Last week, we learned that Facebook was about to launch a new standalone app for breaking news called Notify. The reports were true, as Facebook just took the wraps off it.
The idea behind Notify is that you can get news alerts based on the things that interest you and by partner-based station. Facebook counts 72 publishers among its launch partners. These include ABC, Bleacher Report, Bloomberg Business, BuzzFeed, CNN, E!, Fox News, Fandango, ET, EW, People, The New York Times, Time, The Verge, Vice, Wired, Vanity Fair, and many others. You can see the full list here.
More sources will be added in the future.
“To create your personal mix of notifications you select the stations from which you want to receive updates,” product manager Julian Gutman explains. “Sources like the ones above will publish notifications through these stations when there are relevant updates. Notify also provides station suggestions based on your Facebook profile, and it’s easy to discover and add new stations any time.”
“You’ll receive notifications, delivered right to your lock screen, and a quick glance will keep you connected to the things that you care about throughout the day,” says Gutman. “If you want to see more, just swipe or tap through any Notify notification to open the link in the app’s browser where you can read the full article, watch the video, or view the site.”
Notifications can easily be shared with friends via Facebook, text, email, or other social networks from your lockscreen. You can also save notifications for later.
Notify is for iPhone only for the time being. The company didn’t mention any plans to expand it to other mobile platforms. That probably depends on how much people care about this one.
You can download the app or just get a closer look from notify.co.
Notify, Facebook’s follow-up to Instant Articles, will be made available as a standalone app next week, according to people familiar with its plans. It will feature content from a range of print, digital and video companies, including Vogue, Mashable, CNN and the Washington Post. CBS, Comedy Central and Billboard magazine are also involved.
After reports of early testing for Notify emerged over the summer, Facebook is now giving the go-ahead to a full launch this week.
Notify is a standalone app, continuing Facebook’s push in that direction. Notify is said to allow users to follow certain publications, or “channels”, and receive push notifications when said outlets publish breaking news stories. Early reports indicated that these notifications will be short in character length, and will include links to the new outlets’ sites.
This is certainly not Facebook’s only move into he realm of news. Facebook recently added a bunch of new publishers to its Instant Articles initiative, which has publishers allowing Facebook to publish their content, which loads super fast inside the Facebook wall – no traveling to third part sites.
Facebook says Instant Articles are doing well – in fact, they’re getting more shares that traditional articles posted on the site.
Twitter just announced a new feature called Moments, which are curated stories made up of tweets, images, videos, Vines, and GIFs. These are curated by both Twitter and select partners like Bleacher Report, Buzzfeed, Entertainment Weekly, Fox News, Getty Images, Mashable, MLB, NASA, New York Times, Vogue and the Washington Post (more in the future).
Twitter users can access and follow specific stories from a new lightning bolt tab. New stories appear throughout the day and are continuously updated and organized by topics like entertainment, sports, etc.
When you click on a “moment,” you’ll go to an introduction with a title and description. Swipe to get into the media, tap to get a bigger view of a tweet, then retweet/favorite accordingly. There’s a progress bar that shows you how much more there is to each moment. You can swipe up or down to dismiss a moment and go back to the guide.
Sometimes Moments will parallel what is relevant on the world stage or in the media; other times, they will be built on content unique to Twitter. We will select Moments based on what is happening on Twitter, or create Moments based on Twitter content featured across media outlets. When selecting Moments around controversial topics, we will choose topics that are big news in the mainstream press or are demonstrably large public conversations on Twitter.
We avoid creating Moments that may invade privacy, encourage illegal activities, exploit or harm minors, or make Twitter, Inc. a focus of the story. We do not duplicate curated collections or sets of Tweets embedded on a single third-party website, or those retweeted from a single Twitter account.
Moments is rolling out to US users on Android, iOS, and web. Users outside of the US can still view them if they’ve been shared with them.
Google introduced its “First Click Free” policy nearly a decade ago to help paywall-using publishers better monetize their content. It lets users see a little bit of content for free without giving them free access to everything. The idea is that users will pay (or register in some cases) to be able to view all of a publisher’s articles.
In 2009, Google updated the policy to let users get access to five articles per day. The company says this was an effort to protect publishers “who felt some users were abusing the spirit of this policy.”
Now, Google is changing the policy to reduce the number of articles users can read to 3. The company says it has heard from publishers about the need to revisit it policy to reflect the mobile, multi-device world. The policy now reads:
First click free: We’ve worked with subscription-based news services to arrange that the very first article seen by a Google News user (identifiable by referrer) doesn’t require a subscription. Although this first article can be seen without subscribing, any further clicks on the article page will prompt the user to log-in or subscribe to the news site.
This is our preferred solution since it can benefit both our users and our publisher partners. It allows Googlebot to fully index your content, which can improve the likelihood of users visiting your site; and it allows users to view the article of interest while also encouraging them to subscribe.
It is possible to limit the number of free articles that a Google News reader can access via First Click Free. A user coming from the domain [*.google.*] must be able to see a minimum of 3 articles per day. This practice is described as “metering” the user: when the user has clicked on too many of a publisher’s articles from Google News, the meter for freely accessible articles on that site is exhausted. If your site meters access on a weekly or monthly basis, you are still responsible for showing a minimum of three articles per day to Google users. Otherwise, your site will be treated as a subscription site.
