Digital publishers and advertisers often find themselves at the mercy of seemingly innocuous policy changes from the likes of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:FB), Google Alphabet and other powerful digital gatekeepers.
Such was the lesson of the third-party cookie phaseout of the early 2020s, when, due to privacy concerns, intrusive digital advertisers made it impossible to digitally stalk its online victims.
Today’s trading update from AIM-listed Digitalbox PLC (AIM:DBOX) – owner of satire sites The Poke and The Daily Mash, as well as Entertainment Daily and The Tab – underscored the disadvantages UK small digital media small caps have against this oligopoly.
Digitalbox contended that its lower traffic volumes from Google and Meta’s array of social media sites are a direct result of their changing third-party policies.
“Macroeconomic pressure on these key players means they have had to increase consumer engagement time on their own platforms to improve their results, which has reduced traffic sent to third-party publishers like Digitalbox,” the company stated.
Today saw a trading statement from another UK media media small cap, LadBible parent LBG Media PLC (AIM:LBG).
Though not earth-shattering, LBG’s results had an edge, with content views ratcheting up 87% over the past six months and global audiences increasing 33%.
This didn’t necessarily filter through to significantly better revenues, which increased just 10% on an adjusted basis.
However, it was interesting to see that indirect revenues, being those generated via third parties like Google and Meta, increased 13% to £15.3 million.
Is LadBible’s clickbait game that strong, or is there something else going on under the hood?
LBG Media posited that it had the foresight to see the trend shift towards short-form video content that occurred in the second half of 2022, helping to bolster its content in the cutthroat world of algorithms and search engine optimisation (SEO).
LBG must be thanking God for the collective disintegration of our collective interest spans, or the TikTokification of media, to use a technical term.
This trend shows no sign of slowing down.
According to HubSpot’s 2023 Social Media Marketing Report, “short-form video will see the most growth in 2023 by far, with 33% of social media marketers planning to invest more in it than any other format”.
Short-form video, or snackable content, as some commentators like to call it, will continue its winning streak as the highest return-on-investment format, said HubSpot.
Long-form will come in second place, “though it isn’t close”.
Short-form video is Gen Z and Millennials’ preferred format to learn about new products, with 57% of Gen Z and 42% of Millennials prefering to learn about products and their features through short-form video over any other format.