How to start a digital publishing company

We live in a digital era and, everyone agrees on that, traditional (and printed) publishing is struggling to survive. People who are used to read a print newspaper are increasingly rare, on the other side we usually look for news online, surfing on specific website (such as famous newspapers websites, both national and international), using social networks feed or just searching on Google.

Does it mean that content or information are dead? Totally the opposite! Our present, and even more our future, is based on digital publishing. In 2020, it is estimated that 1.7 billion websites exist. Each website needs to be fulfilled with news contents, day after day. It is not anymore just a matter of journalism or updates on current events. It is a matter of specific content, insights, narrative, opinions, interactions, communities and so. For example, if you have an eCommerce, you should totally consider the possibility to start blogging. As we will see, it will give you many benefits both in term of reputation and online presence. In slightly more technical terms, a blog could be the starting point of your inbound marketing strategy.

Having said that, the idea of starting a digital publishing company could be a very successful one.

Just to be clear, a digital publishing company could be defined as the use of online technology to digitize print material and disseminate it through electronic devices.

As you may know, coming up with a new project is never so easy. How to concrete start a publishing company? Let’s try to go deepen in this article.

First steps of a digital publishing company

First of all, similarly at what it happens when you start any type of company, you should go deepen in detail, in order to understand what your company will be. You should be able to write it down which are your main goals and to whom you are going to talk.

We can summarize the main questions as follows:

Who is your target?
Which are your competitors or, saying it better, to what extent your content is original and should be perceived as a value added by your readers?
What is your ability to produce content in terms of time and resources? This question could be perceived as less relevant, but it is totally untrue. The ability to produce new contents day after day is crucial in our online arena.
Last but not the least, how do you think to monetize your company. Actually, you have different possibilities.

Even though you may start a digital publishing company just to have the possibility to spread your contents or, in some cases, to build you own community, it is extremely important to have an initial idea of how to create value through this. Any activity should be sustainable to go on.

Business Models of digital publishing

Likely, an huge question came up in your mind. How does a digital publishing company manage to be sustainable itself? You can actually choose among different business models and, if you produce high quality content, having a growing traffic, you will attract both advertisers and other brands. Let’s try to explain the main possible business models.

Subscriptions and paid content: once you have built an important community, you can decide to offer some paid contents, for instance a specific newsletter. As the main digital newspaper do, you could divide your contents: some of them are offered free and some of them need a subscription to be read.
Digital Publishing company in order to increase your ability to sell online: if you already have an eCommerce, you can decide to start to produce contents just to attract more customers or to build customer loyalty.
Advertising: if your digital publishing company keeps on having a very sophisticated audience, you can be very attractive for advertisers. You can decide to form partnerships with specific companies or to start gaining money through programmatic advertising.

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How to monetize a digital publishing company

As we have said, both if you a retailer and a blogger, you could be totally interesting in monetizing your digital publishing company through advertising.

DataLit.AI, solution offered by PaperLit, tech company of Datrix group, is a revolutionary ad network based on Artificial Intelligence. DataLit.AI is characterized by the use predictive analysis in order to develop hyper-profiling of your readers. Linking to a pixel inserted within your webpages or using Google Analytics 360 and Adobe Analytics, you can extract high granular information about your users, managing to understand their preferences or their propensity to buy a product. DataLit.AI works as an Ad Network, as well. It means that you can monetize your digital publishing company offering your spaces to advertisers and, on the other side, advertisers have the possibility to reach high-profilated and particular audience.