If your site has been set up using the First Click Free model but you are being labeled as “subscription” in Google News, please contact us so we can help.
The rest of the old guidelines (for both Google News and Google Search) still apply.
Publishers can elect to apply First Click Free to specific sections of their sites, only for Google News, or only for Google Search should they choose to do so.
Begley also runs the @Dronestream Twitter account, which pretty much does the same thing as his app. It was there he reported Apple’s decision to pull the app:
Apple’s incomprehensible disdain for this app actually goes back to 2012. Begley had problems getting Apple to approve his app, called Drones+ at the time.
“If the content is found to be objectionable, and it’s literally just an aggregation of news, I don’t know how to change that,” Begley said at the time.
Maybe a name change? That’s exactly what he did and last year, the Metadata+ app launched. It lasted for a while, before Apple yanked it on Sunday.
Apple’s always been rather puritanical with its app approval process – but that mostly has to do with the company’s inability to understand that adults might want to use apps with adult content.
But as Gawker points out, Apple has plenty of “crude” apps sitting in its App Store.
And a simple app that reports the news isn’t really one of them.
WordPress.com has a new action bar, which makes it easier for readers to follow blogs of interest and for bloggers to make changes to their own sites.
If you’re a blog visitor, and you’re on a WordPress.com blog that you’re not yet following, you can click the “Follow” button that appears in the bottom-right hand corner so new posts from that blog will appear in your WordPress.com Reader. If you click on the three dots that appear on the button, you’ll get more options such as the ability to add the blog’s theme to your own blog, copy the shortlink, report the content, or manage the sites that you follow.
If you’re on one of your own pages, you’ll have “Customize” and “Edit” options. You can use these to go to the customizer where you can adjust your site’s appearance, change themes, change settings, etc, or go to Edit to make changes to your actual content.
The action bar will appear on the desktop, tablets, and smartphones. You can minimize it if you don’t like it.
We know that Twitter is looking to get into the breaking news game in a big way. People already use Twitter as a main source for their news, and the company is taking steps to make it an even bigger part of the platform.
The company is currently testing a new breaking news section that appears on its mobile apps right next to notifications and messages.
Twitter is also working on a huge new feature codenamed Project Lightning – which has Twitter curating important news and putting it front and center on the app and desktop. It will be accessible to everyone – logged in or out.
But just how do people use Twitter for news?
Pew recently looked at a sample of Twitter users and compiled some data on how often they tweet the news, who they follow for news, and more.
Facebook is working on yet another standalone app, according to a report from Business Insider.
The app, which is apparently just beginning to enter testing, is designed for publishers to send out breaking news alerts to users who choose to follow them.
In short, here’s how the app will work:
First, users will download a separate app for this. Then, they will follow certain publications or topics – sort of like Twitter. From there, publications can push notifications to their followers.
These breaking news alerts are currently being tested as 100 characters, not including the URL. Publications can only include their own URLs in the alerts, and the app is in its nascent stage so very few publications are involved yet.
Business Insider says that the links will be outside links – in other words they will take users to the publications’ website. But it’s pretty hard to imagine Facebook not tying this in to its Instant Article initiative.
People do get a lot of their news on Facebook these days – whether that’s a great thing or not. An app like this could allow users to avoid the clutter of their news feeds.
I’ve reached out to Facebook and will update this accordingly.
Twitter is reportedly testing a new “News” tab in its iOS and Android apps, which appears alongside the notifications tab, and gives users quick access to a section called “Trending News,” which shows news stories directly from publishers.
The feature, first reported by Buzzfeed, is apparently Twitter’s answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles, and makes use of partnerships by select publishers. So far, they’re working with a number reported to be in the double digits, but the number would likely grow once the feature graduates from testing, assuming that happens.
The official Twitter statement is as follows (via The Verge):
“We’re experimenting with a news experience on iOS and Android as we continue to explore new ways to surface the best content to users.”
Twitter is already a major source of news and a place where many get a lot of the news they read in the first place. It’s also a place where news often breaks before any publication actually picks a story up, not to mention being a source of commentary that’s frequently included in news coverage on all kinds of topics.
While Twitter already has a popular Trends features where users can discover stories, a News feature seems like a perfect fit, particularly as rival Facebook continues to put more emphasis on news discovery.
In fact, Facebook is testing a new live events feature making use of its Place Tips functionality, which many see as a direct competitor to Twitter.
All of this follows news from earlier this summer that Twitter is working on something called “Project Lightning,” which lets people follow events better.
Back in December, Google announced that it was shutting down Google News in Spain as the result of a new law in that country that requires every Spanish publication to charge Google and other news aggregation services to show snippets from those publications regardless of whether or not the publisher actually wants it that way.
As you may know, some publishers (typically of the old media variety) aren’t fond of Google indexing their content and showing snippets to users. Some claim it is bad for their traffic despite evidence to the contrary. It would appear that Google News shutting down was actually much worse for traffic (as if it could have possibly gone any other way).
