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This week’s link herd February 8, 2016

February 8, 2016 by Andrew Leave a Comment

What’s a link herd?

Here at Zebra Eclipse Studios a link herd is triggered when there’s enough interesting stories about the common evolution of marketing and publishing to share in a roundup. Sometimes link herds are short and snappy. Not today, today’s link herd is a catch-up that stretches back a few weeks.

Enjoy!

WSJ drops publisher frenemy LinkedIn’s share button
LinkedIn has been something of a frenemy. But now, The Wall Street Journal has gone full-on hostile by dropping its LinkedIn sharing button from its article pages.
In search of Facebook love, publishers form link-sharing pacts with each other
The site works with around 35 publishers, including Mental Floss, Maxim and Wired. Seven of those sites have agreed in turn to post Daily Dot stories on their own Facebook pages.
Google News Publishers Don’t Get A Ranking Boost
Shouldn’t be a huge surprise but John Mueller, one of Google’s most vocal engineers, has confirmed that publishers approved for Google News don’t get a ranking boost in web search.
Meet the Instagram gallery entrepreneurs
Since they are doing a good job of dragging the fine art world into in the 21st century, Business Insider decided it was time to interview them, while having a look round their Soho gallery.
Three YouTube influencers give their views on brand partnerships
What demands do vloggers make of brands wanting to work with them? They need clarity, control and plenty of time.
Now That The FTC Has Spoken On Native Advertising, What’s Next?
The days of playing fast and easy in native advertising are over.
PewDiePie to Launch His Own Content Network
pewdiepie, youtube, disney, felixkjellberg
Slant News Growing, With 70% Of Revenue Going To Writers
Slant News is growing and it pays its crowdsourced content creators up with 70% of the ad revenue their stories earn.
Curve Digital and Kuju merge to form ‘major new British publisher’
New British computer game publisher and developer created as The Catalis Group merges acquisitions and ditches old brands.
What were the biggest stories on Facebook in 2015?
NewsWhip’s 2015 roundup shows just how important and huge a viral success can be – but also how rare and hard it is.
Digital publishers face a winter of discontent
Many venture-backed publishers are coming up to the limits of scale. Their models were based on eye-popping audience-growth figures and the presumption that business would follow. That’s not always the case. And traffic growth inevitably hits a ceiling.
Ziff Davis tries middle ground between free and paywall – Digiday
Trying quizzes instead of paywalls. Will it work?
Dennis Publishing outlines 2016 ad blocking plans
Testing the new future where ad blocking is common and alternative approaches scarce.
Medium is now hosting publisher sites, starting with The Awl’s Billfold – Digiday
Medium offering itself up to professional publishers as a platform. Who’s in control?
Are publishers in a losing battle with content distribution platforms?
Third-party distribution channels are increasingly prominent part of the digital publishing landscape, but instead of rejecting channels that don’t offer full ownership and control, many publishers are embracing them.
Lad Bible Ogles Stake Sale As Mags Fade Away
The King is Dead, long live the King. Just weeks after Zoo and FHM close the Lad Bibe is said to be raising £20M. It employs 70 people, his highly profitable and has 10.5m fans.
The Six Biggest Mistakes In Corporate Blogging
Spoilers: SEO, lack of promotion, length/interest. community, involvement and giving up too soon.
Business Bloggers Lead the Pack As Personal Blogs Decline
More bloggers are now client focused; spending up to 6 hours on a post, producing more long form content and 64% write more than one blog.
WordPress.com Goes Open Source And Gets A Desktop App
The easy, free but ad supported version of WordPress is now fully separated from WordPress core, is available as open source on GitHub, has a desktop app and has moved away from LAMP to favour JavaScript and API calls.
Do you agree with Mike Butcher: Is the press release dead?
Article discusses whether there’s a role for the humble press release in today’s digital landscape. From Zebra Eclipse’s point of view it writes, as a given, that publishers and marketers are on a common evolutionary path. We’re all publishers now.
Google Launches Live Label In Carousel For Live Blog Publishers
A new set of search results for publishers right at the top of Google. There’s likely more involved than setting the right schema markup on your posts; the publisher will also be ona whitelist (as with Google News) to qualify in the first place.
Life After Content Blocking
Ad blocking started as an initiative by independent developers who wanted to improve our browsing experience. Now that at least one company, Apple, has made Content Blocking “official”, ad-supported publishing business models are in trouble.
The Journalists Who Refuse To Admit They’re Actually Content Marketers
What is the difference between a paid-for article praising a product and an article praising the exact same product in which no money has changed hands?
Why Web Pages Suck
If anything this puts Facebook’s Instant Articles initiative in a far more positive light: the social network is offering to not only improve the user experience by displaying articles instantly — thanks, primarily, to the lack of programmatic advertising cruft — but also to help monetize said content by selling ads against it and sharing 70%, backed by profile data that is far superior to even the ad networks. Indeed, arguably the biggest takeaway should be that the chief objection to Facebook’s offer — that publishers are giving up their independence — is a red herring. Publishers are already slaves to the ad networks, and their primary decision at this point is which master — ad networks or Facebook — is more preferable
How 98-year-old Forbes Media generates 70% of its revenues from digital
An interesting story of a media company that put SEO before pageviews which resulted in better loyalty, improved SEO and more pageviews.
WPP, Snapchat And DailyMail Launch A Content Agency
Publishers, platforms and agencies – launching agencies. In this case all three have created a 12-person agency called Truffle Pig.
About.com Launches Sponsored Content Studio For Native Ads
What’s this? A publisher creating an agency to help with content publishing? We’re all publishers now.

