First-party data has become a reliable way for publishers to prove performance and build more resilient revenue. This article breaks down why it matters now, and how leading publishers are turning consented, user-declared signals from polls into segments and results they can actually activate.

Modern publishing is under pressure 

Publishers are under growing pressure to prove performance while operating in a market that is becoming harder to measure, target, and monetize. Attention is fragmenting, privacy expectations are rising, and buyers increasingly want to understand and activate their audiences with confidence.  

The First-Party Data Solution 

In this environment, first party data has become one of the most practical tools available to publishers, especially when it is user-declared and consent-based. It helps strengthen direct advertiser relationships, build privacy-safe segments, and create repeatable value from audience engagement, without relying on external identifiers. 

Turning Polls into User Intent Data

Opinary is already partnering with publishers like Daily Mail Group, Funke Media Group, and Burda Forward to support first party data collection through on-site polls and other audience interaction tools. By engaging audiences with relevant questions, publishers can capture sociodemographic insights alongside intent data and feed those signals into their DMP in real time. This approach turns participation into actionable audience understanding, including user intent data and richer customer intent data, that teams can actually activate across sales, targeting, and content strategies. 

Leading Publishers, Leading First-Party Data Strategies

To illustrate the impact of first- and zero-party data, here are some publishers who have already made significant strides in this area:

• By accelerating its 1st party data strategy with a clear focus on addressability and direct revenue, The New York Post has been building authenticated relationships via newsletters and alternative identifiers, using those signals to build audiences that support more direct deals and higher-value campaign planning.

• Bauer Media Group has scaled a first party data approach across a large portfolio, packaging unique audience insights for advertisers and proving measurable impact. In a case study, Bauer reports a 75% increase in revenue, a 152% increase in advertiser count, and a 31% year-over-year increase in average CPM, supported by audience and campaign insights that help sales teams sell beyond individual brands.

• Bloomberg offers a strong signal of where the market is heading: after shifting away from third-party programmatic approaches, Bloomberg reportedly saw a 20% uplift in advertising CPMs, reinforcing how owned, consented data can directly translate into commercial resilience.

Declared Data from Polls: Best Practice

Additionally, our publisher partners offer concrete examples of how poll-generated first-party signals can translate into measurable commercial results:

Daily Mail Group Ireland (DMG) offers a compelling success story. In an interview, Doug Farrell, DMG’s Head of Digital Media, highlighted how Opinary’s in-article polls help capture audience attention and turn it into actionable signals for targeting and performance. The collaboration resulted in a 60% increase in CTRs, an 80% boost in brand engagement, and a 40% increase in CPMs, demonstrating the value that publisher-owned, declared data can bring to campaign performance and client outcomes.

BCN has focused on creating user habits with regular, editorial-driven questions that consistently add value and prove that quality beats volume. Instead of chasing millions of passive signals, BCN found that around 1,000 high-intent responses are enough to build audience segments that performed strongly. The difference comes down to asking better questions and using the right audience participation tools to make participation feel natural. When a poll feels like a conversation rather than a form, relevance goes up and so do response rates. Operationally, BCN connected the full stack by using Opinary for survey collection and DMP Permutive for activation, enabling a real-time flow from poll response to targeting, including scalable segments built on declared interest and intent signals.

If you are interested to learn more about how DMG and BCN leveraged first-party data, click here: 

The shift from ad-driven clicks to subscription-based loyalty has transformed the publisher-reader dynamic—turning fleeting interactions into meaningful connections. But just like dating, building trust and commitment takes patience, communication, and respect. Discover how publishers can move beyond paywall barriers and foster relationships that last, using lessons from real-world romance to redefine engagement and revenue.

For publishers, loyal readers willing to pay for content are gold. But while Paywalls are critical for publishers, for readers, they often feel like barriers, not bridges. That tension changed the entire dynamic between publishers and audiences, and the way they connect.

Looking at the ad driven era before publishers discovered direct user revenues: you could easily compare their relationship with audiences to one-night stands. Users were incentivized to click, read, and move on. Whereas in today’s subscription era it’s much more about building loyal relationships, trust, and long-term commitment.

After years of analyzing how this dynamic works, we’ve found that the user-publisher relationship funnel is quite similar to the stages of dating. Which is why we are here to share with you some practical relationship advice that will take your user-publisher relationship game to the next level:

1st Advice: Be Patient & Persistent

Loyal and long relationships aren’t built overnight. It takes time, patience and consistency to build a strong level of commitment and earn trust.

