Newsweek and Boston Globe Sold

Digital publishing news for August 5, 2013

Newsweek was sold over the weekend to IBT Media, reports Capital New York. “IAC/InterActive reached a deal to sell Newsweek, which has been publishing since January as a digital-only version of the old magazine, to the owners of the International Business Times.” IBT Media has stated that Newsweek will remain a digital-only publication.

Details and final sale price have not been released. Capital New York notes a funny piece of irony ,”in a 2011 expansion, IBT Media moved into new headquarters at 7 Hanover Square, the previous headquarters of Newsweek.”

Is this the beginning of a Newsweek resurrection?

Consumer Preference For Personalized Ads

eMarketer has a new report on a ChoiceStream survey that showed “35% of US internet users said they would like to receive personalized ads or recommendations online.”

The survey also showed that consumers expected a certain level of ad personalization depending on the channel. 67% of responders stated they think that personalized ads within email are important. “But what are consumers interested in seeing in these personalized communications? According to an Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) survey of US and UK web users in March 2013, recommendations for products that marketers think the consumer might like came out on top, cited by 48% as the feature they would most like to see in a targeted ad,” reported eMarketer.

Ad personalization has come a long way but it’s clear that some companies are still creeping out consumers with their ad targeting. Now its time to find the right mixture of personalization that won’t scare away consumers.

Profitable 2nd Quarter for the New York Times

The New York Times reports that they have had a profitable 2nd quarter. “The company reported on Thursday that net income rose to $20.1 million, or 13 cents a share, from a loss of $87.6 million, or 58 cents a share, in the period a year earlier.”

Reporting on its subscriptions, they said “the number of paid subscribers to the Web site, e-reader and other digital editions of The Times and The International Herald Tribune grew to 699,000, a jump of more than 35 percent from the period a year earlier. Digital subscriptions to The Boston Globe and BostonGlobe.com rose to 39,000, an increase of nearly 70 percent from 23,000 a year earlier.”

The Boston Globe was also just sold to Red Sox owner John Henry.

VIEW Magazine Makes A Few Moves

Talking New Media reports the quarterly, VIEW magazine is now available for free on Apple Newsstand. Its parent company FusionLabs has also announced they have also switched digital publishing platforms to App Studio.

Alon Koppel, creative director at FusionLab spoke about the switch to a free app. “We tried doing paid subscriptions and paid per issue,” Koppel said. “It was a $1.99 per issue and $3.99 for a subscription. And the numbers were just not there.” Once they made the app free they started to see more downloads.

A Pure Spammy Reminder

Search Engine Watch has a new post with examples of what content Google issued a ‘pure spam’ penality. This past year Google has created a website to educate webmasters on what it considers spammy techniques and practices. They also include a live spam screenshot of the sites they have removed from search results, meaning that they can show you in an instant, as you page through, new examples of sites getting penalized.

‘Pure spam’ is really defined as scraped content  or unhelpful content thats deceives the viewer. “Websites with this penalty should focus their attention on their content and user experience.”

Safari in iOS7 Will Support Referrer Tag

In more geeky search engine news, Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land has a new report on the latest version of Safari in iOS7. Since last fall iOS 6 searches were being categorized as direct traffic, not search traffic, but now in iOS 7 (which should be released this fall) will put the traffic back into the search bucket where it belongs. Depending on their mobile and tablet traffic percentages, publishers should see a noticeable uptick in search traffic (and corresponding decrease in direct traffic) after the release of iOS 7.