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This week’s link herd January 12, 2015

January 12, 2015 by Andrew Leave a Comment

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A big catch up of shared links and discovers from the end of 2014 and the first two weeks of 2015.

  • Twizoo – This Tiny Startup Has Figured Out How To Turn Twitter’s Free Data Into A Goldmine
    Business Insider on a startup called Twizoo that mines Twitter to pull together restaurant reviews. It’s said that this is a way to extract value from Twitter’s data and that there are about 7 tweet reviews per location in Twizoo to every one Yelp review.
  • Nick Denton says the traffic game is over, and BuzzFeed has won
    Nick Denton says Gawker Media is no longer just about the traffic. He says that while tipping a nod to Buzzfeed and admitting they’ve won. Does Google’s move towards viewable impressions make a difference here? It might for Gawker but won’t for Buzzfeed.
  • Why BuzzFeed Is Massively Underrated (and 9 Things Publishers and Brands Should Learn From It) |
    Shane Snow of Contently gets around to giving Buzzfeed some praise. My favourite of his 9 points is “Buzzfeed has figured out how to get premium advertisers their money’s worth”. How? Viral lift in the new metric. Exactly right.
  • Is Waterstones Getting Ready to Walk Away From Amazon?r
    Waterstones have said that Kindle sales dried up over Christmas. This has resulted in speculation as to whether they’ll walk from their deal with Amazon. Waterstones also claims that paper books sold well. There’s a difference between an ebook and a Kindle, though, and Waterstones gets reoccuring revenue on all ebooks bought from devices they’ve sold.
  • How to Get Read on Medium
    The team at Medium have an official guide on the best way to construct posts that get read.
  • Facing credibility gap, Upworthy poaches from The New York Times
    Upworthy has always insisted that its A/B testing was secondary to its goal of getting people to talk about socially worthy issues. Traffic is down from last year, the internet’s fasting growing site is off the boil, and hiring Amy O’Leary will give it editorial clout. What will Upworthy do with it?
  • What to Learn from the Man Who Managed Reddit’s Community of Millions
    Reddit’s community management boss puts instinct and intuition up there along with data. In fact, watch out you don’t get too bogged down in data.
  • Google Goes All In On “Viewability” For Display And YouTube Ads
    Google announced at CES 2015 that they’ll start to roll out “viewability” stats across their YouTube and DoubleClick network. This mean advertisers will be able to see if audiences actually saw the ads the advertisers bought.
  • What does the mobile market look like at the start of 2015?
    The Media Briefing puts together a look at the upcoming mobile landscape with insight and an extra bonus video presentation embed from Benedict Evans.
  • Private Marketplaces: The Death Knell For Publishers?
    Brian Fitzgerald offers insight on how to survive the “digital publishing apocalypse” in a piece in which PMPs are worryingly troublesome for publishers because they can’t predict the revenue those markets will drive.
  • Infographic: Reddit reports record-breaking 2014 with 71.25bn views
    The UK doesn’t even get a look in for Reddit’s top country list. It’s Iceland that comes top with 20.9 pageviews per capita. 54.9 million posts and 535 million comments in the last 12 months.
  • King of Clickbait
    A lengthy interview with Emerson Spartz, of Dose, who has a talent for headlines and clickbait. He’s into algorithms that cycle through and test alternative headlines but not trailblazing new ideas.
  • The Year’s 10 Most Popular Content Marketing Columns
    The Marketing Land team, sister of Search Engine Land, put together a list of the most popular “content marketing” columns they published this year. Worth a read even if many lean strongly towards the SEO.
  • 11 Actionable Content Marketing Articles You May Have Missed in 2014
    Unbounce offer up a slice of curation by linking too and networking with some of their favourite authors and dealers of common sense.
  • Retailers Waste More Than Half Of Digital Budgets On Bot Traffic
    Half of display budgets is wasted on artificial traffic created by bots. These bots, by and large, are interested in fraud and earning operates ill-gotten revenue based on fake clicks and impressions.
  • What You Can Learn From the Best Marketer of the Year
    Heinken set out to do beer advertising differently. It wanted to boost the profile of the beer drinker and by doing so boost the profile of beer.
  • Michael Wolff on digital media in 2015: ‘A deluge of crap’
    Shouty man Michael Wolff takes a bleak view of digital media. It’s all rubbish he argues and the value, the good content, isn’t possible to realise.
  • 3 Blogger Outreach Trends That You Can Implement
    Kristen Matthews picks three trends she sees in the art and science of blogger outreach and discusses each. Blogger outreach has been forefront of many marketing activities again this year and I think Kristen is spot on with these trends.
  • Platform Or Publisher? Whatever You Call It, It’s The Future Of Media
    Techcrunch host a post from CEO and co-founder of Moviepilot, Tobi Bauckhage, in which it is argued that publishing and/or platforms (kinda the same thing; says Bauckhage) is the future of media. Yup.
  • Say Media Buys Out Investors As It Exits The Media Business And Focuses On Its Publishing Platform
    We’re all publishers, right? Say Media gave it a good crack of the whip and spent a lot of money but now they’re buying out their investors and reinventing itself as a next-generation publishing platform.
  • Why PR is embracing the PESO model
    An insightful article on Mashable (yes) on how PR now must include paid media, earned and owned media. The summary: we’re all publishers now.
  • New questions in mobile
    Benedict Evans (always worth reading) asks some sensible questions about mobile. He looks at the pattern of bundling services into platforms and how long it can continue for. He looks at what the Chinese players might do and at what the future for Android might be.
  • Design revenues rise but staff costs hit the bottom line, report shows
    Accountant KingstonSmithW1 has a report that shows although income has risen by 5% in design agencies (which are mainly independent) that margins have fallen due to rising staff and operation costs.
  • UK agency profit margins hit 10-year low
    An accountancy firm has revealed that the profits of the top 40 UK based RP agencies are at an all time low. Why? Employment cost up by 5.25% and operating costs up by 7.47%. Wages account for 62% of gross income.
  • What Evernote and Uber deals mean for the future of media
    Quartz takes a look at two examples that help build Zebra Eclipse’s point – brands are becoming publishers. In this example we look at how Uber and Evernote position themselves as such for deal making.
  • A first look at Femsplain, a new publishing community for women
    The Daily Dot investigates Amber Gordon’s Femsplain. This is a publishing platform and community built by women for women.

