Of course, as Om and others have already mentioned, there’s no guarantee this deal will actually be consummated: it could fall apart on valuation, as so many deals do — or Facebook could swoop in with a much higher offer and snatch Tumblr out of Yahoo’s clutches, the same way it did when it stole Instagram away from Twitter last year for close to $1 billion.

Update: According to the Wall Street Journal, the Yahoo board of directors has approved a $1.1-billion all-cash bid to acquire Tumblr.

It makes Yahoo look desperate — because it is

Even if the deal does get done, one of the risks for Mayer and Yahoo is that the company could look desperate by paying more than $1 billion for a site that had revenues of less than $15 million last year (although CEO David Karp has said that figure should hit $100 million this year). That’s an almost bubble-like multiple for a company, and there will likely be plenty of criticism from investors who believe that $1 billion could be better spent elsewhere — in other words, on businesses that would make Yahoo a better return.

But the painful fact is that Yahoo doesn’t just look desperate — in many ways it is desperate. Mayer has made some changes since she took over the ailing former web portal, including the acquisition of Summly and a number of other mobile-focused startups and services, but the company still needs to make some aggressive moves if it is going to jump-start any growth at all. And since Yahoo has about $4 billion in cash on hand, it can arguably afford to make a big bet.

Yahoo buying Tumblr makes sense. Tumblr is only big, cool, newish social platform that Yahoo can afford.—
Henry Blodget (@hblodget) May 17, 2013

For Yahoo, the addition of Tumblr would do a number of things: because of the size and profile of the deal, it would make a major statement about Mayer’s intention to do whatever it takes to revitalize the company, and it would also send a signal to Facebook and Google — and even Apple — that Yahoo is a potential force to be reckoned with when it comes to potential acquisitions. Is doing that worth $1 billion? That’s for Yahoo’s investors and board of directors to decide.

Just as important, it would inject some much-needed life and energy into the somewhat stale lineup of content that the company currently relies on, which caters more to the over-50 set than it does to anyone in the much-desired 18 to 25 demographic. More than any other network, Tumblr is the platform of choice for media-obsessed teens and 20-somethings, who spend massive amounts of time sharing photos and videos and animated GIFs on the site — an engine of potential value that Yahoo desperately needs.

Tumblr gets a massive exit

This doesn’t come without its own risks, of course: As a number of observers have noted, Tumblr’s content contains a large quantity of not only mature or arguably offensive content but outright pornography, which many argue is the source of its massive traffic numbers. How Yahoo (or Facebook for that matter) would deal with this kind of content remains to be seen.

3 q's for Yahoo: 1) Can you convert Tumblr users to Yahoo products? 2) Can you monetize Tumblr PVs? 3) What to do w/ all that Tumblr porn?—
Mark Zohar (@markzohar) May 18, 2013

For Tumblr, meanwhile, being acquired would solve a number of problems — the main one being that the company has gone well beyond the “we’re a startup so we don’t really have to make money” stage, and is facing increasing pressure from the investors who have given CEO David Karp more than $125 million in venture financing, an investment that values the company at about $800 million. Accepting a giant check from Yahoo would take care of that problem in one fell swoop, especially if it was all in cash.

With a major company like Yahoo as a partner, Tumblr could connect its massive audience of users to the firehose of ads and other monetization methods the giant web portal has, and potentially generate much more revenue than it could have by itself. The only lingering question at that point is whether Tumblr fans decide that Yahoo is poisoning the well of social content and community on the site, and decide to flee for greener pastures. In other words, does Yahoo make Tumblr into YouTube — a successful standalone network that can grow and prosper on its own — or does it become MySpace?

The only scenario where a Yahoo-Tumblr combo works is if Yahoo keeps Tumblr separate in the same way Google managed YouTube.—
Mark Birch (@marksbirch) May 18, 2013

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / ollyy and Albert Chau

It would be wise not to read too much into those McKinsey numbers, however: virtually all of the available evidence shows media consumption in print continues to decline, particularly with younger audiences, and as a result advertising revenue is disappearing as well. Media companies need to adapt to that fact, rather than trying to pretend it isn’t happening.

According to a post by Rick Edmonds at the Poynter Institute, the research came from a presentation by McKinsey principal Michael Lamb at a recent conference of the International News Media Association in New York. Lamb said that based on data from a number of sources, about 35 percent of the time consumers spend on news consumption is devoted to newspapers and magazines, while TV accounts for about 41 percent and smartphones and tablets account for only about 2 percent.