The law is similar to one in Germany that ensured publishers could charge services like Google for displaying snippets with links, but the difference with the Spanish law is that publishers actually have to charge. That way Google can’t just omit the ones who want to charge. There would be no option to opt out of Google News or to continue letting Google carry on as normal for free. So rather than paying every single publication just to link to their sites and drive them traffic (which is absurd), Google just shut down Google News in Spain and basically washed its hands of the whole mess.
Unfortunately for the publishers who were happy to get traffic from Google (and again, from other aggregators as well), things aren’t going so well for them either.
TechDirt is reporting on a study commissioned by the Spanish Association of Publishers of Periodical Publications (AEEPP) on the effects of the law, and they’re not good. It found that it’s stifling innovation in news and hurting publishers of all sizes, but especially smaller ones who don’t have the brand recognition of the bigger players.
TechDirt’s Mike Masnick hits the nail on the head when he writes, “Of course, for the major newspaper publishers, maybe that’s what they really wanted all along: less competition. But it’s difficult to see how that’s a legitimate public policy strategy.”
Even beyond the decreased competition among publishers, the aggregator market has apparently dried up in the country. Google still has a business without Google News, but while some others have reportedly found ways to shift business models, a number of aggregators have had to shut down entirely. The report specifically names Planeta Ludico, NiagaRank, InfoAliment and Multifriki.
What’s particularly disturbing is that this all seems pretty much like the only possible outcome of such a law. It remains a mystery how it could have possibly helped the news industry in Spain.
You can find the actual study here. It’s in Spanish obviously.
Back in May, Facebook announced its Instant Articles initiative – basically a program to get major publications like the New York Times, NBC News, and The Atlantic to let Facebook host their content.
Since then, Facebook has published a handful of these native Instant Articles. Now, it’s about to ramp up.
The Wall Street Journal quotes the ubiquitous sources familiar with the matter who say that you could start seeing way more of these Instant Articles on your handheld screens as early as this week.
From the WSJ:
The New York Times is ready to publish about 30 articles per day directly to Facebook’s news feed and the Atlantic is prepared to make most of its content available through the program, the people said. Both outlets are prepared to start publishing as early as Thursday, but are waiting for when Facebook is ready. NBC News plans to post between 30 and 40 articles a day to the stream in the coming days, one of the people familiar with the matter said.
So, what are Instant Articles exactly?
Facebook says they are “a fast and interactive experience for reading articles in News Feed” and “a tool for publishers to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook” while giving them “control over their stories, brand experience and monetization opportunities.”
Basically, news partners are allowing Facebook to publish their content, which will load up within Facebook – meaning users will not be traveling to The New York Times’ site to read the article. How does this affect referral traffic? It shouldn’t, at least according to Facebook.
“Instant Articles display within the Facebook app, so readers no longer redirect to the publisher’s website. Facebook worked with publishers and comScore to enable Instant Articles views in Facebook’s app to count as traffic to the original publishers, just as they do on the mobile web,” says the company.
Facebook says its Instant Articles load as much as 10 times faster than regular mobile web articles. Currently, they’re only appearing inside Facebook’s iOS app.
In terms of revenue, publishers can sell their own ads and keep 100% of revenue they sell, or they can just let Facebook do it and split it 70/30. Facebook’s initial nine partners for the initiative are The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild.
We’ve seen the era of the “citizen journalist” expand as the tools at their disposal grow. If you have a camera and you’re in the right place at the right time, you can make history on YouTube. Now, YouTube is looking to bolster its position with “new initiatives to support the discovery and verification of eyewitness news video.”
YouTube is partnering with social news agency Storyful to launch the YouTub Newswire, a “curated feed of the most newsworthy eyewitness videos of the day, which have been verified by Storyful’s team of editors and are embeddable from the original sources.”
The fact that anyone can upload a video to YouTube is both wonderful and potentially problematic. Over 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and separating the “noise” from the “news” is vital – according to Storyful.
“We’ve always taken our commitments to YouTube, our newsroom clients and the uploaders we work with very seriously. Our mission has always been to mine the platform, sort the news from noise and find the stories worth telling. This, the YouTube Newswire, is the next step forward in that mission,” says Storyful Managing Editor Aine Kerr in a post.
“While the platform has become noisier and more diverse, Storyful has gotten much more sophisticated in its technology, discovery, verification, acquisition and distribution of video. We’ve done extensive social sleuthing, worked with the likes of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times on UGC documentaries that had YouTube at their heart, debunked popular YouTube videos and amplified those videos at the heart of some of the biggest news stories of recent years.”
Storyful says its expertise in weeding through the muck will help YouTube Newswire succeed.
YouTube says it wants Newswire to be a tool for journalists.
“With the Newswire, we hope to provide journalists with an invaluable resource to discover news video around major events, and to highlight eyewitness video that offers new perspectives on important news stories. The Newswire will feature global and regional feeds that surface the most relevant videos in different parts of the world.”
The YouTube Newswire will also have a presence on Twitter and can be delivered via daily email newsletter. Right now on the Newswire, you can see videos about the Charleston Church shooting, flooding in Texas, and the new $10 bill.
“We hope that these new projects will empower more journalists to use powerful eyewitness video easily and responsibly,” says Olivia Ma, Head of Strategy and Operations at the Google News Lab.
