What’s been happening in the world of digital publishing over the last week? Here’s your weekly round-up of news, announcements, product launches, and more.
Social media
New Facebook Storm Nears as CNN, Fox Business, and Other Outlets Team Up on Whistleblower Docs.
It’s not often that major news organizations coordinate to sift through a large trove of leaked company documents and agree not to publish stories about them until a certain date. But in the world of news related to Facebook, these are extraordinary times.
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Facebook delivers light Q4 revenue guidance, mixed Q3 results
Facebook on Monday reported mixed third-quarter financial results, seemingly shrugging off the slew of recent bad headlines driven largely by whistleblower disclosures. Shares were up in after-hours trading.
Still, blaming Apple’s iOS 14 changes, the social media giant gave light fourth-quarter guidance. The company also said it expects its “metaverse” investments will reduce operating profits by $10B for FY 2021, as it begins breaking out Facebook Reality Labs as its own business segment.
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YouTube Q3 Ad Revenue Balloons 43% to $7.2 Billion, Tops 50 Million Music and Premium Subscribers
YouTube kept raking in huge ad bucks in the third quarter of 2021 and now counts more than 50 million subscribers worldwide for its music and YouTube Premium services.
The world’s largest video platform generated $7.205 billion in advertising revenue for the period, an annual increase of 43%. That’s a new quarterly record for YouTube, up from $7 billion in Q2, and puts it within range of Netflix’s Q3 revenue of $7.48 billion.
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Twitter shares rise after company says Apple privacy changes had less of an impact than expected on third-quarter results
Twitter’s stock price was up about 4% in extended trading on Tuesday after the company reported its third-quarter earnings, meeting analysts’ expectations for revenue and user growth.
The company said it was taking a one-time litigation-related net charge of $766 million related to an $809.5 million settlement the company announced in September for allegedly misleading investors about user growth.
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YouTube Head of Content Partnerships Malik Ducard Exits to Join Pinterest
After a decade at YouTube, Malik Ducard is moving on: He’s been hired by Pinterest as the image-sharing and social media company’s first chief content officer.
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Twitter now lets all iOS users ‘Super Follow’ select creators
Twitter is rolling out the ability for all iOS users globally to Super Follow select creators. The option was previously only available to users in the U.S. and Canada. Super Follows allow users to subscribe to accounts they like for a monthly subscription fee in exchange for exclusive content.
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Facebook is now Meta: Tech giant announces rebrand
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that the tech company is renaming itself to “Meta” to encompass its expanding technology and role in what it calls “the metaverse.” The company owns multiple technologies and apps, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus VR. In July, Zuckerberg told The Verge that over the next several years, Meta would “effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”
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Audience development and engagement
Vox Media has built a visual way to experience podcasts. It’s accessible to deaf audiences — and gorgeous.
You listen to a podcast. That’s the only option, right? For their new show, More Than This, Vox Media set out to create a podcast that could also be seen and felt. The result was an “immersive transcript” that’s accessible to deaf and hard of hearing audiences.
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USA Today launches an SMS text chat service, letting digital subscribers connect with its fact checkers
We’re living in an age of misinformation. From coronavirus to climate change, via TikTok trends and Facebook memes, being certain about the truth is more important than ever – and more difficult to distinguish.
USA TODAY has unveiled a new service for digital subscribers, an SMS text chat that allows subscribers to connect with our expert fact-checking team of experienced reporters.
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Amazon is building a Clubhouse competitor that turns hosts into DJs
Amazon is next on the list of companies getting into the live audio game. The company is building a new app, codenamed “Project Mic,” that gives anyone the ability to make and distribute a live radio show, complete with music, according to a presentation viewed by The Verge. This project’s big goal is to democratize and reinvent the radio. The app will be focused on the US initially.
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Apple News expands local news offerings
Apple News will now offer its local news experience in three additional cities in the US: Charlotte, Miami, and Washington, D.C. Each experience is curated by Apple News editors and features coverage of topics that are important to local communities, from restaurant openings and real estate trends to big policy decisions. Local news offerings in Apple News provide readers with access to top publications, including Axios Charlotte, the Charlotte Observer, Eater Miami, the Miami Herald, DCist, Washingtonian, the Washington Post, and more.
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Non-mainstream news sites erode people’s interest in politics, study finds
The results of a new study published in Digital Journalism suggest that exposure to alternative media sites — which are often extremist in nature and say they exist to correct perceptions being projected by mainstream outlets — can erode interest in politics.
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Cancel culture: Why do people cancel news subscriptions? We asked they answered.
Public data on cancellations is sparse. It’s not something that news organizations like sharing. It can also be surprisingly annoying to cancel news subscriptions online, often requiring an actual call to customer service. (It doesn’t have to be this way!)
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Advertising and monetization
GroupM and Hogarth team up on global addressable content practice
For a long time, the advertising industry has gotten good at reaching the right people at the right time. But often, the message isn’t as personalized and targeted as the media placement.
GroupM and Hogarth are setting out to change that. The WPP-owned media buying giant and content production agency are teaming up on an addressable content practice that will tie together performance targeting with personalized messaging and content.
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Google turned off advertising for Mail Online homepage in US over ‘perceived derogatory content’
Google turned off ad-serving on Dailymail.com, Mail Online’s US homepage, for four hours on 30 July – halting the site’s main revenue source.
Mail Online said it received no warning and then, when it became aware of what had happened and protested to Google, was told the ban was “due to the perceived presence of dangerous or derogatory content”.
Publishers are seeing increases in advertiser requests around climate and sustainability coverage
As publishers invest in more climate coverage this year, the question remains whether or not this content category is also drawing interest from advertisers.
For BBC, Bloomberg, Financial Times, Group Nine Media and The Economist, the answer is yes — with most saying advertisers are sending out more requests for publishers to pitch campaign or sponsorship opportunities around their solutions-based journalism, showing a growing interest this year in publishers’ coverage of climate and sustainability.
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Australian regulator allows radio station body to negotiate content deal with Facebook, Google
Australia’s competition regulator allowed a body representing 261 radio stations to negotiate a content deal with Facebook (FB.O) and Google on Friday, as part of the country’s new law to compel the tech giants to pay for news content.
The body, Commercial Radio Australia (CRA), will now have 10 years to negotiate with the tech giants for its members except the stations run by Nine Entertainment (NEC.AX) who had already secured deals, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said.
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When bullish finance stories are not exactly what they appear
The Securities and Exchange Act of 1933 made it illegal to promote a stock in exchange for payment without disclosing that payment, a response to crooked tip sheets and newspaper items of the day. Joshua Mitts, a professor at Columbia Law School who advises the Department of Justice on market manipulation and securities fraud violation, says the act of digital syndication makes the enforcement of the rules more complicated.
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SEO
Google Doesn’t Care What’s In An Image
Google’s web search algorithm doesn’t care what’s in an image. All that matters is it’s marked up with the correct structured data.
Whether it’s an award-winning photograph, or a blank square, it’s all the same in terms of the SEO value it adds to the page.
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Google removes 12 structured data fields from the help documents
Google has removed 12 documented structured data fields from its help documents citing these were removed because they are “unused by Google Search and Rich Result Test doesn’t flag warnings for them.”
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