The 21st century has not been easy for B2B publishers. While the industry has broadened its scope and reach over the past twenty five years, it’s also faced relentless headwinds. In turn, this has forced publishers to reinvent their long-running subscription and/or advertising-led business models. 

The first major change was the shift from print to digital, which started to hollow out advertising revenues (ad spend also shifted from print to digital, but typically at lower average rates). As a result, many publications either closed or shifted to digital-only operations. On the more positive side of the ledger, a host of new digital-only publications emerged during this era, taking advantage of lower barriers to entry to open up new niches. 

The second shockwave was the rise of both search and social media, which took ad spending out of traditional publications and into a new set of technology rivals. Today, Google, Meta and Amazon alone collectively account for an astonishing 55% of global advertising spend (excluding China), according to The Drum. This triumvirate’s share of the market is even higher when only digital advertising is considered, accounting for nearly three-quarters of the total. More encouragingly, total global ad spend continues to rise (estimates vary on the total size, ranging from $754bn to some $1.04tr), but the tech sector tucks into an increasingly large proportion of that pie.

Consolidation and diversification 

These shockwaves have reshaped B2B publishing in two important ways. One has been consolidation (aided by the rise of private equity in recent decades), bringing together a range of disparate titles into a single larger group. 

A prime recent example of this has been the merger of TechTarget in the US and Informa’s digital businesses in the UK to create a single entity (imaginatively titled Informa TechTarget). This brought together a wide range of titles, ranging from Information Week and Computer Weekly to Industry Dive and Light Reading. The deal continued a series of acquisitions that Informa had made in recent years, including the 2023 purchases of B2B events group Tarsus and media and events business Winsight. 

The second industry trend has been the ongoing diversification of services, adding data and information services, in-person and online event offerings, and branded content or thought leadership propositions, among other things. 

A publisher that exemplifies both trends is TechnologyAdvice (TA) in the US, which has grown steadily from its founding in 2006 to become a global brand with a wide range of services. These services are built around its core advertising and lead gen offerings and have been bolstered by a range of acquisitions, including tech publications TechRepublic and eWeek and thought leadership firm Raconteur, among others. Providing thought leadership is a key part of the company’s growth strategy, served by both Raconteur (which operates on a standalone basis in the UK) and TA’s custom content brand StudioA.    

While both of these examples are from the technology industry, these trends are relevant in every major area of B2B. Publishers in healthcare, retail, media, manufacturing, construction, and all manner of other sectors have also experienced consolidation and diversification. In the US, for example, the storied publishing brand Crain, which initially launched in 1916, has grown to now own 26 media brands, ranging from Ad Age and Modern Healthcare to Automotive News and Plastics News. In 2016, the company’s 100th anniversary, it announced the launch of Custom Content, its branded content and thought leadership offering.      

A different example is the UK’s Faversham House, an independent and sustainability-oriented publishing group founded in 1961, which has also more recently grown through consolidation and diversification. It acquired Reed Business Information’s portfolio of Utility Week titles back in 2010, and this year launched a new ‘edie Enterprise’ branded content proposition, which adds to an existing research-based thought leadership proposition via Utility Week. 

These trends are also not unique to trade titles either. All of the major global B2B publishing brands - The Economist Group, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg - have all made acquisitions to grow over the past decades, and have also opened up, or expanded, research-based thought leadership offerings and/or custom content propositions. (Disclaimer: we helped to grow the Economist Intelligence Unit’s thought leadership proposition in the mid 2000s, which was later rebranded as Economist Impact; and we sold our standalone thought leadership business, Longitude, to the FT back in 2018.) 

The upsides, and challenges, for B2B publishers providing thought leadership  

Providing some form of thought leadership service opens up a compelling new source of growth and revenue for B2B publishers, helping them cope with the headwinds they continue to face. But for many, this is not just a survival mechanism: they typically hold unique advantages over other providers of research and content services. 

Most obviously, they often have access to unique, proprietary data for their specific audiences (for example, Modern Healthcare provides data on everything from hospital financials and staffing trends through to industry M&A activity, and quality and safety). B2B publishers also have a captive audience, which can be researched for fresh insights that can underpin high-value research-based studies. Naturally, they also provide access to a relevant channel for content distribution, either directly to their subscriber base or via any related events businesses they may own. The content they create is usually bolstered by the well-known and credible brands they own within their specialist area. And at a more basic level, they have the skills and resources to produce a wide range of multi-format content, from reports and articles to audio and video content to social media content and more, which other players often lack. 

Despite these advantages, there are also a variety of challenges to deal with when setting up, or expanding, a thought leadership offering. These vary widely, but they often involve one, or several, of the following:

• Navigating the shift from ad sales to solution selling. Selling thought leadership and custom content services tends to be much more consultative in nature, not least around identifying and agreeing upon mutually agreeable thematic areas. Making the shift to a more consultative sale, often with a much longer gestation period, can be challenging for commercial teams that are unfamiliar with this. Related challenges include deciding how best to structure the sales function: one team that sells everything, carving out a dedicated sales unit, or something else?  
• Finding the right balance on resourcing, skills and client management. For most publishers dipping their toes into the thought leadership world, there are various decisions to be made around resourcing. Should an existing editorial team add these deliverables to their current responsibilities, or is a specialist team needed? Who will liaise with the client during the project, and do they have the necessary stakeholder management skills for that? What should be delivered in-house versus outsourced to freelancers? And how should specialist skills, such as data analysis or project management, be handled? 
• Delivering a credible, research-backed approach. Research-backed content opens the door to much higher-value deals. But delivering on these requires a range of skills (and tools) that publishers often lack. Surveys are a common option, but these involve a host of decisions ranging from how your audience is managed, to how regulations like GDPR are compiled with, to how the survey is designed, to how the resulting data is credibly analysed. 
• Agreeing the right proposition and branding. Providing co-branded opportunities to clients offers a lot of value, but also comes with many considerations. What are the editorial rules and guidelines that should apply to these? Are some topics and issues off limits? Whose brand leads? How can the brand be used above and beyond the immediate content being provided? 
• Deciding how and where branded content can be published. Publishers will rightly be focussed on ensuring that their audiences are being served with relevant and appropriate content. Custom content often falls into a somewhat grey area: it’s not an advert, but it’s not quite independent journalistic content either. This requires careful consideration on where the content is published, and how it’s signposted. 

There are plenty of other challenges to navigate, but these are the most common ones we’ve seen. If you’re dealing with any of these issues, or others, and need specialist support, then please do feel free to get in touch.