Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Illustration by Jim Cooke/Deadspin/GMG Earlier this week Deadspin published a story about how SB Nation team sites’ traffic accounts for the vast majority of the network’s total traffic, even though the people who staff these sites are primarily paid low monthly stipends or nothing at all. The story detailed, among other things, how a Vox…
Publishers are running into a wall with so-called native ads. Once seen as the panacea for declining digital ad rates, these ads that are designed to mimic editorial content have turned out to be costly to make and distribute and hard to scale, which makes them a tough sell with advertisers and also eats into…
You’re half-way through a gaming session and the world is breaking apart around you as you run from attacking aliens. Firing as you go, you turn a corner and suddenly your view is filled with the sight of a brand new sedan. You see a cute dog at your local coffee shop. When you lean…
Blast from the past, disguised as news: The Financial Times is going to have an app in Apple’s App Store. Wait! Don’t go! I’m going to (try to) make this more interesting. The reason the FT’s move qualifies as news is because the FT left the App Store back in 2011 in a dispute over Apple’s subscription rules. At…
If there’s any brand that knows Facebook, it’s NowThis. In January 2015, the digital video news publisher for millennials shut down its site and became a distributed publisher, and it quickly became one of the most-watched news publishers on Facebook, with its video-with-text-overlay style widely copied. But growth has its limits on Facebook, which has its…
SAN DIEGO (CN) – A lawsuit filed in California last week claims the fact-check news site Snopes.com has been caught up in its own concealment scheme, in an ownership spat that has left the site’s personnel matters in limbo. Internet media management company Proper Media sued Bardav Inc. and its owner David Mikkelson over the…
On the web, content fraudsters run sites that generate millions of views, get hundreds of thousands of fans, and even claw their way up to the top of search pages. Some of these sites are nothing but one person. With low cost cash grabs taking over search and social how can publishers win? To fix…
The Guardian needed a new US headquarters. It was the morning of February 23, and staffers gathered at the company’s office in lower Manhattan, an immense space that the British newspaper once hoped would be home to a 300-person-strong US digital arm. Now the company — years ago a burgeoning news outlet with a shiny…
Start Article Post Content This is Distractify. You’ve probably seen its viral posts in your Facebook feed, like this: Makes you think, doesn’t it? Distractify is one of many companies that competes for your online attention with posts like this one: The posts often take the form of curated listicles, which combine written text with…
On July 2, President Donald Trump tweeted out a video showing himself, as he had appeared in a 2007 WrestleMania event, attacking a person whose head had been replaced with the CNN logo. Two days later, CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski wrote an article about the origins of the video and the anonymous Reddit user who…