萝莉社官网

Being a college media outlet means facing an identity crisis when readership graduates and moves on. Digitization of the media landscape compounds the challenge. What鈥檚 a student rag to do, and why should marketers care?

This fall, 20 million students enrolled in America鈥檚 universities, representing roughly 65% of the estimated 30.8 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 24.

In college they are thrust, like generations before them, into uniquely enclosed environments where, regardless of their educational path, they鈥檒l forge behavioral patterns that shape their consumption habits for the rest of their lives.

The evolving personae are largely the result of media diet. Though they carry to campus many content preferences first realized during high school, the next four years are a time of discovery, owing to the influence of new peers and a healthy dose of targeted marketing.

It makes sense that marketers want to reach these young adults just as they are beginning to manage their own spending and develop allegiance to brands. One of the best ways to reach them, until recently, was by placing ads or holding events directly on campus, as well as showing up in the media outlets they consume. 

College Media Then and Now

College-directed media has long swirled inside the milieu that is university culture. At least eight present-day student newspapers jockey for the title of America鈥檚 oldest campus outlet, the eldest of which claims a lineage dating back to 1799. 

The most cutting-edge outlets not only exist without paper, but without websites. One startup, , has replaced its homepage with a meme reading, 鈥淲ebsites suck. Hit us on social.鈥� In between the ancient and modern bookends lies the advent of satirical publications, and it鈥檚 here we see the creation of the college-student marketing model. These early outlets were student-run, single-campus affairs, but they eventually gave rise to professional intercollegiate publications. Beginning in the 1960s, Harvard鈥檚 then-90-year-old hybrid humor publication/social club, the Harvard Lampoon, embarked on an impressive run of nationwide success when it produced full-issue spoofs of popular print media of the day, including Mademoiselle, Esquire, Playboy, Time and Life. The Lampoon went national in 1969 when two staff writers decamped from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to set up shop in New York, backed by $350,000 in start-up capital ($2.3 million in today鈥檚 dollar), following the success of their novella-length J.R.R. Tolkien satire, . Five years later the National Lampoon was averaging a monthly circulation figure of 830,000 with one issue, October 1974鈥檚 鈥淧ubescence,鈥� moving more than a million copies. 

The next generation of satirists took the baton from baby boomers and positioned it in the realm of straight-laced, biting media parody with the debut of in 1988. Now it鈥檚 a digital property controlled by Univision. A look at an issue from the publication鈥檚 first year exposes its funky low-fi college roots. One top story features a Nessie-type monster roaming a lake near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, where the publication was launched, above coupon space for local readers.

Since then, thousands of media startups sought to replicate the success of student publications. Most have failed, fizzling shortly after inception if they were lucky enough to catch any buzz at all. Even the two aforementioned giants of college humor have changed in astounding ways. The National Lampoon ceased operations in 1998 following years of decline. And in 2013, The Onion ended publication of its free print edition, which had once circulated half a million copies in 20 cities across North America.

Clearly, technology is a prime driver of media evolution. The rapid digitization of print media has remade the industry many times over, and the death of college print publications mimics tectonic shifts occurring in the field at large. 

But is there something else going on? Could it be that the reason many erstwhile college media outfits fall out of fashion with student bodies is that the readers grow up? Professional life requires a radical departure from student life, and after a few years of corporate climbing, the campus experience is viewed through a lens of novelty and nostalgia. This raises uncomfortable questions for any student-centered publication fortunate enough to cultivate a loyal readership. Should it say goodbye to readers upon their graduation and recalibrate appeal in a bid to lure the next crop of freshmen? Or should college media companies grow with their readers and reconfigure for adults? Is it possible to appeal to both groups?

A Brand That Expands

鈥淥ur target age range is roughly the same as it鈥檚 always been: We鈥檙e an 18- to 34-year-old brand,鈥� says of The Onion, where he is vice president of marketing. 鈥淭he upper bounds of who we鈥檙e going after creeps up because we鈥檝e retained some people who started with us as young readers. On The Onion site, our strongest demographic is 25 to 34, if we鈥檙e just talking about total penetration in audience size.鈥�

Fullman understands well whom the site is targeting. He says college students remain part of the mix, but they鈥檙e not the whole enchilada. This unsurprising admission nevertheless represents a departure from The Onion鈥檚 traditional path-to-discovery marketing.