In other words, the research seems to show that while digital devices account for more than half of the total time that consumers spend with media in general — and about 10 times more than the amount of time they spend with newspapers and magazines — the amount of time they spend with “legacy” platforms expands dramatically when looking specifically at news consumption.

Time spent is not the only important metric

Although Edmonds notes that there isn’t much research out there to confirm McKinsey’s conclusions (apart from a Nieman Journalism Lab post in 2009 that saw Martin Langeveld try to dig into some readership numbers for newspapers), he says that other researchers he contacted thought that the numbers were probably “not far off” — in part because of the “lean back” form of consumption that print media involves, where users often spend hours with a cup of coffee and a paper.

Edmonds also argues that encouraging advertisers to look at these kinds of time-spent numbers might help newspapers and magazines improve their appeal, since time spent is a big factor in where advertisers spend their money. As he puts it:

“The time-spent metric suggests that there is more life in legacy formats than raw audience numbers and falling print ad revenues would imply. Since the ‘dying industry’ meme is part of print’s problem with advertisers, this could be incorporated in a case for the medium’s continued relevance.”

Unfortunately for publishers who might see this as reason for unbridled optimism, however, Edmonds goes on to note that the time-spent numbers “do not solve the basic advertising problem of vanished monopoly pricing power and strong competition from a wide range of targeted digital marketing options,” and that while users may spend less time overall with digital platforms when consuming the news, these shorter digital sessions “may be a more efficient way of consuming news.”

For most, the news occurs elsewhere

I think Edmonds puts his finger on one major problem: namely, the fact that for many news consumers, the “lean back” experience simply isn’t necessary any more. As research from the Pew Center has shown, large numbers of consumers are getting their news from aggregators such as Google News or Yahoo News — or possibly from newer solutions such as Prismatic and Circa and Flipboard — because they don’t have either the time or the inclination to go to a single newspaper source, or read in print. Is a lack of efficiency really a selling point for legacy print publications?

That’s not to say the “lean back” experience doesn’t still have value for many news and media consumers, but the other painful fact is that most advertisers aren’t specifically looking to advertise to news consumers — they want specific demographic segments or topic-specific shoppers, or other kinds of targeting that legacy publishers can’t offer, and they want engagement or “time spent” across a range of content types, not just news.

As Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker has repeatedly suggested in presentations about the evolution of the digital-media marketplace, advertisers are moving to where the puck is going to be — not where it is now. And according to virtually all of the available evidence, even from McKinsey itself, that means mobile and social and other platforms, not print. Publishers can either try to convince advertisers that they are wrong about this move, or they can try to adapt to it.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover

Friedman is no stranger to the vicissitudes of modern media — she was laid off as the editor of GOOD magazine last year, after the publication decided to pivot and become a kind of social network for user-generated content. But in her CJR piece, she describes how on a recent speaking tour she grew frustrated with the numbers of people complaining about a lack of jobs, a lack of money and the rise of short-attention-span media like Twitter:

“Again and again, I found myself playing the role of cheerleader, trying to convince tired and broke journalists to get excited about the future of media.”

There is far more good than bad

As the CJR columnist acknowledges, it can be hard to motivate journalists — or anyone in the field of media — when reports from research outfits like the Pew Center lay out in bald detail how the business model for much of what we think of as the mainstream media is rapidly disintegrating, with nothing obvious to take its place, and when the number of journalists employed in newsrooms is lower than it has been at any time since the 1950s.

But Friedman argues — I think fairly persuasively — that there are far more benefits available to journalists now than there have ever been, if they choose to see and make use of them. Among other things, she lists:

Reporters have more access to sources: Thanks to the web, social media and other tools, “it’s never been easier to find and reach out to anyone.” This is unequivocally true, especially with the number of potential sources who have their own blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, etc.

Consumers have access to more media: Your job may have been more secure in the past, Friedman says, but now if you have something to say you have the ability to reach a much larger group of readers, and they have much more choice (this is also one argument against paywalls, she says).

Journalists get more engagement: Reporters used to work for years with little or no response from or engagement with readers (which some no doubt preferred), but now you get more feedback than you could ever want. Says Friedman: “I know a lot of journalists hate this, but it’s a good thing.”

Chaos promotes creativity: When traditional paths to professional success are closed, Friedman argues, “those of us who love journalism so much we’d never give up are forced to redefine success – and our methods of seeking it.” And there are more routes to success than ever before.

