Twitter unveils new multi-screen deals with “Twitter Amplify”
Twitter is rapidly expanding its “multi-screen” ad offerings through a range of new partnerships with sports, news and other media companies. Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter tool lets brands sign up customers inside a tweet
photo: GigaOM
Twitter’s latest ad product provides a call to action right inside a tweet — showing the company is finally creating marketing tools closer to the “bottom of the funnel.” Read more at GigaOM »
Yahoo swears it isn’t going to screw up Tumblr — but how realistic is that promise?
photo: Flickr user Stephen Brace
Fans of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer say she shouldn’t be blamed for the company’s history of failed acquisitions — but there are plenty of other reasons to be skeptical about Yahoo’s $1.1-billion Tumblr deal. Read more at GigaOM »
Why Yahoo acquiring Tumblr for $1 billion makes a certain horrible kind of sense
Fans of the social-blogging network might not like the idea much, but a $1-billion acquisition of Tumblr would arguably solve a number of problems for Yahoo — and do the same for Tumblr CEO David Karp. Read more at GigaOM »
Why focusing on ‘time spent’ with print misses the point about how the news works now
photo: Flickr / Arvind Grover
Research from McKinsey seems to suggest that print-based media still commands a large proportion of time spent by consumers of news — but that is just part of the larger picture media companies have to understand. Read more »
Is it the best of times or the worst of times for journalism? Yes
photo: Flickr / George Kelly
There are plenty of reasons for pessimism about the state of the media and journalism, including repeated layoffs, bankruptcies and so on. But there are also many reasons to be optimistic about the current environment. Read more »
Updated: AOL grows again on solid ad sales
AOL continues its surprising turnaround with another quarter of growth in its content and advertising segment. The company is still, however, depending on its legacy business for all its profit. Read more »
Newspapers need to stop lying to themselves — and to advertisers — about their circulation
photo: Shutterstock / Donskarpo
A trade group says that newspapers like the New York Times have seen large increases in circulation, but that’s partly because they are allowed to count their readers multiple times. The industry needs to do better. Read more »
Weather Company unveils three new web series, offers “four-screen” ad opportunity
The Weather Company continues to expand beyond its core programming with new web series devoted to adventure and human interest. The new content comes as the company deepens its content and advertising strategies. Read more »
What I learned at paidContent Live: No one has all the answers on the future of media, and that’s good
One thing that emerged from our media conference was that there is no single solution when it comes to the future of content, or the monetization of media — and that is probably a good thing. Read more »
Two deals that make it obvious where Twitter’s heart lies: inside your television
photo: Shutterstock / Dmitris K
Twitter’s love affair with television seems to know no bounds — two recent deals with BBC America and Comedy Central will bring video clips inside users’ streams, and more such deals appear to be in the works. Read more »
Reports say Twitter has reached multimillion dollar deal with ad-buying company
photo: GigaOM
A new deal with a large ad-buying firm will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars over a multi-year period, the Financial Times reports. Read more at GigaOM »
Takeaways from paidContent Live: Paywalls, sponsored content and massive disruption
photo: Albert Chau
At our paidContent Live conference in New York, we heard about the disruption in publishing, journalism and advertising from speakers such as Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian, Jon Steinberg of BuzzFeed and blogger Andrew Sullivan. Read more »
Can brands evolve from digital advertisers to mass communicators?
photo: Albert Chau
Brands claim they’re taking to social media, but they’re really inserting ads into other people social engagement streams — not engaging themsleves, says the founder of the Dachis Group. Read more »
Two charts that tell you everything you need to know about the future of newspapers
photo: Flickr user Zarko Drincic
The U.S. newspaper industry has lost more than $40 billion in ad revenue in the past decade — over half of that in the last four years alone — and Google’s ad revenues are now more than twice what the industry pulls in. Read more »
Why BuzzFeed’s attempt to reinvent online advertising is a lot harder than it looks
BuzzFeed has become the poster child for what some call sponsored content or “native advertising,” but despite the skills of founder Jonah Peretti, the secret to making ads go viral is not quite as simple as it appears to be. Read more »
Why I admire the OC Register, even though I disagree with almost everything they are doing
photo: Shutterstock / Voronin76
I may disagree with them about the benefits of a hard paywall, or the wisdom of cutting 90 percent of the newspaper’s blogs, but at least the owners of the Orange County Register are putting their money where their mouths are. Read more »
The Orange County Register’s new owners want to reinvent newspapers from the ground up
photo: Flickr / Arvind Grover
It’s a risky bet, but the new owners of the Orange County Register — two entrepreneurs with no background in traditional media — are pouring money and resources into the newspaper, and not just online but in print as well. Read more »
Henry Blodget says Business Insider is growing, but it’s still losing money
photo: Flickr / TechCrunch
Founder Henry Blodget tells New Yorker magazine that Business Insider’s audience is larger than many established financial news outlets, but the company also lost $3 million in 2012 or almost a quarter of its revenues. Read more »
The Daily Mail: Paywall? We don’t need no stinking paywall
The Daily Mail, the world’s sixth largest news site, says it is not only growing digital revenue faster than most other papers, but has engagement levels that put it above Yahoo and even YouTube. Read more »
Two ways the new Flipboard could disrupt media: Advertising and revenue sharing