This week’s link herd October 20, 2014

October 20, 2014 by Andrew Leave a Comment

It’s a mega catch-up! This week’s Link Herd has discoveries dating back the past few weeks. Perhaps think of this post as a feeding frenzy of “we’re all publishers now” goodness as we examine trends in the marketing, media and publishing world.

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  • Disney’s Frozen Marketing And Online Singalongs
    Insight from UK’s Unruly Media on how Disney was able to generate interest and money by allowing Frozen and its iconic songs to flourish on YouTube.
  • Publishers keep tabs on Google’s latest skirmish
    Newspaper publishers in Germany have found Google News won’t be showing their snippets any more. This is Google defending themselves from legal claims of copyright infringement. Is it a case of be careful of what your wish for?
  • Love it? BuzzFeed Wants to Help You Buy It Too
    Buzzfeed adds a “click to buy” button. That would be standard for most sites but for Buzzfeed the implications are larger as retailers will find it much easier to determine whether the site’s readers are actually interested in buying items.
  • The New York Times needs to rethink its strategy — untargeted mini paywalls aren’t the answer
    The NYT is laying off staff, closing one app and taking a hard look at another under-performing mobile strategy. In this piece Mathew Ingram argues that unfocused paywalls aren’t the answer; readers won’t pay premium for content slices. They will, however, pay for relationships so turn the branded journalists into something worth paying for.
  • How to modernise a public relations agency or communication team
    How well is the PR industry adapting to a world in which we’re all publishers? Not well enough argues Stephen Waddington,President of the CIPR, argues that change has been talked about but not actually done. In this piece he walks the industry through some steps to achieve change.
  • Stop Making Misleading Studies on News and Social (by @baekdal) #opinion
    Baekdal tears into a Newspapers vs Facebook report and in doing so makes a host of well argued points. The piece covers everything from what ‘direct traffic’ in analytics actually means through to the definition of news.
  • Soledad O’Brien Brilliantly Explains How Brands Should Work With Elite Storytellers
    Modern media companies want brands to underwrite the stories they can’t necessarily afford to tell, and brands want to be a part of great stories. But very often, that partnership doesn’t work because brands are reluctant to do the things that go into truly great storytelling: namely, taking a leap of faith and relinquishing control.
  • Here’s What 2.7 Billion Social Shares Say About Online Publishing
    A in-depth study into what sort of content and which publisher is statistically significant in nearly 3 billion shares. The answer? Very few publishers and no trends. Old press tends to be more negative than new press. Facebook dominates shares. Surprised?
  • PewDiePie is sick of internet comments too, removes them from his YouTube videos
    King of YouTube the gamer PewDiePie is fed up of YouTube comments. It’s all spam or self promotion according to the vblogger. He’s going to turn them off from his channel and use Twitter or pehaps even Reddit instead. A challenge for Google?
  • YouTube introduces fan funding to allow users to donate to their favourite vloggers
    YouTube is introducing a “tip” system to let fans donate small dollar values to their favourite vloggers. Google takes a 5% cut. The result will likely be a boom in magic middle vloggers who will be able to step up their game, or be more willing to, with the additional revenue.
  • Who owns the rights to branded content: publishers or brands?
    An interesting question and one that’s taken a surprising time to surface – who owns branded content? Can brands pull content after they pay a platform to publish it? If they do then is the publisher due further compensation?
  • Will travel blogging as we know it fade into the sunset?
    Drew Meyers, co-founder of Horizon, argues that travel blogging as we know it today is likely to become a thing of the past as habits change.
  • 500 Publishers On Content Marketing Best Practices [Research]
    500 publishers, including some big names, contribute to a survey about being pitched too. Some of these publishers get dozens of pitches each and every day. Some of these publishers never respond to a pitch.
  • Google Launching Ad-Free YouTube Music Key Subscription Service
    The advertising community may well be up in arms over this rumour – imagine if YouTube users could opt-out of ads. Imagine if that also came with a music subscription! Where would video ads go? It is just a rumour. I think it’s a good move from YouTube too.
  • Brands should be collaborators, creators and curators – not just advertisers
    Very much in tone with ZEST’s “Creators, Curators and Community Moderators”, Georgia Arnold executive director of the MTV Staying Alive Foundation argues that brands should be more than just advertisers.
