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Wednesday, October 26, 2016
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The Information’s Jessica Lessin on how she’s scaling an already-expensive subscription productGoing both upmarket to investors ($10,000 a year) and downmarket to students ($234 a year). By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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Bustle’s open-sourcing a way for news orgs to port content to AMP, Instant Articles, and Apple News“We thought the right way to approach it was to share it as an open project so the whole industry can move forward building on something like this rather than people halfway solving the problem individually.” By Ricardo Bilton. |
What We’re Reading
Politico / Peter Sterne
Guardian CEO: ‘Nothing strategic’ about Guardian U.S. cuts →
Guardian Media Group CEO David Pemsel told Guardian U.S. staff in an off-the-record meeting on Monday “that staff cuts were purely about cutting costs, not about a strategic restructuring of the business,” and that “his earlier projections — which called for Guardian U.S. to break even by April 2017 — were ‘unrealistic,’ given the Guardian U.S.’s lower-than-expected revenue.”
Politico / Josh Gerstein
Backpage is happy about losing its lawsuit over sexual-service classified ads →
“Ultimately, the judge reaches the proper conclusion that you have to have actual knowledge of criminal activity…It confirms that Backpage is not an appropriate subject of a SAVE Act prosecution.”
Ad Age / Suman Bhattacharyya
Forecast: Digital ads to overtake traditional ads in local U.S. markets by 2018 →
In local markets, digital advertising, including mobile, will grow from $44.2 billion in 2016 to $50.2 billion in 2017, BIA/Kelsey forecasts. The use of traditional media for local ads is expected to drop from $101.1 billion in 2016 to $98.6 billion in 2017. The company expects digital local ad share will exceed that of print media by 2018.
Wall Street Journal / Jack Marshall and Steven Perlberg
Get ready for a “bro-focused digital media” invasion from the UK →
“The Lad Bible's video of a man helping three raccoons escape from a dumpster generated about 14 million Facebook views.”
Pacific Standard / Jared Keller
Facebook will now start showing you gorier images →
“This is a good thing, and not just because censorship is diametrically opposed to the freedom of expression on which democracies are built; Facebook's retreat represents a victory for historical testimony.”
Pew Research Center / Maeve Duggan and Aaron Smith
Pew: More than one-third of U.S. social media are worn out by the political content they encounter →
“More than one-third of social media users are worn out by the amount of political content they encounter, and more than half describe their online interactions with those they disagree with politically as stressful and frustrating”
Digiday / Yuyu Chen
Snapchat stops autoplay, marketers grapple with declining view counts →
“While it should come as no surprise that Snapchat's dropping autoplay has led to a decline in views, marketers do not seem to be adjusting their strategies on Snapchat. Nor is the platform planning to adjust its pricing to reflect the lower view counts.”
Medium / Sarah Schmalbach
What my Facebook feed looks like without news →
“Still, what I think is interesting to practically consider is what kind of experience Facebook would be without news, and to gauge how essential it might be to the News Feed.”
Medium / Frontline and Emblematic VR
Frontline is doing a series of posts on its experiences with VR →
“Under the Frontline standards, a re-creation can be an effective device for telling a story when the real image or scene is simply not able to be captured — as long as viewers do not mistake it for the real thing.”
Kickstarter / Peter Axtman
Here’s a Kickstarter for a new quarterly print hockey magazine →
It’s called Barn Magazine, and it’s the latest entrant into a growing market of high-end print sports publications such as Howler and 8by8, which both cover soccer, and Raquet, which focuses on Tennis.