Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

One of the costliest years for natural disasters puts some U.S. insurers in a position to do what they haven’t done in years: raise prices.
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Tom Petty. Gregg Allman. AOL Instant Messenger. These are just a few of the bright lights that went out in 2017. As we head into 2018, we took stock of things in media and marketing taken from us this past year.

Scout
Scout was one of the first publishers to build a subscription business on fans’ obsession with college athletics recruiting, and in a 2014 merger, it became part of a company worth $100 million. Two years later, it collapsed, undone by a costly pivot to video and a play for scale that led it to cover non-sports topics. The company’s board also ousted founder Jim Heckman. By February, it was in bankruptcy court, where a stalking horse bid CBS Sports made for the company’s assets went unopposed.

Ad-supported Medium
In January 2017, Medium founder Ev Williams declared that digital media’s ad-supported model was broken and needed fixing. Seven months and 50 layoffs later, Williams emerged with a subscription model, which would let paying subscribers direct their fees to whichever Medium authors they liked and even get a refund if they didn’t like what they’d read.

Facebook’s Lifestage and Groups
Facebook had its share of mobile product mishaps in 2017. Lifestage, a Snapchat competitor Facebook built to encourage people to share video, shut down in August after less than a year.

That same week, it shut down Groups, Facebook’s other attempt to grow a facet of its core product into a standalone app, after months of growing bugginess and stagnating user growth.

Yik Yak
The anonymous, location-based chat app Yik Yak tore across America’s college campuses in 2014, attracted major venture capital and a $400 million valuation. But a pivot to group messaging inflamed its core user base, and advertisers had trouble seeing the value of the app’s often controversial content. It shut down in April.

Yahoo News Digest
Yahoo was never known for its design sense. An exception was the Yahoo News Digest, an app it purchased from a British design wunderkind in 2015 for $30 million. The app had nearly 10 million downloads and won multiple design awards, but it also aggregated news instead of serving up Yahoo content, so Verizon shut down Yahoo News Digest just a few months after finalizing its acquisition of Yahoo.

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Vivek Shah, CEO of J2’s Ziff Davis, knows a thing or two about surviving digital transitions. He helped lead the publisher of PCMag, AskMen and IGN out of bankruptcy by betting on ad tech, e-commerce and performance marketing. Shah, who will take over as J2’s CEO on Jan. 1, talked about the opportunity he sees in Mashable, which Ziff Davis just acquired for a reported $50 million; why not all publishers will succeed at e-commerce; and why native advertising is undergoing a correction. Here are excerpts of our conversation, lightly edited and condensed.

What’s your read on digital publishing’s missed revenue goals and consolidation in 2017?
I think it’s an expectation problem more than anything else. Many of these companies are solid growing businesses, but just not at the level that’d justify the valuations. I don’t view it as a fundamental problem with the businesses. Scale has always mattered, but it really matters now. A single-title publication, it’s harder.

What’s the value you saw in Mashable?
We’ve always loved the brand and been interested in it for a long time. With venture investment, it started to expand into other areas. We’re going to return it to its core focus on digital tech and culture. We love the core. The pressure to do it all dissipates when you’re part of a portfolio.

Talk about the commerce opportunity there.
Affiliate commerce is a big part of our business. We think the opportunity for affiliate commerce for Mashable will be big. It could be a range of things. We have product reviews and roundups, which are often collections of reviews; deals. [Direct-to-consumer] product discovery, online brands are establishing themselves on social media. There’s this intersection of content and commerce, reviews and commerce. We also see audience, SEO opportunities for the brand.

You’ve been doing e-commerce for years. What do you think when you see all these other publishers piling into the business?
You need to have a brand that, when it makes a recommendation or has a review, has credibility in that space. When you think about a PCMag or TechBargains, you come to them for deals or reviews. Then, you have the business model question. Do you want to be a merchant? Do you want to be an affiliate? But you need tech, people, a long-term commitment. Just hiring a commerce editor and expecting success isn’t going to work. If you’re a vertical publisher that has some brand permission to tell me what’s a deal and you invest, it’s huge. More horizontal brands, it’s going to be harder.

What’s your take on the pivot to video?
Everyone’s like, this pivot to video is bad. I look at it as, the television ad market is $70 million. Viewership is going to move to portable screens. The dollars are going to have to flow. The question is, how much of the digital video market is going to be six- to 15-second ads, and how much will be product placement? The former is a lot more scalable. But there’s inventory challenges. The latter is where the innovation is taking place, but how scalable is that?

Part of the pivot that’s tripping everyone up is the studio business where publishers are trying to compete. A lot of publishers are saying, look at all the content checks being cut. Being a production studio is a different business. Do publishers have an opportunity in SVOD? It’s unclear. Video has been a significant part of our business, but we’re not overextending our reach. We’ve gone on Facebook Watch, but we haven’t sold anything large to a large player doing scripted programming.

You’ve been a critic of native advertising. Are we seeing the bubble bursting there?
It’s a little like video. It’s evolved. It could be content recommendations, branded video, ads that don’t look like ads. The market’s always going to value scale, ease of execution, clear measurement. For it to get to any scale, there needs to be some level of standardization. Outbrain and Taboola have done a lot there. I’m not saying it works for the user or the publisher; we let ours decide.

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This keynote from 2016 is packed full of tips and tricks of how to get ahead if you’re a salesperson in any market – nothing will ever change if you’re just playing the same gave over and over. It’s time to try something new.

Preorder my new book Crushing It! coming out in January of 2018!:

Crushing It! For The Holidays – My NEW Book is Available For Pre-Order Now

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A new blockchain-based technology created by the company NKOR will support intellectual property rights, allowing creators to register and protect their content. The company is working to create a new
standard for verification and the distribution of digital data by authenticating the data and time-stamping the process.

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A year of political media and marketing that seemed to defy precedence is ending, as you might expect, on yet another unprecedented note: an ad campaign thanking the President of the United States for
letting Americans say something they were never prohibited from saying: “Merry Christmas.”

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We may never know what impact paid media played in influencing the outcome of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017,” which signed into law by President Donald J. Trump on Dec. 22, but we do know how
much was spent, thanks to an analysis by political media-buying and issues advertising tracker Advertising Analytics. “We’ve tracked about $35.5m spent on advertising related to the tax reform effort
this year,” estimates the firm’s Research Analyst Joseph Wright, adding, that more than two-thirds (69.6% or $24.4 million) was spent by advocacy groups in favor of the proposals, while less than a
third (30.4% or $10.5 million) was spent on ads opposing the legislation.

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Sling TV’s data suggests that while over-the-top streaming video services may still be nascent, the viewing habits they engender remain very similar to those for traditional television platforms.
Sunday has long been the most popular day to watch TV, and prime time is called that for a reason.

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That’s according to Sparks&Honey, which has released its trends forecast for next year.

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“We are working through the details of several possible magazine tests in the U.S., in partnership with world-class media and technology companies. It’s already shaping up to be a busy year!” Carey
wrote to staffers.

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