Disruption also produces opportunity

To some, this may all have a certain Pollyanna-ish feel to it, but I think Friedman is right — and in many ways she is saying something similar to what Matt Yglesias at Slate argued recently, when he responded to the Pew Center report and said that in his view news consumers were better off than they had ever been (although many disagreed). Jay Rosen made a similar case for why the internet is good for journalism in a debate hosted by the Economist in 2011.

Yes, much of the traditional media business is in turmoil, and the road to profitability — or even survival, for some — is far from clear. And it’s easy to look at the chaos of social media and “citizen journalism” during something like the Boston bombings or Hurricane Sandy and assume that we are much worse off, both as journalists and as news consumers (an argument I have tried to counter). And there is no question that many bad things come with the good.

But as Friedman argues, that same chaotic environment is what produces new things, many of which may grow to become powerful and positive tools for journalism — in some cases better than the ones we have. It’s easy to succumb to the gloom, but the reality is that while disruption of the kind the media world is experiencing creates great upheaval, it also creates great opportunity.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly and Shutterstock / Feng Yu

The profit was at the low end of the average of $0.32 – $0.34 that analysts had been predicting, while AOL’s $538.3 million in revenue was slightly above expectations.

Update: the market does not like the EPS. AOL share prices are off more than 10% this morning.

Overall, the numbers reflect an ongoing turnaround at AOL, which for years had been depending on its legacy dial-up subscription business for profit as its content and advertising business struggled. In March, CEO Tim Armstrong said recent results validated the company’s focus on content.

The most encouraging sign for the company may be a 14% growth in revenue in its so-called brand group, which consists of its in-house media properties like the Huffington Post, AOL.com and TechCrunch. AOL networks, which represent its third-party advertising service, was also up 8%.

The biggest question for the company remains profit where the company continues to depend on its shrinking legacy business to pay the bills. Both the ad networks and brand group continue to lose money, in part because sites like Patch.com continue to be a drag on earnings. This is reflected in the following screenshot, showing revenue and adjusted OBITDA:

If there is a dark spot here, it is the fact that, notwithstanding revenue growth, AOL still depends on its historic business of selling dial-up subscriptions. While losses in the brand group shrank by 71%, they are still losses — and the tech-heavy AOL Networks, in which AOL has invested significantly, is losing money too. Here’s how the company’s earnings release explains the profit situation:

“While significantly improved, Brand Group Adjusted OIBDA remains negative reflecting our investment in Patch and in our editorial and engineering staff at our core brands and in our sales force domestically and internationally [...] AOL Networks Adjusted OIBDA decreased year-over-year due to higher research and product development costs primarily related to continued investment in Adlearn Open Platform (our demand-side platform) and the launch of AdTech MARKETPLACE (our supply-side platform).”

Update: an earlier version of this story cited analysts’ prediction as $0.32; I’ve updated to also to refer to a separate consensus account of $0.34

The real bottom line is that until newspapers start coming clean about their readership — both to themselves and to their advertisers — they are going to continue to miss the forest for the trees.

The latest circulation gains for the NYT and others came courtesy of the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly known as the Audit Bureau of Circulations), an industry group composed of advertising agencies and publishers. The group noted that the numbers are not really comparable to the previous year’s results for a number of reasons, including the fact that some newspapers have launched new subscription formats, stopped printing every day and so on.

Counting readers multiple times

As Edmund Lee at Bloomberg points out, the AAM survey — which is somewhat ironically locked behind a paywall — also allows publishers to count their readers multiple times, according to rules adopted recently by the group. In other words, newspapers can count someone who reads the newspaper in print, on the web and on their Kindle as three separate readers. But doesn’t this inflate their readership numbers unreasonably? It sure does. The bottom line is that no one really knows what the “real” readership numbers are for newspapers.

@mathewi @BGrueskin It's not *unduplicated* audience. Doesn't strike me as any more phony-baloney than "passalong" readership numbers.—
Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) May 01, 2013

Some argue this has always been the case with newspapers, which is true: publishers have routinely engaged in all kinds of shady tricks to boost their circulation — including special discounts for bulk purchases by hotels and airlines and other giveaways, and even dumping large quantities into ravines or pulping them after printing. On top of that, many papers have inflated their readership numbers for years by claiming that each copy gets read by as many as five people, an estimate that borders on the ridiculous.

Newspapers need to come clean

This defence boils down to: “Newspapers have always done this, and no one believes these numbers anyway, so what difference does it make?” A pretty weak defense, you might argue — and you would be right.

