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.
- Dropping the A-Bomb on publishing
Simon Appleby’s essay on the division within publishing. This division, according to Appleby, is between narrative publishing and information publishing. The two are different, require different skills and so will have a different evolution. Publishers, he says, should split themselves along these lines.
- Why 2014 will change everything for video advertising
Affiliate video platform Coull have a feature written by CEO Irfon Watkins about the future of video. Business seems to be booming and pre-roll inventory sells out — but Watkins writes that around 54% of video ads are never seen. The industry is ripe for change and Watkins predicts more merchant integration, more mobile and publishers finally getting involved. Who’s doing well already? The Guardian.
- Why Brands Need to Pay Attention to Upworthy’s Battle With Facebook
Upworthy lost about 40m views in a quarter because of the change Facebook made to their newsfeed algorithm. The company is fighting back with a new metric “attention minutes” designed to show that even if page views are down the time people are spending with Upworthy content is increasing.
- Google Europe Blog: Working with Spanish Publishers
An interesting blog post from Google insofar as it doesn’t say very much except that they’re teaching SEO to Spanish newspapers.
- Content economics, part 5: news
“It is almost impossible to exaggerate the degree to which Facebook has changed the news business.” With Zebra Eclipse I argue that we’re all publishers now. In this article Felix Salmon suggests everybody is a journalist to some extent. An insightful piece.
- BuzzFeed's native advertising: are they really making ads you want to share?
The Media Briefing’s study into Buzzfeed’s native ad shows that they really do get shared. On average they enjoy 263 Facebook shares, 36 tweets, 7 Google +1s, 44 Pins and 2 LinkedIn shares. Facebook comes out as the clear lead for driving their traffic. That said, Buzzfeed is sculpted to suit Facebook style shares and is rarely appropriate for LinkedIn.
- Q&A with Justin Smith, CEO of Bloomberg Media
The new CEO of Bloomberg Media Group is about to announce his 100-day review of the company. It comes at a time when growth is “softening”. Already we’ve seen a move towards more video – with a whopping $75 CPM I can see why – and away from judging properties in silo. Ad Age have an interview.
