Despite the economic headwinds facing digital publishers, Axios is in growth mode.
The publisher eclipsed its overall 2021 revenue numbers as of Q3 this year thanks in large part to its expansion of local-news-focused newsletters, Jacquelyn L. Cameron, SVP of client partnerships and subscriptions, told AdExchanger.
To further diversify its ad revenue, Axios added display banners to its onsite inventory in September. Although, those placements are currently only sold direct on a CPM basis or as part of a site sponsorship. They are not available via programmatic channels.
And with the launch of the Axios Pro paid subscription in February, subscription revenue will be “an important strategic component of the revenue picture, especially as we continue to grow,” Cameron said.
The long-term goal is for Axios to have about 50% of its revenue come from ads and the other half from subscriptions, chimed in Axios Chief Business Officer Fabricio Drumond.
Cross-platform sponsorship
Axios has sponsorship deals that include its newsletters as well as the recently added on-site banner inventory.
“The way we sell newsletters is [a brand] sponsors the week, and it can iterate on the message throughout the week,” Cameron said. “[On-site] display could be sold on any flight that the client is looking to run.”
Axios’s advertiser pitch centers on targeting elite – or affluent and highly educated, at least – audiences with brand awareness messaging. “It’s all about reaching smart professionals, C-suite executives, management teams and influencers in the politics space,” Drumond said.
Axios has in-house measurement capabilities for metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and viewability, and can add in brand lift studies with outside partners, he said.
Its Smart Brevity Studio team consults with brands on messaging and content, particularly for newsletter or site sponsorships, to match Axios’s editorial style.
“We know our audience,” Drumond said. “We will fine-tune your strategy and package it in a way that we know the audience is going to consume, because we feed content to them every single day and we look at that data every single day.”
Newsletter data is a key ingredient, he said. Because Axios builds a strong relationship with subscribers, its analytics are less dependent on web traffic or social media to glean insights into user behavior.
“We can create audience segments and do data matching with other platforms [using newsletter audience data],” Drumond said. “We also run surveys of this audience to better understand their profile.”
For example, Axios has a paid newsletter called Pro Rata written by Dan Primack. Primack’s newsletter subscribers and attendees of Axios’s recently launched event called Axios BFD are packaged into a “dealmakers” audience segment the company can sell to advertisers or use to model lookalikes.
This “dealmakers” segment also formed the user base for Axios Pro: Deals, its first paid subscription offering. Subscribers can pay $1,800 a year for the full subscription, which includes five newsletters, or $600 a year to subscribe to individual newsletters. There is no monthly subscription plan. (Longer billing periods reduce churn.)
Axios is also rolling out a newsletter focused on healthcare policy on November 14, with newsletters about energy and tech policy set to launch next year.
Local news expansion
Axios debuted its local news business last year and it currently serves more than a million subscribers across 24 major metropolitan markets. The plan is to expand to 30 cities by the end of this year and reach 50 cities by the end of 2023.
Each local market has a dedicated newsletter and site vertical. “It’s almost like launching 50 sites in parallel to our national website,” Drumond said.
Because brands can sponsor multiple local newsletters and site verticals in a given week, tailoring ad creative to each metro is core to Axios’s strategy, according to Cameron.
“Our studio has intelligence around what kind of content is consumed most in those markets and the tone and tenor of that content,” she said. “So, when a large national client comes to us, we can take a look at the message they want to distribute across those [geos] and make recommendations on how to tell that story for each city.”
Something as simple as using the preferred name for residents in ad creative – like “Detroiters” for Detroit or “Washingtonians” for Washington, D.C. – can improve engagement “significantly,” Cameron said.
And the addition of local news content has expanded Axios’s contextual offering, Drumond said.
“We have a portfolio of newsletters that allows brands to align contextually with topics they care about,” he said, “and we’re giving them the opportunity to contextually align with the geographies they care about.”