photo: Shutterstock / JJ Studio
Flipboard’s new curation tools for creating custom magazines may appeal to individual users, but they will likely also appeal to advertisers and other brands — and therein lies the potential for real media disruption. Read more »
Flipboard launches custom curation tools, wants to unleash your inner magazine editor
Flipboard has become a leading player in the digital news-consumption field, and now it wants to hand the same filtering and curation tools employed by its editors over to users of the app, to create their own magazines. Read more at GigaOM »
Blip to publishers: we’re going to monetize your videos, whether you like it or not
Video site Blip is looking to increase the ad load on the content it’s hosting by making advertising mandatory. The changes are going in effect early next month. Read more »
The “barbell problem” in media: The ends are fine, but the middle is getting squeezed
photo: Flickr / George Kelly
Some of the larger traditional brands in journalism will probably wind up prospering in the new digital era, and some hyper-local ones will as well — but what happens to the players in the middle? Their future remains uncertain. Read more »
The monetization dilemma for media: Paywalls on one side, advertising on the other
How can media companies and publishers monetize their content when advertising continues to decline and paywalls are not filling the gap? This is one of the major themes we’re going to explore at paidContent Live on April 17 in New York. Read more »
State of the media: The cracks are still widening, but some light is also getting in
The Pew Center’s latest report on the state of the media shows the financial woes affecting the traditional news business continue, and this is having an effect on consumers — but there are a few bright spots as well. Read more »
They found you: ad firm uses 2 billion data points to track consumers across devices
photo: Alexey Fursov
Many people are familiar with ads that follow them across different websites. Now, one company says it can have the same ads show up on an individual’s smartphone too. Marketers like the idea but does it actually work? And will regulators tolerate it? Read more »
If Facebook builds a personalized newspaper, will it suffer the same fate newspapers have?
photo: Flickr / Arvind Grover
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says that the social network is trying to create “the best personalized newspaper” with its news feed. But we all know what has happened to newspapers — can Facebook somehow avoid suffering the same fate? Read more »
Why the Washington Post is smart to try sponsored content, and why others should too
photo: Shutterstock / Eldorado3D
The Washington Post has launched a feature offering advertisers the ability to place sponsored content on its site, and while this form of advertising has come under fire, other media outlets should consider doing the same. Read more »
When advertising becomes content, who wins — advertisers or publishers, or both?
photo: Shutterstock/Gl0ck
One of the biggest trends in media at the moment is “sponsored content” or what some call “native advertising.” But is it the savior of online media, or just another mirage in the advertising desert? Read more »
Marketing to men: Break Media and the business of bro videos
Bro videos — crotch shots, beer chugging, cool cars and so on — have long been a staple of the internet. Today, bro vids are also big business thanks to “man research” and big brands pouring money into making them. Read more »
The opportunities and dangers in the native advertising land rush
photo: Dano
Native advertising, brand journalism — whatever you call it, the current ad-driven content boom provides a lot of opportunity. But for it to work, journalists and publishers need to think about their brand as much as the advertiser does. Read more »
Marco Arment’s digital magazine and the paywall vs. sharing problem
Marco Arment softened the paywall around his iPad-only magazine because his content was not benefiting from the social-sharing effect that the web enables — a microcosm of the dilemma that many other publishers are also facing. Read more »
Buy laxative, get a fiber ad on Facebook: social network mulls expanding offline reach
photo: gcpics via shutterstock
Facebook plans to tap into the loyalty reward data collected by retailers like drug stores to serve you ads based on your off-line purchases. Read more »
The massive advertising shift that Twitter is trying to capitalize on with its API
Twitter’s new advertising API is just part of an ongoing seismic shift in the way advertising works online, where algorithms and self-serve networks are taking over from traditional ad buying and further destabilizing the media industry. Read more »
Blogger and curator extraordinaire Maria Popova signs on for paidContent Live
Maria Popova, who writes and curates content at the Brain Pickings blog, will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17 about alternative monetization models and the future of self-published content. Read more »
The NYT is doing something smart by using Twitter trends to target ads
photo: Shutterstock / noporn
The head of the research lab at the New York Times says the newspaper has launched an advertising product called Sparking Stories that allows advertisers to insert ads into specific content that is trending on Twitter. Read more »
Twitter plucks ad man from Google to be research director
photo: Jeffrey Graham
Twitter’s ad operations are growing rapidly but not all brands and marketers understand them or are convinced of their value. This may explain why Twitter hired Jeffrey Graham as director of ad research. Read more »
The Brainpickings brouhaha and the problem with affiliate links
Blogger Maria Popova has come under fire from a number of critics for her use of undisclosed affiliate links on her blog Brainpickings, which highlights how heated the debate over alternative forms of advertising has become. Read more »
Instagram says ‘self-help’ best option for woman suing over photos — and it’s right
Do you remember the huge controversy when people claimed Instagram wanted to sell your photos? In a court filing, Instagram reiterated a familiar refrain by social media companies that users can take or leave it when it comes to their policies. Read more at GigaOM »
