Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The big five agency holding companies are so deeply mired in surcommissions and client distrust that media agencies as a whole face an existential crisis. Last week saw the great and the good of the advertising world trundle to New York City for Advertising Week – four days of talks, events, awards and general navel-gazing….
Six months in, Facebook’s test of mid-roll ad breaks within live and on-demand videos is driving scant revenue for publishers. Five publishers participating in Facebook’s mid-roll ads test, which began in March, said the product isn’t generating much money. One publisher said its Facebook-monetized videos had an average CPM of 15 cents. A second publisher,…
At least 50 people were killed and more than 200 were injured in a shooting on the Las Vegas Strip late Sunday night. Police have confirmed that “one suspect is down” and they do not believe there are any more shooters. Authorities are looking to talk to a “female companion” as a possible person of…
Ev Williams is in New York to have meetings. He’s meeting with writers to discuss producing original content for his Medium platform; he’s meeting with editors about potential work with the company; and he’s meeting with journalists like me to try and describe just what Medium is now. After the company’s latest strategy shift away…
Louise Linton, the wife of Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, carried an Hermès Birkin bag worth roughly $10,000 on her arm in the ill-fated Instagram post that got her slammed for “flashing her wealth” — and then lecturing a critic about her “sacrifices.” But status symbols don’t have to cost as much as a luxury purse….
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…
Most people told us it would never work, but we did it anyway: We started charging 10¢ to post content on our social network. Our users didn’t leave. In fact, they are posting more than ever, and the quality of content has improved. Our experiment seems to be working. People are willing to pay to…
Back in 2010, some blogger wanted to vent about something. “Small towns like the one I’m from in Texas have a fat girl problem. The scent of cheap perfume, sweat, grease … forms a troposphere-like force field surrounding the town that I call ‘that fat girl smell,’” wrote the blogger. At the end of another…
Begin: WordPress Article Content While Facebook prepares to offer readers a way to subscribe and pay for news directly from inside its app, the social network continues to tinker with how it presents publishers’ content elsewhere. In the latest development, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Facebook has removed Instant Articles — Facebook’s self-hosted, faster-loading article format for…
Credit Daniel Zender I’ve been studying Americans’ accelerating penchant for blending the fantastical into the real world — from Disneyland to reality TV, from themed restaurants to war re-enactments to ubiquitous porn to Burning Man. So I started seeing evidence of the phenomenon in some very unlikely places — such as the excessive police response…