There’s a lot happening in the world of tech news media. The latest piece of news in the publisher circuit is that Vox Media (The Verge, SB Nation, Polygon, Vox.com, Eater, Racked, Curbed) is acquiring Re/code roughly a year and a half after its launch.
Re/code was started at the beginning of 2014 after All Things D, led by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, was spun off from The Wall Street Journal. It has operated under a company called Revere Digital, which launched with backing from NBCUniversal News Group and Windsor Media. It also hosted the Code Conference, which happens to be going on right now.
Re/code will continue to publish at Recode.net and across other platforms. Its coverage areas will complement those of the The Verge, our leading consumer tech lifestyle brand, by focusing particularly on tech business news and analysis.
Re/code’s renowned tech and business conference division will continue to grow, and we will explore ways to apply Re/code’s leadership in this space to our other media brands over time.
Re/code will benefit from Vox Media’s infrastructure and resources, and will eventually move on to Chorus, Vox Media’s proprietary platform. The current members of Re/code’s staff will soon be employees of Vox Media.
Welcome, Kara, Walt, and the Re/code team to Vox Media!
We want to assure you that this combination is designed to bolster and enrich Re/code, and that we will continue to publish under the same name and leadership, with editorial independence. We will also continue to hold our signature Code conferences, and even add new ones, again with the same core team and the same philosophy.
Re/code will benefit from joining Vox Media by integrating Vox Media’s various capabilities — including marketing, communications, audience development, sales and production. We will also eventually migrate to Vox Media’s beautiful, powerful and flexible proprietary publishing platform, which will give us new ways to present our stories to you.
We plan as well to collaborate where appropriate with Vox Media’s current and very successful tech news site, The Verge. While the two sites occasionally overlap, we have focused on the business of tech, while The Verge has focused on covering tech from a lifestyle perspective.
We are excited that, after only 18 months, we are able to join Vox Media’s great family of sites and gain new resources and colleagues that will help us grow and get better at focusing on what matters most to you, our readers.
Here’s a video of the two joking and talking about the news followed by Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff talking about it at the conference:
Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief at The Verge, also wrote a post about welcoming Re/code to Vox Media, how they’ll work together, and how The Verge itself is also growing. He wrote:
When the opportunity to work more closely with Recode arrived, it made perfect sense: Recode covers the business of technology better than any other publication in the world. Kara and Walt have built a juggernaut of reporting talent and an unparallelled conference series designed for business leaders and executives, and the competition isn’t even close. Bringing Recode into the Vox Media fold means that The Verge can remain focused on being the best mainstream technology and lifestyle site in the world, and Recode can dig even deeper into how the money and business of technology works. Recode will maintain its site and branding, but over time we’ll work hard to find as many ways to work together as possible.
We are making one change, though: Recode’s tremendous reviews team of Lauren Goode, Katie Boehret, and Bonnie Cha will join the Verge staff, and Walt Mossberg will be writing reviews and columns for both sites. It’s an exciting expansion of our already best-in-the-business tech news and reviews team, and I can’t wait to see what they do with The Verge’s incredible platform and resources.
And that’s all just the start. We’re also increasing our overall investment in The Verge, and setting the stage to grow even bigger across the multiple platforms our audience finds us on every day. We’ve just hired new entertainment, science, and app reporters, and we are about to begin aggressively hiring transportation reporters. The incredible Verge Video team will double in size over the next few months. And we will continue hiring across The Verge as the year continues. It’s going to be an insane ride.
As mentioned at the beginning, this is just the latest change in the tech media blogosphere. As reported yesterday, Gigaom, which announced its demise earlier this year, is being relaunched in August after being acquired by Knowingly. The site will continue with its existing domain and content library, but will move forward without the staff who made created it all.
Other recent and major tech blog news came when Verizon announced its acquisition of AOL, which includes content sites like TechCrunch and Engadget. Those are about to be owned by Verizon.
In March, the tech news industry was shocked by the news that one of its most prominent blogs, Gigaom, was shutting down after revealing it was unable to pay its creditors. On Tuesday, it was announced that the site will be back. It just won’t be the Gigaom that you knew.
In other words, the domain will be there, along with its archives of content, but what the new content that comes with the relaunch consists of remains to be seen.
Gigaom.com was purchased by entrepreneur Byron Reese on Friday. His Austin-based startup Knowingly plans to relaunch the site on August 15. In the meantime, you can visit the site and see it basically as it’s been without any new content.
In a press release, Reese described Gigaom as “second to none in what it does,” adding, “We are excited to be a chapter of the Gigaom story and look forward to continuing its mission of ‘humanizing the impact of technology.’”
“We live at what I believe is the great turning point of all of human history, and that is being driven in large part by the technologies we are creating. This new world we are making will not just be more prosperous, but it will be more fair and more just than any time in the past,” he said. “Gigaom will continue documenting this transformation and the technologies which are driving it.”
Still, it’s going to have to do so with a different staff of content creators. The former reporters have been hired away. Fortune hired Stacey Higginbotham, Barb Darrow, Katie Fehrenbacher, Mathew Ingram, Jeff John Roberts, and Jonathan Vanian. Variety hired Janko Roettgers, and Signe Brewster joined Backchannel.
