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 June 22, 2015

June 22, 2015 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Every Monday 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.

Relaunched Self-Publishing Platform Pronoun Raises $3.5M
While the new platform hasn’t actually launched yet, the company has already outlined its goals in a manifesto with the grandiose title, “How to fix book publishing.”
Viacom: ‘Our Product Is Content, Our Currency Is Audiences’ | AdExchanger
The tricky issue of targeting and measurement when it comes to omnichannel content.
Google Europe Blog: Supporting high quality journalism
In a world of native ads, user generated content and widespread sharing, how do readers know what they are reading is true, or what is the motivation of the publisher?
FTC: Publishers Will Be Held Responsible For Misleading Native Ads
Big news for publishers as the Americans look to enforcer Native Ads standards on publishers. How this will effect bloggers who are often under pressure from SEO agencies to publish undisclosed articles remains to be seen.
Vox Media Acquiring ReCode
ReCode had lots of kudos but it struggled with growing its audience – never getting above 1.5million a month. The result? A deal with The Verge’s owner Vox.
Introducing Instant Articles
Facebook takes the lid off its new publisher partnership offer; Instant Articles. These are designed to launch quickly, embrace rich media and profit split with the original publishers.
Why Games Journalism Should Update Its Thinking
Tadhg Kelly argues that too many games journalists are writing for sites chasing the same audience. There’s an over supply problem. At the same time, these very journalists are unwilling to break old habits – such as putting mobile gaming up there with PC and console gaming.
Record Breaking Publisher Approvals
The network Affiliate Window, sister to Zanox, has announced that the first quarter of this year saw a record number of people and businesses sign up as publishers. 68% of these publishers were accepted by Awin.
How brands can beat the growing vlogging backlash
A creative director weighs in on how brands can work with vloggers without getting caught up in the credibility backlash – if, indeed, there’s a backlash coming in the first place.
Facebook’s Hosted “Instant Articles” Give Publishers 70% of Ad Revenue
The details emerge of Facebook’s proposal to publishers. 100% of all revenue if you bring the advertisers; 70% otherwise.
Meet The Company Secretly Running All Your Favourite Social Media Accounts
Social Chain is a Manchester based “influencer agency” with about 220 popular Twitter accounts under its control. The result? It can make hashtags trend at will.
How The World’s Fastest Growing Blogging Platform All Began With One Small Freelance Blog
John O’Nolan has played a key role in the development of WordPress but in 2013 he started a new project: Ghost
Wooing Advertisers Gets Even Harder For Mid-Sized Web Publishers
“The trend is at agency level is they want consolidation of partnerships,” said one top online ad sales executive. “They want to work with fewer, deeper partners. And you need big audiences. It’s very, very competitive. Twenty-five million uniques is not enough.”
Condé Nast Closes Blog Network NowManifest
Bloggers who used the platform include Susie BubbleAnna Dello RussoDerek BlasbergBryanBoy and Fashion Toast. They’ve been asked to focus on their own blogs and arrange their own ad deals.

This week’s link herd March 30, 2015

March 30, 2015 by Andrew Leave a Comment

A lengthy Link Herd today as we catch up with the the ins-and-outs of “We’re all publishers now”. We see some of the usual suspects here including the reoccurring bad-boy; publishers are struggling in the face of dropping ad revenue and the rise of alternative platforms. This week we can wonder whether Facebook has a solution is about to put the boot in.

The Facebook Reckoning
Should publishers write for Facebook in an ad-revenue sharing deal? Is that evolution or throwing in the towel? Ben Thompson provides some interesting thoughts.
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti Q&A About Publishing on Other Sites (Video)
So people say, “Oh, Twitter doesn’t send that much traffic” — but we have this intuitive feeling that it’s more influential, and has a bigger effect [than people think]. Lots of people in the media see it. … The way that other blogs and publishers found our dress story was from the tweet, and they clicked through, and they re-shared, and posted it on their site, and that continued the cascade as well.
The dress is white and gold. Or, why BuzzFeed won
We’re all publishers now but this piece from Brian Morrissey argues that all publishers are Buzzfeed. This is both essential for publishers needing page impressions but also the road to trouble as Buzzfeed will do it better.
Condé Nast Closes Blog Network NowManifest
condenaste,bloggers, nowmanifest,platforms,deals,fashion
YouTube makes a move against brand-sponsored videos
Vloggers will find it much harder to get paid to show a brand’s logo as an overlay. Google’s banned the practise unless the overlap was bought via them as a standard media deal.
Bloggers who used the platform include Susie BubbleAnna Dello RussoDerek BlasbergBryanBoy and Fashion Toast. They’ve been asked to focus on their own blogs and arrange their own ad deals.
Livefyre which is both a comment platform and a large publisher content marketing tool has raised shy of $50m in another round of funding. Adobe and Salesforces are onboard as backers. Livefyre’s content tools are beyond this blogger’s budget but I’d very much like to see more community injected into their comment platform.
Why an SEO should think more like a publisher
Linkbait man Lyndon Antcliff takes his history of SEO and joins the cause. He recommends “SEOs should think more like a publisher”.

This week’s link herd January 26, 2015

January 26, 2015 by Andrew Leave a Comment

In this week’s link Herd we’ve news of Tumblr creating an agency – the strongest example of Zebra Eclipse’s philosophy we’ve seen this year. We’re all publishers now. Also; you’ll notice a new look to this little blog. Black, white and read all over.

Are media owners now more attractive than media shops?
Media Week explores the issue of whether marketers would now be better off working for media platforms rather than media shops (whatever a media shop is today).
Tumblr Launches Creative Agency to Connect Artists With Advertisers
We’re all publishers now – and Tumblr knows that. It has created an agency called “The Creatrs Network” for media agencies and brands to tap into. It should be a win-win for everyone involved; with the brands offering cash and audiences and creatrs offering talent and audiences.
Flipboard launches new Promoted Items function for advertisers
Flipboard has added the ability for publishers to promote their content. Levi’s and NARS Cosmetic will be the first two brands to distribute on the new Promoted Items feed.
Will media agencies become the new creatives?
A look by Media Native’s David Brennan on whether “media agencies” are becoming the new “creatives”. It’s an interesting approach to this old question with some relevant points. I suspect the answer is both creative and media agencies are becoming something else entirely – although this article seems to suggest creative agencies are less happy about it.
Google is now a more trusted source of news than the websites it aggregates
What does this mean for newspapers? People trust Google’s aggregated view of the news more than any one piece of coverage. Does this mean people want filtered views?
How crowdfunding helps haters profit from harassment
We’re all publishers now and that includes the trolls of gamergate. Some of these trolls are making money off crowdfunding and ads. At what point does hate become a business?