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Three different ways The Atlantic, Digiday, and Condé Nast approach reader monetization
You’ve heard the news: Facebook is deprioritizing publishers in the News Feed in favor of baby pictures and engagement announcements. Pair that with the fact Facebook and Google now capture roughly 75% of digital ad spend in the United States and 99% of its growth—even publishers with a large audience are struggling to get meaningful…
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Episode 07: Mobile Mythbusters
“My assumption is desktop is basically dead.” Sachin and Andrew analyze data behind the growth of mobile in 2017 and how referral traffic from platforms like Flipboard and Instagram factored in. Plus, they discuss Facebook’s News Feed algorithm and aggregation theory and go +1/-1 on their personal habits with devices, like taking your phone to…
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Episode 06: And Now, Our Feature Presentation
“Moneyball the movies.” Andrew talks with special guest Sal Gionfriddo, a UX Engineer at Parse.ly, about a new data set showing how internet attention for films relates to box office success. Plus, they cover platforms’ role in content policing, the growth of voice assistants, Reddit headline browsing, and Spotify’s IPO. “There is a real-world connection…
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Sharing means caring: Users prefer content recommendations that don’t sacrifice their privacy
Publishers often employ content recommendation systems to build relationships with readers, but the method still presents some challenges. Publishers face a multitude of choices in how they choose to surface content. They only have seconds to capture the attention of the potential “perfect reader.” In this new era of increasing personalization, many companies have assumed…
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What movie will you see this weekend? That depends on where you live.
What do people do before they go see a movie? The movie industry tries to answer this question through proxies employed by marketers: surveys, data on past successes, search data, and more recently social media listening or interaction tools. Given our dataset of billions of internet visitors per month to the largest media properties in…
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Time well spent: The most engaging articles across ten news categories in 2017
What topics did readers spend the most time with in 2017? This question preoccupied us as we reflected on a year that brought with it tumultuous change. Content isn’t apples to apples; how people discover and engage with articles varies by topic. The benchmarks for a successful music article might look very different from a…
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Episode 05: Feeding Online Appetites in 2017
“There’s a huge hunger for political and news content.” Sachin and Andrew reflect on assumptions the digital media industry made about 2017, including predictions about distributed content, video, and political news, and see what the data says about how trends really played out. They discuss a report from Facebook about how spending time on social…
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Survey: The State of Digital Media in 2018
Thanks for taking the survey! Last year, the role of journalism in society topped the list of concerns, selected by 31% of survey respondents. Monetization (24%) and mobile optimization (15%) followed right behind. In light of the growth of audio and pending media mergers, we added voice and regulatory to the list for 2018. See…
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Episode 04: Get AMPed
“Google’s back, baby.” Sachin and Andrew discuss the implications of Google surpassing Facebook as the top traffic referrer to publishers. They consider how algorithm changes and distributed content formats such as AMP and Facebook Instant Articles may have played a role. They catch up on net neutrality and media consolidation news and go +1/-1 on…
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Don’t start 2018 without catching up on the data from this year
You can measure the year in top songs, top movies, or top recipes, taking a look at what made this year “special” using data. But what was special about the data of this year? We’re taking a look at the biggest trends that we found in 2017 using data, and using it to figure out…