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.