Samuel Fatola, autore di State of Digital Publishing

Singapore registered 24,688 marriages in 2025, 6.2% fewer than the year before, with civil marriages at 19,682, the third straight annual decline. For a wedding publisher, that means serving a somewhat smaller cohort of couples each year. At the same time, the way couples find information is changing. As AI-generated summaries and assistants answer more questions directly, the role of traditional search is shifting, and publishers are rethinking how they earn visits and build audience relationships. SingaporeBrides is adapting to both changes. Google clicks to its practical guides are down double digits year on year, while AI assistants such as ChatGPT have begun sending a small but new stream of visitors. The business is anchored by a 16,000-subscriber newsletter, about 11,000 members across its Telegram groups, a twice-yearly wedding fair that is its largest revenue stream, and eight in ten advertisers renewing. In conversation with State of Digital Publishing, founder Chin Leng explains how SingaporeBrides is adapting to AI-driven search and reveals what keeps couples and vendors coming back. He also discusses the platform's plans to introduce a new wedding planning tool in early 2027 as part of its effort to build more direct relationships with couples alongside search. You’ve kept members engaged for over two decades. What does a “sticky” niche community look like today, and how has it changed since forums were the main hub? In 2000, the forum was the whole community. Brides came to one place, asked questions, posted reviews and stayed. Our forum is still live, but the conversation has broadened. Across Singapore, conversation moved to Facebook from around 2008 to 2012, then to Instagram from about 2013, and since about 2018 to chat groups on Telegram and WhatsApp, with TikTok and RedNote for discovery. Sticky today means being useful when a couple needs you. We run Telegram groups by wedding year, such as Brides-to-Be 2025 and Brides-to-Be 2026, plus a pre-loved wedding items group and our Telegram channel. Together, they have about 11,000 members, with some individuals counted in more than one group. Our newsletter has 16,000 subscribers. For scale, Singapore registered 19,682 civil marriages in 2025. The biggest change is that a wedding community is a cohort. It forms, plans for about a year, then moves on. So stickiness is not about keeping people forever. It is about being the go-to place for the new generation of couples as they begin planning their wedding. When SingaporeBrides members stayed on to talk about parenthood, you launched SingaporeMotherhood. How should publishers spot and validate the next life-stage audience before launching a new site? We didn't plan SingaporeMotherhood. Our forum members got married and kept posting about pregnancy, then babies. When the same members keep bringing up a new topic after their original need is over, that is your signal. To validate it, I'd check three things. First, is the conversation growing on its own, without you pushing it? Second, does this audience have a real spending moment, with businesses that need to reach them? Third, can you test it cheaply first, with a section or a group, before buying a new domain? The lesson I learnt is that readers and advertisers are two separate tests. The audience came easily. Advertiser demand in parenting has been much harder than in weddings. Validate both before committing to either. How do you decide which parts of your community should live on your own platforms and which on social platforms, given how unpredictable reach has become? This is my rule: social is for discovery, while our own platform is for decisions. Anything couples come back to, compare or act on lives, SingaporeBrides serves as a central resource: banquet price lists, ang bao guides, venue and vendor pages with virtual tours, enquiry forms, our upcoming planning tool, fair registration. We control those pages, how they work and what couples can do on them. Social is where couples first meet us. We post daily on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Telegram, and weekly on RedNote. Each platform plays by its own rules. RedNote, for example, holds back posts with outside links, so there we answer questions and let people search for us by name. Telegram sits in between. It is a platform we don't own, but the groups are ours to run, and they reach people directly. Which tactics have worked best for building repeat visits and direct traffic, such as email, apps, member perks or events? What brings couples back most is practical tools they use time and again over a year of planning: our banquet price list, the guo da li shopping guide, the auspicious dates calendar, and our wedding show listings. These are reference pages, not one-time reads, and we keep them up to date. Events make a difference. Our wedding fair page and photo gallery get repeat visits before and after every fair. Of all our channels, Telegram is the best at bringing people back: about three in four visits from our Telegram groups and channel come from people who have been to the site before. Instagram, by contrast, mostly brings us new people. The next chapter, our wedding planning tool, launching in early 2027, gives couples a reason to