Bitcoin buzz stays high — even after bubble
Bitcoin is more liquid and popular than ever before — though the cyber-currency remains controversial. Here’s a round-up of a busy week of Bitcoin news. Read more »
How the New York Times can fight BuzzFeed & reinvent its future
The NYT’s multimedia project Snow Fall was a huge success, attracting big audiences and lots of plaudits. But the paper can do even better — it can build a new business from this type of project, and change the definition of journalism in the new century. Read more »
Native advertising: winners, losers and a lot of hype
photo: Albert Chau
“Native advertising” is on the lips of everyone in publishing and advertising these days. Blogger and skeptic Felix Salmon asked executives from BuzzFeed and Forbes what it really means. Read more at paidContent »
This is about more than just advertorial — it’s about brands going direct
There’s been plenty of focus on how publishers are catering to advertisers by producing “native” advertising, including sponsored content — but a much bigger trend is brands and advertisers that are becoming publishers themselves. Read more at paidContent »
Big publishers sign on to New York Times sticky ad tool
photo: New York Times
The New York Times offers an ad tool that lets brands use its stories in a unique form of content marketing. The tool, which can provide publishers with a new source of long-tail revenue, will soon be used by other publishers like Forbes and Condé Nast. Read more at paidContent »
Why the Washington Post is smart to try sponsored content, and why others should too
photo: Shutterstock / Eldorado3D
The Washington Post has launched a feature offering advertisers the ability to place sponsored content on its site, and while this form of advertising has come under fire, other media outlets should consider doing the same. Read more at paidContent »
Disruption guru Clay Christensen says incumbent media players are making a classic mistake
Existing players in an industry almost always fail to appreciate how disruption will affect them or understand how to adapt to it, Harvard professor Clay Christensen says, and media companies are making all of those same mistakes. Read more at paidContent »
What we can learn from The Atlantic‘s sponsored content debacle
photo: Flickr user Stephen Brace
The Atlantic caused a furore this week with a piece of sponsored content about the Church of Scientology, which raised a host of questions about the risks of “native advertising” — which many see as the future of online media. Read more at paidContent »
Henry Blodget isn’t telling us the most important thing about Business Insider
photo: Flickr / TechCrunch
Henry Blodget of Business Insider has opened up about his site’s growth and other metrics, but for someone who is promoting transparency, he hasn’t told us the most important things we need to know in order to tell whether BI is successful or not. Read more at paidContent »
Subscriber Content
Consumer privacy in the mobile advertising era
Smartphones can enable an amazing level of connectivity, but they can also allow that activity to be monitored and used in controversial ways. But for mobile marketing to realize its full potential, consumers may need to sacrifice their privacy to one degree or another. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Bleacher Report and the evolution of the content farm
photo: D. Miller
The purchase of the sports-blogging site Bleacher Report by Turner Broadcasting unit fills a content hole for the Time Warner unit, but it is also a validation of the user-generated-content model behind the sports-blogging network, and a sign of the disruptive effects that model can have. Read more »
paidContent turns 10: A brief history of digital media
Remember when Friendster was the hot social network, publishers doubted that ebooks would ever sell, and Netflix thought DVDs in red envelopes was the future? We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Read more »
News flash: company boards are starting to ‘get’ IT
Techies know how important information technology is to a company’s success. Now new research by Gartner and Forbes seems to indicate that corporate boards have gotten that message as well, with board members ranking IT improvement as highly as boosting sales. Read more »
Chicago Tribune gives readers Economist, Forbes under new paywall plan
photo: Steven Broer
The Chicago Tribune will at last begin charging for its online content through an innovative scheme that will also give readers access to a premium package of third party content. Read more at paidContent »
Is Forbes the model for a digital-first media entity?
