Digital publishing news for July 4th, 2013
Bloomberg Businessweek has been trying their hand at building loyalty lately through a few different personas (including an insulting shot at millennials). Their newest attempt at storytelling includes Cover Trails. According to Media Bistro, “Cover Trails are the mini-story behind how each week’s cover was made. It features thoughts from Businessweek’s editor-in-chief Josh Tyrangiel and creative director Richard Turley, ideas that were canned, and much more.” Paper trail … cover trail … get it?
At Time, Lang is Out, Former CFO in?
At Time Inc, Laura Lang is out as CEO, and there has been speculation as to who is taking her place. Media Bistro reported that David Geithner, Howard Averill, and Todd Larsen — all Time Inc. insiders — were at the top of the list. But now WSJ is favoring Former Time Inc. CFO Michael Klingensmith who left the company in 2008. He was named Editor & Publisher’s Publisher of the Year after he revived Star Tribune. “Mr. Bewkes has told some Time Warner board members about Mr. Klingensmith as a contender but hasn’t formally presented him to the full board,” reports WSJ. We’ll know for sure enough, as the transition is said to take place towards the end of the year.
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Twitter’s Keyword Targeted Ads Get Better
Twitter’s advertising platform has been getting better as the months go on, most recently adding Analytics for no charge at all. Yesterday they amped up their targeted keyword ads too. In April they started letting you target ads at people who said certain keywords in their Tweets, recommending that people target around 20 keywords per ad.
Yesterday they elaborated on the new targeting feature allowing you to not promote when certain keywords appear in a Tweet. In the announcement email yesterday, Twitter wrote, “Negative keyword match increases campaign precision by excluding Tweets with certain keywords. For example, a coffee shop may want to exclude terms like “servlet” and “computer” to make sure they reach coffee lovers on their java break and not engineers interested in java programming tips.”
Also, Twitter can now determine when a Tweet is negative in nature, so that you can target people who have had a negative experience.
Esquire is Testing out a Paywall
In order to test out their new paywall, Esquire put together a 10,000 word expose on the author of the popular book Proof of Heaven. If there was ever a popular topic and a perfect word length to test with a paywall, this was it. “We wanted to see if we could get people to pay for it. They pay for it in the magazine and the iPad app, so we thought we’d give it a shot,” said editor in chief David Granger.
“Currently, the story is getting a 3 to 4 percent purchase rate on Esquire.com,” reports AdWeek, adding that Granger is pleased with those numbers. “So far, he hasn’t heard any major reader complaints about the paywall, which is being handled on the back end by TinyPass.”
That’s enough news for today, Happy 4th of July fellow Americans!