log in throughout their planning. As AI-generated search summaries answer more questions directly, what are you seeing in traffic to practical guide content like “how to choose a diamond ring”? How are you adapting? We're seeing a double-digit drop in Google clicks to our practical guides compared with last year, and our older forum threads have fallen even more. The questions are still being asked. The answers just don't always come back to us. At the same time, AI assistants like ChatGPT have started sending us visitors. It's still a small stream, but it didn't exist a year ago. When AI does credit us, couples click through. We've also seen AI tools use our information without crediting us. ChatGPT once gave hotel and bao rates that came from SingaporeBrides, but linked only to other sites. So we're adapting in three ways. First, we're doubling down on facts only we keep up to date. We collect hotels' own wedding package price lists and update our banquet price and ang bao guides from them. Second, we're putting comparable facts on list pages, which AI tools seem to cite more than single profiles. Third, we're building direct relationships through the newsletter, Telegram and our planning tool, so we depend less on search. Which content types do you think are hardest for AI tools to replace for a niche publisher, and how are you investing in them? There are four: Verified, local, current data. Our most-read pages are all reference data we maintain ourselves: the banquet price list, ang bao guide, venue directory, auspicious dates calendar and wedding show listings. Prices and capacities keep changing every year. AI can only repeat what someone has checked. We check it at the source. We are focusing on real venues, real stories, real couples, real venues, real photos and video. We don't use AI to create images or video. We also feature virtual tours of hotel ballrooms and non-hotel wedding venues. Couples can walk through a space from home and shortlist venues before visiting in person, saving them time. A virtual tour shows couples the actual space they're considering, not an AI impression. We are committing resources to events. No AI can let a couple taste a wedding menu or meet a photographer. Our wedding fair does that twice a year. Community has become important. Couples in a Brides-to-Be group trust each other's experience more than any summary. Where we invest: our price data, our in-house editorial and video team, the fair, and a planning tool that keeps couples' plans in one place. Are you using AI tools in your own operations, and where have they saved time versus created extra work or quality risks? Yes. We use AI to check articles and our email newsletters for errors before publishing, write first drafts, and review legal documents. I also use an AI assistant to analyse our Google Analytics every week and turn it into a short list of things to work on. That used to be the task I never had time to address. We don't use AI to create images or video. Our photos and videos are of real weddings and real venues. So far, we haven't identified any published errors attributable to AI. Our editors review every draft before publication. AI drafts and checks; our editors decide. The bigger risk lies beyond our organisation. AI search tools take our information and don't always credit us. How has your approach to working with vendors and advertisers evolved, and what do brands in wedding and parenting want from a publisher now compared with five years ago? I'll focus on weddings, as this is our primary business segment. Five years ago, most vendors bought visibility: a listing, a banner, a spot in a list article. Today they want evidence. Hotels and venues ask how many people saw their package and how many enquiries it generated. Budgets are also under pressure. The sustained decline in Singapore's marriage numbers has made the wedding market increasingly competitive. Venues also want to be seen, not just listed. Virtual tours of their ballrooms and spaces are one of the add-ons they ask for. So we're moving from selling space to helping vendors sell. Many vendors lack the expertise to market their services, and that's where we can help. We're launching a digital marketing package that runs conversion-focused Meta ads for hotels' and venues' wedding packages. We also include WhatsApp enquiry links that are tagged, so vendors can see which enquiries came from us. How do you diversify revenue between advertising, vendor listings, sponsored content and other income, and which stream has proved most resilient? We have four main streams. The SingaporeBrides Wedding Fair, twice a year, is our biggest. Annual directory listings and advertising packages range from $499 to $15,000. A smaller share of revenue comes from advertorials and email newsletter inserts. And Bouq, our voucher marketplace, is designed for couples. The most resilient are the annual listings, because they renew. Eight in ten of our advertisers renew each year. A vendor who gets results year after year doesn't shop around. We're adding new streams carefully, starting with the digital marketing package. How do you maintain editorial trust when vendors and advertisers are paying to be featured? We draw a clear line between our editorial content and our commercial products. Most