Best guess with zero info: knowingly "relaunches" gigaom by slapping up some robocontent to help maintain some seo value, calls it a day.
Om Malik (pictured) launched Gigaom in 2006, and left day-to-day operations in February of 2014. To our knowledge, he has yet to publicly comment on the site’s acquisition.
And so it begins. After months of rumor and a little bit of chatter from the company itself, Facebook finally announced Instant Articles, its initiative to get publishers to let Facebook host content. The company bills it as “a fast and interactive experience for reading articles in News Feed” and “a tool for publishers to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook” while giving them “control over their stories, brand experience and monetization opportunities.”
Should publishers take the plunge and get involved with Instant Articles? Tell us what you think.
“Web articles in the Facebook app take an average of eight seconds to load, by far the slowest single content type on Facebook,” says product manager Michael Reckhow. “Using the same technology that loads photos and videos quickly in our mobile app, Instant Articles load as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles, so you get to the stories you want to read instantly. Once there, new features like tilt-to-pan photos, auto-play video, embedded audio captions, and interactive maps let you explore the story in beautiful new ways.”
Publishers can sell ads in their articles and keep the revenue or elect to use Facebook’s Audience Network to monetize unsold inventory. They’ll also have the ability to track data and traffic through comScore and other analytics tools.
“Fundamentally, this is a tool that enables publishers to provide a better experience for their readers on Facebook” said Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox. “Instant Articles lets them deliver fast, interactive articles while maintaining control of their content and business models.”
The company is launching Instant Articles with 9 partners, including: The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild. For now, Instant Articles will only appear on Facebook’s iPhone app with a special set of articles published by these partners, but Facebook says it will continue to develop the product with partners over the coming months. If you’re a publisher and wish to get involved, you can contact Facebook about doing so here.
BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones shares his article on Facebook's new Instant Articles product. Linking to…
In an FAQ document, Facebook makes it clear that Instant Articles will not be required for publishers on Facebook going forward and that those who choose to use it still control how much they publish to Facebook. Standard article links will remain accessible from Facebook for publishers who don’t wish to participate. The company says it expects users to appreciate the enhancements and that publishers will see greater engagement as a result.
Publishers don’t need to create original content for Facebook. Instant Articles is simply an optimized way to distribute content on Facebook. One can only imagine that Facebook will give these stories special treatment when it comes time for ranking content for News Feed delivery, similar to what it’s doing with its hosted video content (it’s actively advising pages against posting videos from other sites).
Instant Articles supports automated content syndication via HTML and RSS, so once publishers get involved, the work on their end should really be minimal. Content published on Instant Articles will also be published on the publisher’s own website.
“It’s a straightforward process for publishers to publish their articles in the Instant Articles format because it uses HTML and RSS, standard ways for authoring articles on the web,” the FAQ explains. “Facebook translates articles authored for the web in HTML into the Instant Articles format. We also provide tools for publishers to preview articles prior to publication and make sure they display as they intended. Publishers who wish to embrace new elements like interactive maps and auto-play videos can use simple, well-documented HTML tags to enhance their content with rich-media features.”
Instant Articles works for any article type. Nothing changes with regard to link sharing. Facebook says there is no need to link or post an Instant Article differently. Each is associated with a link, so when a friend or page shares a link in News Feed, readers see the Instant Article version if it’s available. People who are on devices that don’t yet support Instant Articles will just see the normal version of the content.
One question that is likely on every publisher’s mind is: How will this affect my referral traffic? Here’s Facebook’s answer: “Instant Articles display within the Facebook app, so readers no longer redirect to the publisher’s website. Facebook worked with publishers and comScore to enable Instant Articles views in Facebook’s app to count as traffic to the original publishers, just as they do on the mobile web.”
For the most part this all sound pretty good for everybody involved – a win/win for Facebook and publishers. For now. The main concern is that publishers will come to rely on Facebook too much, as many have in the past, and as we all know, being at the mercy of Facebook’s doings doesn’t always work out that great in the end.
That said, the fact that your content still resides on your own site would seem to alleviate that concern. You still won’t have to rely solely on Facebook. Honestly, based on what Facebook has presented so far, I’m not seeing a lot of downside. If anything, it could be a chance for publishers to make up some lost ground in the News Feed.
If you’ve been on the internet today, you probably know that Verizon is acquiring AOL, pending regulatory approval and closing conditions. While the announcement made no claims that AOL’s content properties would be spun off, reports at Re/code have suggested otherwise.
As we referenced in an earlier article on the acquisition, Re/Code’s Peter Kafka suggested Verizon could decide to spin out AOL’s content operations with a third partner, “perhaps German publisher Axel Springer”.
According to numerous sources, while it has been negotiating its deal to sell to Verizon, AOL has also been in advanced discussions with a number of parties to spin off its flagship Huffington Post content unit.
The talks have been most serious with Axel Springer, the German media conglomerate, but a number of private equity firms have also expressed interest in the high-profile property. Sources said the Huffington Post has been valued at above $1 billion in this scenario, which would either be a complete sale or, more likely, structured as a joint venture.
