Data-Labor-Technology

YouTube’s livestreaming TV service is looking to add channels from multiple digital media publishers, including Cheddar, Tastemade and The Young Turks Network. These channels would join E.W. Scripps-owned Newsy as some of the first channels from digital-first media companies to be available on YouTube TV.

According to multiple sources with direct knowledge of YouTube’s plans, YouTube is testing as many as six new channels from digital publishers on YouTube TV, its fledgling livestreaming TV service that offers more than 50 linear broadcast, cable and regional TV channels for $40 per month. Digital publishers working with YouTube include the business news network Cheddar, food and lifestyle publisher Tastemade and progressive news outlet The Young Turks Network. It’s unclear on when these channels will launch, as YouTube is still in the testing phase, but it could be as early as in a couple of weeks, sources said.

YouTube declined to comment about potential YouTube TV deals with digital publishers. Representatives for Tastemade and TYT Network also declined to comment. The usually chatty Cheddar CEO Jon Steinberg has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

YouTube launched YouTube TV a year ago as part of a wave of legacy and tech companies launching streaming pay-TV services. With cord cutting on the rise, others including Hulu, DirecTV and Dish Network are hoping to appeal to customers with cheaper TV bundles that also let them watch programs across different connected screens.

Dish Network’s Sling TV is the leader of this growing pack, with more than 2.2 million subscribers at the end of 2017. In January, CNBC reported that YouTube TV had more than 300,000 subscribers, behind Hulu’s live TV service, which had 450,000 paying customers at the time.

As digital publishers look to diversify their revenue sources away from Facebook and other social platforms, streaming skinny bundles have become an opportunity for those with the capacity to program a 24-hour linear TV channel. Along with CNN’s Great Big Story, Cheddar and TYT Network have previously said they’re pursuing distribution deals with various streaming TV providers, including YouTube TV. YouTube TV will become the second streaming bundle Cheddar distributes on after Dish Network’s Sling TV.

Cheddar, Tastemade and TYT Network won’t be the first digital-first media companies to distribute on YouTube TV; Newsy has been on the service since last July. Newsy CEO Blake Sabatinelli declined to share performance stats for Newsy on YouTube TV, but he said the service and Newsy’s audience have been growing at a “more than acceptable pace.”

“The viewership has been strong so far, and the audience demo fits right where we need to be as far as our target audience,” Sabatinelli said. “As we move to more linear platforms, we know that our general average viewer age is going to go up, but as long as it stays in the realm of the older, late-stage millennials, that’s great for us — and YouTube TV and other [streaming TV bundles] do that.”

Unlike its deals with the legacy TV channels, YouTube TV isn’t paying these digital publishers a carriage fee yet, according to multiple sources. Instead, YouTube and the digital partners will both sell ad inventory on the channels and share the revenue. It’s unclear what YouTube’s cut will be, but on YouTube’s on-demand side, the platform typically takes 45 percent of revenue earned from its ad products.

Still, distribution on YouTube TV, which continues to accumulate subscribers, is an opportunity for digital publishers with linear TV and over-the-top video streaming ambitions. While YouTube hasn’t released any data on YouTube TV consumption, its customers likely spend more time watching programming on connected TV screens than on smartphones or tablets — as is the case with most streaming TV and over-the-top video products.

The combination of longer time spent, viewing on TV screens and a closed, “premium” environment such as YouTube TV should also help generate healthy CPMs, said Alan Wolk, lead analyst for consulting firm TVRev.

“To some advertisers, being on YouTube TV or any other [streaming pay-TV service] probably makes these companies more legit,” he said. “They’ll be able to bring in advertisers, including some big national advertisers, that they may have not been able to get before.”

It also helps YouTube TV channel partners that YouTube has also put a flashy marketing campaign behind YouTube TV. The company grabbed the title sponsorship for last year’s World Series, which included buying out the entire commercial break between the top and the bottom of the first inning in each game. YouTube has renewed that deal with MLB for the 2018 and 2019 World Series.