This week’s link herd January 19, 2015

January 19, 2015 by Andrew Leave a Comment

One some ~~Every~~ Mondays Zebra Eclipse updates with a new Herd. The Herd is a digest of related links to stories appropriate to the blog. The goal is to show the common evolution of agency and publisher and to highlight the influence of creators, curators and community moderators.

Google Closes Gap on Facebook for Worldwide Social Logins
The battle for the universal login is a brutal one fought below the headlines – for now. Facebook has been leading, is leading but the news that might surprise some given Google+’s struggles is that Google is closing the gap.
BuzzFeed to NME: publishers’ lessons in online video
Sponsored tips from Outbrain on how brands can better use video. Unbundle and repackage – in other words; it’s better to have 10 videos that are a minute long than 1 video that’s 10 minutes long. Reuse your clips when you can and turn articles into videos.
Oxford Mail’s WhatsApp news service tops 1,200 subscribers after six months
Publishers are experimenting with private message solutions like WhatsApp as a way to connect with their audiences.
Yet Another Publisher Sues Google For Withholding AdSense Earnings
Super Cray, a clickbait site, had reassurance from their Google rep that their AdSense units were complaint with their rules. Even so; it is alleged that Google closed their account and denied over $500,000 just before payment.

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.

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 August 11, 2014

August 11, 2014 by Andrew Leave a Comment

As it’s another shiny Monday Zebra Eclipse has a new link Herd to share. The Herd is a digest of related links to stories appropriate to the blog. The goal is to show the common evolution of agency and publisher and to highlight the influence of creators, curators and community moderators.

Is the content curation armageddon nearly upon us?
Andrew Bruce Smith on the problem of ever increasing content versus limited time and attention. The suggestion is that content marketing is not a sustainable strategy.
How Much Does Content Cost? It’s Not An Easy Question, And Here’s Why
Search Engine Land’s sister site Marketing Land takes a crack at exploring the tricky issue of content and costs. Rebecca Lieb presents a switched on study on the tough question and concludes it is tricky. At the very least the post is a check list to help you avoid unexpected costs.
The Ad Contrarian: What Are Agency Services Worth?
The respected Ad Contrarian argues that agencies struggle with profits for two reasons; too process orientated and client incompetence. What do agencies have left to offer? Creativity.
Quick Chat: Erika Nardini, CMO, AOL Advertising
And while content, delivery, and monetization strategies are different for news publishers than for digital magazines and social platforms, such as Twitter, all content companies face three universal challenges: fragmentation, programming, and scale, according to Nardini.
How to Self-Publish a Book
Lifehacker has a walk through of self-publishing. This is a post with practical advice as well as academic like “be realistic”.
There Are Officially Too Many Apps, And Nobody Is Making Money
Most apps barely even see the light of day let alone make money. App is a front line in the battle of content and audience awareness for the treasures of success. Why do just 2% of app developers pull in over 50% of all app revenue?
New York Times Chief Data Scientist Chris Wiggins On The Way We Create And Consume Content Now
On how the New York Times is trying to blend the gut sense of good journalism with data.
Publishers have an updated evergreen strategy: Make the old new again
A look at how publishers are re-using old content on evergreen topics. The challenge is that while search would drive a longtail of traffic to long lasting topics; social referral traffic is spiky and short lived.