A big catch up of shared links and discovers from the end of 2014 and the first two weeks of 2015.

• Twizoo – This Tiny Startup Has Figured Out How To Turn Twitter’s Free Data Into A Goldmine
  Business Insider on a startup called Twizoo that mines Twitter to pull together restaurant reviews. It’s said that this is a way to extract value from Twitter’s data and that there are about 7 tweet reviews per location in Twizoo to every one Yelp review.
• Nick Denton says the traffic game is over, and BuzzFeed has won
  Nick Denton says Gawker Media is no longer just about the traffic. He says that while tipping a nod to Buzzfeed and admitting they’ve won. Does Google’s move towards viewable impressions make a difference here? It might for Gawker but won’t for Buzzfeed.
• Why BuzzFeed Is Massively Underrated (and 9 Things Publishers and Brands Should Learn From It) |
  Shane Snow of Contently gets around to giving Buzzfeed some praise. My favourite of his 9 points is “Buzzfeed has figured out how to get premium advertisers their money’s worth”. How? Viral lift in the new metric. Exactly right.
• Is Waterstones Getting Ready to Walk Away From Amazon?r
  Waterstones have said that Kindle sales dried up over Christmas. This has resulted in speculation as to whether they’ll walk from their deal with Amazon. Waterstones also claims that paper books sold well. There’s a difference between an ebook and a Kindle, though, and Waterstones gets reoccuring revenue on all ebooks bought from devices they’ve sold.
• How to Get Read on Medium
  The team at Medium have an official guide on the best way to construct posts that get read.
• Facing credibility gap, Upworthy poaches from The New York Times
  Upworthy has always insisted that its A/B testing was secondary to its goal of getting people to talk about socially worthy issues. Traffic is down from last year, the internet’s fasting growing site is off the boil, and hiring Amy O’Leary will give it editorial clout. What will Upworthy do with it?
• What to Learn from the Man Who Managed Reddit’s Community of Millions
  Reddit’s community management boss puts instinct and intuition up there along with data. In fact, watch out you don’t get too bogged down in data.
• Google Goes All In On “Viewability” For Display And YouTube Ads
  Google announced at CES 2015 that they’ll start to roll out “viewability” stats across their YouTube and DoubleClick network. This mean advertisers will be able to see if audiences actually saw the ads the advertisers bought.
• What does the mobile market look like at the start of 2015?
  The Media Briefing puts together a look at the upcoming mobile landscape with insight and an extra bonus video presentation embed from Benedict Evans.
• Private Marketplaces: The Death Knell For Publishers?
  Brian Fitzgerald offers insight on how to survive the “digital publishing apocalypse” in a piece in which PMPs are worryingly troublesome for publishers because they can’t predict the revenue those markets will drive.
• Infographic: Reddit reports record-breaking 2014 with 71.25bn views
  The UK doesn’t even get a look in for Reddit’s top country list. It’s Iceland that comes top with 20.9 pageviews per capita. 54.9 million posts and 535 million comments in the last 12 months.
• King of Clickbait
  A lengthy interview with Emerson Spartz, of Dose, who has a talent for headlines and clickbait. He’s into algorithms that cycle through and test alternative headlines but not trailblazing new ideas.
• The Year’s 10 Most Popular Content Marketing Columns
  The Marketing Land team, sister of Search Engine Land, put together a list of the most popular “content marketing” columns they published this year. Worth a read even if many lean strongly towards the SEO.
• 11 Actionable Content Marketing Articles You May Have Missed in 2014
  Unbounce offer up a slice of curation by linking too and networking with some of their favourite authors and dealers of common sense.
• Retailers Waste More Than Half Of Digital Budgets On Bot Traffic
  Half of display budgets is wasted on artificial traffic created by bots. These bots, by and large, are interested in fraud and earning operates ill-gotten revenue based on fake clicks and impressions.
• What You Can Learn From the Best Marketer of the Year
  Heinken set out to do beer advertising differently. It wanted to boost the profile of the beer drinker and by doing so boost the profile of beer.
• Michael Wolff on digital media in 2015: ‘A deluge of crap’
  Shouty man Michael Wolff takes a bleak view of digital media. It’s all rubbish he argues and the value, the good content, isn’t possible to realise.
• 3 Blogger Outreach Trends That You Can Implement
  Kristen Matthews picks three trends she sees in the art and science of blogger outreach and discusses each. Blogger outreach has been forefront of many marketing activities again this year and I think Kristen is spot on with these trends.
• Platform Or Publisher? Whatever You Call It, It’s The Future Of Media
  Techcrunch host a post from CEO and co-founder of Moviepilot, Tobi Bauckhage, in which it is argued that publishing and/or platforms (kinda the same thing; says Bauckhage) is the future of media. Yup.
• Say Media Buys Out Investors As It Exits The Media Business And Focuses On Its Publishing Platform
  We’re all publishers, right? Say Media gave it a good crack of the whip and spent a lot of money but now they’re buying out their investors and reinventing itself as a next-generation publishing platform.
• Why PR is embracing the PESO model
  An insightful article on Mashable (yes) on how PR now must include paid media, earned and owned media. The summary: we’re all publishers now.
• New questions in mobile
  Benedict Evans (always worth reading) asks some sensible questions about mobile. He looks at the pattern of bundling services into platforms and how long it can continue for. He looks at what the Chinese players might do and at what the future for Android might be.
• Design revenues rise but staff costs hit the bottom line, report shows
  Accountant KingstonSmithW1 has a report that shows although income has risen by 5% in design agencies (which are mainly independent) that margins have fallen due to rising staff and operation costs.
• UK agency profit margins hit 10-year low
  An accountancy firm has revealed that the profits of the top 40 UK based RP agencies are at an all time low. Why? Employment cost up by 5.25% and operating costs up by 7.47%. Wages account for 62% of gross income.
• What Evernote and Uber deals mean for the future of media
  Quartz takes a look at two examples that help build Zebra Eclipse’s point – brands are becoming publishers. In this example we look at how Uber and Evernote position themselves as such for deal making.
• A first look at Femsplain, a new publishing community for women
  The Daily Dot investigates Amber Gordon’s Femsplain. This is a publishing platform and community built by women for women.