Let’s see how real-world dating works. You meet someone, chat a bit, maybe grab a drink. If there’s a spark, you go on a few more dates. By the fourth one, you’re either ghosting, in a full-blown situationship, or finally deciding if this is going somewhere. The same thing happens in the subscription world. The user starts their journey by clicking on an article, then maybe read a few more, come back, subscribe to a newsletter, and at some point decide if they want to subscribe or not.

But here’s the thing, some publishers get so excited about subscriptions that they try to get first-time visitors to subscribe right away. That’s like meeting someone in a bar and immediately asking them “will you marry me?” It’s not impossible… just wildly optimistic.

2nd Advice: Communicate!

To make any relationship work communication is a key. It takes a lot of talking to build trust, engagement that leads to commitment.

Think about the talking stage when you first start dating someone. You text constantly or spend hours talking on the phone and gradually learn more about each other. That’s what builds trust between people.

Here’s the problem: publishers say they want a relationship with readers, but rarely bother to talk to them. Legacy newsrooms often still sit in their ivory towers: no replies, no questions, just one-sided monologues.

Meanwhile, influencers are masters at building loyal communities. Why? Because they don’t just talk to their followers – they have actual conversations with them. That’s why we started Opinary: to help publishers listen. We make it easy for readers to share their views inside articles, and just as easy for publishers to learn from them. The effect: When people are invited to weigh in, they do. And they come back, because engagement builds loyalty. Every relationship starts with a conversation.

3rd Advice: Relationships are always voluntary

It’s never easy to say goodbye, but sometimes it is necessary to let go.

Breakups happen all the time, for all sort of reasons. Maybe the spark faded, or some expectations weren’t met and that’s okay. The same is true for publishers and readers, sometimes people just want to unsubscribe. But here’s the issue, some publishers make it harder for people to leave. And when you do that, you aren’t only using a subscriber but also losing the trust you worked hard on building.

4th Advice: Explore Other Options

Subscriptions are great, it is a powerful revenue stream, with a lot of untapped potential. But not every user is going to become a subscriber, and that’s the reality.

A healthy business requires diversity in revenue streams. But forming a loyal relationship with your users will not only grow your subscriptions, but also will keep them coming back. Publishers need to engage with their readers in a meaningful conversation, and show genuine curiosity in users interests to build a mutual trust. The more you talk with your users and start asking them questions, the more they’re willing to interact and tell you more about themselves. This conversation will provide you with genuine and accurate data, which will allow better targeting.

Having this mix of invaluable data with engaged readership, will make you more attractive from an advertiser’s perspective, which will bring in other revenue streams like ads,  and won’t require you to rely only on subscriptions.

Just like dating, not every random bar conversation will turn to a relationship and not every user is a potential subscriber. Some people might just to become good friends, which is has a great value in its own way. You need to treat your users with respect, don’t force the relationship, and you will create potential for significant connections with them.

Want to see what this looks like in action?

Discover how The FT uses Opinary polls for retention.

“The bottom line: News consumers have become desensitized to the level of drama they had come to expect from politics over the past four years.” — Axios
At Opinary, we’re asking how can publishers keep audiences engaged at this moment of comparative political peace?

American politics are boring again. After four years trapped in a Trumpian fever-dream in which the very foundations of American democracy, scientific legitimacy, and basic human decency were relentlessly attacked, the United States finds itself on the other side — and it’s eerily quiet.

Trump’s “clickbait presidency” generated media attention, to put it mildly. A daily barrage of scandal, sanctimonious slander, and slime (drain the swamp!!) kept the American people (and the global community) in a constant state of tension. The come-down from this political high (or low, as the case may be) has been swift and brutal. From January to February 2021, audience traffic to politics articles dropped by a precipitous 28%. As the global community lets out a collective sigh of relief, so too have they stopped clicking.

However, while this brave new world of the Biden era does not boast the traffic-boosting emotional chaos and dizzying uncertainty of the recent political past, it does offer something new: an opportunity for both publishers and audiences to take a collective breath and re-calibrate.

The End of the “Trump Bump” & Biden Boredom

Since January 20, publishers and journalists have had to shift down many gears in their coverage of American politics. The feeling of stillness that has accompanied the Biden presidency thus far has been welcomed by the threadbare psychological states of news junkies the world over — publishers, however, are experiencing this transition differently. 

Shortly, the “Trump Bump” is over. Traffic is down and anxiety is up: how can publishers keep audiences engaged at this moment of comparative political peace? 

While the genuine unbelievability of the past four years did produce a veritable onslaught of clicks, this kind of engagement generation was always fundamentally unsustainable. Everywhere, reports of “Trump fatigue” (and the more recent “Covid fatigue”) in particular and “news fatigue” in general have been lamented: according to Lineup, “human psychology is not wired to sustain that kind of emotional charge long-term.” 