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Facebook will eliminate advertisers’ remaining option for using third-party data to target ads through Facebook, the company told ad buyers this week.

Last week, Facebook said it will remove the option in its self-serve tool for advertisers to use information, like people’s purchase behaviors, from third-party data providers such as Acxiom and Oracle to target those people with ads on Facebook, Instagram and across Facebook’s Audience Network ad network, though that option won’t be fully eliminated until Oct. 1. Days later, Facebook said it is developing a permissions tool that will require advertisers to certify they have permission to any data collected outside Facebook that is used to target ads inside Facebook through its Custom Audiences program; Facebook has informed advertisers that the permission tool will roll out in the second quarter, according to Jenny Son, gm of social media at Wpromote, an agency that specializes in direct-response advertising.

Then, Facebook notified agencies this week that it will shut down its “managed Custom Audiences” program that enabled advertisers to access third-party data from approved data providers, like Acxiom and Oracle, through Facebook-managed deals with those providers and then use that data to target their Facebook ads. That shutdown will take effect when Facebook rolls out the aforementioned data permissions tool, according to a Facebook spokesperson. Facebook will also remove the “audience data providers” specialty from its Facebook Marketing Partners program in connection to the broader shutdown, the spokesperson said.

“This is one of many steps we’re taking to provide additional safeguards and accountability in our ad products,” said Facebook in an emailed statement.

But as Facebook looks to lock down the outside data that’s available for ad targeting, loopholes linger that would allow advertisers to continue to use third-party data for ad targeting. And questions have arisen regarding whether Facebook’s primary motivation is protecting people’s privacy or its own liability.

“Brands and their agencies must now work directly with third-party data providers as opposed to working through a Facebook partner manager to develop and import these Custom Audiences, and the brand, not the data provider or Facebook, is liable and responsible for the ethical capture and use of these audiences,” said Michael Price, social media director at digital and CRM agency Ansira.

That Facebook would pass off the liability to advertisers now coincides with the European Union’s impending General Data Protection Regulation that takes effect on May 25. That law will require companies to offer people more controls and transparency regarding the data that companies about them and how that data is used, and it will levy hefty fines on the companies that fail to comply with it. By requiring advertisers to assume more liability over the data they connect into Facebook and to certify that they have the legal rights to that data, Facebook may hope to reduce its exposure to penalties, which can total up to four percent of a company’s annual global revenue. However there’s reason to wonder why then Facebook isn’t taking a stricter stance on advertisers’ use of outside data.

It’s unclear to what extent Facebook can definitively curb advertisers’ use of third-party data for ad targeting as well as what data will and will not still be available after Facebook completes its crackdown.

“If everybody’s plugging through this with loopholes, do they just close it off entirely? It starts getting to their intent of why they made this change in the first place. If it is to protect consumer privacy, then these loopholes aren’t necessarily protective of that mission. Or is it that they’re trying to protect business or PR?” said iCrossing chief media officer Jeff Ratner.

Facebook’s ongoing data lockdown is an attempt to clarify what information collected about individuals outside of Facebook’s walled garden can be used within it. But the haste with which Facebook seems to be imposing these new rules, following the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, has left many ad buyers confused and with unanswered questions. Those questions range from the tactical (“What about offline transaction data?”) to the skeptical (“Is this more than a PR ploy?”) to the type that might be asked in a business major’s dorm room at 2 a.m. (“What even is first-party data?”)

The question of what qualifies as first-party data may sound ridiculous. But it is central to understanding the extent to which Facebook may or may not be able to keep in check the outside data used by advertisers on Facebook and the company’s prospects to “help improve people’s privacy on Facebook,” which Facebook cited as the reason for eliminating third-party data from its self-serve tool.

Usually, first-party data refers to information like email addresses that a brand may collect from people when they sign up for a loyalty program or purchase a product from the brand’s site. But brands can upload that data to data management platforms, where it can be combined with data that another company may have on a person.

