on the think phase.
HA-HOA HAMANO: We're cutting corners on the check phase and we're just going to jump in to build. And we may find some things that we could have found if we had spent more time in the think phase. Again in the think phase, we could certainly spend-- a deeply surreal organization like NPR, we could spend too much time in the think phase. And so I think that's something to be deliberate about, is that there that each phase is set out intentionally for what the problem is we're trying to solve.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so for us when we went to market on Alexa, the problem was that when folks that play NPR, they weren't necessarily connected to the local station that we knew was right for their market. Sometimes, the classical station was the one that folks wanted even though the news station was the one that was prioritized by another aggregator that was serving that. And so, we took that back and we said hey, if we ask them for their zip and their station name, they can be more successful in getting to the station that they want.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And then, we evaluated our assumptions. We did some super light prototyping and we checked them and we found out OK. So let's say it in fewer words. Let's get to the value prop a lot sooner. And so we were able to do that before going to market. And we were pretty successful going to market getting 80% of our folks to right station at the right time.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And with that 20%, we're still optimizing. What is stopping those 20% from getting to the right station? Nowadays, more folks know the zip code than their station name. And so, we're continually optimizing that part of it. And so, some takeaways here. So I'm a process person. Building innovative products through a transparent inclusive process brings creativity and joy.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Optimizing intentional culture accelerates those insights before going to market. And lastly, engaging diverse humans along the way perpetuates a cycle of curiosity. And so for us, this is from our mission statement from 1979, but it really is that time spent with us is super valued. And it's time that they could be spending elsewhere. So how do we make sure that that time spent with us is the most rewarding of their day?
HA-HOA HAMANO: So thank you. These are other places where you can find me and find a lot more deep dives into our process and how we come to our decisions around product development. But I'm looking forward to handing it off to Gabe who is going to talk more about how this applies over at MIT Press.
GABE HARP: Great. Thank you, Ha-Hoa. If you could stop sharing-- there we go. I'll share my screen now. Great. OK. You should be seeing my slides and my video and hearing me, but give a shout if there are any problems here.
GABE HARP: Again, I am Gabe Harp. I use he, him, his pronouns. I'm senior manager of Digital Products at the MIT Press and I also want to acknowledge that I'm speaking today from the coast of Maine, which is the traditional unseated territory of the Wabanaki Confederacy. So the MIT Press has been publishing books and journals at the intersection of art, science design and technology since 1962.
GABE HARP: We are a nonprofit university press located, of course, within MIT and we have a long history of bold design, experimentation and innovation. What you see here is just a snapshot of some of the content that we're publishing toward the end of this month. And just on a personal note, one of the most motivating factors for me is being able to kind of make a meaningful contribution to producing the scholarly work.
GABE HARP: So what I'll share very briefly here is a whirlwind tour through some examples of how we are developing new audiences. And I kind of put these into three buckets, namely new platforms, new models, and new content types. But before I dive in, as a long time listener and unabashed fan of NPR, I gave myself just a little exercise to put myself in the right frame of mind and think about, well, what is it that NPR evokes for me.
GABE HARP: And I did this before I saw Ha-Hoa's presentation, but I hope it aligns well with what she shared. And really, I came up with these three terms-- voice, community, and trust. I think the NPR voice is a thing that is now well recognized out in the world. I'm sure many of you will turn on an NPR show or a station. You know it's NPR just from the sound of it. I think they do a fantastic job of building community and also, community in multiple dimensions.
GABE HARP: So you've got the broad NPR community in front of the national aspect of National Public Radio, but you also very intensely local communities built around the individual member stations but also the individual shows. Like I feel like I'm friends with the hosts of many NPR shows, even though I've never actually spoken to them. And lastly, trust and trust in the quality of the content and the reporting.
GABE HARP: I think this is one of the real foundational strengths that has made NPR such an enduring institution and certainly part of my life. And I hope that some of these things will also come out in what I have to share here today. So I mentioned new platforms as the starting point. While Ha-Hoa was talking, I snuck in some quotes from her to try to tie these together.
GABE HARP: So to me, that phrase meet the audience where they are is really important. We do have some traditional publishing platforms, as I'll call them. So an e-book platform, which is hosted by Silverchair, and an e-journals platform as well hosted by Add Upon right now. But we've also realized that we have to understand we don't have one monolithic audience.
GABE HARP: We have multiple audiences and different platforms serve different audience needs, as Ha-Hoa said. So first here is The Reader. This is a new magazine inspired website that we launched in May of 2019. And the idea here just over a year ago was the importance of breathing new life into the backlist. So we have going back to 1962 such a wealth of incredible material that we've published, but there's a risk that it can get lost.
GABE HARP: Even that term backlist kind of refers to that. So this was a new concept where we decided well, let's publish interviews, excerpts, and essays with authors from our past content. And let's tie these to topical contents of today and use this as a way of engaging a broader audience in a very accessible and lightweight understandable manner, but also with the academic rigor that comes with the works that we publish.
GABE HARP: But also, let's tie this back to our backlist and drive traffic to that content in order to, like we say, breathe life into these old gems and also thereby bring in more revenue by boosting the sales of that content. It launched just a year ago. This has really exceeded our expectations bringing in over 1.3 million viewers in the first year, and really driving a lot of traffic, like I said, to this content that is otherwise is of diminishing discoverability.
GABE HARP: And with the COVID 19 pandemic, we really were able to take this platform that we had built and really focus it on discussions related to COVID 19 and tying that into the content that we've published in the past. Next up is PubPub. So many of you may have heard of this PubPub launch four or five years ago, actually.
GABE HARP: It developed as part a part of the Knowledge Futures Group, which was actually created in a partnership between the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab. Well PubPub now is an open source open access publishing platform and it's really community driven with a lot of features that are built around fostering, nurturing, and engaging community. And the community can range widely in size from just a small handful of people to really many, many more.
GABE HARP: And so, we published some journals on PubPub now. We also host some open access books. We have open peer review experiments on the PubPub platform and the one I wanted to highlight here is Frankenbook. This was really our first project with PubPub. And what we did was the press published on the 200 anniversary of Frankenstein, we published an annotated edition of that novel. But at the same time, we worked with Arizona State University to create this PubPub community called Frankenbook that had additional essays, media, and engagement features that enabled Frankenstein to be brought into a university classroom setting.
GABE HARP: So this was really built to create a community around, in this case, really an individual course. But that's proven to be a really great function of PubPub and a neat way for us to engage more communities, again, around individual works. So next up is new models and here, I think of this in the view of where Jake mentioned in his opening. The importance of ensuring sustainability.
GABE HARP: So open access clearly a critical topic in scholarly communication right now. And at the Press, part of our mission is really to make scholarly research as broadly accessible as possible. And thus, publishing open access is a core part of our mission. We are not a fully open access publisher, but we do publish many journals OA and also an increasing number of books.
GABE HARP: But beyond just simply making works available open access, we're really committed to developing a sustainable model for open access publishing and incubating that infrastructure to make sure the work can be sustainably open access. And our focus right now is on building a model with generous funding from the Arcadia foundation, a model for sustainable open access publishing of scholarly monographs.
GABE HARP: And there are a number of other similar initiatives right now in our industry. I'm working on the very same problem of how do we make the publication model for monographs more sustainable in an open access lens. And this brings in mind to me also the idea of community because we cannot do this on our own. We're really partnering with and talking with a lot of folks in the university press community, in the library community, and beyond.
GABE HARP: And on the other side, we have our trade programs. So our trade titles have broader appeal than our professional books. I mean, I look at these and I just want to dive into them right away. So these are really books of high potential and especially the potential to bring in more revenue. And this is important going back to that question of sustainability.
GABE HARP: How do we generate enough revenue to also help sustain and support the more mission oriented side of our business without also sacrificing our core principles? So all of our trade books also go through the scholarly peer review process, as well, and we do nothing to compromise on the standards there. And lastly, new content types. And to me, this is all about solving real world problems.