of what we publish is independent of our advertisers. Our editors produce the planning guides, advice and features, while paid articles make up only a small part of our content. When we need expert input, we interview a combination of paying and non-paying vendors. Then we have commercial formats. Our directory is a paid marketplace. In our vendor listicles, our editorial team includes vendors we've chosen based on what couples are recommending and talking about, and we check that those vendors are still active before we include them. While advertisers pay for visibility, they have no influence over our editorial direction. How do you think about influencers, creators and user-generated content, as competition or as partners, when your audience is making major life decisions? We consider them as partners. We work with influencers and creators, and one of our own writers is also the on-camera face of our social media. Creators inspire audiences and drive engagement. A couple might discover a beautiful venue through a reel and begin imagining their wedding there. But planning a wedding comes with considerable costs. When it comes to choosing, they need facts: the price per table, the minimum spend, and how many guests fit. That is the value we bring in. User content has always been an integral part of us. Our forum still holds honest reviews, both positive and negative, of solemnisers and vendors, and our pre-loved group lets couples sell wedding items to each other. We keep vendor promotions out of couples' spaces. If you were launching a niche community publication today, what would you do differently from 2000 and 2005, and what advice would you give a publisher building one for 2027? My first three years were challenging. We had few clients and not enough money for my own living expenses. It taught me that the business model comes first. So: 1. Know who pays, and why, from day one. Audience and revenue are two separate problems. 2. Own the relationship early. Collect emails and accounts from the start, not years later. Search and social will change the rules on you. 3. Be the authentic source, not the summary. Keep data and stories nobody else has. AI can summarise everything else. 4. Meet your community in person. Events build relationships and credibility in ways social feeds cannot. 5. Stay narrow. Dare to say no to topics and audiences that dilute you. How do you use the discussions, questions and behaviour of your community members to identify content opportunities or influence your editorial strategy? Could you share an example of an insight that led to a successful initiative? We watch the questions that keep coming back. If couples ask the same thing again and again, it identifies gaps in our editorial coverage. One example is solemnisers. In our forum, couples kept posting "Looking for a solemniser" threads and sharing reviews, good and bad, of the solemniser at their own wedding. Everyone was asking the same thing, and the answers were scattered across many threads. So we created a list article of popular solemnisers in Singapore, all in one place. It became one of our most-read guides. In the past year, it has had many more readers than the forum threads that inspired it, and those threads are still among our most-read too. The community found the need, and editorial turned it into a resource. Beyond pageviews and membership numbers, how do you measure whether your community is healthy and creating long-term business value? Which metrics have proved most useful? Pageviews can be misleading. This year, our raw traffic looked as if it had doubled, but much of that growth was driven by bot activity. We prioritise visits that demonstrate genuine engagement and screen for irregular traffic patterns. The metrics that matter most to us: Advertiser renewal rate. If vendors renew, our audience is delivering couples. This is the single best health check. Our value to vendors is reflected in the quality and volume of enquiries we generate. Owned reach. How many couples we can reach without paying Google, Meta or TikTok: newsletter subscribers, Telegram members and, soon, planning tool accounts. The number of couples attending and exhibitors returning each year. Community activity. Are new couples joining each year's Brides-to-Be group, and are they helping each other? Final Thoughts SingaporeBrides’ response to a changing search landscape and a smaller market is to be a trusted first-hand source rather than a summary of other people’s content. Social media introduces each new cohort of couples. Banquet price lists, ang bao guides, the wedding fair, and the Telegram groups bring them back. The planning tool due in early 2027 is designed to keep them engaged throughout their wedding planning journey. Rather than selling advertising space alone, SingaporeBrides now helps vendors reach prospective customers and generate enquiries through tagged links and tailored advertising packages. It measures its own health the way vendors do: by enquiries and renewals, not pageviews that bots can inflate. As discovery evolves across search, AI assistants, and social platforms, verified data, real venues, and direct audience relationships give SingaporeBrides a foundation that works across channels.

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