“The same Acxiom data that I would have pumped straight through channels on Facebook, I can pump into my own DMP, append that to my data or take it as my data, and then push it into the platform. Is that going to pass their certification?” said Ratner.

“We’re waiting for Facebook to roll out in the coming months the definition of what that is,” said Son, referring to whether Facebook will approve of first-party data that has been attached with third-party data. “As of today, what we know is Facebook needs to provide more insight before we can really understand the impact.”

Or what about the data that retailers collect when people use a credit card to buy something in a brick-and-mortar store and then use to target ads on Facebook? The answer would seem to be straightforward. It’s first-party data because the retailer collects it directly from a person. But the way that information is then connected to a person’s Facebook account involves other parties.

“Whatever personal information you have that’s attached to your credit card, the purchaser’s bank is providing that information to Facebook to be able to determine the identity of that person. Generally, what they’ll end up getting is an email address and/or phone number. That’s what they’re using to match back to a Facebook profile of the user,” said Price. He noted that the information is hashed and anonymized during the process so that individuals’ identities are not revealed to the brand or to Facebook.

Under Facebook’s new policy on advertiser data permissions, are people made sufficiently aware that when they swipe their credit cards at the supermarket, they are not only handing over their money, but their data? And does the way that transaction data — a person’s name and their card number — is processed to be matched with a Facebook account complicate the first-party nature of the data?

“That conversation hasn’t really been had yet with Facebook,” said Stefanie Smith, senior director of paid social at iProspect.

Try as Facebook will to keep in check the outside data used to target ads on its site, it may fail in the same way it failed to prevent an app developer from passing data collected from Facebook on to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook will ask advertisers to certify they have permission for whatever outside data they use to target ads on Facebook. But Facebook may not be able to verify that claim, in the same way it did not verify Cambridge Analytica’s certification that it had deleted the data it improperly obtained on millions of Facebook users.

“There’s still so much gray area in terms of how Facebook is going to let us use data in the future,” said Ratner.

That uncertainty could result in Facebook gaining a stronger hand with advertisers because it would force them to be more reliant on Facebook’s own data in order to reach the people across its social network, Instagram and its ad network.

“It does wall off the garden even further than it already is,” said Ratner.

That could work against Facebook. Once Facebook firms up the changes and officially enacts them, ad buyers will monitor how they affect the performance and prices of their Facebook ads, said Smith. If the results are negative, advertisers could redirect some of their Facebook spend to the platforms that are more accommodating to outside data.

“I’m sure Google is saying, ‘Great, move your dollars back to us and our platforms,’” Ratner said.

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Nick Ascheim is svp of NBC News Digital.

Since the advent of digital news, publishers have pursued scale, a strategy premised on a big assumption: If lots of people consume your content, you will always make lots of money. But that assumption is wrong. To succeed today, content publishers and brands need to shift focus from scale to loyalty and engagement.

In the first era of the Digital Age, a few big-name publishers found something approaching scale, back when the majority of visitors bookmarked their favorite publishers or clicked links in emails they subscribed to intentionally.

In the second era, portals like AOL, MSN and Yahoo redefined scale. Single destinations commanded audiences at levels that had only been seen before when TV viewers across all channels were added together.

Then, in the third era, came the platforms. YouTube, Facebook and others pushed the meaning of scale even further. The size of audience tallies began with the letter “b” instead of “m.”

This kick-started some experiments from publishers, especially when it came to video. New publishers emerged to create viral content that was “optimized,” if forgettable. These newbies, and some legacy publishers, too, bragged about the small nations of people who consumed their videos, but were silent when the conversation turned to making money.

And so we stand today as a publishing industry, bruised by our own scale-ian pursuits, and still in search of a sustainable digital business model to call our own. As the fourth era of the Digital Age dawns, I believe there is a way. Scale still seduces, but there is hope in something even more basic than big numbers: loyalty.

