Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

The Federal Communications Commission just hit Sinclair Broadcast Group with the largest fine of its kind ever — $13.4 million — for running content in 2016 not labelled as sponsored.

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San Francisco startup The Hustle started out as a newsletter built to promote Hustle Con, an event for startup founders and young people on the make. In the year ahead, it plans try to turn itself into a service-oriented media brand, not just with more ticketed events but a software and product recommendation service.

“We get classified as a media company a lot, but I don’t know if that’s entirely accurate,” Hustle co-founder Sam Parr said. “I think we’re a membership company.” 

The fuel for The Hustle’s growing ambitions is its newsletter, which now has more than 500,000 subscribers, up from 100,000 subscribers 18 months ago, and an open rate north of 40 percent, nearly twice the 22 percent benchmark for a media or publisher’s newsletter, according to MailChimp.

Thirty percent of The Hustle’s newsletter subscriber base comes from a referral program like theSkimm’s. Initially, readers who referred contacts to The Hustle got swag like T-shirts. Today, if they refer 10 people, they can become one of the 3,000 Hustle Ambassadors, which gets them access to a private Facebook group for other ambassadors and The Hustle’s seed investors, who include author Tim Ferriss and Bleacher Report co-founder Dave Nemetz.

Those ambassadors, along with The Hustle’s most engaged readers, have inspired some of its new ventures. For example, the company noticed that people in the Facebook group regularly talked about which products or services were best for a specific task or job at work.

Based on that, Parr is building a product-recommendation service for business software that’s slated to launch in early 2018.

Audience feedback has also informed The Hustle’s events business. The site’s female audience responded positively to seeing other women as presenters at Pizza & 40s, an initially male-dominated lunch-and-learn event, so The Hustle — whose audience is now 40 percent female, according to Parr — launched a new event series, 2X, centered around female founders and executives telling their stories in a TED-esque 10-minute format. Two installments, held in San Francisco and Los Angeles, sold over 1,400 tickets that cost between $15 and $35, a big enough success that The Hustle plans to expand the series to five cities in 2018, including Chicago, New York and Austin, Texas. Until now, The Hustle has only staged one event outside California.

While growth and brand-building will remain important for The Hustle next year, Parr said his top priority will be ensuring The Hustle’s readers stay engaged with the newsletter. The newsletter is designed to be self-contained, so it regularly surveys readers to get their feedback. The Hustle also taps into Facebook audience data and third-party data sources to gather demographic data that newsletters do not readily offer up to publishers.

“There’s been a re-emergence of email,” said Jed Williams, the chief innovation officer of Local Media Association. “As you look at newsletters, the most important thing is how engaged that list is.”

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Sure, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and blockchain have been a hot topic for the past several months. But is either of them more than just a buzzword? I spoke to some marketers to see what they had to say about what 2018 holds for these two trends.

Blockchain could solve all our problems — or not
Seems like everyone is talking about blockchain, the distributed shared ledger that promises to keep transactions secure and anonymous. Most know it as the technology behind bitcoin. Ye
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Uber suffered a major defeat in its effort to overturn strict rules and licensing requirements in Europe, after the bloc’s highest court ruled the ride-hailing company should be regulated as a transportation service, rather than a digital service.
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Digital advertising in 2017 saw several major changes that will continue to influence and affect the work of digital marketers in the coming year. As we go speeding into 2018, here are five predictions about how the digital advertising landscape will evolve in the coming year.
US and EU (de)regulations put marketers on divergent paths
Brands that market online in the US and the EU will have to navigate those markets quite differently in 2018.

In 2017, the US and EU regulatory stances di
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Voleon is among funds deploying machine learning, a technology in which computers develop trading strategies. It’s harder than it sounds, given that markets are noisy and clients often want a better understanding of how their money is being invested.
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Amazon has had great success with its at-home Echo speaker, and is now counting on its new service, dubbed Alexa for Business, to spark a surge in voice computing in the workplace.
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4-5 jaar ervaring met Oracle planning? Wij zoeken een financial voor onze klant in Den Haag…
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Corporate boards are taking a tougher stance in vetting CEO candidates out of fear that the scourge of sexual misconduct may reach the corner office.
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Nintendo told outside game developers it is delaying delivery of 64-gigabyte game cards for the Switch console, meaning gamers may have to wait longer for some data-rich software titles.
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