Digital publishing news for October 24, 2013
Matt Cutts, head of search spam at Google spoke at Pubcon yesterday and had some very interesting things to say about Google Page Rank. Danny Sullivan from Search Engine land writes, “Speaking at Pubcon today, Cutts explained that the “pipeline” to send PageRank updates to the toolbar is broken. Google, feeling that too many people obsess over PageRank, doesn’t see it as important to fix that. Cutts said this probably won’t happen by the end of the year. It repeats his message from earlier this month.” Hopefully Google will either remove Page Rank or update it. A decision, one way or the other, would be helpful.
Peretti’s Warning About Over Optimization
Jonah Peretti, Buzzfeed founder was the keynote speaker at Association of Magazine Media’s American Magazine Media conference. Capital New York’s Johana Bhuiyan writes, Peretti “cautioned against the dangers of solely basing decisions on site metrics and numbers. And his most vivid cautionary tale was drawn from The Huffington Post—a site he also helped to found before leaving to begin his own experiment, but never mentioned by name.” Peretti described to the crowd a new term thats been kicking around called the local maximum.
Bhuiyan adds, “The “local maximum,” as Peretti described it, is essentially the highest amount of traffic a site can receive given the limited topics the site’s content covers. And hitting it can impede the exploration of other varieties of content, Peretti argues, preventing a site from optimizing their reach.” Have you hit your “local maximum”?
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Why Buffet Passed on The Washington Post
CNN has a new report on why Warren Buffett didn’t purchase The Washington Post. Carol Loomis writes, “Participating in a Q&A last week at Washington’s Metropolitan Club, Warren Buffett, 83, spoke of his long-term affection for the paper and said he had “briefly” considered buying it when it went on sale earlier this year. But he then decided the purchase wouldn’t work.” Buffet didn’t want to burden the next CEO of Berkshire Hathaway with a newspaper they wouldn’t want. Sounds like an admirable thing to do.
Vox Media’s DNA
USA Today did a profile on Vox Media’s video strategy and the meteoric rise of their brand. They’ve skipped the high volume, low quality approach to content and focused more on well laid out stories and bold advertisements. Roher Yu writes, “Vox also embodies a new strain of digital publishing that reverts back to magazine-style aesthetics while embracing documentary-style video — both in its original shows and in ads tailored to corporate sponsors — that is increasingly preferred by high-end advertisers.” Vox Media, in anticipation of a big ad spending boom in 2014 has doubled its video team to 32 people. Vox Media is one to watch.