In the 鈥�90s and early 2000s, print copies of The Onion blanketed campuses across North America. The papers were a dorm room rite of passage. Now The Onion only exists online, no longer central to collegiate mise-en-sc猫ne. 

鈥淏eing on campus is difficult to justify,鈥� Fullman says. 鈥淭he value of a reader who doesn鈥檛 have some kind of financial relationship with us is not high enough to have a physical touch point. For our physical event strategy, we are focused on a slightly older audience, let鈥檚 say 21 and older, because a lot of our event strategy ties in with alcohol partnerships.鈥�

Fullman says The Onion segments its audience similarly to the divide among undergrads at four-year schools. At 33, his own history interacting with The Onion might be totally different from readers a scant five years younger than him.

鈥淚f you鈥檙e looking [at the 18- to 44-year-old demographic], you now have three distinct generational splits,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou鈥檝e got your Gen X, who act very different than older millennials, then younger millennials that act differently than older millennials. It鈥檚 become a spectrum across all these audiences. We try to think about all these different groups of people and our financial opportunities not as separate strategies necessarily, but distinct objectives.鈥�

Fullman says the most visible cleavage among The Onion鈥檚 readers is not between undergrads and professionals. Rather, it鈥檚 between people who are still reading content on site and those whose attention is captured by social media. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a whole generation of people we never reached in print who are coming of age and learning what The Onion is based on their experiences exclusively with our Instagram or Facebook presence,鈥� Fullman says.

How Students Consume Media

Despite the long history of student publications, college students鈥� overall news consumption has been on the decline. A at 25 large universities shows how far media consumption has shifted in a generation. Sixty percent of respondents reported spending between two and 10 hours per week on social media, and another 17.1% said they use social networks even more than that. Compare those findings to more than three-quarters of respondents who said they watch fewer than two hours of live television per week and 88.5% who report listening to fewer than two hours of broadcast radio per week. 

conducted by in partnership with Nielsen provides further insights. Tracking the participants over four years using surveys, interviews and reality show-style video diaries, Chan-Olmsted noticed that college students tended to be ahead of the curve in their media habits, if not outright driving trends in media consumption.

鈥淲hen they talked about what鈥檚 in and what鈥檚 not cool, we typically saw that [reflected] six to eight months later in trade reports,鈥� she says. 

A big difference between these students and their predecessors is the way they consume news. The participants reported consuming news on demand or when it turned up as the solution to a query. 鈥淔or this generation, [media is] more like part of their daily lives in solving a problem,鈥� Chan-Olmsted says.

Chan-Olmsted鈥檚 research appears to be borne out in application, attested to by long-time college marketing experts such as , CEO and president of , which specializes in targeting college-aged adults for marketing campaigns. Borgerding is hyper-aware of the changes in the college media landscape over the previous generation. There are two main ways that college students are engaging these days, he says: digital and face-to-face interactions. The new reality presents significantly more opportunities to target students than when Borgerding attended college in the mid-鈥�90s. He says advances to backend martech are an important driver of enhanced college demographic tracking. Ultimately, improved data-gathering and analysis are just as important as improvements to the user interface. But what鈥檚 better for the marketer isn鈥檛 necessarily better for the college media outlet, and the improvements helped usher in the collapse of a generation worth of college-specific sites. 

鈥淣ow you can target subsets of content based on traffic patterns, registration information and IP addresses,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou can go to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and subset who鈥檚 coming from a college campus.鈥� 

 鈥淭he programmatic share of total display ad revenue will continue to grow until direct is a relatively minor factor,鈥� Fullman says. 鈥淭he long-term trend is towards premium programmatic. I don鈥檛 think that鈥檚 confined to the college audience. You see a lot more direct advertising in regulated industries like alcohol or event-oriented [industries].鈥�

This shift has necessitated the evolution of publishing platforms, but also the nature of media companies鈥� relationships with marketers. That was partially the impetus behind Onion Labs (the company鈥檚 in-house ad agency). 鈥淲e saw the need to grow that branded content business because while the market is likely to shift to programmatic overall for display, the opportunity to work with brands or agencies directly on content is only going to get bigger over time,鈥� Fullman says.