GABE HARP: So First Reads is actually a new model for publishing books where what we will do is we will release an early or preliminary version of a peer reviewed book on a really critical timely topic for the world. Books can take years to develop and publish. And what we're finding, especially in the COVID pandemic, is that years is-- that's too long. And so starting with this book that you're seeing here, Economics in the Age of COVID 19, what we do is we publish a rapid early version of the book still going through peer review and our normal production processes.
GABE HARP: But with this case, we actually went from initial concept to publication in just five weeks. And then later on, we will publish a full expanded version of the work. And to tie other threads together here, this book actually started as an essay on The Reader, which we talked about. And then, we did the open peer review for this work on PubPub and then, we have actually published this final book.
GABE HARP: So here, we're tying together the different threads and also putting our different platforms to use for different audiences. And lastly, so this Rapid Reviews: COVID 19 is a new journal we've just launched in partnership with UC Berkeley. And the idea is to publish peer reviews of COVID 19 related preference.
GABE HARP: And so, we saw the abundance of COVID 19 research coming out there. We recognized a lot of the risks and concerns around misinformation and also misunderstanding of what a preprint represents in terms of the level of review that has gone into it or not gone into it. And we thought well, how can we actually accelerate the dissemination of peer reviewed research? And so, we are selecting preprints that have high potential for making an impact and we're actually conducting the finding reviewers and publishing those reviews in order to get them out there into the world as soon as possible.
GABE HARP: I know this was, just like I said, a whirlwind. I'm really happy to talk at length about any of these. Anyone can reach out to me at any time and I'm sure we'll get into some of this in the discussion. So thank you very much and I'm turning it over to Kristen now.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: Thanks, Gabe. And I think we are going to have some really great synergy, both with your presentation as well as the earlier NPR discussion. So I'm going to be taking a more macro look. And folks, let me know if you can't see this for whatever reason. But I will be taking a more macro look at how Duke University Press picks its platform and uses its platform and content decisions to really make a brand.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So first, let me give just a little bit more information about the Press to help situate us in the scholarly landscape because we are a little bit different than MIT certainly. So we are primarily humanities and social sciences, and mathematics publisher. Publish 130 books, 60 journals per year, and our publications focus on really pushing the limits of what various disciplines in anthropology or queer studies related fields contain.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: And along with that, we have this goal of foregrounding traditionally underrepresented voices. We're also just about celebrate our centennial. We were founded in 1921. So assuming the world is all here in three to four months, we'll be 100 years old. But that work that we do foregrounding those voices and looking at new disciplines is really part of our broader practice of being experimental, innovative, and being willing to take risks.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So related to that is how we've chosen our digital content platforms and the experiments that we've made related to that. So if we can all go back in time way back when we were young to the early 2000s, in that time we were just starting to figure out, OK. What do we want to do with our digital content? Because JSTOR, these aggregators, they're not working for us.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: They're not giving us much control about the content itself, how people are viewing it. And we also want to start doing some fancy things with the platforms that we just can't otherwise do. And so along with this early exploration, we launched our library relations team and we started to say OK. How can we get-- how can we remove the content from the aggregators.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So in 2005, we made our own platform, put our journals up. Finally got our act together a couple of years later to put our books on that same platform and then, spent the next couple of years really curating and figuring out the best platforms that we could get to give us that type of control both of the content and branding. And as you can see from the timeline on your screen, there was no perfect platform initially.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: We had to play around quite a bit before we landed with Silverchair. So for the next 10-15 years, that was our strategy. Put our content on our own platform and make sure that our brand was tied to it. But all things change. Oh, no. Except my screen. Hold on.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: All right. Sorry, guys. And all things change. So starting in 2019, we begin exploring the possibility of what it would look like to put a toe back in the aggregator or the other platform landscape, and see what it would be like to have our content exit our branded stronghold.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: And so, we start asking ourselves what happens if that content goes elsewhere? And what happens if users have other ways to access our work? And so in the beginning, we started putting our content in a few other places. We recently restarted putting our books in Project MUSE. Our content is now with De Gruyter and folks can purchase our single ebooks on GOBI which is a very new strategy for us.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: But it became part of how we answered the question, how does a small non-profit academic publisher survive 2020 and all of the years that come after? So part of it is putting our content other places and part of it's finding new ways to work with other university presses. So a couple years ago, we started working with MSP to sell their content on the Project Euclid platform.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: And we also started working more closely with LongLeaf to help them with their fulfillment, and one of the folks who works here at the press is helping them sell their international rights for different books. We're also going back to the basics and saying OK. Unlike a lot of university presses, we actually don't have very close ties to our institution's library.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: What does that look like if we start building those relationships back up? It also means that we need to figure out new ways to get our content out in the world. So for us, part of that was creating syllabi about things like care in uncertain times or catastrophe and its aftermath. It means creating new events series for the digital times. We're all sitting here looking at Zoom right now.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: Lots of scholars want to do the same thing about newly published works as well, and it means flipping things to open access. So we recently acquired a former spare and nature title demography, which is the publication for the Population Association of America. And we flipped it to entirely open access with the support of libraries and with help from some of our consortium partners, including Lyricists.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So this new strategy has really meant asking what are the things that Duke University Press is best at and how can we use those to find new revenue streams at a time where revenue is really-- we all have lots of questions about where it's going to come from in the future. But that leads to an interesting question. What happens to the idea of the press, to its brand, when our content is in many places and we're doing many different things?
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So I'm going to pause from all of my talking to take a brief look at this really interesting tweet that came up on the 21st. And so, this is by Sandipto Dasgupta and he says "anarchist jurisdiction sounds like the title of a new book published by Duke University Press." And for those of you who blessedly have not been paying attention to the news, the US Justice Department recently called or labeled New York City, Portland, and Seattle as anarchist jurisdictions.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So I chuckled when I saw this tweet because it's fun teasing. I respect that, but it also indicates that Dasgupta understands the Duke University Press brand well enough to laugh at us but also that he could name a title of the book. He understands who we are as a publisher, the kind of content we create. There's no greater compliment. Now, Dasgupta is a political theorist at the New school whose research includes things like empire, decolonization, revolutions, et cetera.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: If any scholar was going to know the type of work that we publish, it would be someone like him, but not everyone is a decolonial political theorist. So this got me thinking. Is it OK if people only interact with part of our brand or only see part of the press? Dasgupta, for example, probably doesn't have super strong opinions about the platform, even though we have spent a decade and a half making sure it's the best it can be.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: But an e-resource librarian definitely has opinions about the platform, its admin tool, how it works, all of that. And a scholarly communications librarian probably has some thoughts about us flipping demography to open access. An undergraduate, who's only reading one of our books because they absolutely have to, really doesn't care where they find that book whether it's on the news platform, on our platform, through the De Gruyter or just the magic of the internet.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: As long as they can get it for their course, they don't care. And someone who wants to download Sarah Ahmed's Living a Feminist Life on their Kindle just wants it to work well. They may have no idea who The Press is anymore than I have any idea who the record company for my favorite artist is, but they also may-- sorry. They also will maybe think of us more fondly or look at similar titles.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So all of these folks have vastly different relationships to our content, and our brand, and who we are as a press, and that's OK. That allows us to adapt to a world that's changing very, very quickly and it means that we'll be stronger for it in the end. And that's really our goal. Overall, we publish groundbreaking scholarship that pushes the boundaries of disciplines and how people think.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: And as a press, we want to continue to be equally innovative in deciding where we put our content, how people access it, and all of those related digital puzzles. So that's how we survived our first century and that's how we're hoping that we'll get through the next. I can't wait to chat with you all about any questions that have come up.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. Thank you. Thank you, Kristen and thank you to all of our panelists. I've been to a lot of these virtual events and those were very, very solid presentations. I'm very happy with the content that's been provided so far and we have questions. The questions have come in and I'd like to lead us through a discussion here. Some of these are directed to individual folks and some are a little more broad.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: The first one is for Ha-Hoa and it says that NPR is so strongly anchored in free. It's actually part of the name. [LAUGHS] Is it possible to produce product revenue or are you really relying on donations and sponsorships as your only revenue source?