It is no small irony that we publishers can look to the platforms for a path forward. The successful platforms didn’t begin by chasing scale. First, they sought validation in loyal users because loyalty meant their efforts had given rise to products and experiences that people wanted to visit and use again and again. Their audiences grew because of that intense focus on quality before all else. And what followed? Scale, though loyal scale, and then of course revenues in seemingly unending supply. We believe the platforms can help publishers find loyal scale, but publishers need to also prize quality content above just amassing audience.

At NBC News Digital, we have adopted loyalty as our North Star — not because we don’t aspire to be big, but because we do.

We’ve done this by judging success not in video starts or unique views, but in the return frequency of our visitors and in the quantity of content they consume during a single visit. We made our video players faster and more visually compelling. We turned off autoplay. We committed to making made-for-digital video content across several channels and to using new storytelling techniques. We rolled out new content verticals to appeal to specific audiences, and we’ve expanded our newsrooms.

Building for loyalty and engagement is not an easy road or a short one. But we know that audiences rely on us as publishers, so it’s important that we keep them in mind at all times.

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Over the last six months, a new type of client base has been “bombarding” influencer marketing agency Viral Nation, which creates campaigns for companies like Apple, McDonald’s and the NBA.

It’s the coin companies behind every random or obscure cryptocurrency that exists.

Viral Nation, which co-founder Joe Gagliese said is filled with “advocates of crypto,” decided not to entertain those pitches.

“It’s hard for us to distinguish reality from fraud or scams,” he said. “It’s not something we want to tie our horse to. There are a lot of legitimate companies and players in that space, we understand that, but it’s best to just make sure we keep our influencers safe as well as their audiences from something risky.”

It’s safe to say that influencer marketing has hit cryptoworld. There’s a growing number of influencers on platforms like Instagram and YouTube being paid anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars (if they’re being paid in crypto) to endorse some new coin or initial coin offering, according to Barbara Soltysinska, CEO of indaHash, a tech platform that connects brands with influencers and just completed an ICO, which it promoted by partnering with a number of “crypto YouTubers.”

It’s not an especially recent phenomenon — crypto influencers have been raising their profiles since the major price hikes at the end of 2017 — but in light of bans by social media companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter of ads that promote less than sophisticated crypto projects, it shows that crypto mania, which has gotten out of hand for most serious participants in the space, can still find other ways to grow.

“It’s important for us to reach influencers to give more of an explanation,” said Soltysinska, who collaborated with YouTube channels like Crypto Love, which has about 80,000 followers, Crush Crypto, which has 28,000, and The Cryptoverse, which has 44,000 on 20-minute video interviews and reviews that mostly involve one person talking energetically into the computer for an extended period of time. “You can’t explain as many things in a Facebook ad as in a 10-minute or one-hour video.”

Soltysinska said YouTube is where “everyone goes” for crypto news. Channels with a 50,000-person following are a big deal, she said. On Instagram, you’re only a big deal if you have at least a million.

And Soltysinska maintains that it’s real, authentic content. “It’s important to mention we don’t influence the content at all,” she said. “We want them to give credible videos.”

Kevin Ting, the founder of Bitcoin for Beginners, uses his YouTube channel to educate beginners on how to even begin navigating cryptocurrencies. But not every crypto YouTuber is so focused on education. Many endorse new coins and ICOs for payments — the Federal Trade Commission requires they disclose the sponsorship — in the form of “reviews.” Some do interviews with the company executives behind an ICO.

Ting said sometimes companies reach out to him asking for a review of their product or service. Typically, they’ll negotiate a price in Ethereum or bitcoin. So far, he has reviewed coins called VeChain, Electroneum, Iota, Verge and Tron.

“A lot of influencers do it differently. I do it as an intro or overview of the project, rather than a review,” he said. “I don’t say, ‘this is good or bad,’ or give it a rating. I don’t do that in any of my videos, sponsored or not.”