The Supremacy of Social

It鈥檚 easy to forget that there was a time when the world鈥檚 largest social media company, Facebook, traded on its exclusivity. For the first three years of its existence, if you wanted to set up a Facebook profile, you needed a university e-mail address.

Perhaps Facebook had the right idea by expanding to everyone. A few years after it opened the platform to the world, another group of entrepreneurs tried to reclaim the college-only social network space and failed. Josh Weinstein, fresh out of Princeton, launched CollegeOnly in 2010, financed by $1 million in capital from investors including Peter Theil, the doyen of Silicon Valley who bet on Facebook early. CollegeOnly was primarily a social network, but the fledgling company鈥檚 portfolio also included a video chat site, RandomDorm, and a college dating site, GoodCrush. 

After a glitzy public relations rollout, the company had 25,000 signups. It folded within three months. Although it appears that the door has closed on a just-for-college social network, college students aren鈥檛 showing up across all platforms in equal numbers. If they were, marketers would still host panels on how to reach Gen Z through MySpace. Instead, students are establishing a presence across several social media sites, but using each selectively to cater to specific motivations.

Take Facebook: There has been a well-documented loss of appeal among teens and young adults, who view the site as something akin to the white pages. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not cool to be on Facebook,鈥� Chan-Olmstead says, but adds she saw many study groups and social clubs still find utility in it as a free and accessible place to congregate digitally during her study of college student media habits.

Instead, Chan-Olmsted says, Snapchat and Instagram are becoming the preferred venues for young adults to indulge in unguarded communication. Snapchat鈥檚 topline value proposition of temporary messages and videos is coveted by a cohort of young adults with one eye on their long-term career prospects while they enjoy the freedom of being away from home for the first time. 

The company seems to know this, too. Snap Inc. announced in September it was partnering with student newspapers around the country to create campus editions in the app. The stories appear in users鈥� feeds when they are on or near campus and can be found using the search bar. 

A top story on the Snapchat account of the UW-Madison Badger Herald, for example, showed a large headline, 鈥淎mazon HQ Comes to Madison?,鈥� across a sliding photograph of the Wisconsin Capitol building. Swiping up brought up a Badger Herald story on the city鈥檚 push to secure the facility. Tapping the screen鈥檚 right side flipped to separate stories about UW athletics, dining hall hacks, Madison鈥檚 best hangover recovery brunch and a video announcement from the 鈥淧od Save America鈥� team hyping its upcoming show in the Madison area. Snap plans to monetize these college editions by inserting video ads in between stories.

The Onion is also getting ready to establish a major presence using Snapchat. Whereas the site鈥檚 properties have huge reach on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, penetrating Snapchat has proven elusive. Fullman says the company鈥檚 not ready to divulge details, but he does concede Snapchat has been an enigma for the brand.

鈥淚t鈥檚 been a learning experience over the past year working closely with the Snapchat team to figure out how to create a product that is both The Onion and also fits with the voice of Snapchat,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a place that is especially challenging because we are, in some ways, a satire of The New York Times or The Washington Post news style, and [that] style is thrown out the window as news organizations get into the world of Snapchat and Instagram.鈥�

A New Model Student Army

The flipside to social media becoming the gathering place for college-aged adults is that they can like and share relevant content within their network of peers, which, if it鈥檚 consistent enough, might provide enough revenue to support a college-focused media company.

runs one such company, 鈥攕hort for 鈥渢abloid鈥濃�攚hich he and two classmates founded in 2009. Focused on student life and controversies happening at their school, the University of Cambridge, The Tab鈥檚 punchy and provocative reporting quickly caught the attention of the U.K. press, which referenced the campus outlet many times during its first year of operation.

Three years later, the trio finished their studies, but they weren鈥檛 ready to leave The Tab behind. Instead, they set up editions on 12 other British universities and courted investors to further expand their operations. At the start of the 2017-18 academic year, The Tab operates on 80 total campuses in the U.S. and the U.K., and in early September, Rivlin announced a $6 million round of funding, led by Rupert Murdoch.

鈥淲e took The Tab to other universities because we felt student newspapers were poorly serving their audience,鈥� Rivlin says. 鈥淭his is particularly true in the U.K. They would be covering Middle Eastern politics or Premier League Soccer鈥攖opics that the journalists really wanted to write about, but the audience didn鈥檛 necessarily want to read. As we spread across the U.K and later U.S., we saw there was real demand for that.鈥�

Rivlin, 28, claims The Tab鈥檚 monthly audience averages 51 million young people, sought by dozens of advertisers. Following the lead of The Onion and others, The Tab works closely with sponsors to create branded content that runs on the site and social channels. Brand stories feature real students acting out life with the sponsored product. 萝莉社官网t 15 of these branded stories run each month, and in the past, The Tab has guaranteed 25,000 pageviews per story, the majority of which Rivlin says are organic.  

Branded content accounts for approximately two-thirds of the site鈥檚 revenue, with the last third coming from display advertising. Forty million visitors watched Tab videos through social in August 2017, and 10 million visit the site directly. ComScore stats shared by Rivlin show that The Tab is the second-biggest publisher for the 18- to 24-year-old audience in the U.K. behind BuzzFeed, and U.S. data reveal that 53% of The Tab鈥檚 stateside audience are between the ages of 18 and 24, compared to 22% for BuzzFeed and 12% for all digital media on average.

鈥淲e found a lot of these big millennial media companies, like BuzzFeed, Vice or Vox, don鈥檛 actually have a high concentration of audience in that demographic. For most of them, the majority of their audience is over 30,鈥� Rivlin says. 

Unlike direct competitors aggressively targeting college-aged youth, such as Her Campus and The Odyssey (which gifted the world the infamous 鈥溾�� essay in 2015), The Tab invests heavily in hard-nosed, original reporting to break news rather than curate blog posts or lifestyle essays. Audiences get the first-reported lowdown on campus happenings often before the news trickles out to the student newspaper and well in advance of nationally curated college sites. 

The Tab鈥檚 student-reporters prowl their campuses, working solely for experience鈥攁n experiment offering cash to authors of viral stories was discontinued after Rivlin decided it wasn鈥檛 incentivizing the best journalistic outcomes鈥攚hile The Tab鈥檚 national homepages employ a paid staff with an average age of 23. The youth of the writers and their readers has allowed the site to break stories hidden from the mainstream media. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think that any other media company can really build a connection with people under 25 unless they are willing to hand over a lot of the editorial to people that age,鈥� says Rivlin.

Rivlin doesn鈥檛 intend for The Tab to operate a chapter on every campus in America, but he forecasts expanding to as many as 150 U.S. universities. One thing he doesn鈥檛 see, however, is maturing the site鈥檚 content with its readers as they age.

鈥淭here are two ways a media company can go: You can either be generational in the way Vice has been鈥� 鈥� that audience is generally in their early 30s鈥攐r you could be a media brand that is tied to a period in people鈥檚 lives, and be prepared to let them go at the end of that. We鈥檙e in that latter category,鈥� Rivlin says.

It might be heresy to abandon readers after they鈥檝e converted, but brands often have to pick who they will serve first and best. Rivlin has no problem saying goodbye to readers no longer young enough to relate to the college experience.

鈥淲e鈥檙e happy that once people exit their 20s, we鈥檙e not going to be their media brand of choice,鈥� he says. 鈥淢aybe I will change my mind in the future because it鈥檚 always tempting to keep going, especially as it raises questions about my ability to run the company when I鈥檓 much older.鈥�

Until that day, Rivlin and his youthful cotemporaries jockey for position in the college media landscape, hoping to swoop in beneath aging millennial brands and catch fire as the voice of Gen Z.