  • The LinkedIn challenge: acting like a publisher
    LinkedIn’s senior director of global marketing talking about the challenge the network faces – creating and growing a publishing arm within a platform company.
  • We Have a Rape Gif Problem and Gawker Media Won’t Do Anything About It
    A horrible story from Gawker staff about Gawker Media. The Jezebel team are at their wits end having to deal with horrible gifs that get posted as spam. The company won’t block them. As a result poor Jezebel staff have to delete each by hand.
  • Need more evidence that publishers and agencies are evolving on the same path? Mashable’s future is branded content and consultancy
    Mashable’s CRO describes the company as a “hybrid tech-media company” and wants the phrase native ads banned. Mashable is pushing further into branded content and consultancy.

This week’s link herd June 2, 2014

June 2, 2014 by Andrew Leave a Comment

This issue of the Link Herd contains plenty of pointers to the future.
What is the Zebra Eclipse future, you ask? I believe that marketing agencies and publishers share a common evolution. Both are now interested in engaging with audiences (not always with content) with the aim of turning that engagement into business value.

In the news below you’ll find publishers launching agencies (content marketing), publishers merging their marketing and content teams and marketing agencies discussing content and audience strategies. You’ve even got one switched on retailer who admit they’re essentially a publisher these days.

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  • WhatsApp emerges as big share driver for publishers
    WhatsApp can drive significant amounts on traffic – more than Twitter for those publishers able to track it. The lack of tracking is one problem and the other significant challenge is just how hard it is to integrate the share functionality in site and apps.
  • The HuffingtonPost moves all comments to Facebook
    In a move that shows the importance of community (return visitors and those who’ll persuade others to become return visitors) the US version of the HuffingtonPost is moving exclusively to Facebook comments. They say this is where readers want to discuss their articles but the team will have looked very closely at comment rates, engagement and traffic too.
  • Everything you need to know about the future of newspapers is in these two charts
    Two charts that paint a clear but bleak future for newspapers. The trend away from newspapers is likely to accelerate. At the same time the stats says the newspapers over index with advertisers with mobile ready to rise up and close the difference.
  • VICE to Gawker: Fuck You and Fuck Your Garbage Click-Bait ‘Journalism’
    Gawker and Vice continue their handbags at dawn battle. Interesting? Only in the sense that the two, page impression seeking, companies are doing this in public.
  • John Lewis marketing director and winner of The Drum’s Marketer of the Year Award Craig Inglis: ‘We regard ourselves as a publisher’
    John Lewis’ marketing director Craig Inglis is on hand to argue the Zebra Eclipse cause – in this article and video for The Drum (a publisher who recently launched a content agency) he says that the retailer considers itself to be a publisher.
  • Bloomberg gives its native ads a data spin
    A data-mining department within Bloomberg that is part of the editorial side of the company is being used to power and native ads in a program called Bloomberg Denizen. It’s the merger of publishing and marketing. Zurich Insurance Group is the first client and they’ve already signed on for a two-year campaign.
  • How Disney learned to stop worrying and love copyright infringement
    An insightful look into how Disney has done almost a 180 when it comes to policing their copyright and now seems very happy to let their fans create, curate and parody the property the company owns. Why? It’s good for business. These are the people who buy Disney. These are the people who turned Frozen into a phenomenon.
  • What Television Will Look Like in 2025, According to Netflix
    A great read on what Neil Hunt of Netflix predicted TV might look like in 10 years. Curation will be hugely important – albeit automated and provided by Netflix’s recommendation engine.
  • The Drum launches content marketing agency led by former NMA editor Justin Pearse
    Another clear signal that publishing and marketing are converging: The Drum have launched a Content Marketing Agency called The Drum Works. The Drum Works will be seperate from the editorial business but will create engaging content for The Drum’s online and print audiences.
  • The Future of eBooks? Streaming is Now 21% of Music Revenues in the US
    The growth of music streaming, completely legal, continues at a pace. In the States streaming now accounts for more than 20%. The Digital Reader asks what this means for the future of eBooks.
  • Publishing 2014: 3 brands tackling the digital challenge
    How are publishers adapting to the digital challenge? This article, a piece from Tara Honeywall at Mediator, looks at the FT, Conde Nast and the Times.