Ting said making money is a motivation, but maintained he’s mostly in it for the well-being of the space. Ting, who has about 12 different coins, is a HODLer, the industry term for someone that buys coins and holds onto them for the long term without much or any trading activity. He said there are so many different coins because none of them are perfect, and by creating education content, he can help those seriously invested in the space figure out where to make improvements or create better features.

That’s part of the problem that ultimately led to the crypto ad ban by other social media platforms: Despite cryptocurrency showing up in mainstream media daily — and not in headlines related to a drug bust or exchange heist — there’s a huge lack of education and understanding of the business and technology of crypto available to the general population. The space is just too immature for the level of mania surrounding it.

“We’ve also seen companies come and say, ‘We’ll pay you a couple thousand dollars to do an Instagram story,’ talking about how this is going to be the next big coin and pushing people to their platform in order to buy some,” said Gagliese, adding that even though crypto ads have been banned on social platforms, the gold rush to crypto is too big to contain companies’ desire to promote projects.

“Every grassroots type of affiliate marketing and payments thing that you can think of is probably going on,” Gagliese said.

And yet, if done well and done right, influencers could have a role to play in closing that understanding gap.

Crypto is still in the earliest stages of adoption, and there are still huge barriers to entry. There are different wallets people need to set up; they may not be able to find certain coins on the exchange they use, so it might be necessary to open an account on a different exchange. If a fork in the code happens, they need to learn how to claim their “new currency.”

“Theoretically, if influencers are great at getting large groups of people more comfortable with new products, new ideas, I can definitely see how for something so confusing and intimidating as cryptocurrency, getting people trusted by their audience to speak on it would be helpful and eventually lead to adoption or greater understanding,” said James Nord, CEO of Fohr, another influencer marketing firm.

Shameless promotion of shoddy projects is definitely not good for the ecosystem, but the markets will fix that themselves, Ting said. Last year, when ICO boomed in popularity, investors could bet they’d get a high return on investment, he said, but today that’s not the case, as people are starting to become more cognizant of illegitimate projects.

“We’ve already seen a movement to ICOs getting lower returns,” he said. “That’s the market telling ICOs they’ve taken notice of a lot of the b.s. going on.”

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Sephora’s retail teams have been operating differently since the company broke down one of the biggest internal barriers in October of last year, combining its in-store and digital teams. Mary Beth Laughton, who had been the company’s svp of digital since 2014, assumed a new title as evp of omni retail.

The decision was a sign of the times, said Laughton. The company had to take a step back and consider how the customer today shops, and then realign itself accordingly.

“We should be fine with wherever the customer wants to shop, and our existing organization didn’t reflect that mindset,” said Laughton. “So we brought in-store and digital under one roof, along with customer service. It’s changed the way we think about sales metrics, engagements and experiences across channels.”

Since the teams were combined, Sephora’s customer profiles have been rebuilt to include 360-degree data that tracks in-store purchases, interactions with sales people, online browsing and online purchasing. The company has rethought how it considers sales metrics, in order to trace the behavior that led up to a sale. And at the center of the strategy is mobile, which plays a role in both physical and digital retail — not to mention that customers who download the Sephora app are the most loyal.

“If a customer browsed online then bought in store, we can see that. We just weren’t looking at it before, but it’s a win for both channels,” said Laughton. “We had good relationships across our channels, but we weren’t collaborating or finding synergies, and we were maximizing business in isolation. We’re more aligned, and we can move faster across in-store, online and mobile strategies. Mobile is the glue that holds it all together.”

As sales shift online, retailers with physical stores have been figuring out how to deal with separated in-store and online sales. When there’s no communication between the two, the channel departments start to work against each other.

“We end up competing against each other a lot of the time, and that actually means that both departments run promotions just to fluff up sales for a particular quarter,” said the e-commerce manager at a fashion retailer. “If we were thinking together about how to boost sales overall, rather than working against each other, it would be a lot healthier.”