Forbes has been reinventing itself ever since it acquired Lewis DVorkin’s media startup in 2010 — and while there have been some stumbles, the magazine has shown how a traditional media entity can take advantage of the social web and the way that content works online. Read more »
Are robots and content farms the future of the news?
photo: D. Miller
The Chicago Tribune has laid off most of its hyper-local unit and hired what some describe as a “content farm,” while other outlets are using content that is generated by algorithms. Is this the future of news, and if so should we be happy about it? Read more »
Gold below the fold: new metrics promise end of unseen ads
According to estimates, 30 percent of online ads are seen by no one at all. Read more at paidContent »
Subscriber Content
A near-term outlook for big data
Big data now touches everything from enterprises to smart-meter startups, while Hadoop is fast becoming the leading tool to analyze that data, and debates around privacy abound. GigaOM Pro analysts offer insights on what to consider when it comes to big data decisions for your business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Social Magazine Apps Grapple With Advertising
Now that Forbes has 460,000 subscribers on Flipboard and 900,000 across properties on Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Currents, the brand is close to ad… Read more at paidContent »
Subscriber Content
New Facebook ad offerings fill some holes
Facebook needed to change the way it sold advertising inventory and add some glitzier formats. Last week, at its fMC event for marketers, it made some progress towards addressing those needs. Let’s see what Facebook is doing right and where it still has ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Are aggregation and curation journalism? Wrong question
There’s been a lot of debate about whether a Forbes blog post that excerpted and summarized a New York Times story qualifies as journalism or not — but to some extent that’s a red herring. The only question that matters is whether the reader is served. Read more »
Subscriber Content
Smartphones help us to understand the cloud
A recent survey suggests that “mobile computing appears to be a driving force behind cloud adoption in enterprises.” While the cloud clearly plays a role in making mobile devices as valuable to the enterprise as they are, it may be too much to suggest that mobiles ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Subscriber Content
The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
As our demand for data increases, so too do the number of mobile devices and services. Add to that the infrastructure needed to support such connectivity, and a wide, complex picture of the mobile industry emerges. This report examines the various sectors of the mobile landscape and what the future holds for each. Hardware, cloud services, mobile search, advertising, location-based services and the growing ubiquity of the Internet of Things will all play an important role in the concept of mobility as it shifts and evolves over the next several years. With the help of more than a dozen contributors, GigaOM Pro presents a comprehensive analysis of the companies and trends that will lead us into the next era of mobile. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Note to media: We are all brands now, so get used to it
There’s been a lot of talk about “branding” and media lately, sparked in part by Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten’s recent anti-branding rant, in which he said it was “ruining journalism.” But like it or not, branding is now an inescapable part of new media. Read more »
Journalism 2.0 Didn’t Kill Anyone, and Neither Did Old Media
Forbes media writer Jeff Bercovici says Journalism 2.0 is somehow to blame for the deaths of 24 people in Afghanistan in the wake of a Quran burning in Florida. But the story he refers to says more about Journalism 1.0 than it does about new media. Read more »
Logitech Revue Google TV Teardown Reveals Netbook At Heart
Want to know how one of the first Google TV devices looks like on the inside? Well, you’re in luck: iFixit just published a Logitech Revue teardown, revealing that the hardware that makes Google TV work isn’t really all that different from a plain old netbook. Read more »
Is Forbes Putting Its Editorial Soul on the Block?
Forbes magazine has been talking with major advertisers about giving them blogs on the magazine’s website that would blend their marketing message in with Forbes’s editorial content, but blurring the line between advertising and journalism is a hugely risky bet for the business publication to make. Read more »
Off Topic: BusinessWeek Is for Sale — Who's Next?
A few months ago, 24/7 Wall Street, a New York-based blog, suggested that the sun was about to set on BusinessWeek, Forbes and Fortune — and that BusinessWeek would be the first to go. Well, they were right. McGraw-Hill Cos., the parent company of S&P and […] Read more »
Forbes Says Not Being Sold to the Russians
Over the weekend, rumors emerged that private investor ONEXIM Group, led by Mikhail Prokhorov, was buying Forbes and its residual holdings. Having worked at Forbes during the dot-com days, I was intrigued by the development, but couldn’t get any facts about this deal. So I emailed […] Read more »
Forbes: Google Bought YouTube, Now Trying to Make Money on It!
Forbes posted a magazine story to its site today about YouTube that includes some new revenue estimates and advertising prices. The train-of-thought piece doesn’t exactly convince me Forbes knows anything about YouTube — the main dirt/insight it seems to have is that original staffers were shuffled […] Read more »