HA-HOA HAMANO: What's also public is our pie chart on where that revenue comes from and you'll see that the breakdown is with station fees, which is our membership fee. I think that's about 30%. And so, that is directly tied to audience donations and then plays into the station paying into the membership fee. A large chunk of that is also corporate sponsorship. And so when you listen to your favorite podcast you hear that it's brought to you by Casper mattresses, that is corporate sponsorship buying into the super engaged NPR audience digitally across our portfolio podcasts.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And some of that is broadcast and podcast reach as well for them. And there's a fascinating write up about the halo effect so that when they hear that on NPR, it gives that audience like a higher view of those companies. And so that's, as you can imagine, a really ripe space for folks to have that halo effect of we advertise on NPR. Therefore, we think highly of Casper mattresses.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so then, the other part of that is foundation funding and so, as a lot of the academic folks here know, that's another place that folks love to give back to the work of an informed public. And so, we have foundation support as well. I think across all of that certainly as our revenue arms like to say, we're nonprofit. It's not that we don't like money. And then, I think you said it in the beginning, Jake, of how expensive the content creation is.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And it's certainly experimentation can also be-- it's something that we need to invest in as well. And so, that's the balance. As a nonprofit, all of that revenue does go back into our content generation. And so we operate at a zero budget, like we are not squirreling that money away for anything. It all goes back into our news making and our content making. And so that's our charge and the organizations to constantly be optimizing for that.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And I know it's a business buzzword. It's certainly an innovation buzzword, but really we want to be good stewards of any of that money and we want to reach more. In order for us to reach more folks, we need to do more of something. And so, is it more content? Is it more partnerships with other platforms? What is the more?
HA-HOA HAMANO: And I think that plays into a lot of our approach to how do we approach more. How do we get faster to yes is something that I love to try and say. And it really is to be disciplined and intentional about what it is we're optimizing for.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great thank you. Our next question is for Kristen and it kind of relates to Gabe, as well, because Gabe introduced the concept of MIT and their trade program. And Kristen, has Duke considered a trade strategy? Certainly, the topics that Duke has traditionally published have gained more public awareness in the general public recently.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And has Duke considered how to bring some of these titles to the general public?
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So we've actually had a mixed trade academic and semi trade list for a couple of years now, but it is still trade through us entirely. Unlike MIT, we're not partnering with any other presses currently. And I think we could definitely expand on that because folks like Living a Feminist Life, that Sarah Ahmed book I mentioned before, have tens of thousands of purchases and are very popular.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: And it's definitely something we're interested in, but we also want to make sure that we do what that great work that MIT is doing with maintaining the peer review and the scholarly thrust of all of the work that we publish. So we do always sell to bookstores and I know several of our books marketing folks make many journeys to talk to different buyers, places who have unfortunately been terribly affected by fires in California.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: But definitely a place for expansion, I think.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. And Gabe, you mentioned that your trade books go through the same scholarly peer review process. How has that gone? Is it any different? Is it faster? Is it done in a slightly different way, considering it's for the general public?
GABE HARP: Great question. Part of this is all about balance. That's what I'll say. We actually do tailor the peer review process to each book, regardless of whether it's trade or monograph, but we have certain baseline expectations that every work goes through. And we feel like that's actually part of the core purpose, especially of a university press, is to facilitate that peer review process.
GABE HARP: But it does present some challenges. I'll mention just two very briefly. One is that we moved this year to a partnership with Penguin Random House to distribute our books. This is the first partnership I believe of a university press with a large global distribution house like PRH. Well, that is actually enabling us to reach much broader audiences, but PRH has no concept of the peer review process and how it integrates with workflows, and metadata, and so on.
GABE HARP: So that-- I'm being a little flippant there, but it's been-- we've-- it's been great to work with them from both sides, in terms of determining well how do we actually make this work just from an internal systems perspective. The other piece is that we have to really make sure that we're not prioritizing trade books over our professional titles or vise versa. But a professional title that might print just 200 or 300 copies and will never appear on the shelf of Harvard bookstore, that's equally as important as like one of those trade books that I showcased.
GABE HARP: But that's where we have different angles of our mission. But peer review is one of the unifying factors.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Sure. Great. I'm going to go to a question that I suppose a little more generally. So I'll let you all jump in and decide who wants to go first or answer it entirely. It's really around user personas on making product decisions. Do you each have those into your products decision routine, and what is your feeling on whether it's helpful or limiting as far as how they're used inside of your organization?
JAKE ZARNEGAR:
HA-HOA HAMANO: Go ahead, Gabe. I'll jump in after.
GABE HARP: OK great. I was waiting to hear what you were going to say. I have mixed feelings based on my past experience. We do not currently have a set of personas we're using it at The Press. I think that the use of personas in product development has a lot of potential, but a huge risk which is that you spend a lot of time-- organizations spend a lot of time creating these personas and then they just sit on the shelf.
GABE HARP: So what I say is if you're going to use personas, you have to really commit to them. And that means nurturing them and keeping these personas up to date and really part of your development process.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Yes. So we both have a similar view on them, as well. We have the luxury of having an audience insights team that's adjacent to us that nurtures that persona and keeps it up. Over the years I think for us-- for me as a product manager, it's a helpful storytelling tool and an alignment tool, but it doesn't necessarily drive some of the really minute decisions around, again, the metrics and the decisions that we're making to solve the problem.
HA-HOA HAMANO: I think we try and just-- I think to Gabe's point, the lead way we work, it's so fast and it turns out that there's a lot of overhead and keeping up that persona. The point is that folks can see that person and there's like a lot of visual and storytelling part of it that is a little bit extra to our work when we're trying to just super focus at all times on optimizing around the user experience.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: Yeah. And I would say that at Duke University Press has experienced has been a lot like the MIT presses in that we've had personas that we've used for things in the past. But honestly, a lot of the product development and content decisions we've had to make we've had to make so quickly that using those in a storytelling way or to make decisions hasn't been an option.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: It may be something we revisit in the future, but it hasn't had as much utility I think as the time to create and keep them updated would make sense.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Right. And I have one final question here, which I think will go to most of you. It's around analytics and bringing behavior back into the product team. Ha-Hoa, you mentioned that matching the type of content to the routine, even down to the minute, of where your audience is and what they're doing is kind of core to NPR'S mission.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And I'd like to hear how you gather that information about those audiences and where they might be. And for the scholarly publishers here, have we thought about that closely about the routines of our readers and where they are at 9:00 AM on a Sunday and what kind of content they might be consuming at that time? Is this a new area for us to explore, really timing the type of content?
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Ha-Hoa, maybe talk about how NPR gathers analytics and uses them.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Yeah. I'll make it quick because I want to definitely hear Gabe and Kristen's viewpoint, as well. And so from specifically that to the minute on Alexa, that morning briefing was five minutes and we could have certainly grown that audience. And there's a lot of them and there still are a lot of them. And so, what does it mean to grow that audience to be even more five minutes world class, hourly newscast, that we produce 24/7-- versus in our other long form experience or other news experiences, we know that we can get those people to listen for 30 minutes, 50 minutes a day.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so playing into that is it is more more or is more eliciting our northstar? And so, we leaned into that. And when we turned on that audience to go from five minutes to 50 minutes, we knew we're going to lose some folks. We got it in the comments and then in the reviews like I just wanted five minutes of news. Well, there's more than five minutes of news happening in 2020.