AOL has been sending around a statement in response to such reports (via Variety): “AOL owns a portfolio of premium, global content brands including The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Endgadget, among others, and all of them will continue to be part of our business as we go forward.”
Swisher says this contradicts what “several top AOL sources” told her this morning. As Kafka noted in his article, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong also said in the past that there was no truth to reports of a potential acquisition by Verizon.
Reddit just announced the launch of its first ever email newsletter. It’s called Upvoted Weekly, borrowing the name of its recently launched Upvoted podcast. It’s opt-in (double opt-in, actually) and promises subscribers the “very best of reddit’s content curated, packaged, and delivered to your inbox once a week.”
“It’s free and we’ll never spam you,” says the subscription form. “We will NEVER send you an unsolicited email. Never. Seriously. If you do not check that box [to opt-in], your email address will never show up in our email list. User profile information is stored in a completely different place than the email list. These two databases do not, and will not, talk with each other.”
Content will come “from every nook and cranny on the site,” and will be handpicked by co-founder Alexis Ohanian and his team. It will be delivered each Sunday morning “so you can enjoy it with a nice cup of coffee, tea, or bacon.” The first issue will be sent out on April 19.
On Product Hunt, Product manager Heath Black talked more about reddit’s reasoning for getting into email now after all these years:
First of all, we know that a lot of people interact with reddit content across the web on a daily basis. They love the content, but don’t necessarily understand that concept of reddit itself. This helps us build some context for those two things for new users, reddit lurkers, and folks that just can’t spend all day on the site.
Secondly, as the site continues to grow, and the amount of content submitted grows with it, finding good content can be incredibly difficult. Discovery is a hard problem to solve, and much of the best content can be found in some of the smallest corners of reddit. A weekly digest gives us the ability to call out those good content creators, no matter where they reside on reddit.
Third, since reddit content blows up pretty often, we want to make sure that the creators of that content are given the credit they deserve. Many publishers that use their content don’t credit at all and it absolutely pisses our users off. We want reddit users to know that we love them and the creative things they do.
That last point is also at least partially why reddit recently added embeddable comments (like the one above) as well.
Upvoted Weekly will not factor in the subreddits a user subscribes to because, again, the email list is completely separate from the user information.
“Every day there are millions of people that engage with reddit content across the web,” the company says. “Many of them love the CONTENT on reddit, but don’t understand the CONCEPT of reddit. This newsletter is an easy way for people to experience the great stuff that reddit creates, while maintaining proper attribution to the users that created it.”
Reddit says to get an idea of what you’re in for, you can check out the podcast as well as the compay’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. Here’s a quick look at the latter:
Email newsletters can go a long way toward increasing user engagement on a site, and I don’t see reddit being any different in that regard. You can see a “teaser” of how it will be laid out here.
StumbleUpon has been trying a similar approach to increase engagement with its content, and that seems to be working pretty well. Like reddit, it too shares some of its best content on its official Facebook and Twitter accounts, and much of this ends up in emails to users as well.
StumbleUpon takes things further, however, and is very much about user information, which it uses to personalize emails based on interests and content that users have already engaged with. We recently spoke with the company’s director of marketing here.
“Both email marketing and social media are important pieces to the marketing mix that can significantly increase DAU [Daily Active Users],” she told us. “We are running several tests to gauge what content our users want to see. In many regards, email at StumbleUpon has been 100% dynamic content generated out of our personalization algorithm.”
She also mentioned the company’s weekly recommendation emails, which are personalized, had the highest engagement rates.
This is obviously a much different approach from what reddit is doing, but the completely hands-off approach it’s taking makes a lot of sense for the site. If Upvote Weekly proves successful, perhaps reddit may experiment with some more user-based email options. There are no doubt plenty of users who would prefer weekly, or even daily digests of highlights from the subreddits they actually subscribe to. We’ll see. For now, they’re not hinting at any such plans.
Facebook is testing some changes to its Trending feature, which for some has become a staple of the Facebook experience since it launched on desktop early last year.
In December, Facebook introduced some big changes, adding new sections to split up the types of content that users can peruse for each trend. These include Articles, In the Story, Friends and Groups, Near the Scene, and Live Feed. It also launched the feature on mobile devices.
With the new test, Facebook is trying out some additional categorization – this time by actual topic. AdWeek shows the trending box displaying a few trends, with the ability to “see more” followed by categories like Politics, Business, Science and Technology, Sports, and Entertainment. Clicking any of these topics will reportedly show you a few trends from that category.
When Facebook first added its trending feature, it was largely looked at as the latest (at the time) attempt to add more Twittereque flavor to the social network. Facebook has historically been more about personal social networking, but in recent years it has become much better for public information. The Trending section has certainly helped in that regard, not to mention the trending stories it inserts into the News Feed.
Twitter itself has been messing around with its trends as well, electing to add some context.
“We know that trends aren’t always self-explanatory, so now you’ll see a description below each trend,” the company said earlier this week. “Since trends tend to be abbreviations without context, like #NYFW, a description will make it clear that this trend is about New York Fashion Week. The new trends experience may also include how many Tweets have been sent and whether a topic is trending up or down.”