This week’s link herd March 24, 2014

March 24, 2014 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Today’s weekly round-up is actually two weeks of news in a single post. That’s agency life for you – even with a semi-automatic publishing system and an almost religious devotion to always-on sometimes the speed of events steal time.

One way to keep up with Zebra Eclipse Studios’ link discoveries is to follow on Twitter. @ZebraEclipse tweets via Delicious as it shares. Why Delicious? It’s not because this blogger is old school; it is because Delicious powers that semi-automatic publishing system and because it uses Twitter cards better than almost any other bookmark system. You preview each link find on Twitter without visiting the original site. Just enough for a teaser.

  • You ruined my wedding – and you’re suing me?
    The rising tide of contracts that include “Non-Disparagement” clauses that are intended to stop negative reviews. The “gotcha” factor, the article says, will be important in American courts. If it wasn’t reasonable to put a non-disparagement in a contract then it may not stand even if it’s signed.
  • Amazon Publishing to Expand in US, UK, Germany
    How well is Amazon Publishing doing? Read any blockbusters they’ve backed? Maybe so but Amazon Publishing will expand in the UK, US and Germany according to a leaked memo.
  • Coull Plays It Cool, Raising Another $4M Angel Round And Opening In NYC
    Video affiliate platform Coull is raising more cash and will be profitable this year. The system lets publishers ad overlay messages to YouTube videos to earn CPA revenue from clickthroughs. The CEO says they’ve no competitors and that may be true but only until YouTube eases up on their own overlay rules.
  • Kotaku invades UK
    Popular and sometimes controversial gaming site Kotaku is coming to the UK. A number of interesting things here – it’s a website; it’s already in the UK as most games that launch in the US launch in the UK. That’s why Kotaku alreadyy has 1.1m UK users every month. Secondly, Kotaku’s owners Gawkers won’t be managing the site but Future will be. Future and Gawker do have a partnership. Kotaku UK (Kotauk?) will be run by former IGN editor Keza MacDonald.
  • Fraudulent traffic: adventures in ad farming
    A walkthrough of how easy it is to drive fraudulent traffic and make a profit. In this example Jack Marshall makes a %30 markup on just $100 of fake traffic. It’s easy. The main “silver lining” of the post is that all but one ad networks wouldn’t touch his site.
  • How To Do Content Marketing Right
    An article with plenty of advice and opinion on the art and science of brand publishing. The first point – stop calling it content. This is not an uncommon argument these days. Let’s see how loud the calls become.
  • Group chats launches on io9 and Kotaku
    Gawker showing it understands how important community is by launching group charts out across their sites. The rollout began with Deadpsin and Jalopnik the feature which allows readers to talk online in groups is now on Io9 and Kotaku.

Recent ZEST posts

  • Using Kickstarter to battle tired tropes: An interview with Monica Valentinelli
  • The Guardian’s Key Publishing trends
  • This week’s link herd February 8, 2016
  • What could publishers offer? An interview with T Q Chant
  • Does The Society of Authors’ open letter to the Publishers Association miss a trick?

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