At Sephora, Laughton said that all sales and metrics are tracked within her department, while a subset of the group focuses on experiences that link the two channels together. In-store makeovers, for instance, have gotten a digital upgrade: The Sephora makeup artist working with a customer in stores will make a log in the Sephora app of every product she used in the tutorial. That’s then sent to the customer’s profile, where it can all be shopped later, online or in stores. The Sephora Virtual Artist, an in-app augmented reality tool that lets users try on different makeup looks and products virtually, can either send customers to purchase the products online or tell them where they can be found in a store.

But the biggest goal of the united team is to drive more customer loyalty by blending in-store and online loyalty perks, making better product recommendations based on what was browsed in both settings and sending smarter offers to the right customers at the right time.

“My new team brings loyalty to the forefront, since we’re better positioned to understand customers across channels,” said Laughton. “The power of using that data to better appeal to her at every touchpoint and understand her in a deeper way enables us to create these experiences that she cares about across our channels. Loyalty is a data-driven ecosystem, so that’s hugely powerful.”

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Like many digital publishers that achieved fast growth during the heyday of Facebook virality, PinkNews has undergone a hard pivot since the social platform’s latest algorithm change.

The British site, which is dedicated to LGBT audiences, no longer sets its news agenda according to what will become a Facebook hit, a strategy that left it at the mercy of unpredictable traffic fluctuations. Instead, it has redirected resources to produce harder-hitting, more in-depth articles on big-issue topics and debates relevant to the LGBT community, which perform well on its homepage. It’s also stepping up its search engine optimization efforts and widening its distribution partners to the likes of Flipboard.

Three new staffers have been hired to help with these efforts — a news editor, a features editor and a video editor. PinkNews, which previously published two to three original videos a day on Facebook, also stopped creating video for the platform. The new video editor, who starts next week, will refocus the publisher’s video strategy on what works on its own site and other distribution platforms.

Around 40 percent of PinkNews’ traffic used to come from Facebook, but as a result of the algorithm change, that number has dropped to 20 percent, according to the publisher. But PinkNews believes the decline is a short-term hit necessary to build a more sustainable model. The publisher was aware of the need to diversify from Facebook publishing for the last year, so it had already begun developing a strategy to wean itself off prioritizing only content that performed well on Facebook — a strategy that required drastic expediting, thanks to the timing of the algorithm change.

“It has been disappointing that Facebook is not the winner it used to be, but it means we have gone back to our core audience,” said Ellen Stewart, head of content at PinkNews. “In doing that, we’ve been able to see what people are actually reading and what they expect to see from PinkNews.”

Around 35 percent of PinkNews’ referral traffic is from social platforms, 65 percent of which comes from Facebook, according to data from site analytics firm SimilarWeb. Roughly 30 percent of its traffic is direct to its homepage, according to the publisher. By focusing more on stories that are core to big issues within the LGBT community, PinkNews hopes to continue building its homepage traffic. So far, so good: The number of pageviews per session on its own site have quadrupled, and there has been a 20 percent increase in pageviews per session since the algorithm change, according to the publisher.

“Facebook was about marketing one story and making that story do really well, but we ended up with random users not in our core demographic accessing us,” said Ben Cohen, CEO and founder of PinkNews. “We have realized they weren’t people we could rely on doing anything other than just read that one article. That’s led us back to re-evaluating what is our core mission.”

PinkNews’ search referral traffic is also strong, with around 40 percent of its traffic coming from search, according to SimilarWeb. Over the last year, the bulk of its search traffic (74 percent) was from nonbranded searches, per SimilarWeb, proving the publisher is in tune with what its users look for. The site has seen a 20 percent increase in Google-driven traffic since January, according to the publisher.

PinkNews refers to itself internally as the “Gayly Mail,” covering a wide range of lighter, celebrity-focused stories, as well as harder-hitting topics such as transgender rights and the gender pay gap. But part of its mandate is also to provide campaign clout: a voice representing minority groups and lobbying for LGBT rights. PinkNews also plans to launch events such as a career fair for LGBT graduates through its recently acquired events business, LGBT Leaders. PinkNews has also launched the PinkNews Awards, which celebrates the contributions of politicians, businesses and community groups toward equality for the LGBT community.