@mathewi @BGrueskin That’s harder than it looks. We can’t even come up with web metrics we all agree on.—
Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) May 01, 2013

The other line of defence is that online measurement is also chaotic and confusing at best, and that since websites can’t even agree on whose numbers are correct, why should newspapers be any different? It’s true that measurement of online traffic is murky, with providers like comScore often giving wildly inaccurate estimates when compared with a site’s internal numbers. But this is a little like saying newspapers don’t have to tell the truth because no one else does either.

If newspapers are competing with online publishers and digital-native content companies for both readers and advertising, which they clearly are, then they have to be better than their competition — being just as inaccurate is hardly helping their cause. And they should be spending a lot more time on trying to measure real engagement (repeat visits, time spent, etc.) than on simplistic and flawed vanity metrics like raw circulation numbers. That is a mug’s game.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

The company says advertisers can be exclusive sponsors of the shows, which consist of six 2 two to four-minute episodes across four screens: smartphone, tablet, web and cable. The shows are titled “I am Unstoppable,” “Virus Hunters” and “Alive,” and will be shown this fall in addition to three other already-announced web series.

For the Weather Company, the original web series are an attempt to tap digital dollars while also expanding its content offerings — which include the Weather Channel and Weather.com — beyond forecasts and national disasters. Weather’s digital editor-in-chief, Neil Katz, announced the details as part of Newfront, a series of events in New York at which video creators are trying to woo Madison Avenue.

The web series comes at a time that the Weather Company is emerging as a formidable data and advertising company. Recently, the company has been comparing itself to Google insofar as it allows marketers to sell in real time based on users’ likely intent — an ice cream company, for instance, could display its ads while the sun is out. It has also been hiring veteran data and ad tech executives.

On the social media front, the Weather Company has been creating personalized products like a custom Twitter forecasts and, as an executive described today, a “social emergency network” that can let people use Facebook to warn loved ones in a given region about an impending weather apocalypse.  It has also been expanding its original TV content.

The Weather Company’s mass audience makes it attractive to advertisers but its histrionic style — which can feel like tragedy tourism — has also attracted ridicule. After a snowfall this year in the northeast, for instance, Gawker displayed a series of screenshots to explain how “Snow panic has driven Weather.com completely Insane.” The company also gained attention for “Torturing its interns with Twitter” — a social media stunt for “tornado week” that involved high-powered fans aimed at interns.

Among those questions are the following: Are people going to pay directly for content? Is native advertising going to subsidize media? Does sponsored content raise ethical issues for media companies? Are individual creators going to succeed by connecting directly with their audiences or by striking deals with existing media entities? And as far as I can tell, the answer to all of these questions is the same: Yes. And no. That may not seem very helpful, but I think it is.

You have to try everything

At one point during the panel on monetization — which also included Richard Tofel from ProPublica, Raju Narisetti from News Corp. and Bob Bowman from Major League Baseball — Atlantic Media president Justin Smith said that his organization didn’t really have a single answer to the question of how to monetize content, because it was more or less trying everything it possibly could (which is one of the reasons why I have said Atlantic is one of the media companies worth watching).

(L to R:) Richard Tofel, President, ProPublica; Justin Smith, President, Atlantic; Raju Narisetti,SVP and Deputy Head of Strategy, News Corp; Bob Bowman President and CEO, MLB Advanced Media paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

For the Atlantic, that means experimenting with sponsored content (despite its potential pitfalls, which were highlighted during the Scientology incident) as well as doing live events, and introducing a premium offering — which Smith wouldn’t provide much detail about but is supposedly coming soon. As he put it:

“To say that the ad model is going to win over the pay model is foolish. I think the solution will be multiple revenue streams, it will be how experimental, how creative you are in seeking out those revenue streams… we must try everything. And we must not believe that one thing is going to work over the other until we actually experience it and see it over a period of time.”

The future isn’t going to be one model

Even just on that panel, we had almost every model represented, with ProPublica — which is built on a donation model, one that Dick Tofel believes will be replicated in dozens of states and cities, in the same way most metropolitan areas have symphonies or ballet troupes — and the Atlantic, and then News Corp. with its variety of hard and soft paywalls, and MLB with its app-based and content-focused strategy. Bowman said everyone should have some form of pay model, because why not give your hardcore fans a way to pay you for what they value?

