Bloomberg ditches Taboola and says first-party ads strategy is 'audience-first'

As this newsletter highlighted at the time and Marketing Brew cheekily reminds us: "Last fall, the publisher said it would cut ties with the programmatic open marketplace as well as the chumbox provider content recommendation company Taboola." Bloomberg has been moving away from third-party programmatic advertising and data, and for a company at its scale and with its audience, they can position this as a win for premium advertisers and also as a win for their audiences who have a cleaner experience with fewer ads and faster load time. As Marketing Brew points out, they will still be selling programmatic, but these will be private deals. It's a nice business model if you can get it. 

Note: Paid search saw its lowest revenue growth in 10 years while video showed the strongest growth amongst ad revenue. One thing that leaped out when I looked at the numbers. While the percentage remained relatively static, the gross revenue numbers ballooned. Digital is a growing pie, and then the question becomes where it pulls that revenue from. 

This is a good list to keep handy when you are trying to figure out which lever to pull to improve your Google ranking. How mobile-friendly is your site? How fast does it load? How fresh is your content? And what is your Google Core Vitals score? 

This is a good interview with my friend Damon Kiesow. (He and Cindy Royal were both incredibly helpful when I was going my master's dissertation on product management at news organisations.) It underscores the choose-your-own-adventure nature of modern journalism careers, and yet the broad experience he has also speaks to the cross-functional skillset necessary to be successful in media product management. 

ConDesk is the latest publication to outline its editorial guidelines on how it will use AI Tools. It will be using some generative AI text in its articles, but the text will be fact-checked, checked for plagiarism, edited and disclosed. 

An interview with the editor of the NYTimes at ISOJ in Austin. The Grey Lady won't be leaving Twitter, and he responds to accusations that the paper "has not been supportive of the transgender community".

Speaking of Twitter, it is launched its verified organisations product globally. Note, there will not be any actual verification involved.