HA-HOA HAMANO: So, stay with us here. And that was important to our business. It was important to the user experience. And obviously, it's a direct relationship. And so, I think that to me is like that indicative of data driven versus data informed. Like if we were data driven and just wanted those numbers, those top line numbers, that was a decision we could have made.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so when we go into partnerships, do we have that granularity into those metrics? And so sometimes, dashboards are expensive to produce. And so when you go into a partnership and they're like we can only give you top line numbers once a year and it's a CSV that will download and give to you, and then we have to weigh whether that's enough for us to enter into this business decision to optimize for what it is where we're trying to reach with the partnership.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so, data is super important to us. It doesn't drive all of our decisions. It informs a lot of our decisions.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Thank you. Gabe or Kristen.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: Yeah. So I think for academic publishers, there are sort of two types of data analytics that we're looking at as well. There are the social media, Twitter, ones when we post that because looking at it, et cetera. And then to get to the question that Debbie asked in chat, it's analytics of how are people accessing the data. And I will admit that off the top of my head, I don't quite remember the extent to Silverchair's, how much data you give us.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: I will say that we rely a lot on counter reports to see patterns and usage, as well as if there's a sudden drop in usage. Because for us, that indicates something about the access of metadata whether things are being shown correctly in discovery services, whether all of our partners are sending the metadata and information that they should. Sometimes they are.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: Sometimes they aren't. But it's important for us to keep an eye on.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: We do send-- we do have a firehose, which is not always the correct tool at the time. So you have to choose your flow to match your needs. Yes. Gabe, do you want to-- give you 30 seconds on this before we wrap.
GABE HARP: Yup. 30 seconds. Just two points to chew on. One is I'm thinking a lot about our institutional customers, which are our libraries. And privacy is a number one priority. So that inherently does limit some of the granularity that we can get in terms of analytics right now and that's a good thing. So that's an important piece to keep in mind.
GABE HARP: The other is open access. A big question that I think we all struggle with is where and how much usage is occurring for open access books, especially when they're hosted across multiple platforms that have different analytics and so on. And there are a lot of really exciting initiatives happening right now to try to address that problem. So I think we'll be hearing more about that from many parties in coming months and years.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. Thank you. And on behalf of all of the attendees, I would like to thank you all for such a great panel and discussion. This does conclude this session of Silverchair Platform Strategies. We'll be getting those tote bags ready to go out. We have-- right before we leave, I'd like to preview our next series and it's all about curation, which was touched upon today.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So a great segue there. On November 10 at
11: 00, we're hosting
11: "If curation is the future, what actually works? " And so, it's looking at models of curation, new models that might replace more traditional ways of creating and curating content. We have some great speakers from the Company of Biologists and the Microbiology Society, as well as TrendMD joining us then. So I hope all of you who joined us today I found great value. I know I did from our panelists. And we look forward to seeing you in a few months, so thank you all.
11: Goodbye.
Segment:0 .
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Hello. Welcome, webinar listeners. I'm Jake Zarnegar, as Stephanie noted, I head up business development here at Silverchair and I'm going to be the host and moderator today. Today's discussion is centered around strategies for finding and connecting with new audiences for the high quality and, in many cases, expensive to produce content published by our prestigious organizations.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Our speakers today are Ha-Hoa Hamano, Senior Product Manager of Emerging Platforms at NPR (National Public Radio), Gabe Harp, Senior Manager for Digital Products at the MIT Press, and Kristen Twardowski, Library Sales Manager for Duke University Press. Underlying our topic today is what I like to call the three R's for publishers-- reach, revenue, and resilience.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Reach, as in finding and connecting with audiences, whether that be adding completely new audiences or reaching your existing audiences in new ways. Revenue, as in developing a sustainable funding model to support this execution and this expansion. And finally resilience, the concept that a publisher with diverse offering is better prepared to adapt to changes in audience behavior and market dynamics, be they voluntary or forced changes such as the current pandemic.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: But before we get started, I have to say it's pledge week here at Platform Strategies. That's right. It's time to pick up the phone and pledge your support for the high quality programming that you love. [PHONE RINGING] Oh! Look at that. We're getting pledges coming in now. [LAUGHS] I hear the donations pouring in. Sorry, Ha-Hoa. I couldn't resist. Now, over to you.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Thanks, Jake. Love it. Mugs, tote bags. You know, we're all here for it. Thank you so much, Jake, for setting the virtual stage, if you will, for this panel discussion. I also want a shout out and thank Will and Stephanie at Silverchair for putting together this panel with Gabe and Chris. And I'm so thrilled to be part of the series and definitely the discussion for today.
HA-HOA HAMANO: I'm going to jump right in because I want to give enough space for everyone to engage and ask questions at the end. I hear that that is the most thrilling part of the series. So super quick for those that are unfamiliar with NPR, National Public Radio, we're a non-profit multimedia organization. And our mission is to work in partnership with member stations to create a more informed public, one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of ideas events and cultures.
HA-HOA HAMANO: So many of the folks I'm super lucky to regularly interact with formally in the building now virtually unequivocally say this mission is why they love working for NPR. And I want to highlight the in partnership with our member stations. Some folks think of us interchangeably between our member stations and NPR, and that's OK. Give a shout out to your local NPR station in the comments if you know it.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Because you're a savvy scholarly audience, I want to give you additional context. And so, there are 270 members of NPR. The stations are independent and locally owned and operated, and so there are over 1,000 stations. Radio towers, if you will. And thanks to the member station, 95% of the US population is within listening area of a station carrying NPR programming.
HA-HOA HAMANO: So the programming, like Morning Edition, All Things Considered and The Hourly Newscast. And so via broadcast, we reach nearly 30 million Americans every week.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Ha-Hoa, just to let you know, we're not seeing slides for you.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Oh goodness. You're right. I do know technology. I promise.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And I'm seeing as you're talking folks are listing there local stations with pride in the chat.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Thank you. I see that too. I'm a little distracted by that and super thrilled to see that folks know it. So I am sharing now.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great We see it.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Great. So that was our radio side and folks are all shouting out their stations. And so, I appreciate that and this is the part where I come in on our digital side. And so some of you know us from podcasts like How I Built This, Invisibilia, and Code Switch. And others know us from npr.org, our website, or social media, or apps like NPR One. So when you combine our broadcast audience-- so the audience, our stations, and where you hear that programming, our fantastic lineup of podcasts and our online audiences together, we reach more than 100 million users every month.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so what does that mean when we have that balance of audience, our longstanding broadcast audience and our shifting listening behaviors on digital, the side of the business that I work on? This is a little bit of an older study, but certainly something that had been feeding into a lot of the cues that we've been getting with listener behavior.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Our audience panel study in fall of 2017 said 50% choose broadcast is their favorite platform, but it no longer dominates an NPR day starting point. 50% listen to it on the radio. That means the other half listened to it on other platforms and not just the radio. So this quote here is I think pretty pointed in this time. Folks aren't in the car, so where else are they listening to NPR?
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so some of them when they're on the go, it's on the phone. When they're home or at their desk, it's npr.org. So we see that obviously in our shifting behaviors and certainly where my side of the building and the office focuses a lot of their time. So for folks that had a single platform that only listened to it on podcast, for example, that only listened to it on the radio in their cars, the reasoning was it's a habit.
HA-HOA HAMANO: There's familiarity. Satisfaction with what they already know. It's easy, right? But for a multi-platform listeners, that convenience is also an ease factor that it matches the platform to the environment that they're in. And so that's where we needed to step up and really reach those folks.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And apologize for not seeing the initial slide, but it is really about meeting the audience where they are. That's my charge in our division and certainly for NPR as a whole is meeting our listeners where they are. And so what does that mean to reinvent radio? Some of the behaviors are pretty obvious in a lot of the other listening platforms that you have on your phones and other devices is that it's on demand, that it starts from the top.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Again, some of us have disrupted habits and now in the morning routine, the evening routine. And so, when you-- Others of us who have developed this habit know at 9:01, Morning Edition is on. I know that this is where I'm going to get my morning news right off the top. But others of us, it's 9:05. It's 9:07.
