Month: August 2018

Following up its campaign featuring Dennis Quaid (who, for some reason, kind of looks like Harrison Ford), Esurance is taking its new “Surprisingly Painless” tagline to heart with a 10 city activation today that brought little pockets of joy to the day of the week most people loathe. In a partnership with media company ATTN:,…

YouTube announced Monday that it consolidated all of its tools that enable people to control and monitor their usage of the video site in a single location. The video site’s parent company initially introduced the tools at its Google I/O annual developers conference in May. Director of product management Brian Marquardt said in a blog…

BuzzFeed News is working with Google to pilot a membership model that will ask readers to contribute to the news outlet. Similar to The Guardian, which has had success soliciting donations from readers, BuzzFeed News is adding messaging to pages that solicits small donations of $5-$100, as seen below. The initial benefits will be updates on big investigations and new video programming. (There’s no member-only content for now; if the program is successful, BuzzFeed News hopes to add perks that will come on top of its news content, that will remain free.)

BuzzFeed News, like The Guardian, has staunchly adhered to the idea of being part of the free and open web. But like many news organizations, it’s eager to capitalize on people’s growing willingness to pay for quality news, as seen by the growth of digital subscriptions and memberships to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and others.

“A partial paywall could make sense,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said in a recent Q&A with Digiday. “But it’s also important we educate and inform the broad public. If every news organization puts the majority of their content behind paywalls, it’s hard to have an informed electorate.”

BuzzFeed News said it’s working on its membership program as part of the Google News Initiative, a broad suite of programs the tech giant announced earlier this year and that initially started in March with letting people subscribe on Google to paywalled publishers with a two-click process. Google helped BuzzFeed with tech and market research; it’s unclear if Google is planning to expand its subscription program to accommodate publishers that have reader donation or membership programs. A Google rep confirmed the company is working with Buzzfeed to help it explore different business approaches and understand how its readers would react to this kind of model.

The membership program is among a number of strategies that parent BuzzFeed is pursuing to diversify its revenue streams after missing its business targets last year. Peretti has said he expects one third of BuzzFeed’s revenue this year to come from non-advertising sources such as TV and film production as well as merchandising, licensing and commerce. As for news, BuzzFeed News rolled out a dedicated site in July that’s fueled solely by programmatic advertising, but with many marketers gun-shy about advertising on news sites because news is often controversial, it would be hard for the site to support itself on programmatic ads alone.

The post BuzzFeed News quietly tests a membership program appeared first on Digiday.

Nike shows the “Voice of Belief” that has allowed Serena Williams to carry on in the face of adversity in a powerful new “Just Do It” ad. Serena Williams returns to the U.S. Open this week during a difficult year marked by health concerns following the birth of her daughter, Alexis. After an unexpected triumph…

Fox News Channel’s upcoming streaming video service Fox Nation is beginning to market itself to potential subscribers. Fox News and Fox Nation will have no overlap in programming, although Fox News
talent like Lahren and Sean Hannity will make appearances on the service.

Cox Media Group has hired veteran Cox Communications executive Billy Farina as president of national ad platforms.

Forrester estimates that online video ads will grow from about 21% of the market in 2918, to 34% of the market in 2023.

Racial and ethnic minorities accounted for 20% of all public elementary and secondary school teachers in the United States during the 2015-16 school year. That makes teachers considerably less racially and ethnically diverse than their students – as well as the nation as a whole.

Crazy Rich Asians reigned supreme at the box office for the second weekend in a row. It raked in another $25 million for Warner Bros., bringing its total box office to $76.8 million, according to Deadline. Warner Bros., the studio behind the film (which allegedly already has a sequel in the works), recognized the opportunity…

Casper is getting into all things bedroom decor. After seriously disrupting the mattress category four years ago, the company is looking to add to its offerings as it continues to innovate around product, retail experience and customer service at scale. This push to grow the brand’s offerings and consumer touch points, even as dozens of…