CEO offers advice on publisher technology; plus, GroupM, Google, Medium, and more
To paraphrase Steve Miller, publisher technology keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future. Could be your content management system, your app, your digital advertising: There’s little time to rest on your laurels after each and every advance.
Anytime a vendor or service exec has some free advice to share with publishers, even if they have a marketing strategy in mind, we pay attention. Today, it’s a search engine startup CEO. We also have some news to relay on ad blocking, Google AMP, Medium’s latest move, and more, all from our friends at MediaPost.com. Let’s take a look!
Swiftype’s Advice on Publisher Technology, Site Search
Swiftype CEO Matt Riley certainly has an agenda, but he also has some interesting things to say. His company’s goal is a significant one – to challenge Google for search supremacy. This includes site search for digital publishers. Get a glimpse into his world view with this interview at MediaPost.com.
“We have an entirely different way for users to find your content. We build our own search index, and it powers the search experience on your site. Publishers would have their own independent results and are not at the mercy of Google’s algorithm. You have your own algorithm. It’s the opposite of Google. For example, you could tweak the general algorithm if you wanted articles that were published most recently to show up first. Or, do the opposite and have content that was published a long time ago come higher up in search results, based on the keywords the user types in,” Riley tells Sara Guaglione.
“There is a great opportunity to integrate native advertising into the experience. We give you detailed analytics for what people are searching for on your site, what keywords are most popular for your users and what sort of article content you could target at them. I would look at the analytics and say — these are my top 20 keywords this month, let’s go and get some sponsored content related to those keywords. Either pin those results to the top of the result set to make sure they get more views or bias the search engine to show those things more highly, so if it’s sponsored or native content, it shows up first or higher up. Publishers find that interesting, and they’re trying to learn new ways to make money and evolve that part of their business.”
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GroupM’s Advice on Ad Blocking
GroupM released a revealing report late last month, and MediaPost.com relayed the results.
“The report, ‘Interaction 2016,’ questions the ‘effectiveness of these investments,’ citing ‘fraud, viewability and measurement’ issues. While the top line of the report focuses on ad-blocking, it wasn’t clearly how the trend undermines the integrity of digital investments, because unlike fraud, viewability or measurement issues, advertisers generally do not pay when an ad is blocked by an ad blocker, although it clearly represents a potential loss of reaching digital consumers that have installed them,” Joe Mandese writes.
“Seeking to shed light on ad-blocking, the report noted that there continues to be a ‘lack of hard facts on the state of ad-blocking,’ but based on data from 19 countries GroupM, found that ad-blockers were installed on an average of 22% of consumers’ devices.”
Google Opens Up AMP to Google News
More news on Google Accelerated Mobile Pages, this time from MediaPost.com:
“Trying to keep up with Facebook’s Instant Articles initiative, Google is expanding its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project to Google News on Android, iOS, and the Web. Google added AMP to its search results on mobile, earlier this year,” Gavin O’Malley writes.
“At the top of Google’s News page, mobile users will now find an AMP carousel filled with headlines and stories of the day. They can browse up to 14 headlines there, and click any article to jump into the viewer, which will be optimized for fast-loading AMP articles.”
Medium’s Latest Funding Round – and Latest Direction
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Medium has always been a publishing platform, but now they seem to be officially assuming the role, as MediaPost.com reports.
“Medium seems to be undergoing a transformation from blogging platform to publishing platform, and the change is paying off. The company has raised another $50 million, just a few months after it raised $57 million last fall. According to a post on Medium’s blog, the Series C financing comes from Spark Capital,” Guaglione writes.
“As Publishers Daily reported a few weeks ago, more than a dozen independent sites are migrating to Medium’s publishing platform, including The Awl, Pacific Standard and The Bold Italic. Medium now offers design tools for publishers to customize their sites, custom URLs and a migration tool to make it easier to move a site to Medium.”
What’s your preferred publisher technology? Tell us all about it in the comments!
To read more about publisher technology and other industry news, visit MediaPost.com.