HA-HOA HAMANO: It's 9:13. It's 10:13 AM, right? And so, what we still want that experience to be as if you had started from the top. And when you turn on your experience that it's starting for you and only for you. Curated content. Little plug for the upcoming talk from the series. It's super important that this content is fitting into your day.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so for us, our personalized experience will be news heavy in the morning and the afternoon will be a little lighter on the news and drops you into some podcasts sooner. And then certainly on the weekends, our day partying data has showed us that some of the podcasts can even come in even earlier. So shows like Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me and It's Been a Minute and some of the other shows that we have go into your experience a little bit earlier than then kind of news all day every day.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Ubiquitous is the one that I am mostly focused on is that you're not-- well prior to the pandemic, you're not always at your desk all day. There's some sort of transition of your day, of your behaviors, of your habits. And so when you're at your desk, it can be a bigger experience. And when you're at your-- on the go, it can be a smaller experience.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Obviously, the car is a sacred space for NPR. And so, what does that mean when you're in your car and there's certainly a layer of driver distraction? That regulation that's on there-- and so, these are all experiences that can't be just one size fits all. And so what does it mean for NPR to innovate and meet our audience where they are? As a nonprofit news organization, how can we be best stewards of the trust and also embrace experimentation?
HA-HOA HAMANO: I think many of you have heard of the mantra fail fast. That's not always the first option for us, certainly when I first started. But when you are on devices like a smart fridge-- yes that is NPR on a smart fridge in the bottom right of your corner-- on TVs where TVs are a very large visual space. What does it mean to be audio? And a smartwatch, you don't have a ton of real estate to explain the story, explain the visuals.
HA-HOA HAMANO: What does it mean to have an experience there? So I'll give you a superfast Olaf Frozen 2 recap of another emerging platform. And for those that have these devices at home, you might want to mute them. I'm going to use the wake word a couple of times in this presentation. But in 2014, the Alexa enabled Amazon Echo entered the market. And to everyone's surprise, it caught on.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And a few years later with the audience growing-- the NPR audience going there. And we call them talking cones. These talking cones look like a radio. They sounded like a radio and what do we do? How do we go all in on this platform, yet still maintain our business and maintain some optimization on how we go to market and do an experimentation as best we can so that we're not-- so that we're confident in our experimentation.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so, our approach has some foundations in Lean UX. Some of these will be familiar to folks in the digital realm. It's rooted in design thinking, agile methodology, a lot of these buzz words that you may hear in digital innovation. But what was super important to us is that we adapted to our unique culture and time in the market and where we are. Audio, obviously, is in a renaissance right now with a lot of podcasts and audio content finding a mainstream market in the digital world.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so we adapted our process to that. And so a couple of key principles there are collaborative and shared understanding that designers, business stakeholders, software developers, product folks like me are all respected for our individual expertise, but then we share responsibility in these decisions. I think making a decision and going back on it or questioning each other's decision.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Well, tech decided this or the designers decided this. And those heavy questioning of decisions is counter to innovation and certainly counter to efficiency. And so something that we learned very early on that we have that shared understanding and we have that level setting early on. Solving real problems. I think this is a fascinating shift in reframing of a broadcast audience like from our ivory towers, how are we broadcasting to an audience versus really individual curious humans who are having-- who have real problems with accessing direct content, seeing our-- seeing the full breadth of our content.
HA-HOA HAMANO: What are the real problems we're trying to solve? And lastly, continuous validation. Again, with a deeply curious workforce with journalists and digital folks and everyone else, questioned everything. But for me as a product manager, to prioritize always. Hopefully all of this idea generation opens up a lot of questions, but at every stage that we need to prioritize. Is that question solving a real problem?
HA-HOA HAMANO: Does everyone have a collaborative and shared understanding of what that real problem is? And so I love the framing that Jake gave around reach, revenue, and resilience. And of course, Public Radio loves a good complex problem. And so all of these lenses that we take to the new opportunities are touching on a little piece of that of reach of revenue and toggling that balance.
HA-HOA HAMANO: We get revenue, but not a lot of reach. We get a lot of reach, but not a lot of revenue. Does it prepare us for our future, our digital forward future? And so these are some of the really key principles for us when we're making those decisions. And so a direct relationship, again, that tees up front with the pledge drives, it's super important to us that are our audience, our listeners, have that direct relationship with our station which ties into the second part.
HA-HOA HAMANO: That local connection we know is what keeps a loyal and engaged audience. It's not just this voice from DC, this voice from above, that it truly is that local connection that ties into the third piece, which is a delightful experience. That folks who are engaged in our local content actually listen longer. They come back more often. And when we evaluate platforms, or opportunities, or partnerships that they have to hit on all of these key points.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And if we're going to give on delightful experience, we know that there is something outside of our control whenever we partner with a platform. Is that something we're willing to give because the direct relationship and the local connection is there? And so, these are all levers that are the lens that we look at when we're evaluating all these opportunities.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so these are a couple of the phases folks have seen it. And build, measure, learn, we took it up a level to think about it as think, make and check. And so, what's super important for us is that there's equal attention to each phase or that we make a deliberate choice to move on. So everyone wants to jump to the build phase and that's OK. If go to market is the number one thing we need to hit, then we need to say that we're cutting corners on the think phase.
HA-HOA HAMANO: We're cutting corners on the check phase and we're just going to jump in to build. And we may find some things that we could have found if we had spent more time in the think phase. Again in the think phase, we could certainly spend-- a deeply surreal organization like NPR, we could spend too much time in the think phase. And so I think that's something to be deliberate about, is that there that each phase is set out intentionally for what the problem is we're trying to solve.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so for us when we went to market on Alexa, the problem was that when folks that play NPR, they weren't necessarily connected to the local station that we knew was right for their market. Sometimes, the classical station was the one that folks wanted even though the news station was the one that was prioritized by another aggregator that was serving that. And so, we took that back and we said hey, if we ask them for their zip and their station name, they can be more successful in getting to the station that they want.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And then, we evaluated our assumptions. We did some super light prototyping and we checked them and we found out OK. So let's say it in fewer words. Let's get to the value prop a lot sooner. And so we were able to do that before going to market. And we were pretty successful going to market getting 80% of our folks to right station at the right time.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And with that 20%, we're still optimizing. What is stopping those 20% from getting to the right station? Nowadays, more folks know the zip code than their station name. And so, we're continually optimizing that part of it. And so, some takeaways here. So I'm a process person. Building innovative products through a transparent inclusive process brings creativity and joy.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Optimizing intentional culture accelerates those insights before going to market. And lastly, engaging diverse humans along the way perpetuates a cycle of curiosity. And so for us, this is from our mission statement from 1979, but it really is that time spent with us is super valued. And it's time that they could be spending elsewhere. So how do we make sure that that time spent with us is the most rewarding of their day?
HA-HOA HAMANO: So thank you. These are other places where you can find me and find a lot more deep dives into our process and how we come to our decisions around product development. But I'm looking forward to handing it off to Gabe who is going to talk more about how this applies over at MIT Press.
GABE HARP: Great. Thank you, Ha-Hoa. If you could stop sharing-- there we go. I'll share my screen now. Great. OK. You should be seeing my slides and my video and hearing me, but give a shout if there are any problems here.
GABE HARP: Again, I am Gabe Harp. I use he, him, his pronouns. I'm senior manager of Digital Products at the MIT Press and I also want to acknowledge that I'm speaking today from the coast of Maine, which is the traditional unseated territory of the Wabanaki Confederacy. So the MIT Press has been publishing books and journals at the intersection of art, science design and technology since 1962.
GABE HARP: We are a nonprofit university press located, of course, within MIT and we have a long history of bold design, experimentation and innovation. What you see here is just a snapshot of some of the content that we're publishing toward the end of this month. And just on a personal note, one of the most motivating factors for me is being able to kind of make a meaningful contribution to producing the scholarly work.
GABE HARP: So what I'll share very briefly here is a whirlwind tour through some examples of how we are developing new audiences. And I kind of put these into three buckets, namely new platforms, new models, and new content types. But before I dive in, as a long time listener and unabashed fan of NPR, I gave myself just a little exercise to put myself in the right frame of mind and think about, well, what is it that NPR evokes for me.