“We have a moral mission as well as a commercial mission,” Cohen said. “We want to document the LGBT movement, and do that by investing in original content that can provide a long tail [and be more evergreen]. One of the challenges with Facebook is a story would be a hit on Friday, but by Monday, no one would care. But the content we’re producing now, every article is being accessed every few months, which is helping us build [the brand].”

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Sol, an aggregated news site from Norwegian magazine and news publishing group Aller Media, launched an app in December to gain new, younger readers. The Sol app uses a combination of algorithms and human editors to surface content people are interested in, in order to keep them in the app longer.

So far, Sol is seeing encouraging results from the app, which has a healthy average daily dwell time of 11 minutes, according to Sol CEO Jan Thoresen, thanks in part to the algorithm serving relevant content. The app has 50,000 daily unique users and adds around 5,000 new users a week, he said, noting that it’s particularly popular with women between 18 and 24 years old. Sol’s app and site have a 750,000 unique weekly users, Thoresen said.

“The ongoing challenge for the content industry is that we’re losing control of distribution, and we can’t expect Google and Facebook to take care of us,” said Thoresen. “We need to reinvent the way news is distributed in a feed way. We focus on creating habits. The strategy is around the quality; we call it thinkbait rather than clickbait.”

When users register with the app, they are welcomed by a chatbot assistant, which 50 percent of users opt into using, according to Sol. The app surfaces local news stories based on users’ location, as well as content based on interests gleaned from what users choose to read. The editorial team also manually sources roughly 100 news stories a day from other Norwegian publishers, linking back to those news outlets.

“Machine learning is reviving news aggregators all over the world,” said Thoresen, adding that Sol’s app took inspiration from Toutiao, a Chinese aggregator app. “We wanted to test it out in a local market.”

Another reason for the app’s popularity is Facebook’s algorithm change in January that de-emphasized news content in the feed, which Thoresen said has led to a huge decrease in Facebook referral traffic for Norway’s news publishers. “People miss the news, and they’re used to a sophisticated way of sorting,” he said.

Sol has 25 people working on the app, split evenly between sales, editorial and technology. A team of six people developed the app over six months. Thoresen said Sol monetizes its content in the app through display ads, and it’s profitable.

As with other apps, encouraging people to download the Sol app is a challenge, particularly when similar services like Apple News or Upday come installed on mobile phones. After Sol advertised its app on Facebook and Instagram in March, the app climbed from No. 17 to No. 1 on the Apple App Store’s list of top free apps in Norway.

Other publishers that have had success with their apps include sports publisher Bleacher Report, which gets people to spend five minutes a day in its app, and women’s lifestyle site Bustle, which gets users to spend six minutes per session in its app.

Sol plans to add more ad units to the app without compromising the user experience and improve its push notifications. People who opt in to push notifications get about four push notifications a day about specific topics users have shown interest in, like sports, science or technology, plus an additional two about breaking news. “Based on interest and urgency, we’re experimenting with more editorial content that’s less time-urgent, as well as trying to make [the app] more like a news assistant,” said Thoresen.

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Samsung Electronics said first-quarter operating profit will be its highest ever, topping analyst estimates and continuing the company’s string of record results.

The large cable companies that own NCC Media, the national advertising sales, technology and marketing firm, announced today that they will launch a new division to sell targeted ads to cable systems nationwide. The group will use “non-personally identifiable data” to create products for targeted audiences across linear and video-on-demand, or VOD, platforms that will…

The Atlantic fired recent hire and highly criticized columnist Kevin Williamson, who said people who get abortions should be hanged. Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg told staff in an email today that while he thought the former National Review correspondent was a “gifted writer,” The Atlantic would be “parting ways” with Williamson after coming…