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.
- New York Times website overhaul includes ‘content paid for by advertisers’
The New York Times will start to publish “content paid for by advertisers”. Is this content marketing, native ads or is a grand newspaper publishing advertorials? The Times say the content will be native ads and won’t be produced in-house. So, agencies writing for The New York Times then?
- What content farms teach us about content | Gerry McGovern
This is an ad agency weighing in on the content and content farm debate. It’s yet another look at Demand Media’s struggles. So what? Here we have agencies offering publishers advice on publishing.
- Science Blogger Shows Problem With Facebook
The remarkable aspect of this story isn’t Business Insider doing a “blogger says” story but that it has taken this long for struggles with News Feed to be news. Users, I think, will have increasing concerns thinking that Facebook controls what they see. How long before the first posts of gaming Facebook trending topics begin?
- UsVsTh3m at nine months and Ampp3d at six weeks: What has Trinity Mirror learned?
The UsVsTh3m team could well work for agencies – they don’t; they work for a publisher instead. A classic example of publishing becoming agency and agency work becoming publishing. In this case the sites specialise in what it takes to engage audiences. As this article says one of the key requirements is agility. There’s no point publishing anything if you’re slow.
- AOL Buys Personalization Startup Gravity for $90 Million in Cash
AOL is one of the best examples of publishers and agencies meeting on a common evolution. The company is a platform at heart that’s served agencies. However, it’s strategy in recent years has been very much about becoming a publisher. In AOL’s case this is about selling ads.