GABE HARP: And I did this before I saw Ha-Hoa's presentation, but I hope it aligns well with what she shared. And really, I came up with these three terms-- voice, community, and trust. I think the NPR voice is a thing that is now well recognized out in the world. I'm sure many of you will turn on an NPR show or a station. You know it's NPR just from the sound of it. I think they do a fantastic job of building community and also, community in multiple dimensions.
GABE HARP: So you've got the broad NPR community in front of the national aspect of National Public Radio, but you also very intensely local communities built around the individual member stations but also the individual shows. Like I feel like I'm friends with the hosts of many NPR shows, even though I've never actually spoken to them. And lastly, trust and trust in the quality of the content and the reporting.
GABE HARP: I think this is one of the real foundational strengths that has made NPR such an enduring institution and certainly part of my life. And I hope that some of these things will also come out in what I have to share here today. So I mentioned new platforms as the starting point. While Ha-Hoa was talking, I snuck in some quotes from her to try to tie these together.
GABE HARP: So to me, that phrase meet the audience where they are is really important. We do have some traditional publishing platforms, as I'll call them. So an e-book platform, which is hosted by Silverchair, and an e-journals platform as well hosted by Add Upon right now. But we've also realized that we have to understand we don't have one monolithic audience.
GABE HARP: We have multiple audiences and different platforms serve different audience needs, as Ha-Hoa said. So first here is The Reader. This is a new magazine inspired website that we launched in May of 2019. And the idea here just over a year ago was the importance of breathing new life into the backlist. So we have going back to 1962 such a wealth of incredible material that we've published, but there's a risk that it can get lost.
GABE HARP: Even that term backlist kind of refers to that. So this was a new concept where we decided well, let's publish interviews, excerpts, and essays with authors from our past content. And let's tie these to topical contents of today and use this as a way of engaging a broader audience in a very accessible and lightweight understandable manner, but also with the academic rigor that comes with the works that we publish.
GABE HARP: But also, let's tie this back to our backlist and drive traffic to that content in order to, like we say, breathe life into these old gems and also thereby bring in more revenue by boosting the sales of that content. It launched just a year ago. This has really exceeded our expectations bringing in over 1.3 million viewers in the first year, and really driving a lot of traffic, like I said, to this content that is otherwise is of diminishing discoverability.
GABE HARP: And with the COVID 19 pandemic, we really were able to take this platform that we had built and really focus it on discussions related to COVID 19 and tying that into the content that we've published in the past. Next up is PubPub. So many of you may have heard of this PubPub launch four or five years ago, actually.
GABE HARP: It developed as part a part of the Knowledge Futures Group, which was actually created in a partnership between the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab. Well PubPub now is an open source open access publishing platform and it's really community driven with a lot of features that are built around fostering, nurturing, and engaging community. And the community can range widely in size from just a small handful of people to really many, many more.
GABE HARP: And so, we published some journals on PubPub now. We also host some open access books. We have open peer review experiments on the PubPub platform and the one I wanted to highlight here is Frankenbook. This was really our first project with PubPub. And what we did was the press published on the 200 anniversary of Frankenstein, we published an annotated edition of that novel. But at the same time, we worked with Arizona State University to create this PubPub community called Frankenbook that had additional essays, media, and engagement features that enabled Frankenstein to be brought into a university classroom setting.
GABE HARP: So this was really built to create a community around, in this case, really an individual course. But that's proven to be a really great function of PubPub and a neat way for us to engage more communities, again, around individual works. So next up is new models and here, I think of this in the view of where Jake mentioned in his opening. The importance of ensuring sustainability.
GABE HARP: So open access clearly a critical topic in scholarly communication right now. And at the Press, part of our mission is really to make scholarly research as broadly accessible as possible. And thus, publishing open access is a core part of our mission. We are not a fully open access publisher, but we do publish many journals OA and also an increasing number of books.
GABE HARP: But beyond just simply making works available open access, we're really committed to developing a sustainable model for open access publishing and incubating that infrastructure to make sure the work can be sustainably open access. And our focus right now is on building a model with generous funding from the Arcadia foundation, a model for sustainable open access publishing of scholarly monographs.
GABE HARP: And there are a number of other similar initiatives right now in our industry. I'm working on the very same problem of how do we make the publication model for monographs more sustainable in an open access lens. And this brings in mind to me also the idea of community because we cannot do this on our own. We're really partnering with and talking with a lot of folks in the university press community, in the library community, and beyond.
GABE HARP: And on the other side, we have our trade programs. So our trade titles have broader appeal than our professional books. I mean, I look at these and I just want to dive into them right away. So these are really books of high potential and especially the potential to bring in more revenue. And this is important going back to that question of sustainability.
GABE HARP: How do we generate enough revenue to also help sustain and support the more mission oriented side of our business without also sacrificing our core principles? So all of our trade books also go through the scholarly peer review process, as well, and we do nothing to compromise on the standards there. And lastly, new content types. And to me, this is all about solving real world problems.
GABE HARP: So First Reads is actually a new model for publishing books where what we will do is we will release an early or preliminary version of a peer reviewed book on a really critical timely topic for the world. Books can take years to develop and publish. And what we're finding, especially in the COVID pandemic, is that years is-- that's too long. And so starting with this book that you're seeing here, Economics in the Age of COVID 19, what we do is we publish a rapid early version of the book still going through peer review and our normal production processes.
GABE HARP: But with this case, we actually went from initial concept to publication in just five weeks. And then later on, we will publish a full expanded version of the work. And to tie other threads together here, this book actually started as an essay on The Reader, which we talked about. And then, we did the open peer review for this work on PubPub and then, we have actually published this final book.
GABE HARP: So here, we're tying together the different threads and also putting our different platforms to use for different audiences. And lastly, so this Rapid Reviews: COVID 19 is a new journal we've just launched in partnership with UC Berkeley. And the idea is to publish peer reviews of COVID 19 related preference.
GABE HARP: And so, we saw the abundance of COVID 19 research coming out there. We recognized a lot of the risks and concerns around misinformation and also misunderstanding of what a preprint represents in terms of the level of review that has gone into it or not gone into it. And we thought well, how can we actually accelerate the dissemination of peer reviewed research? And so, we are selecting preprints that have high potential for making an impact and we're actually conducting the finding reviewers and publishing those reviews in order to get them out there into the world as soon as possible.