(L to R:) Andrew Sullivan, Editor, The Dish; Andrew Ross Sorkin, Columnist, NYT; Maria Popova, Writer, Brain Pickings; Tim Ferriss, Author, The 4-Hour Workweek paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

The “blogging superstar” panel also had a variety of models, none of which was obviously better than the other. Maria Popova of Brain Pickings said that she didn’t even think of herself as a business — she wrote “for an audience of one” and was happy to get whatever donations she could get. Andrew Sullivan has famously bet his future on a direct-to-reader model, but he also said he isn’t opposed to advertising either (although he is adamantly opposed to native advertising). And Andrew Ross Sorkin says he is happy to continue building a personal empire of sorts within the New York Times.

Maybe that in itself is enough of a valuable insight, at least for now: that the future of media isn’t going to be one thing, or even a couple of obvious things — there is no one-size-fits-all solution (if there ever was) and waiting around for one to appear is a mug’s game. At least for the foreseeable future, the landscape of digital media is going to be a form of loosely organized chaos, with everyone trying whatever they can. As Clay Shirky said about newspapers two years ago, this chaotic environment is actually beneficial, because we need to try everything in order to figure out what works.

Note: You can find streaming videos of each of the major sessions at paidContent Live in this post, and links to transcripts of those sessions in this post, as well as a roundup of our live-blogging of the event.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Mark Strozier and Albert Chau

These deals reinforce something I tried to make clear in an earlier post about the company’s plans: namely, if you don’t like television then you’re probably not going to be very happy with the future of Twitter. The deal with BBC America — which is owned by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the agency, and carries such popular shows as Doctor Who and Top Gear in the U.S. — will presumably see Twitter run clips from those shows inside its users’ streams, in much the same way it did with ESPN during March Madness.

.@Twitter and @BBCAmerica, home of #DoctorWho & #TopGear, ink deal to offer 1st in-Tweet branded video synced to entertainment TV series—
BBC AMERICA (@BBCAMERICA) April 18, 2013

TV shows inside your Twitter stream

There have been other such one-off deals — as well as arrangements like the one with the Weather Channel, which will bring weather clips into Twitter’s expanded tweets — but the BBC America partnership seems to be the first one that involves an entire channel and potentially all of their shows, and it could easily be the prototype for further such deals. But will users react positively or negatively to all of this real-time video showing up in their Twitter streams?

Meanwhile, Twitter is also launching a somewhat different project with the Comedy Central channel that illustrates just how much the company wants to bring video as an experience inside the stream: the network is launching what it calls a five-day “comedy festival,” but all of the content will appear within Twitter, and most of it will be either created or distributed via Twitter’s recent video acquisition, Vine — which is designed for video clips of six seconds or less.

According to a report in the New York Times about the arrangement, a number of comedians — including legends like Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner — will be posting video snippets of comedy routines as well as jokes using the hashtag #ComedyFest. On Tuesday, comedian Steve Agee will reportedly host a “Vine Dining” party as part of the festival, in which he and others will tell stories in six-second video clips that will be hosted and distributed by the Twitter network.

Video plus brands equals ad dollars

As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post last week about the rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, these moves are just part of Twitter’s ongoing plans to not only host TV and video content on the network, but to monetize it (or help its creators monetize it) as well. In addition to Vine, one of the recent acquisitions that could help Twitter do that is Bluefin Labs, which specializes in tracking the real-time data about who is watching what show.

That kind of information — along with the data from Twitter’s partnership with Nielsen, announced last year — would in turn help Twitter appeal to advertisers who are looking for as much targeting information as they can get. And that appeal could be paying off already: according to a report from the Financial Times on Monday, Twitter has signed a major multi-year deal worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” with Starcom MediaVest Group, a large ad-buying firm that represents clients like Walmart and Coca-Cola.

Moves like these — and the launch of Twitter Music last week — reinforce just how much the company has evolved away from its original nature as a short-messaging service that gave you only 140 characters or less, and could be consumed quickly. Now, it is becoming a lot more like a broadcast network, or at least a willing handmaiden for broadcast networks, as CEO Dick Costolo predicted in a speech last year. But is that what users really want from Twitter?

This post was updated on April 24 to note that BBC America is a unit of BBC Worldwide and not a joint venture with Discovery Channel as was originally stated.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K and Eva Blue

Twitter’s deal means the company is officially moving into larger territory when it comes to advertising and turning the social media company into a serious platform for brands to spend their budgets. The report says the deal will give SMG’s clients access to special advertising slots and opportunities with Twitter.

The company has been improving its different ad products for businesses of all sizes, recently rolling out keyword advertising that allows companies to advertise around particular words that individuals tweet. A research firm recently estimated that Twitter will earn nearly $1 billion in advertising revenue in 2014, likely due to strong growth on mobile, making $528 million this year and $950 million in 2014.

