Digital publishing news for July 8, 2013
Contextual ads are getting easier and easier for tablet editions. According to Neiman Journalism Lab, “Three-year-old ShopAdvisor is creating a next generation of editorial/advertising links in a number of Time Inc. and Hearst magazines, with more clients on the way.”
The technology allows ads in the tablet editions of magazines, like Cosmo, to have ads or an editorial for “20 hot accessories for summer” and a little button that says “Shop This Ad” which allows users to click and buy any of the items in the ad or save them for later.
“Those linkages,” says Ken Doctor, “offer a new way of reconstructing digital commerce. Potentially, billions of revenue flow — among manufacturers, retailers, etailers, advertisers, ad networks, paid search, and publishers — are at stake, as digital commerce may take some unexpected turns.”
Zinio has begun to integrate ShopAdvisor into their magazines, and it’s already in Cosmo, Golf and All You with Health and Essence coming up from Time Inc.
“It’s a fairly straightforward business relationship,” writes Doctor. “ShopAdvisor supplies growing product databases and attendant e-commerce functionality.” He notes that publishers can make money three ways: upselling advertisers to these shoppable ads, a revenue share of sales, and by creating special offers through email.
Meredith and Wenner Media are Dating
“Meredith’s Fitness and Wenner Media’s Men’s Journal have struck up a sales alliance to compete with bigger health/fitness players Rodale and American Media Inc,” according to AdWeek.
The bundling offers a unique opportunity to sell to advertisers. “Together, Fitness and Men’s Journal can guarantee advertisers a monthly average circulation of 2.2 million, putting it just ahead of AMI’s Shape and (combined circ guarantee of 2.15 million) and approaching Rodale’s Men’s Health and Women’s Health (3.3 million).
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Search Engine Watch Translates Penguin 2.0
SEW put together a nice little guide to Penguin 2.0. In their report, one of the most specific suggestions was to look at your inbound link report for anything less than a PR of 4, which would be considered a low quality inbound link. Most publishers have very little they can do about bad quality inbound links besides using the disavow tool, but we did talk to someone recently who was literally emailing all of the sites less than 4 that had inbound links to his site to remove them. He’d paid someone to build inbound links for him. Oops.
Also according to the guide, a spike in inbound links (rather than slow organic growth over time) is a trigger for Penguin. SEW suggests that you “download all the links from your Google Webmaster interface. Once you’ve created that spreadsheet, you can either run a query using a tool like Scrapebox to help you analyze the data, or review it manually, line by line,” and conduct a link audit.
Forbes CEO Describes What “Winning” Means to Him
“Winning used to be a narrow paradigm for us built around print competitors,” said Forbes CEO Mike Perlis to PBS MediaShift after calling Forbes a “96-year-old start-up.” Perlis went on to say what he defines as “winning”:
“It’s very different for us today. We want to win in four areas. We want to continue to win in print because it’s the gateway, it’s the front door to our brand in many ways. The second leg is digital and that’s where we might compete with some of the folks you mentioned and the entire digital business audience.
The third leg of our strategy — and we have to win at all of these — are brand extensions, where we do events, newsletters and branded products of all kinds. We’re announcing an education initiative shortly, a financial services initiative coming … Brand extensions are very important to us, and that business growing around the world is very important.
The fourth leg is to be a very good technology company. The business that we built around our contributor-based platform [purchased with True/Slant] involves a great deal of technology, and we’ve built what we think is a great platform … for our contributors to post 500 pieces of content every day. We think that technology lets us go out in the marketplace and show it to people — we’re in fact in beta with a couple customers who would buy a license to use our technology to deliver their own content…”