Two years ago, Flipboard launched its now-fundamental Magazines feature, which turns all users into content curators. Now, the company is launching a highly-requested feature with private group magazines, which it says are ideal for classrooms, clubs, work groups, friends, and families.
“With millions of Flipboard Magazines already being curated publicly by Flipboard users, this new private capability opens up new use cases,” the company says. “Now, Flipboard Magazines give a private place for family and friends to collect stories for each other, teams to document events, colleagues to research together or clubs to share ideas.”
“This launch allows people to use Flipboard in new ways, giving groups a way to use our platform to stay connected and follow interests together—in the privacy of their own Flipboard Magazine,” adds product manager Christen Duong. “We’ve been testing this as a team at Flipboard and it’s been a great way to share stories relevant to our business.”
The feature is available on Flipboards apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, as well as the recently launched desktop version at Flipboard.com.
To create a private group magazine, tap the “+” at the bottom of any story while you’re browsing Flipboard, and start a new magazine.
When you’re adding a title and description, you’ll have the option to select “private”.
Then go to your magazine and click the “+” to invite contributors.
You’ll also see a new “Invite Contributor” button for existing magazines when you look at their covers.
Flipboard has seen over 15 million public magazines created since launching the feature two years ago. The company revealed the leading magazines in a few categories.
The one with the most likes is Cute:
The one with the most re-flips is Fit in 2015:
The one with the most comments is Think Tanking:
And the one with the most followers is How To Style:
Flipboard also says some of the most flipped-through magazines have names like Ghost Towns Around the World, Luxury Cars, Man of Many, Mobile Photograph Daily, Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown, Recipes: The Art of Eating Asian Food, and Tangents. This illustrates that popularity can come from some pretty niche topics.
Last week, we posted the results from our Q&A with Flipboard editorial director Josh Quittner, who told us, “We see that readers appreciate focus. General topics such as ‘technology,’ ‘food’ or ‘design’ are great if you’re curating a collection for your own reference, but if you want to build an audience, general topics don’t give readers much to get excited about. Get specific, like instead of ‘gadgets’ go for ‘gadgets for kids’ or instead of ‘recipes’ choose ‘slow-cooker recipes.’”
“Once you’ve picked a topic, start thinking about your perspective on it,” he added. “A magazine with a point of view and a tone of voice resonates well with readers. We see magazines about the same topic but with different points of view all the time. Your take on happiness, healthcare or fast cars will be different than anyone else’s.”
Flipboard offers some traffic opportunities to publishers. More on how to take advantage of those here. With the new private group feature, perhaps B2B publications will be able to attract more eyeballs through the service.
Flipboard, which turns its users into curators, apparently doesn’t quite see it that way. Editorial director Josh Quittner told The Drum a couple years ago, after the launch of its now fundamental “Magazines” curation feature, “The creator is still more valuable than the curator.”
In other words, the content being curated by Flipboard users has to come from somewhere, and creators can take advantage of that fact and potentially gain traffic from the service. We recently dove into how you can go about doing so, but have since reached out to the company itself for some additional insight. The result was a Q&A with Quittner.
First, he addressed a question about how Filpboard chooses what stories to show users, beyond the personalization that comes with topic, magazine, and profile following.
“When you go to Flipboard, the first thing you see is your Cover Stories with highlights from everything you follow, including magazines, sources, topics and social networks,” he says. “We look at a whole bunch or heuristics to determine what to show in your Cover Stories such as comments, likes and interactions on Flipboard as well as the social networks you have connected. As you add more things on Flipboard such as sources, magazines and people, their posts will begin to appear in your Cover Stories. We also give personalized recommendations for magazines and people to follow based on your interests. An algorithm-driven discovery engine analyzes millions of articles each day across more than 34,000 topics, suggesting content based on your interests and preferences. These are some of the ways we strive to make content that’s relevant to you more easily discoverable.”
Flipboard has a set of community guidelines on how to share and how not to share content on the service. Asked about some dos and don’ts beyond the standard guidelines, Quittner had the following to say.
“We see that readers appreciate focus. General topics such as ‘technology,’ ‘food’ or ‘design’ are great if you’re curating a collection for your own reference, but if you want to build an audience, general topics don’t give readers much to get excited about. Get specific, like instead of ‘gadgets’ go for ‘gadgets for kids’ or instead of ‘recipes’ choose ‘slow-cooker recipes.’”
“Once you’ve picked a topic, start thinking about your perspective on it. A magazine with a point of view and a tone of voice resonates well with readers. We see magazines about the same topic but with different points of view all the time. Your take on happiness, healthcare or fast cars will be different than anyone else’s.”
“When you first start a new magazine, keep it private for a while until you have about 40 items in it. By then you will know if you picked a topic you are really interested in and for your readers there will really be something to read. I’ve seen exceptions too – if you’re making a magazine about an event or for a class for instance you may not need the same amount of content. The 10 articles to read for science class this week can also work.”
“Then there are some practical things you want to think about such as a magazine title and cover photo. A compelling magazine title, which can be descriptive or creative, can attract new readers and so can an attractive cover. And don’t forget the basics: make sure your profile has a photo and description. Providing a face to a name helps establish trust and adds a human element to your profile.”
