Scale up to stay up – approaches to content monetization for the B2B publishing sector

Scaling any business is hard, but the challenges for those in the B2B publishing industry can seem particularly stark.  ‘Traditional’ digital content monetization approaches are outdated and under pressure - potentially leaving ‘money on the table’ for B2B publishers - yet the move to results-based advertising products can seem complex to navigate and overwhelming.Little wonder, then, that we had so many attendees to our ‘Approaches to Content Monetization’ webinar last week!  With close to 120 registrations for the event, I was fortunate enough to be joined by industry experts who have been through the process and could share successes as well as flag some of the ‘banana skins’ in a frank, open and ‘warts and all’ discussion.Paul Franklin is the former publisher and operations director of the B2B Division at Dennis Publishing and Will Brookes is CEO of Raconteur, a B2B publishing house which, under Will’s leadership, has reduced its historical reliance on print revenue both by growing its registered audience online and by launching several digital publishing products and services. Co-hosting the session alongside me was Fergus Gregory, managing director of the scaleup advisory unit at Collingwood Advisory, a consultancy that provides scaleup and exit advice to independent media entrepreneurs.The very honest accounts from both Paul and Will clearly struck a chord with attendees as - quite unusually for webinars - the questions from the ‘floor’ came flooding in. So many questions, in fact, that we were unfortunately unable to answer them all, but fortunately leading to us deciding to run a ‘part 2’ to the session in the near future, such was the interest, so watch this space!Here are the key takeaways from the discussion: