Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
By Andrew Bosworth, VP, Ads & Business Platform As more and more content has shifted to the internet, online experiences have improved dramatically, becoming more immersive and intuitive. But many digital ads haven’t kept up. We’ve all experienced a lot of bad ads: ads that obscure the content we’re trying to read, ads that slow down…
Photo As it blocks ad blockers, Facebook is asking its users to help control the ads they see on the site. SAN FRANCISCO — Digital ads pop up online so frequently and ubiquitously that many people are using software to block them. But if you try to stop ads from showing up on Facebook’s desktop…
If there’s one macro trend with which almost every publisher is struggling, it’s the increasing distribution power of platforms like Facebook, and how that is continuing to disrupt traditional media business models. Where they once controlled the entire process from creation to consumption, media companies now see their power over almost all the elements of…
If you don’t live in or around Louisiana, you may not know that. And it’s not your fault. Cable news has mostly ignored it. Sure, there’s been coverage, but not as much you’d expect given the scale of the suffering. As Rod Dreher noted on his blog, a screenshot of CNN’s home page over the…
Following a day-long auction against the online publisher Ziff Davis, the media conglomerate Univision is buying Gawker Media’s assets—including Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel, Kotaku, and Lifehacker—for $135 million. However, the fate of the company’s flagship website, Gawker.com, remains unclear. Recode’s Peter Kafka reported yesterday that Univision’s final and successful offer shall “encompass all seven of…
Billionaire Peter Thiel published a passionate op-ed in the New York Times today, mere hours before the deadline for bids to purchase Gawker, the media company that Thiel helped to bankrupt in response to a blog post that publicly exposed his sexual orientation. In the editorial, Thiel positions himself as a defender of online privacy…
One person calls the other dumb. The second guy responds by calling the first an “asshole” and a “dumbass with his head up his ass.” The first guy fires back again, accusing his “thin-skinned” antagonist of throwing a “tantrum.” Is this a middle school playground argument? Two drunks yelling at a bar? A YouTube comments…
Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel speaks at the 2016 Republican National Convention last month in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.) Peter Thiel proudly acknowledged (again) on Monday his funding of an invasion of privacy lawsuit that brought Gawker Media to its knees, ahead of the company’s scheduled bankruptcy auction later today. In a prominent op-ed in…
Here’s a tiny, tiny wrinkle in the ongoing Gawker Media auction: LittleThings, a digital publisher that specializes in Facebook-friendly content, says it wants to buy Jezebel, one of the sites owned by Gawker Media. The problem is, Jezebel isn’t for sale: Gawker Media, which is in bankruptcy, wants to sell all seven of its sites…