“I also want to make sure curators know they can use badges to spread the word about their magazines. At share.flipboard.com you can find tools to help build your magazines’ reach. There is a profile badge that will take people to your profile page with all your magazines, as well as a magazine widget. If you add the widget to your website, a magazine cover that updates dynamically will be displayed.”
On whether it’s better for users to create/curate one or two magazines or a bunch of them…
“Curating is personal so it really depends on what your goals are,” says Quittner. “If you want to connect with likeminded people and build up an audience, I recommend curating a separate magazine for each interest. If your magazine is more for yourself, than it’s fine to collect everything in one magazine.”
A couple of questions that a lot of people would probably ask are: Does it matter how much of the content in a user’s magazine comes from their own website? Is it always better to have a mix, or is it sometimes good to have magazines that explicitly feature your own content?
“It’s really up to you,” says Quittner. “A Flipboard magazine can be a great way to make your blog more discoverable or to make it look beautiful on a mobile device. We see bloggers who flip a lot of their own blog posts into a magazine and mix in stories by others about the same topic or with a similar point of view. We also see bloggers compliment the magazine with their own content on other platforms, for instance Medium posts, Tweets, Instagrams or photos from your phone.”
“Some of the larger blogs, curate multiple magazines on Flipboard,” he adds. “For instance, if your blog is about technology, you could curate all your stories about wearables into one magazine and create another magazine with all your games content.”
He notes that Flipboard has tools specifically for bloggers, which you can look through here.
As noted in a previous article, we’ve seen some people speculate on the SEO value of having content in Flipboard. Asked about this, Quittner says, “We’ve seen that Flipboard helps drive traffic to publishers and content creators by making content more discoverable. Now that Flipboard is on the Web, you may have noticed that your magazines will surface when you do a Google search. Adding descriptions to your magazine and your profile helps people understand what your content is about and it’s part of what the search engines crawl.”
In October, Flipboard said 10 million magazines had been created. Asked for an update on that and how many are actively updated, Quittner tells us, “Since we launched the third generation of Flipboard in October, which introduced topics we saw the number of magazines created by our readers grow fast. We’re now at 15 million. And over the same period of time we doubled the number of active curators. Flipboard 3.0 has also made people more engaged and while we had 30 million monthly active readers in October of last year, we now have almost 50 million.”
In addition to asking Quittner some questions, we reached out to Mathew Ingram, formerly of Gigaom (which was still operational at the time of our interaction), about getting more out of the service. Ingram has been featured on Flipboard’s own blog, where he talked about how he uses the service.
“I actually think having multiple magazines makes a lot of sense,” he tells WebProNews. “That way you can segment and target your various interests and appeal to different readers.”
On how much of the content in your magazine should come from your own stuff, Ingram says, “I think a 70-30 breakdown is a good rule of thumb for a lot of social media — so 70 percent or so content from other publishers or creators and about 30 percent from you.”
Asked about traffic, Ingram says, “We often see some high volume from Flipboard to our stories, although not regularly enough to count on. And it’s difficult to track why some stories take off and others don’t.”
Are you taking measures to increase your content’s exposure with Flipboard? Do you plan to in the future? Let us know in the comments.
Last week, a study from the Media Insight Project came out finding that millennials have little interest in paying for news. Now, Retale has some new findings based on a poll of over 1,000 people, looking at newspaper readership, format preferences, and attitude toward paying for content.
According to that, only 19% of millennials have paid for newspaper content (print or digital) in the last month, while 50% of all age groups are completely unwilling to pay for print. Millennials are the least willing at 55%.
In fact, 29% of all millennials said that they couldn’t even recall the last time they read a print newspaper.
“Millennials are a digital-first audience,” said Retale President Pat Dermody. “They’re not consuming print newspaper content in the same way as previous generations. For the industry to adapt, they’ll have to be creative and consider new digital formats to support readership and drive revenue.”
67% of all age groups were against paying for digital news access while 50% were unwilling for print. About 60% of all millennials said they’re not willing to pay anything for digital news access.
According to the study, 27% of millennials prefer a Netflix-like, “all-you-can-eat” payment structure for digital news. It also dound that 76% of those 55 and older are completely unwilling to pay anything for digital news access. Millennials prefer to access digital content via mobile browser (37%) vs. PC (35%).
Here’s what the numbers look like for paying for digital news:
85% of respondents who choose to get their news digitally cited cost as a key factor. 59% cited convenience, and surprisingly only 39% cited more up-to-date content. For print, 49% cited familiarity, while 37% said the experience is less distracting than a website. 36% cited convenience, and 27% cited perceived credibility of content.
For those few millennials who do prefer print content, 31% cited credibility compared to 26% citing convenience. For those 35 and over, 39% cited convenience over 26% for credibility.
When it comes to receiving and redeeming deals and retail promotions, 40% of millennials prefer digital, and this is the largest group that does. 52% of those 35 and over prefer print.
“Retail circulars have long been one of the most effective marketing tools in retail marketing,” said Dermody. “However, broader trends in media consumption, with readers migrating from print to digital, can’t be ignored. In digitizing print circulars, retailers can navigate the evolving landscape and preserve a proven marketing strategy. They can also better connect with this new and growing group of mobile, millennial shoppers.”
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