• by Sara Guaglione , Staff Writer, August 4, 2016

Rob Gregory, president of sales and marketing at celebrity news site and content marketing company WhoSay, believes most legacy publishers will not survive the digital publishing revolution.

“It’s almost impossible for them to change,” said Gregory, who has previously served as president of The Daily Beast and publisher at Maxim and Rolling Stone. “Publishers who aren’t 100% born of the digital age are never going to succeed in fully changing their perspective the way they have to.”

On the other hand, Gregory believes niche publishers will thrive -- though there will be a smaller pool of them.

“There are going to be far more losers than winners,” Gregory said.

When I got in touch with Gregory to discuss the problems publishers are facing, the first words he used to describe the state of the digital publishing industry were “unprecedented,” “scary” and “existential crisis.”

Gregory told me it was “palpable” how frustrated marketers were at the annual ANA Digital & Social Media Conference in Colorado this June, where he witnessed advertisers “collectively freaking out” about viewability, transparency, bots, click fraud and dropping CPMs.

Gone are the days when people were going to click on a “crummy little banner,” Gregory said, adding that publishers are struggling to stay afloat while they figure out what's the next best way to make money.

He believes there are two main culprits for the changing landscape: the power of Facebook, Google and Snapchat, and the “paradox of choice.” With thousands of choices of where to get their information, consumers are less loyal to a particular brand.

But there is a recipe for success, and Gregory believes it is three-fold: have a very distinctive and unique brand, run a ruthlessly lean operation, and stick to one business model.

Gregory said publishers like Hollywood Reporter have gone "100% programmatic and have no sales team," but churn out high-quality content with a strong point of view that is uniquely theirs.

The Daily Beast is surviving because it has cut both sales and editorial costs “to the bone” to focus on a few core topics like politics and culture. It has  fewer advertisers, Gregory said, but benefits from focusing on custom products for those advertisers.

This also helps attract more advertisers. The more specific your brand -- and the more specific the demographic of your readership -- the more likely you will have a dedicated following that advertisers can tap into, he noted.

Some publishers have found success with branded content and native ads, like Forbes, Gregory said, while others rely on a 100% distributed model, like NowThis, which turned its focus away from its Web site, building its brand by distributing content on Facebook. NowThis has reportedly become the most-watched news publisher on Facebook, with over 1.2 billion video views on the platform in April 2016.