GABE HARP: I know this was, just like I said, a whirlwind. I'm really happy to talk at length about any of these. Anyone can reach out to me at any time and I'm sure we'll get into some of this in the discussion. So thank you very much and I'm turning it over to Kristen now.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: Thanks, Gabe. And I think we are going to have some really great synergy, both with your presentation as well as the earlier NPR discussion. So I'm going to be taking a more macro look. And folks, let me know if you can't see this for whatever reason. But I will be taking a more macro look at how Duke University Press picks its platform and uses its platform and content decisions to really make a brand.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So first, let me give just a little bit more information about the Press to help situate us in the scholarly landscape because we are a little bit different than MIT certainly. So we are primarily humanities and social sciences, and mathematics publisher. Publish 130 books, 60 journals per year, and our publications focus on really pushing the limits of what various disciplines in anthropology or queer studies related fields contain.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: And along with that, we have this goal of foregrounding traditionally underrepresented voices. We're also just about celebrate our centennial. We were founded in 1921. So assuming the world is all here in three to four months, we'll be 100 years old. But that work that we do foregrounding those voices and looking at new disciplines is really part of our broader practice of being experimental, innovative, and being willing to take risks.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So related to that is how we've chosen our digital content platforms and the experiments that we've made related to that. So if we can all go back in time way back when we were young to the early 2000s, in that time we were just starting to figure out, OK. What do we want to do with our digital content? Because JSTOR, these aggregators, they're not working for us.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: They're not giving us much control about the content itself, how people are viewing it. And we also want to start doing some fancy things with the platforms that we just can't otherwise do. And so along with this early exploration, we launched our library relations team and we started to say OK. How can we get-- how can we remove the content from the aggregators.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So in 2005, we made our own platform, put our journals up. Finally got our act together a couple of years later to put our books on that same platform and then, spent the next couple of years really curating and figuring out the best platforms that we could get to give us that type of control both of the content and branding. And as you can see from the timeline on your screen, there was no perfect platform initially.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: We had to play around quite a bit before we landed with Silverchair. So for the next 10-15 years, that was our strategy. Put our content on our own platform and make sure that our brand was tied to it. But all things change. Oh, no. Except my screen. Hold on.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: All right. Sorry, guys. And all things change. So starting in 2019, we begin exploring the possibility of what it would look like to put a toe back in the aggregator or the other platform landscape, and see what it would be like to have our content exit our branded stronghold.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: And so, we start asking ourselves what happens if that content goes elsewhere? And what happens if users have other ways to access our work? And so in the beginning, we started putting our content in a few other places. We recently restarted putting our books in Project MUSE. Our content is now with De Gruyter and folks can purchase our single ebooks on GOBI which is a very new strategy for us.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: But it became part of how we answered the question, how does a small non-profit academic publisher survive 2020 and all of the years that come after? So part of it is putting our content other places and part of it's finding new ways to work with other university presses. So a couple years ago, we started working with MSP to sell their content on the Project Euclid platform.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: And we also started working more closely with LongLeaf to help them with their fulfillment, and one of the folks who works here at the press is helping them sell their international rights for different books. We're also going back to the basics and saying OK. Unlike a lot of university presses, we actually don't have very close ties to our institution's library.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: What does that look like if we start building those relationships back up? It also means that we need to figure out new ways to get our content out in the world. So for us, part of that was creating syllabi about things like care in uncertain times or catastrophe and its aftermath. It means creating new events series for the digital times. We're all sitting here looking at Zoom right now.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: Lots of scholars want to do the same thing about newly published works as well, and it means flipping things to open access. So we recently acquired a former spare and nature title demography, which is the publication for the Population Association of America. And we flipped it to entirely open access with the support of libraries and with help from some of our consortium partners, including Lyricists.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So this new strategy has really meant asking what are the things that Duke University Press is best at and how can we use those to find new revenue streams at a time where revenue is really-- we all have lots of questions about where it's going to come from in the future. But that leads to an interesting question. What happens to the idea of the press, to its brand, when our content is in many places and we're doing many different things?
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So I'm going to pause from all of my talking to take a brief look at this really interesting tweet that came up on the 21st. And so, this is by Sandipto Dasgupta and he says "anarchist jurisdiction sounds like the title of a new book published by Duke University Press." And for those of you who blessedly have not been paying attention to the news, the US Justice Department recently called or labeled New York City, Portland, and Seattle as anarchist jurisdictions.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So I chuckled when I saw this tweet because it's fun teasing. I respect that, but it also indicates that Dasgupta understands the Duke University Press brand well enough to laugh at us but also that he could name a title of the book. He understands who we are as a publisher, the kind of content we create. There's no greater compliment. Now, Dasgupta is a political theorist at the New school whose research includes things like empire, decolonization, revolutions, et cetera.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: If any scholar was going to know the type of work that we publish, it would be someone like him, but not everyone is a decolonial political theorist. So this got me thinking. Is it OK if people only interact with part of our brand or only see part of the press? Dasgupta, for example, probably doesn't have super strong opinions about the platform, even though we have spent a decade and a half making sure it's the best it can be.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: But an e-resource librarian definitely has opinions about the platform, its admin tool, how it works, all of that. And a scholarly communications librarian probably has some thoughts about us flipping demography to open access. An undergraduate, who's only reading one of our books because they absolutely have to, really doesn't care where they find that book whether it's on the news platform, on our platform, through the De Gruyter or just the magic of the internet.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: As long as they can get it for their course, they don't care. And someone who wants to download Sarah Ahmed's Living a Feminist Life on their Kindle just wants it to work well. They may have no idea who The Press is anymore than I have any idea who the record company for my favorite artist is, but they also may-- sorry. They also will maybe think of us more fondly or look at similar titles.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So all of these folks have vastly different relationships to our content, and our brand, and who we are as a press, and that's OK. That allows us to adapt to a world that's changing very, very quickly and it means that we'll be stronger for it in the end. And that's really our goal. Overall, we publish groundbreaking scholarship that pushes the boundaries of disciplines and how people think.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: And as a press, we want to continue to be equally innovative in deciding where we put our content, how people access it, and all of those related digital puzzles. So that's how we survived our first century and that's how we're hoping that we'll get through the next. I can't wait to chat with you all about any questions that have come up.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. Thank you. Thank you, Kristen and thank you to all of our panelists. I've been to a lot of these virtual events and those were very, very solid presentations. I'm very happy with the content that's been provided so far and we have questions. The questions have come in and I'd like to lead us through a discussion here. Some of these are directed to individual folks and some are a little more broad.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: The first one is for Ha-Hoa and it says that NPR is so strongly anchored in free. It's actually part of the name. [LAUGHS] Is it possible to produce product revenue or are you really relying on donations and sponsorships as your only revenue source?
HA-HOA HAMANO: What's also public is our pie chart on where that revenue comes from and you'll see that the breakdown is with station fees, which is our membership fee. I think that's about 30%. And so, that is directly tied to audience donations and then plays into the station paying into the membership fee. A large chunk of that is also corporate sponsorship. And so when you listen to your favorite podcast you hear that it's brought to you by Casper mattresses, that is corporate sponsorship buying into the super engaged NPR audience digitally across our portfolio podcasts.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And some of that is broadcast and podcast reach as well for them. And there's a fascinating write up about the halo effect so that when they hear that on NPR, it gives that audience like a higher view of those companies. And so that's, as you can imagine, a really ripe space for folks to have that halo effect of we advertise on NPR. Therefore, we think highly of Casper mattresses.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so then, the other part of that is foundation funding and so, as a lot of the academic folks here know, that's another place that folks love to give back to the work of an informed public. And so, we have foundation support as well. I think across all of that certainly as our revenue arms like to say, we're nonprofit. It's not that we don't like money. And then, I think you said it in the beginning, Jake, of how expensive the content creation is.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And it's certainly experimentation can also be-- it's something that we need to invest in as well. And so, that's the balance. As a nonprofit, all of that revenue does go back into our content generation. And so we operate at a zero budget, like we are not squirreling that money away for anything. It all goes back into our news making and our content making. And so that's our charge and the organizations to constantly be optimizing for that.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And I know it's a business buzzword. It's certainly an innovation buzzword, but really we want to be good stewards of any of that money and we want to reach more. In order for us to reach more folks, we need to do more of something. And so, is it more content? Is it more partnerships with other platforms? What is the more?
HA-HOA HAMANO: And I think that plays into a lot of our approach to how do we approach more. How do we get faster to yes is something that I love to try and say. And it really is to be disciplined and intentional about what it is we're optimizing for.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great thank you. Our next question is for Kristen and it kind of relates to Gabe, as well, because Gabe introduced the concept of MIT and their trade program. And Kristen, has Duke considered a trade strategy? Certainly, the topics that Duke has traditionally published have gained more public awareness in the general public recently.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And has Duke considered how to bring some of these titles to the general public?
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: So we've actually had a mixed trade academic and semi trade list for a couple of years now, but it is still trade through us entirely. Unlike MIT, we're not partnering with any other presses currently. And I think we could definitely expand on that because folks like Living a Feminist Life, that Sarah Ahmed book I mentioned before, have tens of thousands of purchases and are very popular.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: And it's definitely something we're interested in, but we also want to make sure that we do what that great work that MIT is doing with maintaining the peer review and the scholarly thrust of all of the work that we publish. So we do always sell to bookstores and I know several of our books marketing folks make many journeys to talk to different buyers, places who have unfortunately been terribly affected by fires in California.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: But definitely a place for expansion, I think.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. And Gabe, you mentioned that your trade books go through the same scholarly peer review process. How has that gone? Is it any different? Is it faster? Is it done in a slightly different way, considering it's for the general public?