This psychological reality is mirrored in media consumption habits, as reported by Chartbeat: data for Q1 of 2021 has revealed that search traffic (articles views driven by internet searches for specific content) has continued to rise while social traffic (article views driven by social media platforms) has remained static. This indicates a move towards more practical, information-providing news rather than emotionally charged editorials. Readers are looking for specific content that is relevant to their lives and experiences rather than for sensationalism and pathos. Perhaps “Biden boredom” is simply a more sensible approach to news consumption, rooted in hard facts and need-to-know information?

Biden-era journalism trends

The monoculture of Trump-era political journalism, largely limited to Tweet coverage and outrage porn, has yielded to a veritable media ecosystem: diversity is flourishing, both among publishers and between stories. 

The slower and more predictable pace of the news cycle under President Biden has allowed news sites to distinguish themselves from one another, as they are no longer bound to publishing pieces in response to the same outrageous Tweets or speeches. According to Digiday, “the latitude to do more enterprise reporting creates an opportunity for news outlets to differentiate themselves from one another.” And with that differentiation comes the potential to build loyal audiences who strongly identify with a given publisher’s specific ethos. 

In addition to allowing for sharper distinctions between publishers, Biden-era journalism has allowed other stories to garner attention that has long been out of reach. Without the Trump-shaped black-hole at the center of the media landscape, audiences are recovering their taste for diverse content, remembering that there is a world beyond Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago. Axios has pointed out that “other stories — including GameStop stock and developments on the coronavirus vaccines — have driven higher interest than they could in a Trump-centric world.” Now that Trump has stopped colonizing headlines, diverse and meaningful stories are able to flourish in terms of both traction and depth. 

Rest, recovery, and really listening

This moment towards slower, deeper journalism has major implications for today’s digital journalism landscape: after four years of publishers competing to inform readers about the latest presidential dramas, the Biden era of political journalism seems to demand that audiences inform publishers about what kinds of content they’re looking for — in other words, it’s time to listen. As Ali Gordon of Lineup has written:

“Over the past 4 years, audiences have increasingly demonstrated a need to be heard, and that doesn’t change with a presidential transition. If anything — under a new administration with less news cycle whiplash and challenge to journalistic integrity — now is a time for media brands to focus on the quality of their relationships with readers, not just the quantity.”

The best way to improve the quality of publisher relationships with audiences is to listen, and publishers across the world are doing so in different ways, all of which are focused on fostering genuine relationships with readers. While we at Opinary offer polling tools for our publishers to ask their readers questions and gain more insight into their audiences’ preferences and tastes, innovation is taking place on a number of fronts, shaping what listening can mean for publishers in a post-Trump era. 

As described in Nieman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism 2021, Romanian publication DoR has made a point of listening to their audience in order to offer “a space that acknowledges experiences and emotions.” Catalina Albeanu, DoR’s digital editor, elaborated on the ways in which they are ensuring that they are really hearing their readership, including collecting “responses to stories where we crowdsource contributions from our members” and holding “online events that can offer validation that your own questions are important and offer some tools to find answers.” This approach even extends to listening to “what some of our members are telling us directly about what we could do better.” 

Increasingly, publishers are also engaging with their readers through messaging apps like WhatsApp. Brazilian newspaper Correio has been operating WhatsApp groups, some of which only allow posts from an admin, while others are open to contributions from all members. Correio’s digital content coordinator, Wladmir Pinheiro, spoke to the Reuters Institute about the logic behind this choice: “We use the open groups as a source to know what people are talking about and sharing. We don’t mind if competitors’ content is shared. If it’s just Correio, you make the group feel artificial.” Ultimately, he emphasizes that “WhatsApp has reminded us that we have to put the user at the centre.” 

A new era

President Biden is a boring president (or, as some argue, he just seems so in comparison to his predecessor). This boredom is nothing to be lamented — rather, it is an opportunity for emotional recovery for a collectively worn-out American psyche; for publishers to genuinely cater to their readers and build resilient, loyal audiences. 

Given the decaying state of public faith in journalism, as widely decried and tidily summed up by Gallup here, this “boring” moment is also an opportunity for the media industry to regain the confidence of the American people (where 60% of citizens have “not very much” or no faith at all in mass media). Building this trust involves implicitly addressing the allegations of elitism and snobbery that have dogged “disconnected” media outlets for years. While these shadows will not be overcome overnight, again, it becomes apparent that the best way to move towards virtuous relationships with audiences is to take them seriously. 

Now that the rolicking clamor of Trump’s chaos has died down, publishers have the responsibility to fill that void, to fill this comparative silence, with an appeal to their readers — they have a responsibility to begin asking real questions.