Social media use around television and broadcast events has provided huge advertising opportunities for Twitter already, with the company forging media partnerships around TV and sports, like the NCAA March Madness tournament.

There was much talk about both aspects of this ongoing evolution at the conference, from people like star blogger Andrew Sullivan and Tumblr founder David Karp to investor Ken Lerer and Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. What follows are just some of the key lessons or moments that struck me as significant during the show (you can also read our live coverage of each session and watch livestreams of each panel as well).

Paywalls vs. open journalism:

During my interview with him, one of the key points that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger made was that there is a very clear tension between the efforts by an increasing number of newspapers to erect paywalls — in order to bolster their revenue — and the philosophical approach to journalism that sees openness and interactivity with readers as a cornerstone of what journalism has become. As Rusbridger put it:

“It is journalism that wants a response. It is journalism that is itself responsive. It is journalism that doesn’t just sit on the web as though it has no connection with the web, that acknowledges that the web is the most extraordinary revolution in publishing where lots of people will be publishing extremely worthwhile and informative information. And so you can produce better things by not ignoring it or building a barrier between yourself and that but incorporating it and linking to it.”

The many different flavors of paywall:

Much of the discussion that took place on the monetization panel — which featured Dick Tofel of ProPublica, Justin Smith of Atlantic Media, Raju Narisetti of News Corp. and Bob Bowman of Major League Baseball — was about the myriad ways in which media companies can charge for their content. Bowman argued that every media company should be charging its users, even if it is through some kind of “pro” version, and Smith announced that The Atlantic will soon be launching a content offering related to the magazine that will be subscription only, although he didn’t say what kind of content it would be.

Narisetti also talked a bit about his vision of a “reverse paywall,” which focuses more on membership benefits that readers could accumulate based on their engagement with a site — although Bowman said he thought this would just encourage readers to click on ads or perform other tasks in order to get something for free, and that advertisers would quickly see through this gaming and not be interested in advertising around it. Smith also pointed out that The Atlantic‘s event business produces a lot of revenue for the company, and therefore decreases the need for a strict paywall.

No one can agree on sponsored content:

On the panel that focused on the increasingly blurry line between editorial content and advertising, Felix Salmon of Reuters challenged Jon Steinberg of BuzzFeed, Kyle Monson of Knock Twice and Forbes chief operating officer Lewis D’Vorkin to define their terms — but the panelists spent most of their time debating whether “native advertising” of all kinds is inherently unethical or duplicitous in some way (the view held by Andrew Sullivan, who has railed against the phenomenon).

Steinberg maintained that the conventional wisdom that says average readers are confused — and in some sense misled — by sponsored content is hogwash, and that this is essentially a lie perpetrated by traditional media entities who continue to rely on banner advertising for their revenue. According to the BuzzFeed president, banner ads are a dying medium, and some form of sponsored content is the only real alternative. Monson, however, argued that if native advertising becomes too ubiquitous, readers will begin to ignore it the same way they currently ignore every other form of advertising.

Independence is a doubled-edged sword:

(L to R:) Andrew Sullivan, Editor, The Dish; Andrew Ross Sorkin, Columnist, NYT; Maria Popova, Writer, Brain Pickings; Tim Ferriss, Author, The 4-Hour Workweek paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

One of the highlights of the conference for many (including me) was a panel composed of superstar bloggers and authors Andrew Sullivan, Maria Popova, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Tim Ferris. Sullivan has famously bet his livelihood on going direct to his readers for financial support — although he maintained that he is not anti-advertising, as some have assumed. He said he is dedicated to that approach even to the point of not taking a salary until he can prove that the model works, and that he values his independence and his direct relationship with readers over the comfort of working for a large media entity.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, by contrast, has been able to build a fairly large team and business model for himself inside the New York Times — even though he could probably (or theoretically) have created something similar, and more independent, on his own. Sorkin said that his interest in remaining inside a large media entity stems in part from the resources it puts at his disposal, and partly from his commitment to the brand itself, since the paper took a large bet on him years ago when he created DealBook.

There was a lot more to the conference that I haven’t even touched on here — including a startup showcase featuring new platforms like Circa and Branch, a panel on the use of algorith-driven personalization with Mark Johnson of Zite and Aria Haghighi of Prismatic, a great look at the future of books with Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks and Evan Ratliffe of Atavist, a discussion between Om and John Borthwick of Betaworks, and an interview with the architect of Aereo’s ongoing disruption of cable.

Thanks to all those who attended and to all of our speakers as well.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Albert Chau