GABE HARP: Great question. Part of this is all about balance. That's what I'll say. We actually do tailor the peer review process to each book, regardless of whether it's trade or monograph, but we have certain baseline expectations that every work goes through. And we feel like that's actually part of the core purpose, especially of a university press, is to facilitate that peer review process.
GABE HARP: But it does present some challenges. I'll mention just two very briefly. One is that we moved this year to a partnership with Penguin Random House to distribute our books. This is the first partnership I believe of a university press with a large global distribution house like PRH. Well, that is actually enabling us to reach much broader audiences, but PRH has no concept of the peer review process and how it integrates with workflows, and metadata, and so on.
GABE HARP: So that-- I'm being a little flippant there, but it's been-- we've-- it's been great to work with them from both sides, in terms of determining well how do we actually make this work just from an internal systems perspective. The other piece is that we have to really make sure that we're not prioritizing trade books over our professional titles or vise versa. But a professional title that might print just 200 or 300 copies and will never appear on the shelf of Harvard bookstore, that's equally as important as like one of those trade books that I showcased.
GABE HARP: But that's where we have different angles of our mission. But peer review is one of the unifying factors.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Sure. Great. I'm going to go to a question that I suppose a little more generally. So I'll let you all jump in and decide who wants to go first or answer it entirely. It's really around user personas on making product decisions. Do you each have those into your products decision routine, and what is your feeling on whether it's helpful or limiting as far as how they're used inside of your organization?
JAKE ZARNEGAR:
HA-HOA HAMANO: Go ahead, Gabe. I'll jump in after.
GABE HARP: OK great. I was waiting to hear what you were going to say. I have mixed feelings based on my past experience. We do not currently have a set of personas we're using it at The Press. I think that the use of personas in product development has a lot of potential, but a huge risk which is that you spend a lot of time-- organizations spend a lot of time creating these personas and then they just sit on the shelf.
GABE HARP: So what I say is if you're going to use personas, you have to really commit to them. And that means nurturing them and keeping these personas up to date and really part of your development process.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Yes. So we both have a similar view on them, as well. We have the luxury of having an audience insights team that's adjacent to us that nurtures that persona and keeps it up. Over the years I think for us-- for me as a product manager, it's a helpful storytelling tool and an alignment tool, but it doesn't necessarily drive some of the really minute decisions around, again, the metrics and the decisions that we're making to solve the problem.
HA-HOA HAMANO: I think we try and just-- I think to Gabe's point, the lead way we work, it's so fast and it turns out that there's a lot of overhead and keeping up that persona. The point is that folks can see that person and there's like a lot of visual and storytelling part of it that is a little bit extra to our work when we're trying to just super focus at all times on optimizing around the user experience.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: Yeah. And I would say that at Duke University Press has experienced has been a lot like the MIT presses in that we've had personas that we've used for things in the past. But honestly, a lot of the product development and content decisions we've had to make we've had to make so quickly that using those in a storytelling way or to make decisions hasn't been an option.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: It may be something we revisit in the future, but it hasn't had as much utility I think as the time to create and keep them updated would make sense.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Right. And I have one final question here, which I think will go to most of you. It's around analytics and bringing behavior back into the product team. Ha-Hoa, you mentioned that matching the type of content to the routine, even down to the minute, of where your audience is and what they're doing is kind of core to NPR'S mission.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And I'd like to hear how you gather that information about those audiences and where they might be. And for the scholarly publishers here, have we thought about that closely about the routines of our readers and where they are at 9:00 AM on a Sunday and what kind of content they might be consuming at that time? Is this a new area for us to explore, really timing the type of content?
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Ha-Hoa, maybe talk about how NPR gathers analytics and uses them.
HA-HOA HAMANO: Yeah. I'll make it quick because I want to definitely hear Gabe and Kristen's viewpoint, as well. And so from specifically that to the minute on Alexa, that morning briefing was five minutes and we could have certainly grown that audience. And there's a lot of them and there still are a lot of them. And so, what does it mean to grow that audience to be even more five minutes world class, hourly newscast, that we produce 24/7-- versus in our other long form experience or other news experiences, we know that we can get those people to listen for 30 minutes, 50 minutes a day.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so playing into that is it is more more or is more eliciting our northstar? And so, we leaned into that. And when we turned on that audience to go from five minutes to 50 minutes, we knew we're going to lose some folks. We got it in the comments and then in the reviews like I just wanted five minutes of news. Well, there's more than five minutes of news happening in 2020.
HA-HOA HAMANO: So, stay with us here. And that was important to our business. It was important to the user experience. And obviously, it's a direct relationship. And so, I think that to me is like that indicative of data driven versus data informed. Like if we were data driven and just wanted those numbers, those top line numbers, that was a decision we could have made.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so when we go into partnerships, do we have that granularity into those metrics? And so sometimes, dashboards are expensive to produce. And so when you go into a partnership and they're like we can only give you top line numbers once a year and it's a CSV that will download and give to you, and then we have to weigh whether that's enough for us to enter into this business decision to optimize for what it is where we're trying to reach with the partnership.
HA-HOA HAMANO: And so, data is super important to us. It doesn't drive all of our decisions. It informs a lot of our decisions.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Thank you. Gabe or Kristen.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: Yeah. So I think for academic publishers, there are sort of two types of data analytics that we're looking at as well. There are the social media, Twitter, ones when we post that because looking at it, et cetera. And then to get to the question that Debbie asked in chat, it's analytics of how are people accessing the data. And I will admit that off the top of my head, I don't quite remember the extent to Silverchair's, how much data you give us.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: I will say that we rely a lot on counter reports to see patterns and usage, as well as if there's a sudden drop in usage. Because for us, that indicates something about the access of metadata whether things are being shown correctly in discovery services, whether all of our partners are sending the metadata and information that they should. Sometimes they are.
KRISTEN TWARDOWSKI: Sometimes they aren't. But it's important for us to keep an eye on.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: We do send-- we do have a firehose, which is not always the correct tool at the time. So you have to choose your flow to match your needs. Yes. Gabe, do you want to-- give you 30 seconds on this before we wrap.
GABE HARP: Yup. 30 seconds. Just two points to chew on. One is I'm thinking a lot about our institutional customers, which are our libraries. And privacy is a number one priority. So that inherently does limit some of the granularity that we can get in terms of analytics right now and that's a good thing. So that's an important piece to keep in mind.
GABE HARP: The other is open access. A big question that I think we all struggle with is where and how much usage is occurring for open access books, especially when they're hosted across multiple platforms that have different analytics and so on. And there are a lot of really exciting initiatives happening right now to try to address that problem. So I think we'll be hearing more about that from many parties in coming months and years.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. Thank you. And on behalf of all of the attendees, I would like to thank you all for such a great panel and discussion. This does conclude this session of Silverchair Platform Strategies. We'll be getting those tote bags ready to go out. We have-- right before we leave, I'd like to preview our next series and it's all about curation, which was touched upon today.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So a great segue there. On November 10 at
11: 00, we're hosting
11: "If curation is the future, what actually works? " And so, it's looking at models of curation, new models that might replace more traditional ways of creating and curating content. We have some great speakers from the Company of Biologists and the Microbiology Society, as well as TrendMD joining us then. So I hope all of you who joined us today I found great value. I know I did from our panelists. And we look forward to seeing you in a few months, so thank you all.
11: Goodbye.
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Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
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End At:
Embed Size
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You Size - Responsive
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We Size - Responsive
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Picture Overlay Popup
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400 x 225
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512 x 288
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400 x 700
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768 x 1024
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1024 x 512
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1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode