Battered in U.S., IB Times grows in Europe

Lucinda Southern of Digiday writes about the growth of the International Business Times in Europe after layoffs in its editorial staff in the United States.

Southern writes, “Every publisher now has a branded content unit; each touts its own audience as its selling point. Newsweek, with more in-depth coverage on foreign affairs, technology and business, has the print heritage. The publisher’s own figures find people are spending a solid 12 minutes on the site, and its best-performing articles are up to 3,000 words long. IBTimes, with shorter pieces and more millennial-skewing readers, has a larger audience and more content verticals, like finance, entertainment and sport.

“Internal Google Analytics show that IBTimes hit nearly 23 million unique users in July, and 2.5 unique users for Newsweek, but these don’t account for singular users on multiple devices. While comScore, which hasn’t yet compiled figures for July, finds that IBT Media’s brands altogether have hovered around the 5 million monthly unique mark since January.

“‘There is an opportunity in that space; there is a lot of branded content that isn’t done well,’ said Tom Sheppey, account director at Total Media, who also said IBT Media was late to the party for content studio. ‘Too often, branded-content arms are little more than a glorified extension of the sales team. If they excel, it will need to be in things that agencies can’t do themselves, a deep knowledge of their audience and data behind it. But I fear they could be putting eggs into a basket that has already proven to have holes in it.'”

Read more here.